Buy Me A CoffeeVoltaire (1694-1778) is the self-invented name of François-Marie Arouet, riffed on a childhood description of him as a determined little man. He belongs in the Panthéon in Paris, old wise and wizened, but eyes sharp and gleaming through the stone. The central figure in the Enlightenment, Voltaire’s legacy is now being systematically dismantled worldwide.
It is notable that Black Lives Matter sought to desecrate his statue despite condemnation of slavery in his most famous book Candide (1759). It was an unjust attack, even allowing for his occasional ambiguity as a product of his times. Why not go to Monticello and attack icons of Thomas Jefferson? John F Kennedy famously said in a meeting of Nobel Prize winners in the White House: ‘there is more intellect in this room except when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.’ We may not simply be desecrating statues, but also those who brought Enlightenment to the human soul.
Voltaire’s work is eclectic and difficult to classify. His plays are rightly disparaged, though these were often his main source of income. They also brought a lengthy stay in the Bastille, as well as forced exile for over two years in London, where he got to know among others Newton and Swift. There, he wrote a celebratory text on the English, famously describing them as a nation of one hundred religions but only one sauce. He went on to popularize Newton, and is attributed with spreading the story of the apple tree.
So, using quotations from the man himself let’s explore his central contribution.
Voltaire was imprisoned in the Bastille from 16 May 1717 to 15 April 1718 in a windowless cell.
- Freedom Of Speech
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
If we resort to ‘no platforming’ or censoring people for saying things we disagree with then all is lost. Sadly, we no longer have a polity dedicated to ideal speech, the utopia envisaged by Habermas, via Jeremy Bentham. Instead, we find a uniform, soporific social media blandness.
Ronald Dworkin towards the end of his illustrious career, and in response to the Danish Cartoon incident, wrote a nuanced defence of the right to offend, saying:
Ridicule is a distinct kind of expression: its substance cannot be repackaged in a less offensive rhetorical form without expressing something very different from what was intended.
So, in a democracy no one, however powerful or important, can have a right not to be insulted or offended.
Thus, for example, in 2015, when 12 journalists from satirical paper Charlie Hebdo were shot in a terrorist attack, Voltaire’s Trait sur la tolerance/ Treaty on Tolerance (1763), which defends freedom of speech was drawn attention to. Protesters marched down the Boulevard Voltaire in Paris brandishing images of the great man shouting: Je suis Charlie.
In the treatise he argued: Oh, different worshippers of a peaceful god. …love God and your neighbour.
Christoper Hitchens Oscar Wilde, along with others such as the English judge Stephan Sedley, have in substance also remarked that the freedom to speak inoffensively is a freedom not worth having They are merely his intellectual offspring.
Voltaire with Denis Diderot, Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Marquis de Condorcet and Jean-François de La Harpe.
- Religion
If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.
The problem in this post-truth-transhumanist zeitgeist is that there exists a moral vacuum. Moral relativism and the structuralists have destroyed community, sociability and the Aristotelian tradition of the virtues. The death of God in people’s lives has undermined society and social ordering. Habermas‘ most recent text in effect says so. Voltaire agrees.
Voltaire was actually an atheist but deliberately circumspect. On his death bed he was asked did he want the services of a priest for the last rites and renounce Satan. His Delphic response was: ‘This is no time to be making new enemies.’
Thus, the arch-rationalist and pragmatist recognised the need for doubt. He understood the need for Christian compassion and religion as a source of social order. Indeed, he famously was sceptical of certainties.
On the brink of the destruction of the ancien regime, he spent his final twenty-five years in Ferney, a fabulous estate near the Swiss border at Geneva. It was built to some extent on the proceeds of winning the French lottery. He treated his workers admirably and built a model town, which I have had the privilege of visiting.
Luckily, he was not around to witness the descent of the French Revolution into barbarism and terror ushered in by virulent atheists such as St Just and Robespierre.
Indeed, Thomas Paine, the author of The Rights of Man and co-author of The French Declaration of The Rights (1793) narrowly avoided the guillotine by a mark on the wrong door at the height of the Terror.
In the interests of balance it was worth recalling another of his aphorisms on religion:
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it. (Letter to Étienne Noël Danielsville, May 16, 1767)”
and
God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh.
Voltaire at Frederick the Great’s Sanssouci, by Pierre Charles Baquoy.
- Miscarriages of Justice
It is better to risk saving a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.
