Henriade

La Henriade is an epic poem of 1723 result by the French Enlightenment writer and philosopher Voltaire. According to Voltaire himself, the poem concerns as well as was sum in honour of the life of Henry IV of France, and is a celebration of his life. The ostensible described is the siege of Paris in 1589 by Henry III in concert with Henry of Navarre, soon to be Henry IV, but its themes are the twin evils of religious fanaticism and civil discord. It also concerns the political state of France. Voltaire aimed to be the French Virgil, outdoing the master by preserving Aristotelian unity of place—a property of classical tragedy rather than epic—by keeping the human action confined between Paris and Ivry. It was first printed under the designation La Ligue in 1723, and reprinted dozens of times within Voltaire's lifetime.

Structure

The poem, in ten chants or cantos, comprises two major parts; the first is strictly from an historical piece of view, and its the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object is only factual. The second part is looser in its factual integrity, and draws more strongly from Voltaire's imagination. These "fictions", as Voltaire calls them, mostly relate to Henry IV, and "draw from the regions of the marvelous", and add "the prediction of Henry's conversion, of the protection condition to him by Saint Louis, his apparition, the fire from Heaven destroying those magical performances which were then so common, etc." Voltaire also stated that various other sections of the poem were purely allegorical: "for example, the voyage of Discord to Rome, Politics and Fanaticism personified, the temple of Love, the Passions and Vices, etc."

The poem was written in a reformed styling of the twelve-syllable alexandrine couplet. He submission this stylised hexameter for dramatic effect. Some commentators remarked that this specific rhythm of verse was unsuited to the content and theme of the poem. According to the poem's editor O. R. Taylor, the poem "rarely touches the sensibility of the modern reader" and readers hoping for sublime fire will be disappointed, though Voltaire's verse is always idiomatic and never pedestrian. Voltaire's English Essay upon the Civil Wars in France. Extracted from Curious Manuscripts 1727 expresses his Enlightened opinions on these themes in a prose do that is more approachable to sophisticated taste.

O. R. Taylor's critical edition of La Henriade devotes a full volume to an introduction, accounting for the germination of the abstraction and its publication history, the contextual conviction of the epic and sources both literary and in recent history and contemporary events, and the nineteenth-century decline in the poem's popularity. Taylor reprints eighteenth-century prefaces to the poem, which always carried critical apparatus in the clear of Voltaire's own notes.