This book portrays Voltaire as he was perceived by readers of gazettes and literary journals published in Holland. Among them the literary critic Prosper Marchand, who was allergic to the many factual errors in Voltaire's works, and Henri Du Sauzet, publisher of the Bibliotheque francoise. Also Jean Rousset de Missy, who in 1736 sided with Jean-Baptiste Rousseau in his controversy with Voltaire, and who in his journals Le Magazin and L'Epilogueur often attacked Voltaire: an arrogant little creature, always out to cheat his publishers. We provide a day-by-day chronology of Voltaire's visits to Holland, and illustrate these with a large number of as yet unpublished comments. Thus Henri Du Sauzet tells a correspondent about his problems with Voltaire over Histoire du siecle de Louis XIV, while at the same time his Amsterdam colleague Etienne Ledet clashes with Voltaire over Elements de la philosophie de Newton and 'uvres de M. de Voltaire. Diplomats reported in detail on Voltaire's dealings with Johannes van Duren over the Anti-Machiavel, and on his unsuccessful diplomatic mission to Berlin in 1743.
We include an unknown version of Voltaire's Sur un usage tres utile etabli en Hollande, and discuss at some length his Sommaire des droits de Sa Majeste le roi de Prusse sur Herstal, first printed as a pamphlet in The Hague, and published in the Leydse Courant before it appeared in the Gazette d'Amsterdam, the Gazette de Leyde and the Gazette d'Utrecht. As to the Anti-Machiavel, the first edition to comprise variants was not published by Van Duren, but by Pierre Paupie under the false imprints of Colomb (Marseille) and Lacaze (Amsterdam). With regard to Voltaire's very popular Vers a M. Van Haren, composed in June 1743, we publish a letter by Voltaire, written in Dutch. It was a reaction to criticism of his verses by a Dutch reader, and we suggest that the pamphlet L'Anti-Magazin, a more extensive answer to his critic, may well have been by Voltaire himself. As for Voltaire's Representations aux Etats-Generaux de Hollande, only a few phrases of it were used in the memorandum presented by the French envoy in The Hague on 6 October 1745.