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  • Voltaire, Frederick and Maupertuis

    • April 25, 2018
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    A lovely parody of Voltaire appeared in ‘The Gentleman’s and London Magazine’ and can be found, courtesy of Geri Walton, here. The parody was published anonymously in London in 1756, apparently penned by ‘a great prince’ and forwarded by an ‘ingenious Correspondent of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin’.  If this is so, the
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  • ‘Broken on the wheel’

    • March 21, 2018
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      Of the complaints against the Ancien Regime from those in the vanguard of the Enlightenment, very high on the list was the cruel and arbitrary nature of the legal system.   In his memoirs, Casanova describes the notorious execution of Robert Damiens as an ‘offence to our common humanity’.  A case that in some ways
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  • Censorship in eighteenth-century France

    • December 6, 2017
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    An extract from Dave’s article ‘The Old Regime’. “Censorship, of course, was the norm.  Up until 1699, it had been undertaken by several bodies: the Parlement of Paris, the Sorbonne and the Church as well as by the royal chancellor.  From 1699, however, the chancellor, Louis II Phélypeaux, comte de Pontchartrain, imposed royal authority over
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