The Voltaire Library: History

Voltaire’s library, much like its owner, couldn’t stay in one place for long. And each place it went, it grew and became something new, taking on a different form, interceded upon by scholars seeking to better understand the imprint left by nearly 7,000 books on one of the greatest minds in early modern history.

This is a story of the library’s evolution, from the very place in which it was stored to how it was represented throughout two centuries. Through this history we will better understand how this database came to be, how it builds upon existing work, and where it can take us next.

Château de Cirey, Haute-Marne, France (1734-1749)

While Voltaire no doubt collected books throughout his life, the library at Chateau de Cirey is a good place at which to begin a ‘prehistory’ of the subsequent library at Ferney. In a curious, and decidedly French, arrangement, Voltaire lived at Cirey with his muse Emilie du Châtelet and her husband Marquis Florent-Claude du Chastellet-Lomont. The two philosophes built a library at Cirey alongside a scientific laboratory. It is believed that some portion of the books made their way to the Ferney library after Voltaire departed from Cirey. In any case, this hub of intellectual activity set a precedent and a model for what Frédéric Barbier called Voltaire’s ‘laboratory of thought.’1

Château de Ferney, Ferney, France (1758-1778)

Close to present-day Geneva, the château at Ferney was a safe distance from Paris for Voltaire to pursue his intellectual work. From here, Voltaire headed an extensive network of correspondence and exchange (including the exchange of books).

We can see from this visualisation that breadth and reach of letters departing from Ferney, which in the scope of his correspondence was the second top source of correspondence (the first being unknown). One notable correspondent was no less than Catherine II, Empress of All Russia. Catherine the Great was one of Voltaire’s most powerful admirers, writing to him, “By chance your works fell into my hands; and since then I have never stopped reading them, and have not wished to have anything to do with books which were not written as well and from which the same profit could not be derived.”2 Catherine kept Voltaire abreast of the drafting process as she wrote Russia’s new legal code, the Nakaz.3 The empress even sent him a copy in 1777, writing “I do not believe these rules could serve the thirteen cannons [of Switzerland], but I send you an exemplary copy for the library of the chateau at Ferney.”4 Voltaire’s correspondents understood the value of having their work in his library. He might read the text, provide feedback, and then discuss it with other agents in his social network. As for Catherine, her literary affair with the French philosophes spawned a mania with French literature and culture that lasted into the Soviet Union. French became the official court language, and French literature was widely disseminated among the upper classes.5 After Voltaire’s death, Catherine wrote to Melchior Grimm, her “literary and political agent,” with intentions to purchase the library, stating flatly that the scion’s “heirs…did not even realize the true value of the library.”6 She also burst out in frustration at Grimm, because the latter had apparently failed to take possession of Voltaire’s body. “I can promise you he would have had the most splendid tomb possible.”7

Under Voltaire’s supervision, Jean-Louis Wagnière – the ‘most loyal of Voltaire’s secretaries’ – made a catalogue of the library at Ferney, even noting the order in which books were located. 

Imperial Public Library / State Public Library in the name of M. Saltykov-Shchedrin/ National Library of Russia, St. Petersburg, Russia (1779-present day)

In addition to Voltaire’s library, Catherine also purchased the library of his fellow philosophe Denis Diderot. Catherine the Great saw the libraries of Voltaire and Diderot as the spiritual homes of the Enlightenment project. By making them publicly accessible, she wanted to bring the ideas of her venerable philosophes to the Russian people. In fact, as Inna Gorbatov notes, “at some point during her reign, Catherine expressed interest in establishing a public library to bring together the imperial books collections,” including those of Voltaire and Diderot. Catherine understood the value of these collections as cultural monuments.8 They represented the links between Western Europe and a Russia that was blossoming into Peter the Great’s vision. 

The subsequent course of Russian was less favorable to these French visitors. Indeed, the political turmoils of the 19th-century can be read through the fate of Voltaire’s library. Nicholas I shut down the library altogether, citing its “radical” contents.9 Heralding the storms brewing on St. Petersburg’s horizons was the chief of the tsar’s gendarmes Alexander von Benckendorff. Benckendorff is known to history for hunting down the Decembrists of 1925.10 Less known is his role in monitoring Alexander Pushkin.11 Five years before his untimely death, Pushkin came with hat in hand to Benckendorff, writing, “…May I take the liberty of troubling your Excellency again with a most humble request for permission to examine in the Hermitage the library of Voltaire, who used various rare books and manuscripts, sent to him by Shuvalov, for the compilation of his History of the Russian Empire under Peter the Great.”12

