Voltaire and the Sirven affair (1762-1772)

Long overshadowed by the campaign to exonerate the memory of Calas, the Sirven affair (1762-1772) has nonetheless, but mistakenly, been bracketed with it in importance. This is the first-ever study in English to evaluate its evolution, to gauge Voltaire’s true involvement in it and, above all, to rectify misleading assumptions made in both French and English-language pronouncements.

Voltaire’s involvement with Sirven, has - for long – elicited laudatory judgements from French or Anglo-Saxon voices. If the former proclaimed that ‘Voltaire avait une fois encore gagné’ (as he had famously done with Calas), the latter have been even more fulsomely assertive : ‘he secured a complete victory’; ‘Sirven was in one important respect the most successful of Voltaire’s human rights campaigns’. Such confidence seems strange, however, given that the topic has not received the coverage that it deserved in France, while - in the English-speaking world - it has merited not one single monograph. This study attempts to rectify such curious overstatements, and to propose conclusions that are more consonant with a good understanding of such a complex affair which was, however, emphatically not ‘Calas bis’.

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