2020
Cairn
Gérard Laudin, « Les Annales de l’Empire depuis Charlemagne. Voltaire et les mutations du système féodal dans le Saint-Empire romain germanique », Études Germaniques, ID : 10670/1.vfxrza
The Annals of the Empire from the Reign of Charlemagne (1753), one of Voltaire’s largely forgotten historical works, are part of a rather long list of publications since the end of the seventeenth century aimed at recounting the history and the institutions of the Holy Roman Empire. They fuel political thought in an era focusing on “European equilibrium” and “perpetual peace”. Voltaire, who was so very aware of the counter-powers which allow us to assert that liberty is the first of the natural rights, uses elements of Montesquieu’s and the Abbé de Saint-Pierre’s analyses, while taking a different general viewpoint: he sees the Holy Roman Empire, in its Germanic part, not as a model worth imitating, but as a tension zone which remained paradoxically stable due to a specific evolution of feudalism: although “carrying within it all that ought to destroy it”, it remained “unshakable”, and conversely, the overthrow of the feudal system dismembered the Italian part of the Empire, making it the prey of its neighbours at the cost of its freedom.