La diffusion des idées voltairiennes au XIXe siècle : Pigault-Lebrun

This work intends to show the extent of the influence of Voltaire's religion-related writings on Pigault-Lebrun, a famous 19$ rm sp{th}$ writer scarcely remembered today.The subject is divided in two separate parts. The first part will demonstrate how the different clergy members described by Voltaire are rendered quite faithfully as the characters of the secular and the regular clergy found in the author's novels. In the second part, we will find out the extent to which Pigault-Lebrun has used the 18$ rm sp{th}$ century philosopher's writings in order to write Le Citateur, an anti-clerical essay used by Napoleon as a political weapon, which summarizes the history of christianism from the biblical era until the Enlightenment.Our study clearly illustrates a broad range of borrowings from Voltaire's work and shows that Pigault-Lebrun played an important part in the diffusion of Voltaire's ideas in the 19$ rm sp{th}$ century