French Research Seminar:‘Shadows of things that may be?’ Voltaire, an author in the dialogue des morts

30 November 2022, 1.45 PM - 30 November 2022, 2.45 PM

Dr. Jessica Goodman, St. Catherine's College, University of Oxford

G.01 LT, 43 Woodland Road

‘Shadows of things that may be?’ Voltaire, an author in the dialogue des morts

In late eighteenth-century France, an outpouring of dialogues of the dead depicted famous figures in conversation in the afterlife. These texts are often read for their satirical content, as critiques of the contemporary world. However, their reconfigurations and re-imaginings of their protagonists in fact serve their new authors in a variety of much more interesting ways. Some are glorifications of their subjects, whose lives and works are presented as exemplars to which reader and author might aspire. Others take an inverse approach, and warn of the probable negative result of emulating the figures they revivify. And yet others are entirely self-serving, appropriating the name/words/authority of the dead to support their own politics or self-fashioning - a technique that becomes even more complex when their subject is an author in his own right. 

This paper studies the figure of just such an author, Voltaire, in dialogues des morts that span four decades: from before his death until after the 1789 Revolution. It examines the role of the imagination in the manner in which his figure is constructed, considering what he represents at different moments for different authors, how far this presentation relates to his own self-fashioning in life, and what these texts can suggest about the relationship between the imagination and posterity in a broader sense. 

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