Madame De Pompadour Research Articles

Chinoiserie in Eighteenth Century France: Francois Boucher’s Imagination of China

Through the eyes of Francois Boucher, one of the most prominent court painters of the Rococo period, this essay delves into the enthralling world of Rococo art. Through the analysis of several of Boucher's paintings, such as "The Portrait of Madame de Pompadour" and "The Chinese Garden", the author intends to determine how various aspects of Chinese culture and aesthetics, as interpreted by Boucher's active imagination, were fluidly incorporated into the Rococo aesthetic. This study examines how Boucher deftly incorporated Chinese design elements, such as porcelain and scent sachets, into his works of art. These components, which are frequently considered symbolic of the Orient, provide a one-of-a-kind glimpse into Europeans' fascination with Chinese culture during the Rococo period. This article demonstrates that the influence of Orientalism on the aesthetics of European art is not limited to paintings but rather encompasses architecture as well as everyday objects, like tapestries, by demonstrating how the fusion of Chinese culture and Rococo aesthetics led to this influence.

From the History of the Decipherment of West Semitic Writing: Events and People. VII. Barthélemy-Orientalist: Between Scholarship and High Society. Part III

The article is the third essay on the life and scholarly activity of the outstanding French scholar Abbоt J.-J. Barthlemy as part of a series of publications on the history of the decipherment of West Semitic writing (events and people). The essay examines the circumstances of Barthlemys appointment in September 1753 to the post of the Keeper of the Royal Cabinet of Medals. This event, long awaited by the abbot, became possible with the help and mediation of Marquis de Gonto and Comte de Stanville, both close to Marquise de Pompadour. Some events that led to the rapprochement of the influential mistress of the king with Comte de Stanville may, in a sense, be regarded as a background to this important appointment for Barthlemy. This Barthlemys appointment to a new post was the occasion for his personal acquaintance with de Stanville family, with whom the abbot would associate for the rest of his life and to which, by his own admission, he would sacrifice his scholarly career and the name that he could have in scholarship.

Шахерезада из Бельвю или французский будуар «а-ля тюрк» XVIII столетия

Introduction. The boudoir as a concept of a peculiar female room originated at the beginning of the 18th century, when the Turkish was just beginning to enter European fashion. Among the factors that influenced this fashion, more than anything else is the publication of the first French translation of the fairy tales «One Thousand and One Nights» (1704-1717). France was a trendsetter in those years, and the development of fashion greatly helped by letters from travelers. Materials and methods. The intensification of FrancoTurkish diplomatic relations also contributed: after the arrival in Paris of the Ottoman Embassy of the Sultan Ahmed III (1720-1721) Turkish at the peak of popularity in various fields: in music and in the stagearts, in literature and painting. One of the manifestations of the «à la Turk» fashion was the «Turkish» decoration of boudoirs that came into fashion in the early reign of Louis XV, together with the fashion for a private rather than ceremonial lifestyle. Results. This problem, which has not previously come to the attention of domestic Turquerie researchers, addressed through a study of the earliest known boudoirs «a la Turk» by Louis XV's favorite, the Marquise de Pompadour, at Bellevue (1748-1750). Conclusion. The author comes to the conclusion that it was the Turkish boudoir that was the heart of Bellevue. Here, the marquise, like the fabulous Scheherazade, entertained the king and his friends, "terribly suffering from unbearable boredom." Such boudoirs in the conventional Turkish style will become more common in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when many European aristocrats will have the opportunity to try on the role of an oriental beauty. The boudoir of the Marquise de Pompadour, whose well-known strength was the ability to surprise, each time finding something new in the ordinary, became one of the first, opening a series of relatively oriental specific female interiors.

In the Shadow of the Queen: On UNESCO’S Universal History, the Women of the Petit Trianon, and Tourist Meaning-Making

Abstract Upon the designation of Versailles as a World Heritage Site, UNESCO renamed the Petit Trianon the Domaine de Marie-Antoinette (Estate of Marie-Antoinette). Subsequent tourist materials, such as travel guides and website directories, reiterated this redesignation and retell the site’s historical past through the life of Marie-Antoinette, thereby casting Madame de Pompadour and the Comtesse du Barry to the periphery. This essay analyzes visitor Instagram photos and Tripadvisor reviews to understand how UNESCO’s uniting of the queen’s memory with the Petit Trianon affects tourist interpretation and meaning making. It considers the consequences of the universalization of a single narrative to recount a multi-actor history and highlights the continued erasure of Madame de Pompadour and Comtesse du Barry taking place in visitors’ retelling of the Petit Trianon’s past.

