Hidden in Plain Sight: The Questions sur l’Encyclopédie in the Nineteenth Century

Journal article

The question of Voltaire’s influence on the nineteenth century is famously thorny. The task is all the more complicated when considering a work like the Questions sur l’Encyclopédie, Voltaire’s longest and perhaps least-known masterpiece. For various editorial reasons, the Questions all but disappeared after their initial publication in the 1770s, a period during which they nonetheless had become a bestseller. Although no longer referred to using their rightful title, excerpts from the Questions proliferate in the print culture of postrevolutionary France, used and reused across an impressive swathe of texts of all stripes and sizes. The presence of these reuses would seem to corroborate the assertion that one important, if perhaps overlooked, aspect of Voltaire’s influence is his role as an agent of transmission. This role emphasises what might be called Voltaire’s aesthetic of reuse, and suggests a powerful new way of understanding this essential element of his participation in the Enlightenment project. This essay attempts to understand this particular version of Voltaire as an agent of transmission in the promulgation of Enlightenment ideas, while, at the same time, exploring the impact of his turn towards alphabetical works as a weapon of choice in the last decades of his life, as he engages in the larger arena of philosophical warfare opened up by the publication (and suppression) of the Encyclopédie in the 1750s. The embedding of questions so fundamental to the Enlightenment (religious toleration, philosophical and political liberty, human rights, fair treatment under the law, etc.) into Voltaire’s later dictionary works can perhaps help explain the immense success of the Questions, at least in the immediate years following their publication, and perhaps even in the postrevolutionary era, as these same questions will traverse the entire nineteenth century. With this in mind, our aim is to re-evaluate and reposition the Questions’ place (or absence) in literary history using current digital humanities methods and corpora to unearth references to Voltaire’s ‘hidden’ masterpiece of Enlightenment thought

Authors: Morrissey, R; Roe, G

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Liverpool University Press
• Journal: Modern Languages Open
• Volume: 2024
• Issue: 1
• Article number: 24
• Publication date: 2024-11-28
• DOI: 10.3828/mlo.v0i0.517
• EISSN: 2052-5397
• ISSN: 2052-5397
• Language: English
• Keywords: Encyclopedia; Law; Sight; History; Political science; Astronomy