Il “Settecento libertino” e gli storici. Il caso di Voltaire e degli epicurei del Temple

It has been written that libertinism and philosophical heterodoxy are under a kind of curse: that of never being taken seriously and dismissed as «posture sociale, un prétexte à la licence des moeurs». In the case of Voltaire, this is especially true for his early years of philosophical apprenticeship and for the circle where that training took place: the Epicurean, skeptical, deist symposium of the Temple. The seductive and still popular vulgate of the “libertine century”, of aristocratic insouciance and voluptuousness, was manufactured in France in the journalistic, critical, and literary context of the Second Empire. The article investigates the reasons that led historians to adopt this legend of purely literary origin, just at the moment of transition from romantic historiography to positivist historiography, reconstructing its contexts and specific circumstances. Produced during what was the true «century of the French Revolution» (Furet), the legend of the siècle libertin was a catalyst and vehicle for many of the polemical and conflicting subtexts produced by a long 19th century that never stopped ruminating on its causes and consequences, and that pointed to the age of Enlightenment as the cause of all the disasters of modernity.