Voltaire à l'ouvrage

de Gillian Pink

Voltaire is one of the most famous authors of the French Enlightenment with Candide or optimism , and Philosophical Letters , among others . His struggle against judicial errors and fanaticism makes us close, and in fact a relative figure of some intellectuals of the XX th century. The formula "We do not stop Voltaire" has passed to posterity! The Voltaire Gillian Pink presents us is not the public figure but the reader. It is in the intimacy of his library, sold after his death to Catherine II and preserved at the National Library of Russia, a gigantic library of 3867 titles and more than 7000 volumes that introduces us this book. Voltaire wrote on the sidelines of his books for more than fifty years, from the eve of his departure to England in 1726 until his death in 1778. Between textual genetics, book history, literary history and literary study, this book shows how Voltaire used his books and the different kinds of notes he used to leave there. White spaces with mordant annotations, nonverbal signs like numbers or bars, bookmarks marking binding operations and expanded commentary readings tell us how Voltaire worked, reacted to his fellow writers and thought.--translation of page 4 of cover by CNRS Éditions.