Unto One Man’s Hand: The Power of Portraiture of The Favorites of James I

This paper discusses the study and analysis of portraiture of the favorites of King James I: Esmé Stuart, Robert Carr, and George Villiers. Although famous female mistresses (such as Anne Boleyn before her queenship or Madame de Pompadour) often did wield immense political power, there is better historical documentation for the power of male favorites in politics, the military, economics, and other areas of national affairs. Studying visual primary source material allows a new perspective on contemporary thought and propaganda of the time. Certain aspects of character are better communicated through the intricate symbology of the time, and portraiture allows a perfect avenue to bringing those observations to light. The art forms discussed—official depictions as well as engraved prints, which were more easily disseminated to a wider public—had very different audiences and therefore carried different messages. By analyzing these works, we can draw new conclusions about the ways in which the contemporaries of the favorites, regardless of social status, perceived these men. "Reading” visual and written sources through a queer lens will also provide a depth of understanding missed by earlier sources, which have historically lacked that lens.

Alexandre Dumas’s Works in the Art of Alexandre Benois

The article studies the problem of interpretation of literary source in visual creative work of A.N. Benois. There are identified and analyzed new sources of his works — historical novels by A. Dumas, père. The question about the role of the novels by Alexandre Dumas devoted to the history of France of the 17th and 18th centuries in creative work of Alexandre Benois has never become the object of research. The re­levance of this article is determined by this fact. The scientific novelty of this article lies in revea­ling new literary sources of creative work of A. Benois — Dumas’s novels “Joseph Balsamo (Doctor’s Notes)” (1846—1848), “Louis XIV and his Century” (1844), “Louis XV and his Epoch” (1849) — and determining parallels between them and art practice of the artist: painting, graphics and art of book. The author analyses content of the ar­tist’s memories, his literary works, diaries, as well as diaries by E. Lanceray, and complements these information details by a comparative textological analysis of Benois’s memoirs and Dumas’s no­vels in Russian translations. This method allows to deepen the formal analysis of A. Benois’s works (primarily the two Versailles series) and partially reveal the mechanism of complex figurative synthesis in the artistic consciousness at the turn of the 19th—20th centuries, on the basis of which they were created, to expand the existing perceptions about the literary sources of the artist’s creative work. The author concludes that the no­vels by Dumas “Joseph Balsamo”, “Louis XIV and his Century” had an influence on the artist’s perception of the theme of court culture and Versailles in the historical, cultural and natural aspects. It was reflected in the appeal to the plot of “fish feeding” in the late 1890s, in the formation of the images of Versailles and King Louis XIV in old age. The article also finds that the novel “Joseph Balsamo” had an influence on Benois’s creation of Trianon’s everyday image in the past. At the same time, the artist turned to the interpretation of the image of Marquise de Pompadour as “sultana” under the influence of Dumas’s novel “Louis XV and his Epoch”. In addition, the three musketeers — characters of Dumas’s novel with the same name — are placed in the drawing of the title page of Benois’s “Versailles” album. It is important that it does not come about direct illustration of the novels, but about an artistic process of creating a figurative system of images and forming the artist’s stylistics.

