<i>Voltaire après la nuit: Paris, Moscou, Genève</i> . Par François Jacob <i>Voltaire après la nuit: Paris, Moscou, Genève</i> . Par JacobFrançois. (Publications de la Société Voltaire, 5.) Ferney-Voltaire: Centre international d’étude du <scp>xviii</scp> ^e siècle, 2021. 192 pp., ill.

With the completion last year of the Voltaire Foundation’s monumental edition of the Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, our attention turns to the international groundswell that helped bring the project about. (See, in this issue, the État présent by Nicholas Cronk, ‘Rediscovering Voltaire: The New Œuvres complètes de Voltaire (1968–2022)’.) In this excellent book, François Jacob focuses on the renewal of Voltaire studies in Europe from the end of the Second World War to the 1960s. The central figure is, naturally, that of the Polish-born British bibliographer and psychic researcher Theodore Besterman, who founded the Institut et Musée Voltaire in Geneva in 1952, who edited Studies on Voltaire, and whose edition of Voltaire’s correspondence revived interest in the subject around the world. In 1968 Besterman lent his support to the idea of undertaking a new critical edition of Voltaire’s complete works. Hence, in a roundabout way, the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford was established. It was curious fate for one of the leading lights of French thought. Those of us in the Anglosphere do not necessarily appreciate that Voltaire has traditionally been a polarizing figure in France. Jacob explains with great insight the touchiness Voltaire arouses in French intellectual circles. This was especially true in the years following the Liberation. The Catholic right could never abide Voltaire, though the fascist right approved of his antisemitism. On the left, he was often cited as an apostle of freedom. And yet, his bourgeois outlook and liberal views on capitalism made him highly suspect to the communists. Despite the solemn ceremony held at the Sorbonne on 10 December 1944, celebrating the 250th anniversary of his birth, the Patriarch of Ferney was a figure unlikely to rally a nation still recovering from Nazi occupation. Jacob structures his book around three geographical and political poles: Paris, Geneva, and Moscow, each one in some way connected to Voltaire. The ‘Heure de Moscou’ chapter is perhaps the most puzzling, given the comparative lack of attention to Voltaire in Eastern Europe. Voltaire’s library was bought by Catherine the Great and has remained in Russia ever since. This stunning asset notwithstanding, one is hard pressed to point to a significant body of scholarship on Voltaire coming from that quarter. Those publications that have appeared, including the Bibliothèque de Voltaire: catalogue des livres (Moscow: Académie des sciences de l’URSS, 1961), have been out of print for decades. They were, moreover, produced on cheap paper with commentary in Russian. After a slow start in the German Democratic Republic, it was ultimately left to the Voltaire Foundation to complete the edition of Voltaire’s marginalia. Equally odd is the chapter devoted to the writer Nancy Mitford (!), whose Voltaire in Love (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1957) admittedly helped popularize Voltaire in English. Where Jacob succeeds admirably is in telling the story of Besterman’s initiatives in Geneva, a city which took the lead in celebrating Voltaire and his legacy. A sequel that we might hope for would consider the American Voltairistes, George R. Havens, Norman L. Torrey, and Ira O. Wade, whose contributions to the field coincided with the Voltaire revival of the 1950s.

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