Le Siècle de Louis XIV
Edition critique par Diego Venturino
OCV volumes 11-13
(Forthcoming 2013)
Voltaire’s Siècle de Louis XIV (1751) was the first major overall account of the reign of Louis XIV (1643-1715). It is the starting-point for any reflection on the political and cultural history of the era of the Sun King, and is a monument of eighteenth-century historiography that cannot be bypassed. It paved the way for both modern historiography and literary history.
The lasting success of this flagship work is due to the depth of Voltaire’s insight into the persons and events that he is describing and to his historical method, which was remarkable for its day. The emphasis on first-hand accounts from those who witnessed events and on the perspective of the age as a whole rather than a parade of facts bears the stamp of Voltaire.
This first-ever critical edition takes as its base text the last version of the work that Voltaire authorised (1775), and gives variant readings from all preceding versions of the text. The third volume will include the Catalogue des écrivains français qui ont paru dans le siècle de Louis XIV, an important and fascinating work in its own right. The edition will be supplied with an index with full names and dates of all persons mentioned in the text.
‘Le Siècle de Louis XIV is a milestone on the road to modern history-writing. Voltaire, the chief publicist of the Enlightenment, wrote his history en philosophe, concerning himself with the human condition and with man’s progress (or the lack of it) towards personal freedom; a preoccupation which later generations of historians have largely inherited. This three-volume edition, based on the 1775 version but with annotations from earlier editions, provides an eighteenth-century portrait of le grand siècle which was startlingly new and an insight into the new history which is surprisingly familiar. Such a scholarly re-publication of one of the seminal works of the Siècle des Lumières is greatly to be welcomed.’
J. H. Shennan, Professor Emeritus at the University of Lancaster