From myth to religion in Ossian’s France TILI BOON CUILLE ´ Though the French Enlightenment was long thought to be virtually devoid of epic poetry, a genre that was subsequently resurrected by Romanticism, Jean-Marie Roulin has recently affirmed the existence of an eighteenth-century French epic tradition conceived along the lines established by Voltaire. 1 According to Roulin, Voltaire rejected the marvellous component traditionally associated with epic poetry, establishing the eighteenth-century French epic on a firm historical footing. 2 Yet neither description of the eighteenth-century epic, as either obsolete or historical, accounts for why the French proved so receptive to the Ossian epics, rapidly infusing their philosophy, literature, painting and opera with Celtic lore. I therefore wish to explore the French fascination for the Ossian epics as a countercurrent to Voltaire’s his- torical model, beginning with the definition of the marvellous in the Encyclope´die. The anonymous author of the article defines the marvellous as pertaining to epic poetry, particularly to the intervention of the gods in Homer and Virgil. Remarking that the heyday of mythology is past, he wonders whether a Christian marvellous might not effectively take the place of the pagan marvellous in modern literature. 3 Indeed, he observes, Scripture is the only credible source of the marvellous for modern France since ‘l’illusion ne peut e ˆ tre complette qu’autant que la poe ´ sie se renferme dans la cre ´ ance commune et dans les opinions nationales.’ The ancients drew upon their system of beliefs to people their fictions, in 243 1. Dafydd Moore contests the categorisation of the Ossian poems as epic as well as their relationship to the Enlightenment, arguing that they would more accurately be described as belonging to the genre of romance and viewing them as a precursor of Romanticism: Enlightenment and romance in James Macpherson’s ‘The Poems of Ossian’: myth, genre and cultural change (Aldershot, 2003), p.1-20. 2. See especially chapter 1 of Jean-Marie Roulin, L’Epope´e de Voltaire a` Chateaubriand: poe´sie, histoire, et politique, SVEC 2005:03. The anonymous author of the article ‘Merveilleux’ in the Encyclope´die notes that the paucity of the marvellous in Voltaire’s Henriade led some critics to say that it ‘ressembloit plus a ` une histoire qu’a ` un poe ¨ me e ´ pique’. 3. For the origins of the debate about the plausibility of a Christian marvellous and the its association with the notion of a modern France see Marc Fumaroli’s discussion in his introduction to La Querelle des anciens et des modernes (Paris, 2001), ‘Les abeilles et les araigne ´ es’, p.124-29. Fumaroli refers to the opposition between the pagan and the Christian marvellous as ‘la Querelle dans la Querelle’ (p.124).