Voltaire: The Pamela Project
Sep. 14th, 2020 05:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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rheinsbergWrite-up by gambitten on Voltaire.
Voltaire went back and fabricated his entire Prussian-resident-era correspondence with Madame Denis in the vengeance-filled winter of 1753 to 1754, and arranged for these fake letters to be released to the public by Denis after his death. Voltairean scholars thought these letters were legitimate for a VERY long time. Like, for almost 200 years.
To give you some context about when these letters were discovered to be doctored:
Theodore Besterman, the Most Passionate Voltaire Scholar, collected and published as much of Voltaire's correspondence as he could from the 1950s until his death in 1974, after which his work was taken over by the Voltaire Foundation, which he founded. His work was VERY important for Voltairean scholarship; it is his editions of Voltaire's correspondence that serve as the basis for the Electronic Enlightenment database. He treats the entire Prussia-era Voltaire-Denis correspondence as authentic, and all Voltaire scholars based their analyses on his work. In 1953, it was noted by French scholar Jean Nivat that, in an October 1753 letter, Voltaire requests for Denis to return their (real) correspondence to him so he can begin work on a literary project called 'Pamela', a reference to an English novel written by Samuel Richardson. Nivat questioned whether this 'Pamela' was a work of Voltaire's which had been lost to time, since none of Voltaire's known published works seemed to have anything to do with the Pamela novel except for Nanine, which was published in 1749; Besterman rejected this and said there was no lost 'Pamela' project.
It wasn't until 1989 that French professor André Magnan proved that the Voltaire-Denis letters were fabricated by Voltaire in his French-language analysis in Dossier Voltaire en Prusse (1750-1753), and that this fabrication was the very 'literary project' that Voltaire called 'Pamela'. This very helpful English-language review of the book summarises Magnan's findings. Only 3 of the Prussian-resident-era letters between Voltaire and Madame Denis can even be called 'letters'; more than 50 others are basically an extended novel written by Voltaire in the form of letters and passed off as a real correspondence to get revenge on Friedrich in the eyes of posterity.
Any Voltaire biographies written before 1989, and even most written in the 1990s, will treat these letters and the events depicted in them as authentic. As late as 1995 French scholars were still discussing whether this series of fictionalised letters should be called 'Pamela' or something else. In the end, most modern scholars call these letters 'Pamela' or 'Paméla', and you can find analyses about them under this title, mostly from 2005 onwards in English (it took a while for English-language scholarship to catch up to the French, as often happens with new findings published in foreign languages):
-- What's in a Name? Reflections on Voltaire's Pamela (2005)
-- On the Voltaire Foundation's website the PAMÉLA text is summarised as late as 2010:
"Paméla, a reworking of letters to Mme Denis during his years in Prussia (which were long thought to be authentic), gives a very carefully constructed view of the period, where attitudes are modified, chronology manipulated, details omitted. The same is true of the Mémoires, where the perspective is different, but still issues are simplified, and evidence changed at will. Through these two texts, Voltaire speaks directly to posterity, as he seeks to claim the authority to write about himself, to create and control his image."
-- The Best of All Possible Marriages: Voltaire and Frederick in Paméla (2013)
Of course, the Electronic Enlightenment database never mentions that these letters are inauthentic either, since the annotations provided are Besterman's own. Hence some of the quotes I have provided here before are unfortunately part of the fake narrative Voltaire pushed, including this one, whichmildred_of_midgard was excited about:
"I have been handed over, my dear, with all due formalities, to the King of Prussia. The marriage is accomplished: will it be happy? I do not know in the least: yet I cannot prevent myself saying, Yes. After coquetting for so many years, marriage was the necessary end. My heart beat hard even at the altar."
Voltaire wasn't playfully using flirtatious language here; this is "Fritz is gay!!!" controversy-stirring rhetoric written with the same intention as what Voltaire wrote in his memoirs, doubling as an allusion to Pamela's exploitative marriage in the Pamela novel. Voltaire is also being dramatic here, wanting to introduce a sense of irony, since he of course knows how the 'marriage' will end up.
It also means that the events aptly summarised byselenak in her fanfic probably didn't happen because...