In the summer of 1765, in the little town of Abbeville in Picardie in northern France, three young men, Franzoi’s-Jean Lefebvre, chevalier de La Barre, Gaillard d’Alene and Charles Moisnel, were accused of sacrilege, blasphemy and irreligion. A crucifix had been damaged on a bridge leading to Abbeville. The three young men had been observed failing to doff their hats as a religious procession passed. They had been heard singing songs with pornographic allusions to the Virgin Mary. Shocking and libertine books were discovered in La Barre’s room, among them Voltaire’s Dictionarie Philosophique, printed anonymously in Geneva in 1764.
On July 1 1766, La Barre was tortured and beheaded. His body was burnt on a pyre together with Voltaire’s Dictionary. Voltaire heard about the case in his retreat at Ferney, when the first accusations were made.
At first, he was hopeful that the death sentence would be commuted. Later, when he learned that the execution had taken place, he was horrified. In a letter to a friend, he expressed his horror at the strange combination of frivolity and cruelty he observed in the French. After the burning and symbolic execution of his Dictionary he felt indirectly targeted and under genuine threat. Extradition in fraught times was a possibility.
He retaliated brilliantly. In the 1769 edition of the Encyclopaedia entitled La Raison par alphabet, Voltaire includes an article on torture in which he relates La Barre’s ordeal. The prosecution mentioned this scandalous book which was later put on the Vatican’s Index Libro.
He wrote initially in the hope of achieving a retrial. With each new attempt to intervene on behalf of the accused, Voltaire goes back to the documents, re-reading and cross-checking. As new information comes to light, he modifies his arguments, considering the potentially biased nature of the “facts” that had been presented to him.
Noticeably Voltaire scatters them throughout his letters to friends, but also circulates them among important members of the judiciary. Luckily, he had the privilege of being on friendly terms with the powerful. Thus, he enjoyed a volatile lifelong relationship with Frederick the Great of Prussia and Catherine the Great in Russia as well as the King of France. This saved his skin.
In the Le Barre case what was at issue was not the legality of the proceedings, but the legitimacy of the judiciary.
A crucial text Prix de la justice et de humanity (1777), describes the French justice system from the point of view of a Swiss protestant traveller in France. Yet, the last important text Voltaire wrote on the case was Le Cri du sang innocent (1775), a letter addressed to the King of France, Louis XVI, and signed by La Barre’s co-accused who had escaped to Prussia. It was a decidedly brave stance.
He also intervened famously in the Calas affair, involving a Protestant merchant who was sentenced to death on the Wheel by the Parliament in Toulouse. and executed on March 10th, 1762 after being convicted of murdering one of his sons who had openly converted to Catholicism. Voltaire wrote to the Comte argental and Memo la Comtesse:
…You will ask me, my divine angels, why I am so interested in this merchant of Toulouse who has been broken on the wheel. I will tell you. First, it is because I am a man. Then it is because I see how foreigners in discussing this affair condemn us. Is it necessary to make the name of France stink all over the continent…. which dishonours the whole of human nature?
Voltaire was contacted about the case, and after initial suspicions that Calas was guilty of anti-Catholic fanaticism were dispelled by his investigations, he began a campaign to get the sentence overturned, claiming that Marc-Antoine had committed suicide because of gambling debts and being unable to finish his university studies
Voltaire’s efforts were successful, and King Louis XV received the family and had the sentence annulled in 1764. The king fired the chief magistrate of Toulouse, and in 1765 Jean Calas was posthumously exonerated. There was also the posthumous pardon of the Comte De Lally, which led to a comment from a Swiss functionary with whom he maintained cordial but confrontational relationships: ‘You seem to attack Christianity but do the work of a Christian.’
Portrait of Voltaire in the Palace of Versailles, 1724-1725.
- Post Truth
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
and
It is forbidden to kill; therefore, all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
Is there a more apt comment on the way our post-truth disinformation society justifies genocide, racism and the exclusion and murder of the other
Then there is the defining quote representing the motif of his career: It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.
- Self-Care
We also find him dispensing advice that is superior to any self-help books currently on the market, and certainly a lot better than Jordan Peterson’s
The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.
and
Let us cultivate our garden.
And he did so for twenty-five years.
So, what if he was a bit of a libertine. The alt right and indeed puritanical left are very adept at confusing sexual licence with immorality.
He also wrote science fiction. In Micromegas (1752) fiction aliens visiting earth learn that a theologian Thomas Acquinas said the universe was made uniquely for mankind they collectively erupted in laughter.
He is really the creator of all that is now being lost. The father of constitutionalism, the rule of law, decency and anti-extremism, a hater of superstition. His scepticism still stares down from the Panthéon.
Feature Image: Voltaire’s tomb in the Paris Panthéon
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