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A significant proportion of Voltaire's enormous output is historical in nature: a life of Charles XII of Sweden (1731),1 a cultural history of France under Louis XIV (1751),2 a history of the War of 1741 (1755),3 a history of Russia under Peter the Great (1760),4 a précis of the age of Louis XV (1768),5 a history of the Parliament of Paris (1769),6 and a very ambitious Essay on the Manners and Spirit of Nations (1756),7 which was a secular continuation of Bossuet's Discourse on Universal History. Yet Voltaire's status as a historian is an ambiguous one. The Essay on Manners was greatly influential in eighteenth-century Europe, but academic historians like those of the Göttingen School were deeply suspicious of the kind of philosophical history that Voltaire practiced and advocated. In a brief and scathing review of the German translation of the second part of his history of the Russian empire, Schlözer accused Voltaire of errors, lies, faulty reasoning, and gross ignorance. 8 Gatterer ranted against the "pretentious little Humes or Robertsons, the little German Voltaires," and vowed "to hunt down these insects without mercy, wherever they may be," because "they can be dangerous, like all insects."9 When such distinguished representatives of German academic history as Dilthey and Meinecke looked back at the history of the discipline, their view of Voltaire was much more generous than that expressed by their eighteenth-century predecessors, Gatterer and Schlözer. In 1901 Dilthey wrote that Voltaire was "the first to attempt an account of the new universal history of human culture," 10 and that "the effect produced by applying the new ideas to historical facts was extraordinary."11 In 1936 Meinecke argued that
the first and crowning achievement of the Enlightenment in the historical sphere is to be seen in the work of Voltaire. In many respects, it is true, the historical achievements of Hume, Robertson and Gibbon may be ranked higher than Voltaire's; but no one occupies such a broad and obvious and above all effective position within the whole development of historical thought. 12
Meinecke added that "never before . . . had there been such a deliberate and determined effort to distinguish...