Correspondance littéraire by Friedrich Melchior Grimm Ulla KölvingMélinda Carón

MLR, .,   Gallagher argues in her introduction, the works chosen have been those oriented towards the Anglo-Saxon world. is justifies Gallagher’s translation of Hiver caraïbe,whichgivesusasenseofMorandasindefatigablecosmopolitanglobetrotter. First published in , Caribbean Winter remassages notes from two journeys to the Caribbean and America made two years before. With Morand we cross the Atlantic: ‘Flying fish. e ship slows down, inching forward in a gelatinous light that is occasionally broken by a dorsal flash of shark. e walls of my cabin creak like a stove over-filled with fuel’ (p. ). We land at Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, and very soon may be made uncomfortable by Morand’s outlook: ‘It is quite obvious that all the Negroes here have the vote. ey are wearing the stony, hostile and malevolent expressions of people set to nurse their bad humour for another four years’ (p. ). ere follow Port of Spain, Venezuela, Curaçao, Haiti, Cuba, then a magnificent coda devoted to Mexico and southern California. In his elliptical and allusive style, Morand remarks on people, politics, landscape, literature, and art. Morand is obsessed with racial and national difference, and the Caribbean crucible is a perfect environment for him to explore. What haunts him is the threat of métissage and the destruction of the racial ecology he seeks to protect: ‘Black and white are both beautiful; what’s ugly is grey’ (p. ). As Gallagher points out, in this age of trigger warnings, the world of Morand is a distinctly unsafe space. On the other hand, Paul Morand, with his brittle European arrogance and adumbrations of mass migration and global miscegenation, could be considered a postcolonial studies wet dream. Gallagher makes some very astute points. First, Morand seems attracted to a form of American Sublime, which explains why, on arriving on the islands, he immediately makes for the highlands, and devotes so many pages to Mexico and the Apache Trail, making no mention of the Deep South he travelled through in . What is also striking is how the synchronic staccato of Morand’s travelogue occludes the history of slavery. On the other hand, Gallagher suggests that, in his descriptions of the vestiges of Aztec and Maya civilizations, he is, unconsciously, making us think of other Caribbean peoples destroyed by the arrival of the white man. ere are a couple of factual errors in Gallagher’s introduction: Ouvert la nuit is not set in London—in fact, the only story touching British soil is ‘La Nuit écossaise ’; Morand wrote about the Napoleonic occupation of Spain and not the Spanish Civil War. Nevertheless, such quibbles apart, this book is beautifully written and translated, helpfully annotated, and gloriously ‘incorrect’. U  S A G B Correspondance littéraire. By F M G. Ed. by U K. Vol. : . Ed. by M C. Fernay-Voltaire: Centre International d’Étude du e Siècle. . lxxx+ pp. €. ISBN ––––. If the Correspondance littéraire for  ended with Grimm expressing his astonishment at the talent of the seven-year-old Mozart, he began , despite suffering  Reviews from a fever, by offering significant support for the Mozart family until their departure from Paris in April. While we are indebted to the editor Mélinda Caron for this information, which is not mentioned in the Correspondance itself, this almost prophetic support of the cosmopolitan music of the future provides a striking contrast to Grimm’s negative reaction to the death of Rameau in September. Grimm was, of course, never a supporter of French music, but, with hindsight, the vehemence of his reaction to the demise of the man who would now be regarded as one of the two greatest French composers of the century makes for fascinating reading. ere is important writing on the plastic arts too, and if the enthusiastic article in the second issue for August concerning Drouais’s famous portrait of Madame de Pompadour is relatively brief, the lengthy essay reviewing the criticisms of Soufflot’s design for the church of Sainte Geneviève in the second issue for October leads to further extended essays in subsequent issues, first on the history of ecclesiastical architecture, then on the history of Christianity itself. Like ,  was a relatively poor year...

The University of Southern California Voltaire Letters: A polymathic multimodal digital project

In spring 2015 one catalog record in the University of Southern California (USC) Special Collections came to my attention: Voltaire correspondence, 1741–1777. The correspondence consists of 30 original autograph letters and four poems authored by Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet, 1694–1778) and his circle, including leading figures of the Enlightenment such as Jean le Rond d’Alembert (1717–1783), Frederick II of Prussia (1712–1786), and Madame de Pompadour (1721–1764)—the acknowledged mistress of Louis XV (1710–1774).

Portraits from the second half of the 18th century in Croatia

This paper will attempt to analyze the clothing from the rococo period and underline fashion as an important segment in the reconstruction of a specific style era. Based on conserved portraits from the second half of the 18th century, as well as rare artifacts of clothing from the period found in Croatia, a description of primarily women’s types of clothing, accessories and the terms used to describe them will be given. Influences had, primarily through cultural and trade routes, come from the fashion capital of the period – France, and fashion innovations and the intensity of their changes were under the influence of the personal style first of Madame de Pompadour and afterwards Marie Antoinette. Croatia, which had at the time been part of the Habsburg monarchy and under the Republic of Venice, tended toward French influences in fashion, which represents a considerable move from the prior influence of Italian and German style.