"I wish he wouldn't always bring me his dirty laundry to clean," Voltaire says one day when he has to interrupt his own work, which happens to be an entirely new way of describing history by using the age of Louis XIV as an example. Unfortunately, he says this within hearing of La Mettrie, who tells Maupertuis, who tells the King. This is something Voltaire will only discover later, as the King says nothing to him about it, not directly. On the other hand, the various guests of the King's carefully selected table round suddenly all seem to know that the King has told La Mettrie he simply needs Voltaire for his exquisite French and for his knowledge. "I'll squeeze him dry like an orange," La Mettrie quotes Federic when Voltaire point blank asks him about this, "and then I'll throw away the peel."
... the only evidence we have for this entire scenario was written after the fact by Voltaire as part of a revenge novel in the form of fake letters. That this story is present in so many of Voltaire's biographies is a testament to how successfully Voltaire controlled the narrative of 'what went on behind the scenes in Prussia'. All we really have in regards to these events is a falsified correspondence which Voltaire himself likened to a fictional novel.
Basically, if you ever see any quotes from Voltaire to Madame Denis, or from Madame Denis to Voltaire, and they're alleged to be from 1750 to 1753 in an English-language biography written before 2010 or a French-language biography written before 2000, both you and the writer have been fooled by Voltaire across time.
mildred_of_midgard comments:
I had on my list of things to talk about the letters that we can no longer use as evidence, which include, among others:
- marriage to the King of Prussia
- dirty laundry
- orange peel
- Darget being unhappy about the Palladion
About the dirty laundry, though, Jessen reports MT using the phrase in a letter to Joseph in 1778, so while Voltaire was still alive, i.e. before the posthumous publications of his memoirs and letters. So word of this phrase being used in regards to Fritz's terrible spelling must have been making the rounds in Europe, however it originated.
selenak:
MT writing to Joseph re: a Fritzian letter, "he could have used someone to clean up his dirty laundry" would argue she's at least familiar with the story that Voltaire said this about Fritz. BTW, since it's not in the 1752 anonymous pamphlet, my money is on the Imperial Ambassador in Berlin as her source, the Marquis de Puebla, who was around during the Voltaire years. (And according to Lehndorff well connected to Prussian society. His mistress, the Countess von Bredow, kept his portrait on the wall even after he left at the start of the 7 Years War.)
mildred_of_midgard:
Oh, the "can't live without you, can't live with you" letter, that was from Voltaire to Fritz and is still authentic as far as we know, right?
selenak:
Yep, because it's from the Prussian State Archive. How's this for irony: both Fritz and Voltaire didn't hesitate to falsify evidence about each other, but with their correspondence, they couldn't do that because the other party kept the receipts, so to speak. Also reply letters will mention things in the previous letter etc. (For example, the letter where Voltaire makes the rat/lion comparison for himself and Fritz (complete with signing off "the rat kisses your paws"), which I also love, has a reply letter from Fritz where he picks up the metaphor and runs with it. You can bet that if Voltaire had altered or rewritten any letters there, Preuss et all would have pounced.
Questions: Did Voltaire "only" forge his correspondence with Madame Denis from 1750-1753, or with his other niece as well? Because I recall Orieux quoting from those letters as well, and at least one of those was pretty slashy as well. (Sadly, I'm currently without the Orieux volume to look up the exact quote, but it goes something like, paraphrased: "Yes, I know it's a big step, but look: king, philosopher, satirist, adores me - who can resist a man like that?" (When explaining why he's moving to Prussia.)
(I suppose if he got the letters back from one niece, he could get it from the other, but Madame Denis was the one living with him and also the one with a personal reason to get back at Fritz after his death. If, however, there's no indication that he retrieved all of his correspondence, including that with his other niece, then he used the flirtation metaphors during the actual time frame already.)
selenak on a quote that, in contrast, probably is real:
Voltaire wrote the following to his other niece, Madame de Fontaine, i.e. not Madame Denis and hence presumably not part of the reworked correspondence:
Berlin, September 23rd, 1750: I wish I could sacrifice the King of Prussia for your benefit, but I can't. He's a King, but it's a sixteen-years-long passion that connects us; he's swept me away. I imagine nature has created me for him. Our taste is so eerily alike that I forgot he's master over half of Germany. And that the other half trembles in front of him, that he's won five battles and is the greatest general of Europe, that he's surrounded by six foot tall professional killers. All of this should have caused me to run a thousand miles in the other direction, but the philosopher in him has reconciled me with the monarch, and I have only found him to be a great man who is good and sociable.
gambitten on Voltaire.Voltaire went back and fabricated his entire Prussian-resident-era correspondence with Madame Denis in the vengeance-filled winter of 1753 to 1754, and arranged for these fake letters to be released to the public by Denis after his death. Voltairean scholars thought these letters were legitimate for a VERY long time. Like, for almost 200 years.
