Towards a Typology of Historical Discourse

As his article Histoire in the Encyclopedie (and the Dictionnaire philosophique) testifies, Voltaire first recognizes that cannot be viewed simply as a collection of past events, but must also be seen as a specific type of language: HISTOIRE, s.f. c'est le rkcit des faits donn6s pour vrais, au contraire de la fable qui est le r6cit des faits donn6s pour faux.' This definition, by emphasizing the importance of the historical narrative, demands that the narrator unify the incidents he recounts into a cohesive unit, and excludes from the realm of catalogues or chronicles that merely list dates, places, and events without determining the relationships that exist between them. It also stresses the narrator's role in the presentation of history, which in turn should elicit both a judgment and a response from the reader. In an attempt to examine the configuration of Voltaire's historical discourse, this article will first concentrate on rapidly sketching his idea of and its organizational principles before entering into a detailed examination of the correlation between the actual linguistic formulation of this and its social purpose. According to the criterion contained in the above definition, i.e. that must be a factual narrative, Voltaire proceeds to exclude ancient from the historical realm and to characterize it as fable, since he insists that no modern historian or reader operating in accord with rational demands could seriously accept as true the material that this history presents. He demands that the corpus of ancient be carefully edited and re-organized to form the basis for a new universal that would trace the development of the human species

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