The Bullet That Ended Chivalry: Voltaire's Histoire de Charles Xii As A Celebration Of The Implausible

Abstract

Voltaire's first historical work (History of Charles XII, 1731) is frequently read as a piece of literary satire designed to ridicule the tradition of military heroes and warmongering monarchs. I offer a contrasting perspective and make the case that the book grapples with a problem both epistemic and poetic: how to narrate and make sense of an implausible or unbelievable past. In shedding light on this issue, this article questions widely held assumptions about the relationship between truth, plausibility, and history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It pushes back against the notion that Voltaire, like other neoclassical historians, had a rigid and naive understanding of the implausible as “fabulous” or “unhistorical.” Instead, I make the case that the implausible to Voltaire often pointed to a necessary and meaningful aspect of histories as narratives of the grand, the extraordinary, and the grotesque.