In an unusual display of magnanimity, Benckendorff gave the poet entrance to the temple. Pushkin left empty-handed, with the sources of Voltaire’s Russian history that captured his imagination eluding him. He did however leave for posterity a sketch of Voltaire’s statue.13 The statue itself was a monument to Voltaire’s fame across cultural borders, having been commissioned by the Empress.14 It is no wonder that this display of royal admiration for the Enlightenment should have drawn Nicholas’ ire, who ordered his lackeys to “eliminate this old monkey.”15

The Candide-esque journey of Voltaire’s library did not end with the fall of the Russian Empire. A hundred years after Pushkin’s death, scholars at the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg undertook the Herculean task of issuing a new catalogue. Since its publication in 1961, and ranging 1166 pages, the catalogue has remained an authoritative record of Voltaire’s collection.16 Two discoveries were made in the later half of the twentieth-century of other texts that were not transferred with Voltaire’s library, but were instead moved into the general collections of the IPL ( later renamed the National Library of Russia).17 These texts however comprise a small percentage (roughly around 0.03%) of the total number of volumes in Voltaire’s library. 

The scholars working on the catalogue endeavored that theirs should be a “scientific catalog of the Voltaire library.”18 They clearly understood the value, and good fortune, of what had ended up in their collection. In the editor’s preface, Alekseev writes, 

‘Not only did the library make it to us in its complete state, in value and substance, with all the marginalia within it, but also in particular among the remaining so-called ‘Ferney catalogue’ of the library, in the composition of which Voltaire himself took part… All of this gives us the right to consider Voltaire’s library, now housed in Leningrad’s State Public library in the name of M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, one of the most valuable book collections of the Age of the Enlightenment in France, to which foreign book collectors have no equal.’

Voltaire’s library escaped the fate of Diderot’s, whose contents were deemed ‘insignificant’ and eventually assimilated into the general collection of the NLR. 

Stanford University, California, United States of America (2016-2019)

The National Library of Russia collaborated with the Bibliothèque nationale de France to create a website devoted to the library, with a PDF copy of the catalogue and detailed explanations of the library’s history and the catalogue’s creation, which can be found here: ​​https://vivaldi.nlr.ru/bx000070514/view/?#page=1.19 The catalogue includes the title, author, date and place of publication, as well as censorship data, with each entry in the the original language of the book. Yet it has remained largely inaccessible to Western scholars. It is difficult to search through the 1,166 pages with little understanding of how it is structured or what gems the editors have included.

Pushkin’s excursion to the library demonstrates two of the persistent issues that have shaped the library. Accessibility defined, and continues to define, scholars’ interaction with the library. And the process of searching through nearly 7,000 books proves a daunting challenge, even for one of Russia’s greatest minds. The questions raised by the life and afterlives of this library lend themselves to interpretation through digital humanities, and, more broadly, the fields of cultural preservation, book history, and intellectual history. Conversely, the values embodied by Voltaire that shine through his library illuminate a path for our research. His interests transcended cultural and linguistics boundaries, a journey mirrored by his collection and his legacy. How can we make the library accessible to a wider audience? How do we facilitate scholarly research into Voltaire, his thought process, and the Enlightenment project? 

To answer these questions, and to build a resource that could help scholars in the West better understand Voltaire’s library, I was tasked by Professor Dan Edelstein in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at Stanford University to build a spreadsheet. This quest fell into my lap as Russian is my native language and I was embarking on a degree in French, with a focus on the French Enlightenment. It was the perfect synthesis.

The creation of the first catalogues under Voltaire and Wagnière raised the issue of intervention. A catalogue is a type of representation and is already different from the physical display and organisation of a library. While, as Wagnière’s copy included, a catalogue can demarcate the location of books, it is objectively a different experience from walking through a library and physically handling the texts. It is not an infrequent concern in the digital humanities that digitisation removes the materiality of texts (for example, with medieval manuscripts). This issue however predates digitisation: with a catalogue, it is not necessary to visit a library and manually browse to determine what is inside. 

This is not to say that such an intervention is inherently a disadvantage: catalogues are easily exported, and of great use to those who can’t visit a library in person. They also condense the process of comprehending the library’s contents through alphabetisation and standardised formatting. 

Every intervention should be interrogated, however: does it move us further or close to the original artefact? Perhaps it does both: how does each degree of separation or proximity enhance our understanding? Do they obscure key features of the artefact? Voltaire supervised the creation of the first catalogues of the library but he himself experienced it for the most part in its physical manifestation. Each intervention should be conscious of the distance it creates or inherently contains from the experience of the original owner. In this way, projects like Reading with Austen which recreate the experience of walking through a library are a step towards capturing the full experience. 

Again, the term ‘intervention’ does not have a normative prescription and can in fact be useful for preserving historical data across different contexts and media. It is fundamentally a question of self-awareness and reflection, which subsequently informs how we use the tools at our disposal to capture the essence of the original artefact. 