Opera in the Age of Rousseau: Music, Confrontation, Realism by David Charlton (review)

Opera in the Age of Rousseau: Music, Confrontation, Realism. By David Charlton. (Cambridge Studies in Opera.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. [xxi, 413 p. ISBN 9780521887601 (hardcover), $124.99; ISBN 9781139786065 (ebook), $100.] Music examples, illustrations, portraits, charts, diagrams, bibliography, index.David Charlton's Opera in the Age of appears on the heels of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's tercentenary, in a year that also saw the publication of an insightful colloquy in the Journal of the American Musicological Society. In its introduction, Jacqueline Waeber comments on the perpetual historiographical chasm between Rousseau's intellectual and musical output which, as she claims, inevitably fuels the cliche of the dabbler ( Jacqueline Waeber, convenor, Rousseau in 2013: Afterthoughts on a Tercentenary, Journal of the American Musicological Society 66, no. 1 [Spring 2013]: 253). From Andre Gretry's Memoires through nineteenthcentury criticism and into our post-Derridean musicological present, critics concentrated their evaluations of Rousseau's musical thought on his individualism and his personality, focusing almost exclusively on his prose writings. Rejecting the Great Man model, Charlton offers a thorough reexamination of Rousseau's musical milieu. His book, then, is not as much about as it is around Rousseau. By examining Rousseau's famous one-act Le devin du village alongside Eustachio Bambini's bouffons troupe, as well as little-known contemporaries, Charlton presents a comprehensive study of musical life in and around Paris between the years 1739 and 1774, roughly between Rameau's zenith and Gluck's advent (p. xi). In short, Opera in the Age of is a massive achievement in its comprehensive reexamination of a critical period in French musical history.Charlton draws on a dizzying array of primary source material, and touches on issues of patronage, comic and tragic conventions, the politics of repertory choice, modes of historical and pastoral representation, discourses of opera reform, and the mobility of operatic works between Parisian theaters. In chapter 1, entitled Palaces and Patronage: Le Devin and the 1754 Alceste, Charlton discusses the theater group of Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompa dour, the official chief mis - tress of Louis XV from 1745 to her death in 1764. Scholars of the period, Charlton argues, hitherto focused on luxury and image-making as the principles driving Pompadour's selection of theater works for her court. But published accounts, Charlton writes, have rarely assessed the musical and operatic achievement of the woman who commissioned twelve new operas, eight of which reached the Paris stage in largely authentic form, many circulating in the public domain through printed scores and librettos; who trained, rehearsed, sang and acted the female (or male) leading role in all of them; and who oversaw the running of a group whose decisions were taken exclusively by women (p. 15). In support of this claim, Charlton includes a useful table that provides an overview of theater works sponsored by Pompadour (Rousseau's Devin was performed there in 1752, a year before its public premiere at the Theâtre du Palais-Royal).Charlton's discussions of staging, acting, costuming, and singing conventions offer valuable insights into the technologies of operatic production in eighteenth-century France, a severely understudied area of scholarship. Charlton identifies two primary types of comedic movement: haut (high) and bas (low), represented by stylized gesture and realistic movement, respectively. Such distinctions are found in Opera librettos that record the practices of earlier revivals and also record the stage directions for the use of subsequent generations (p. 36). Two examples of such librettos are M. Favart's Don Quichotte, set by Joseph Bodin de Boismortier (see table 2.1, p. 37) and Jacques Autreau's Platee, set by Jean-Philippe Rameau (see table 2. …

Madame de Pompadour's Protege: Henri Bertin and the Collapse of Bourbon Absolutism c. 1750-1792

Gwynne Lewis, Emeritus Professor of History at Warwick University, describes the collapse of French absolutism through the distinguished administrative career of Henri Bertin, reformer, sometime économiste, intendant, contrôleur-général des finances (1759–63) and ultimately secretary of state (1763–80). Lewis asserts that Bertin rose to such heights thanks to the patronage of Madame de Pompadour and stayed there because of his vital role in both overseeing and covering up Louis XV’s illicit sex life. Organised in mostly chronological fashion in six substantive chapters and a lengthy conclusion, Lewis takes his readers on a whirlwind tour of a number of important topics. Although Lewis claims that he will ‘record and evaluate Bertin’s significant contribution to the ideological, political and economic reforms that were introduced following the disasters of the Seven Years’ War’, he spends remarkably little time discussing either the content or nature of the reforms themselves or detailing Bertin’s role in them even in the three chapters ostensibly devoted to those subjects (Chapters 4–6). Instead, readers learn about the rise of the Bertin family of Périgueux to become robe nobles, the displacement of the oldest son and heir, the comte de Fratteaux and Henri’s assumption of the mantle of leadership and his simultaneous assimilation to the group surrounding Madame de Pompadour. Lewis goes out on a limb to assert that Pompadour, Bertin and Louis XV formed a ‘royal “triumvirate”’ in 1754 that lasted nearly until Pompadour’s death in 1764 that was based on overseeing and then covering up Louis XV’s extramarital affairs. Lewis frequently over-emphasises the impact of Louis XV’s sex life on the waning authority of Bourbon absolutism. For this reader, these assertions required much more evidence to be convincing. This part of the book also highlights the significance of the Seven Years War in weakening French absolutism as well as making tantalising but vague references to Louis XV’s secret diplomacy. Unfortunately the linkages among these factors are not clarified or explored sufficiently to understand the basis of Lewis’s arguments.

Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution * Sans-culottes: An Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the French Revolution

Together, Michael Sonenscher’s two books constitute a monumentally erudite history of social, moral, political, and theological thought in the French eighteenth century. As signalled by their similarly designed, yet differently coloured covers (blue for Before the Deluge, red for Sans-culottes), they can be read as complements of each other. Both set their theme by placing a phrase or word in historical context. In Before the Deluge, the phrase is Madame de Pompadour’s infamously insouciant remark, ‘Après moi, le Déluge’; and in Sans-culottes, the word that forms the main title refers less to the familiar revolutionaries, than to the unexpected salon-dwelling ancestors that Sonenscher reveals them to have had in the eighteenth century. A major political thinker also hovers over each book. In Sans-culottes, it is Rousseau, and in Before the Deluge, Montesquieu—although Sieyès too is central, appearing in both works as a thinker whose merits have been under-recognised. Each book examines the thought of its major thinker’s predecessors, of his successors, of those who converged with him, of his admirers and critics, or of those who simply discussed similar subject matter. Adopting a long-standing Cambridge approach, Sonenscher shifts attention and imparts significance to minor authors. He discusses hundreds of writers, from the great philosophers of antiquity to the anonymous pamphleteers of the revolutionary decade. The result is a thick description of eighteenth-century intellectual history that creates a new context for the forms of political thought—and especially of republicanism—that rose to the fore during the French Revolution. Read in this way, Before the Deluge emerges as the background of Sieyès’ theory of representative government; while Sans-culottes becomes a prehistory of Jacobin thought. Cogently, the first book examines principally thinkers who reflected on how to reorganise political society fiscally and institutionally—a project consonant with the Montesquieuian tradition—while Sans-culottes concentrates on authors who projected to refashion human faculties and needs—a major preoccupation of Rousseau. Debt and commerce, though, continue to preoccupy Sonenscher in this last volume: indeed in both books he insists – and this is crucial to his contribution—that eighteenth-century political thought, whether monarchical or republican, cannot be understood apart from the economic considerations that animated it. Hence the symbolic primacy he lends to Pompadour’s prophecy.

Madame de Pompadour and Le Havre-de-Grâce: An unnatural history

This essay examines the revealing particularities of the act of seeing in a historical setting. Placing stress on the classical unities, it presents a visual and documentary reconstruction of two indirectly related scenarios in which the act of seeing was staged to radically different effect. In pursuing the deceptively obvious argument that the how of looking at things depends largely on the where of looking at them, it offers a study in and by juxtaposition. The setting is eighteenth-century Le Havre-de-Grâce. The storied visit of Madame de Pompadour to see the sea for the first time provides the pretext for placing the Abbé Jacques-François Dicquemare (b. Le Havre 1733), who devoted his life to the study of the sea, on the historical stage. He has an instructive role to play as a minor but important character in the development of natural history, nominally understood as the art of describing the world.

The Four Seasons: Winter, by François Boucher

<i>The Four Seasons: Winter,</i> by François Boucher

Plus Ça Change: Along the Rue de Caumartin [Doing No Harm

Plus Ça Change: Along the Rue de Caumartin [Doing No Harm

The Age of Comfort: When Paris Discovered Casual—and the Modern Home Began by Joan DeJean

