ABSTRACT
It is easy to draw broad-brush portraits that suggest a family resemblance among Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Denis Diderot; but less easy, perhaps, to find common ground between Samuel Richardson and the philosophes. But the guiding thread will be found in the first kind of ambivalence just mentioned: whilst emulating Richardson, each philosophe rejects his Christian scheme. This chapter inquires why the philosophes converge on Richardson, and with what results. It discusses the fact that the Enlightenment was an international phenomenon, which was accompanied a no less international 'counter-Enlightenment'. The chapter focuses on the two-way or 'cross-Channel' flow in texts and ideas that continued between Britain and France throughout the long eighteenth century. It explains the role played by Richardson in the so-called 'rise of the novel' that might be described more accurately, if perhaps pedantically, as the 'spread of the novel'.