With this in mind, my first step was to create a spreadsheet of the 1961 catalogue- the philosophes would have loved spreadsheets. My spreadsheet of Voltaire’s library expands on the original four bits of metadata provided by the 1961 catalogue to 135 metadata categories. Here are a couple examples of the data which I used to enrich the original metadata.

Social data

These categories include a wider net of individuals who helped produce the texts (such as authors, editors, commenters, publishers, and booksellers). This arena of characters includes those who might fall of the radar of Enlightenment scholars if their names are not Rousseau, Montaigne, or Aristotle. Including these people restores their place in the story of the Enlightenment book trade, and acknowledges the role they had in shaping Voltaire’s library. The next step is to reconstruct the social networks between Voltaire and these individuals. The top ten authors in Voltaire’s library by frequency of texts are his contemporaries (including both famous and minor thinkers). This data point shows that the library reflected ongoing debates, and suggests that Voltaire networked with the people he read. How did he receive the books in his library? Were they gifts, and, if so, from whom? How and from whom did he request books (in particular, censored texts)? With whom did he discuss his opinion of the texts? Reconstructing the networks that gave rise to and sustained Voltaire’s library, we can identify the practitioners of savant sociability. In turn, we shed light on the circulation of ideas, and the “intelligencing” of the 18th-century.20

Linked data

To enrich our understanding of the library, each item – bibliographic, geographic, social – is given linked data. For example, each individual associated with a text- such as author, publisher, or collaborator – is assigned a VIAF number, allowing us to pull information about their background into the database. This information can give us insights into whom Voltaire was reading, and classify them across a range of categories, including temporal proximity to Voltaire, profession, nationality, and language. Among the challenges of working with this data will be the disambiguation and reconciliation of names.

In addition to VIAF, the spreadsheet includes linked data from repositories like GallicaBNF and GeoNames. With the help of GallicaBNF, each title will have a full text copy. The long-term goal of this data is to overlay a digitised edition of Voltaire’s marginalia onto the exact pages where it is found. This will give the user the experience of being in his library and seeing the text through his eyes. With a GeoCode, we can map the places of publication, both real and falsified, to see where Voltaire’s sources are coming from – especially the scandalous ones. Censorship data is provided for both places and individuals, and opens up possibilities for exploring the clandestine sources of Voltaire’s work.

Original and stated data

The spreadsheet also accounts for distinctions between original and stated data. For example, each book in the 1961 catalogue has a stated date. This is the data provided by the catalogue for the edition that Voltaire owned. At the expensive of eyesight and socializing, the spreadsheet includes the original date for every single text. This is the data of the first edition of the work. Looking at the discrepancies between these two dates allows us to measure how old, in fact, are Voltaire’s sources. Graphing the two sets of dates has revealed sources as old as 600 BC, and a remarkable dearth of medieval texts. The same logic is applied to the languages of the library, or rather this early modern tower of Babel. The stated text language is the language in which Voltaire read the book, and the original language is precisely that. This data shows us that Voltaire’s books come from 24 different languages, and were owned by him in nine. Questions of course arise surrounding the books in languages he did not know. For example, a surprising number of his ancients authors are in Polish. He most likely did not know Polish, so why did he own them? This is an enigma for the research to-do list.

Genre

One piece of information missing from the catalogue was genre. The texts in the database are classified using a genre system established according to the criteria of the epoch.21 It would have been a system intelligible to Voltaire and his contemporaries. Including typologies in the database that Voltaire would have used and understood brings us a step closer to faithfully rebuilding his working library. Each book is assigned up to three genres and nine sub-genres. This data can visualise the interdisciplinary nature of Voltaire’s library.

University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom (2023-present)

A database allows the user to ask two types of questions. In a large corpus such as a catalogue, we often ask a leading question, for example, is there a particular text? When you have a paper document like this catalogue, which is 1,126 pages, you probably don’t want to search out every single text relating to a particular topic. You are more likely to use the alphabetical list to locate a specific text. With a database, we can ask open-ended questions with ease. In addition to searching for a specific text, we can ask the database to show us all books relating to a particular topic. The process of searching is easier, and in turn it enhances the scope of our inquiry. Open-ended questions allow us to cast a wider net, meaning we can analyse more books at once and also uncover texts we were not anticipating. 