DEJEAN, JOAN. The Age of Comfort: When Paris Discovered Casual—and the Modern Home Began. New York: Bloomsbury, 2009. ISBN 978-1-59691-405-6. Pp. 304. $28. After analyzing how the French invented style under the influence of Louis XIV (The Essence of Style, 2005), Joan DeJean explores how the French discovered casual living around the same time, creating the “Age of Comfort” during the period from 1670 to 1765. DeJean demonstrates that the origins of the modern home and how we live in it can be traced back to the contributions of certain architects, interior decorators, and craftsmen during that time, as well as to two women with close ties to the royal court, the Marquise de Maintenon and the Marquise de Pompadour, who were the trendsetting mistresses of Louis XIV and Louis XV, respectively. The author shows how the innovations created during the Age of Comfort had a profound impact on such seemingly unrelated domains of early modern life as apparel, body language, literature, and the relations between the sexes. This book reads like a guided museum tour of an Age of Comfort home: over the course of fourteen chapters, readers move from its overall structure (architecture; chapter 2) via its more intimate rooms (bathroom, bedroom, and boudoir; chapters 3, 10, and 11) and their furniture (flush toilet, easy seats, and seating; chapters 4, 6, and 8) to the bodies that inhabit them (clothing, fabric, and body language; chapters 12–14). DeJean brings together the various tour elements in a coda where she also discusses the subsequent decline of the Age of Comfort. She is a likeable, knowledgeable tour guide with an eye for detail and a sense of humor, pointing out that the French and English used each other’s language for things they preferred not to speak of: “The French replaced ‘English places’ with ‘water closet’ or ‘WC’ [...] ‘Loo’ comes from lieu, ‘commode’ from commode, and ‘toilet’ from toilette” (92). DeJean further enlivens her tour by quoting such contemporary sources as Françoise de Graffigny. DeJean uses paintings from France and England to analyze and compare some of the changes occurring in fashion, décor, furniture, and interior life during the Age of Comfort. Given the visual nature of the topic, the book’s abundant images—forty-six black-and-white illustrations and fourteen color plates—allow readers to follow the author’s argument in detail. The illustrations from the Encyclopédie in particular elucidate how and why the Age of Comfort came about during the Enlightenment. The book’s annotation appears in the form of endnotes . Although the text is meticulously annotated, as we have come to expect from DeJean, this reader would have preferred to find note markers whenever annotation is present in order to know exactly when to refer to it. The absence of note markers gives the book a less scholarly, more “casual” appearance. The bibliography , though very extensive and useful, would have been user-friendlier if it had been divided into contemporary and modern sources. Due to its accessible language, anyone interested in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French literature , history, and culture will enjoy this consistently informative and often entertaining book. Scholars will find it an invaluable addition to their libraries. University of North Texas Marijn S. Kaplan Reviews 379 ...

VOLTAIRE: OEuvres completes de Voltaire, 28A. OEuvres de 1742-1745 (I)

Volume 28A is another stunning volume from the Complete Works of Voltaire team that will give great physical pleasure to readers for centuries to come. It boasts lovely paper, editorial excellence and a wonderful sense of permanence. One element alone detracts from it: the title Œuvres de 1742–1745 (I) camouflages the fact that this volume houses many fascinating works of Voltaire's mid-career. Unless proper, detailed indexing is urgently provided by the Voltaire Foundation on a future state-of-the-art website, readers may inadvertently overlook the gems contained within volume 28A and similar compilation volumes, and this would be a terrible shame. Russell Goulbourne takes a fresh, prefatory look at 1742–1745, or Voltaire's pre-Versailles years, as the philosophe curries favour to become a courtier of Louis XV. David Williams presents the short Fragment sur la corruption du style, where Voltaire argues that ‘le mélange des styles’ is the antithesis of good literary practice. Only fragments remain of Voltaire's farcical comedy Thérèse. Goulbourne notes how during its conception D'Argental warned Voltaire that Thérèse was in poor taste; it was subsequently withdrawn and never performed. Olivier Ferret unravels the labyrinthine editorial history of the brief, but caustic, A M.***sur le mémoire de Desfontaines, highlighting the fact that Voltaire hides behind the persona of Malicourt in order to insult Desfontaines with greater vehemence. Within the short essay Sur la police des spectacles, Williams situates the venomous irony with which Voltaire denounces the Gallican church's hypocrisy in excommunicating actors of the Comédie-Française, effectively placing them on a par with witches. Voltaire's comédie-ballet La Princesse de Navarre was first performed at a 1745 royal wedding, receiving a positive contemporary reception, but only after myriad teething difficulties between Voltaire and the notoriously temperamental Rameau. Goulbourne traces the opera's unhappy and labour-intensive genesis, contrasting this with its royal propagandistic values, propelled by themes of victory, honour and love. The similarly court-commissioned opera-ballet Le Temple de la Gloire was another work of royal propaganda for Louis XV's court, which fused history with mythology, and which, as Goulbourne notes, Voltaire lived to regret. Intended as a celebration of Fontenoy, this was the final collaboration between Voltaire and Rameau and the allegory was a great success with the king, who was implicitly compared with emperor Trajan. Ralph A. Nablow presents the final section of this collection, subtitled Shorter verse of 1742–1745 and housing nearly 40 poetic pieces, dedicated to a range of personages, including Mme Du Châtelet, Swedish princesses, duchesses, King Frederick of Prussia, a Frisian poet, and the marquise de Pompadour. They include typically humorous offerings, often in quatrains, such as the cheeky Vers sur un dindon à l'ail. Voltaire's adoring character-sketch of Émilie, ‘les livres, les bijoux, les compas, les pompons’, figures in Étrennes à madame Du Châtelet. Some rather gushing poetry addressed to various royal figures, not least the sycophantic couplet Impromptu sur une rose que le roi de Prusse donna à Voltaire, reflects Voltaire's eagerness to curry royal favour and recognition throughout these key, if rather whirlwind, years.