To give you some context about when these letters were discovered to be doctored:
Theodore Besterman, the Most Passionate Voltaire Scholar, collected and published as much of Voltaire's correspondence as he could from the 1950s until his death in 1974, after which his work was taken over by the Voltaire Foundation, which he founded. His work was VERY important for Voltairean scholarship; it is his editions of Voltaire's correspondence that serve as the basis for the Electronic Enlightenment database. He treats the entire Prussia-era Voltaire-Denis correspondence as authentic, and all Voltaire scholars based their analyses on his work. In 1953, it was noted by French scholar Jean Nivat that, in an October 1753 letter, Voltaire requests for Denis to return their (real) correspondence to him so he can begin work on a literary project called 'Pamela', a reference to an English novel written by Samuel Richardson. Nivat questioned whether this 'Pamela' was a work of Voltaire's which had been lost to time, since none of Voltaire's known published works seemed to have anything to do with the Pamela novel except for Nanine, which was published in 1749; Besterman rejected this and said there was no lost 'Pamela' project.
It wasn't until 1989 that French professor André Magnan proved that the Voltaire-Denis letters were fabricated by Voltaire in his French-language analysis in Dossier Voltaire en Prusse (1750-1753), and that this fabrication was the very 'literary project' that Voltaire called 'Pamela'. This very helpful English-language review of the book summarises Magnan's findings. Only 3 of the Prussian-resident-era letters between Voltaire and Madame Denis can even be called 'letters'; more than 50 others are basically an extended novel written by Voltaire in the form of letters and passed off as a real correspondence to get revenge on Friedrich in the eyes of posterity.
Any Voltaire biographies written before 1989, and even most written in the 1990s, will treat these letters and the events depicted in them as authentic. As late as 1995 French scholars were still discussing whether this series of fictionalised letters should be called 'Pamela' or something else. In the end, most modern scholars call these letters 'Pamela' or 'Paméla', and you can find analyses about them under this title, mostly from 2005 onwards in English (it took a while for English-language scholarship to catch up to the French, as often happens with new findings published in foreign languages):
-- What's in a Name? Reflections on Voltaire's Pamela (2005)
-- On the Voltaire Foundation's website the PAMÉLA text is summarised as late as 2010:
"Paméla, a reworking of letters to Mme Denis during his years in Prussia (which were long thought to be authentic), gives a very carefully constructed view of the period, where attitudes are modified, chronology manipulated, details omitted. The same is true of the Mémoires, where the perspective is different, but still issues are simplified, and evidence changed at will. Through these two texts, Voltaire speaks directly to posterity, as he seeks to claim the authority to write about himself, to create and control his image."
-- The Best of All Possible Marriages: Voltaire and Frederick in Paméla (2013)
Of course, the Electronic Enlightenment database never mentions that these letters are inauthentic either, since the annotations provided are Besterman's own. Hence some of the quotes I have provided here before are unfortunately part of the fake narrative Voltaire pushed, including this one, which
mildred_of_midgard was excited about:"I have been handed over, my dear, with all due formalities, to the King of Prussia. The marriage is accomplished: will it be happy? I do not know in the least: yet I cannot prevent myself saying, Yes. After coquetting for so many years, marriage was the necessary end. My heart beat hard even at the altar."
Voltaire wasn't playfully using flirtatious language here; this is "Fritz is gay!!!" controversy-stirring rhetoric written with the same intention as what Voltaire wrote in his memoirs, doubling as an allusion to Pamela's exploitative marriage in the Pamela novel. Voltaire is also being dramatic here, wanting to introduce a sense of irony, since he of course knows how the 'marriage' will end up.
