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Voltaire and the Refusal of Mystery

Voltaire; anti-poète; mystère; désinfecter

Voltaire serves in Mon cœur mis à nu LI–LII2 less as an exhaustively read historical author than as the name of an intellectual manner Baudelaire rejects: the brisk exposure of sacred claims as bodily absurdities.

From the book

Intimate Journals

Charles Baudelaire · Diotimos Editions · 2026

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Orientation

At a Glance

  • The wordVoltaire serves in Mon cœur mis à nu LI–LII2 less as an exhaustively read historical author than as the name of an intellectual manner Baudelaire rejects: the brisk exposure of sacred claims as bodily absurdities.
  • In Intimate JournalsMon cœur mis à nu LI invents a missing Voltaire chapter for Emerson's Representative Men.
  • In this edition‘Disinfect’ preserves the deliberately clinical metaphor rather than substituting ‘purify’.
  • A place to readVoltaire, ou l’anti-poète — The imaginary chapter title announces an aesthetic judgment.

Meaning

Voltaire serves in Mon cœur mis à nu LI–LII2 less as an exhaustively read historical author than as the name of an intellectual manner Baudelaire rejects: the brisk exposure of sacred claims as bodily absurdities. ‘Anti-poet’ and ‘anti-artist’ condemn a mode of attention, not merely a political allegiance.

The opposed faculty is the capacity to remain with mystery. For Baudelaire, an unsettling conjunction of body and soul can invite interpretation instead of being settled by laughter.

Use in the book

Mon cœur mis à nu LI invents a missing Voltaire chapter for Emerson's Representative Men. The imagined title multiplies hostile offices, from king of gawkers to father of newspaper editors. This is a satirical proposal by Baudelaire, not an omitted chapter that Emerson planned. The figure becomes an ancestor of a whole culture of shallow public explanation.

Mon cœur mis à nu LII focuses on the joke about an immortal soul lodged near excrement during gestation. The source annotation answers by treating sexual embodiment as a possible sign of original sin or a satire by Providence. Both readings notice the same bodily facts; they differ over what the facts can mean. Baudelaire therefore contests the inference rather than disproving the anatomy.

The adjacent sentence about the Church ‘disinfecting’ love through marriage makes the opposition unstable. He too can turn religious institutions into a sardonic medical metaphor. The notebook does not contrast a wholly reverent writer with a wholly irreverent enemy. Its hostility concerns the kind of irreverence that closes inquiry, while its own jokes seek, or claim to seek, darker implications.

Places to read

  1. Mon cœur mis à nu LIVoltaire, ou l’anti-poète — The imaginary chapter title announces an aesthetic judgment.
  2. Mon cœur mis à nu LIIVoltaire, comme tous les paresseux, haïssait le mystère. — Incuriosity is redescribed as spiritual laziness.
  3. Mon cœur mis à nu LIIl’Eglise a voulu au moins le désinfecter — The medical joke complicates any simple division between reverence and mockery.
  4. Mon cœur mis à nu LIIun signe du péché originel — The same bodily arrangement receives a contrary theological reading.

Translation in this edition

‘Disinfect’ preserves the deliberately clinical metaphor rather than substituting ‘purify’. The paragraph labelled ‘[In a note]’ belongs to the printed source's annotation layer; it is not a new translator's objection. Note 54 locates the Voltaire passage in the speech of the anatomist Sidrac, an important distinction between a fictional speaker and a direct authorial proposition.