The Writing Workshop of François Quesnay and the Making of Physiocracy

Using archival materials, we investigate the scientific practices of François Quesnay and the individuals who worked with him in relation to their social background. Our contention is that, before 1764, the group of authors who shared Quesnay's commitment to an agrarian economic theory are best described as the “writing workshop” of François Quesnay rather than as the “physiocratic” school. Quesnay organized and supervised the work of these individuals, who assisted him in a manner clearly reminiscent of that of workshops of artists from late medieval and early modern Europe. On the one hand, Quesnay tightly controlled the work of those (the Marquis de Mirabeau, Pattullo, Du Pont de Nemours) who published economic writings, correcting and even rewriting whole parts of their texts. On the other hand, he commanded other writers/individuals to collect data and execute and verify calculations, most notably for his tableaux économiques. In other words, the production of political and economic writings was structured by a detailed division of labor organized by Quesnay, who acted as the master of a writing workshop. After the death of Madame de Pompadour, Quesnay's prominent patroness, in 1764, the situation changed. Quesnay's aura of power at court disappeared and with it, his writing workshop. The center of gravity of physiocracy moved from Versailles to Paris, and the workshop was gradually replaced by the physiocratic school.

Terror, Trauma and the ‘Young Marx’ Explanation of Jacobin Politics*

Tocqueville in the 1850s wrote of France in the 1780s that never had tolerance been more accepted, authority been more mild, or benevolence been so widely practised. Nonetheless, he went on, ‘from the bosom of such mild mores would spring the most inhuman of revolutions’. And even for those of us who deeply admire the French Revolution’s message of civic equality, the Terror of the Year II (1793–4) seems not just ominous and horrendous, but also out of place. Auschwitz, Dresden and Hiroshima — after the Great War of 1914–18 and the Great Depression of the 1930s: we can see why these wartime tragedies happened, given the awful events that preceded them. But what of the Terror after the Enlightenment — after Voltaire, Boucher, and Madame de Pompadour? Isser Woloch has rightly described the ‘sequence’ from 1789 to 1793, from liberalism to terror, as an eternally fascinating ‘enigma’. Why the French Revolution occurred is something of a mystery. And why it failed so dramatically is also deeply perplexing.1

Voltaire’s Précis of Ecclesiastes: A Case Study in the Bible’s Afterlife

In 1756 Voltaire was invited to write a paraphrase of the Psalms for the recent Christian convert, and influential mistress of Louis XV, Madame de Pompadour. With the subtlest touch of satire, Voltaire reportedly replied that he was ‘not the right man for the Psalms’. The idea likely took root in some form, since in 1759, in what appears to be an unsolicited act, he wrote two striking précis of biblical texts that perhaps suited his temperament more clearly: Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs. In his Ecclesiastes text Voltaire translated portions from the Hebrew and arranged them by theme, with opposing stanzas of reflective verse. Voltaire’s reading is remarkably free from the polemical and satirical approach he takes in almost all of his other published work on the Bible. It is also unorthodox in its empathetic and inventive approach to Qoheleth’s themes, and as such is a valuable reading for stimulating reflection on Ecclesiastes. Providing a fulsome account of the context for the composition of the Précis, making use of the Précis itself and undertaking some exposition of the Zeitgeist of Voltaire’s era, this article reflects on the significance of this unusual example of the Bible’s reception. Also included is a full translation of the Précis by Terry McWilliams, with critical notes.