Henriade

• 1. Introduction

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  La Henriade, the epic poem Voltaire published in 1723, opens not on a battlefield but on a city under siege. Paris, in the year 1589, is encircled by two kings: Henry III and the man who would soon replace him, Henry of Navarre. Voltaire chose that moment of violence and political desperation as the frame for something far more ambitious than a war poem. He wanted to write the French answer to Virgil's Aeneid, and he wanted Henry IV of France to be his Aeneas. What did it mean for an Enlightenment philosopher to channel a classical epic tradition? And what were the twin evils that Voltaire believed had nearly torn France apart? The answers lie in ten cantos, a reformed twelve-syllable line, and a poem that was reprinted dozens of times in its author's lifetime but never quite became what Voltaire hoped it would be.

• 2. The Virgilian Ambition

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  Voltaire set himself a goal that few poets in any language had attempted: not merely to imitate Virgil but to outdo him. He aimed to preserve what he called the Aristotelian unity of place, a rule borrowed from classical tragedy rather than from epic tradition. To achieve this, he kept all the human action of the poem confined to two locations, Paris and Ivry. Virgil had ranged across the Mediterranean world; Voltaire drew a tighter circle and dared the form to hold. He also chose to write in a reformed version of the alexandrine couplet, the twelve-syllable line that was the prestige meter of French verse. He shaped this into a stylised hexameter intended for dramatic effect. Some contemporaries were unconvinced. Several commentators remarked that this particular rhythm was poorly suited to the poem's content and themes. The poem's later editor O. R. Taylor put it plainly: the verse is always idiomatic and never pedestrian, but readers who arrive hoping for sublime fire will be disappointed. Voltaire, Taylor observed, rarely touches the sensibility of the modern reader.

• 3. Fact, Fiction, and the Marvelous

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  The poem divides cleanly into two halves, and Voltaire was candid about where history ended and invention began. The first major part stays close to historical fact, drawing on the actual record of Henry IV's life and the siege of Paris. The second part loosens its grip on factual integrity and draws, in Voltaire's own word, from "the regions of the marvelous." Voltaire catalogued these invented elements himself: the prediction of Henry's conversion to Catholicism, the protection given to Henry by Saint Louis, Saint Louis's apparition, a fire from heaven destroying magical performances common to the age. Alongside the marvelous, other sections were designed as pure allegory. Voltaire named them specifically: the voyage of Discord to Rome, Politics and Fanaticism personified, the temple of Love, the Passions and Vices. These fictional and allegorical layers carried the poem's philosophical argument, giving Voltaire a space where he could stage the abstract forces he believed governed French history, above all religious fanaticism and the civil discord it produced.

• 4. Reception and Rivalry

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  La Henriade was first printed under the title La Ligue in 1723, and it went through dozens of reprints within Voltaire's lifetime. That commercial success sat alongside a critical conversation that never quite resolved in the poem's favour. Many readers regarded it as one of Voltaire's best works, a genuine achievement in the tradition of the epic. Yet the same readers often stopped short of calling it his masterpiece or the best he was capable of. Critics charged the poem with lacking originality and novel inspiration, with falling short of anything truly extraordinary. A harsher strand of commentary went further, suggesting that this shortfall came from Voltaire's own incomplete understanding of what he was writing, and from a lack of genuine enthusiasm in the work. La Henriade is one of only two extended epic poems Voltaire produced; the other is La Pucelle d'Orleans, which took Joan of Arc as the subject of satire. Voltaire wrote poetry throughout his life, but nothing else approached the length or ambition of these two works. By the nineteenth century, the poem's popularity had declined noticeably, a trajectory that O. R. Taylor's critical edition documents across a full introductory volume.

• 5. Downstream Influence

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  In 1740, the French writer Francois-Thomas-Marie de Baculard d'Arnaud completed a tragedy titled Coligny, and the influence of Voltaire's poem on that work was direct and acknowledged. Both Voltaire's Henriade and d'Arnaud's Coligny then fed into a later visual tradition. The 1787 history painting Admiral Coligny Confronts His Assassins, by the Flemish-born French painter Joseph-Benoit Suvee, drew on both as sources. That a poem about the siege of Paris in 1589 could still be generating new works in painting nearly two centuries later points to the durability of the historical material Voltaire had chosen. For readers who find the verse too difficult, Voltaire himself provided an alternative entry point: his English Essay upon the Civil Wars in France, extracted from curious manuscripts and published in 1727, covered the same Enlightened opinions on religious fanaticism and civil discord in prose that his own editor described as more approachable to modern taste.