This duality is encapsulated by the playwright Tom Stoppard’s remark that “the predetermined and the unpredictable unfold together to make things the way that they are.”22 Scholars frame the digital archive as a space in which “to rethink large historical processes.”23 In our case, we are looking at Voltaire’s research process. What shaped Voltaire’s library? And what in the library shaped Voltaire’s work?  In this working library, Voltaire made deliberate choices as to what became a part of his collection. The goal of the Voltaire Library Project is to uncover those choices. You can compare this with something like the Codrington Library at All Souls College, which is a collector’s library. There is not much of a rhyme or rhythm to Codrington’s purchases. By contrast, Voltaire made deliberate choices as to which books became a part of his collection. And by looking at thousands of books at once, we can start to uncover these patterns of choice. In even broader terms, this is a project about reading practices, knowledge collection, and the production of ideas, and how we can replicate these processes using digital humanistic tools.

Building a database was thus the natural next step following the creation of the spreadsheet. 

Ethical and Legal Considerations

The database linked to this website and produced by the Voltaire Library Project does not claim to be an exact reproduction of the 1961 catalogue. The spreadsheet that was initially created took the data in the 1961 catalogue as the starting point for an entirely new dataset, which heavily adds, expands, and, in certain cases, corrects on the information found in the 1961 catalogue. Thus the spreadsheet and the database are a new representation of the books found in Voltaire’s personal library.

Bibliography

  1.  IGorbatov, 308.
  2.  D13433.
  3.  D20847. 
  4.  Gorbatov, 310.
  5.  Inna Gorbatov, Catherine the Great and the French Philosophers of the Enlightenment: Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot and Grimm (Bethesda: Academica Press, 2006). https://books.google.com/books?id=9sHebfZIXFAC&pg=PA102&dq=catherine+the+great+wagniere&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjb76KO9efhAhWFMnwKHR4jAaEQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=heirs&f=false, 97-98. 
  6.  Ibid.
  7.  Gorbatov, 310.
  8.  Inna Gorbatov, Catherine the Great and the French Philosophers of the Enlightenment: Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot and Grimm (Bethesda: Academica Press, 2006). https://books.google.com/books?id=9sHebfZIXFAC&pg=PA102&dq=catherine+the+great+wagniere&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjb76KO9efhAhWFMnwKHR4jAaEQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=heirs&f=false, 97-98. 
  9.  Ibid.
  10.  Gorbatov, “Catherine the Great,” 103.
  11.  Ibid. 317, 318.
  12.  “Count Alexander von Benckendorff, Chief of the Third Section of His Imperial Majesty’s Own Chancellery,” Presidential Library, https://www.prlib.ru/en/history/619357. 
  13. Tatiana Wolff, Pushkin on Literature (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1986), 326. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Pushkin_on_Literature/z3O7rvHhYRgC?hl=en&gbpv=1.  Zara Martirosova Torlone, Vergil in Russia: National Identity and Classical Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 132-133. https://books.google.com/books?id=F8uSBQAAQBAJ&pg=PA132&lpg=PA132&dq=ALEXANDER+VON+BENCKENDORFF+pushkin+duel&source=bl&ots=5GU7t9mJIE&sig=j6_oYc_DcIIQ_GRZu6WowqbAcKg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiFqIuejsvfAhXSct8KHTqkCUgQ6AEwEXoECAMQAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false.  “History of the Library,” The Voltaire Library, National Library of Russia, http://nlr.ru/voltaire/RA417/history-library-Voltaire.
  14.  Ibid.
  15.  Akademia Nauk USSR Institut Russkoi Literaturi, Katalog Knig (Leningrad: Izdatelstvo Akademia Nauk USSR, 1961), 46.
  16.  Gorbatov, Catherine the Great, 105. 
  17.  They did not succeed. Museum International 55, Issue 1 (2003): 14.
  18.  Gorbatov, “From Paris to St. Petersburg,” 321.
  19.  Ibid.
  20.  Havens and Torrey, 990.
  21. The following lists the three sites created in collaboration between the National Library of Russia and the Bibliothèque nationale de France: (1) “Библиотека Вольтера, » Российская национальная библиотека, http://www.nlr.ru/voltaire/activity.php. (2) “la Bibliothèque de Voltaire à la Bibliothèque nationale de Russia” / “Библиотека Вольтера В Российскoй национальнoй библиотекe,” Gallica Voltaire, http://gallica.bnf.fr/dossiers/html/dossiers/Voltaire/.  (3) “Библиотека Вольтера,” Vivaldi, https://vivaldi.nlr.ru/bx000070514/view#page=1.
  22.  “About.” Networking Archives. https://networkingarchives.org/.
  23.  François Furet, Livre et société dans la France du XVIIIe siècle (The Hague: Mouton & Co, 1965), 14-16.
  24.  Tom Stoppard, Arcadia (New York City: Samuel French, 1993), 47.
  25.   Joanne Bernardi, “Creative Curating: The Digital Archive as Argument.” Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities (Debates in the Digital Humanities) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017): 187.