It also means that the events aptly summarised by
selenak in her fanfic probably didn't happen because..."I wish he wouldn't always bring me his dirty laundry to clean," Voltaire says one day when he has to interrupt his own work, which happens to be an entirely new way of describing history by using the age of Louis XIV as an example. Unfortunately, he says this within hearing of La Mettrie, who tells Maupertuis, who tells the King. This is something Voltaire will only discover later, as the King says nothing to him about it, not directly. On the other hand, the various guests of the King's carefully selected table round suddenly all seem to know that the King has told La Mettrie he simply needs Voltaire for his exquisite French and for his knowledge. "I'll squeeze him dry like an orange," La Mettrie quotes Federic when Voltaire point blank asks him about this, "and then I'll throw away the peel."
... the only evidence we have for this entire scenario was written after the fact by Voltaire as part of a revenge novel in the form of fake letters. That this story is present in so many of Voltaire's biographies is a testament to how successfully Voltaire controlled the narrative of 'what went on behind the scenes in Prussia'. All we really have in regards to these events is a falsified correspondence which Voltaire himself likened to a fictional novel.
Basically, if you ever see any quotes from Voltaire to Madame Denis, or from Madame Denis to Voltaire, and they're alleged to be from 1750 to 1753 in an English-language biography written before 2010 or a French-language biography written before 2000, both you and the writer have been fooled by Voltaire across time.
mildred_of_midgard comments:I had on my list of things to talk about the letters that we can no longer use as evidence, which include, among others:
- marriage to the King of Prussia
- dirty laundry
- orange peel
- Darget being unhappy about the Palladion
About the dirty laundry, though, Jessen reports MT using the phrase in a letter to Joseph in 1778, so while Voltaire was still alive, i.e. before the posthumous publications of his memoirs and letters. So word of this phrase being used in regards to Fritz's terrible spelling must have been making the rounds in Europe, however it originated.
selenak:MT writing to Joseph re: a Fritzian letter, "he could have used someone to clean up his dirty laundry" would argue she's at least familiar with the story that Voltaire said this about Fritz. BTW, since it's not in the 1752 anonymous pamphlet, my money is on the Imperial Ambassador in Berlin as her source, the Marquis de Puebla, who was around during the Voltaire years. (And according to Lehndorff well connected to Prussian society. His mistress, the Countess von Bredow, kept his portrait on the wall even after he left at the start of the 7 Years War.)
mildred_of_midgard:Oh, the "can't live without you, can't live with you" letter, that was from Voltaire to Fritz and is still authentic as far as we know, right?
selenak:Yep, because it's from the Prussian State Archive. How's this for irony: both Fritz and Voltaire didn't hesitate to falsify evidence about each other, but with their correspondence, they couldn't do that because the other party kept the receipts, so to speak. Also reply letters will mention things in the previous letter etc. (For example, the letter where Voltaire makes the rat/lion comparison for himself and Fritz (complete with signing off "the rat kisses your paws"), which I also love, has a reply letter from Fritz where he picks up the metaphor and runs with it. You can bet that if Voltaire had altered or rewritten any letters there, Preuss et all would have pounced.
Questions: Did Voltaire "only" forge his correspondence with Madame Denis from 1750-1753, or with his other niece as well? Because I recall Orieux quoting from those letters as well, and at least one of those was pretty slashy as well. (Sadly, I'm currently without the Orieux volume to look up the exact quote, but it goes something like, paraphrased: "Yes, I know it's a big step, but look: king, philosopher, satirist, adores me - who can resist a man like that?" (When explaining why he's moving to Prussia.)
(I suppose if he got the letters back from one niece, he could get it from the other, but Madame Denis was the one living with him and also the one with a personal reason to get back at Fritz after his death. If, however, there's no indication that he retrieved all of his correspondence, including that with his other niece, then he used the flirtation metaphors during the actual time frame already.)
selenak on a quote that, in contrast, probably is real:Voltaire wrote the following to his other niece, Madame de Fontaine, i.e. not Madame Denis and hence presumably not part of the reworked correspondence:
Berlin, September 23rd, 1750: I wish I could sacrifice the King of Prussia for your benefit, but I can't. He's a King, but it's a sixteen-years-long passion that connects us; he's swept me away. I imagine nature has created me for him. Our taste is so eerily alike that I forgot he's master over half of Germany. And that the other half trembles in front of him, that he's won five battles and is the greatest general of Europe, that he's surrounded by six foot tall professional killers. All of this should have caused me to run a thousand miles in the other direction, but the philosopher in him has reconciled me with the monarch, and I have only found him to be a great man who is good and sociable.
