The Age of Voltaire

by Will Durant

  But the Toulouse magistrates found a hundred devices for delay in gathering and remitting the papers. It was during that summer that Voltaire wrote and sent forth his epochal Traité sur la tolérance. To widen its appeal he adopted a tone of surprising moderation. Concealing his authorship, he spoke as a man of Christian piety, a believer in immortality; he praised the bishops of France as “gentlemen who think and act with a nobility that befits their birth”;51 he pretended to accept the principle, “Out of the Church there is no salvation.”52 The treatise was addressed not to philosophers but to the Catholic clergy itself. Even so, it had its audacities, for often he forgot his audience.

  He began with an account of the trial and execution of Calas. He reviewed the history of toleration, exaggerating it in the case of Greece and Rome. He anticipated Gibbon by arguing that Roman persecution of Christians was immeasurably surpassed by Christian persecution of heretics, who were “hanged, drowned, broken on the wheel, or burned, for the love of God.”53 He defended the Reformation as a justified revolt against the sale of indulgences by a papacy lately disgraced through the amours of Pope Alexander VI and the murders perpetrated by the Pope’s son Caesar Borgia. He expressed his shock at reading a recent attempt to justify the Massacre of St. Bartholomew.II He admitted that Protestants too had been intolerant.III Nevertheless he recommended that Protestant worship be allowed in France, and that the banished Huguenots be allowed to return.

  They ask only the protection of natural law, the validity of their marriages, security as to the condition of their children, the right to inherit from their fathers, and the enfranchisement of their persons. They ask not for public chapels, or the right to municipal offices and dignities.55

  Despite this strategic limitation, Voltaire defined toleration:

  Do I propose, then, that every citizen shall be free to follow his own reason, and believe whatever his enlightened or deluded reason shall dictate to him? Certainly, provided he does not disturb the public order.… If you insist that it is a crime not to believe in the dominant religion, you condemn the first Christians, your forefathers; and you justify those whom you reproach with persecuting them.… For a government to have the right to punish the errors of men it is necessary that their errors should take the form of crime. They do not take the form of crime unless they disturb society. They disturb society when they engender fanaticism. Hence men must avoid fanaticism in order to deserve toleration.56

  Voltaire concluded with an address to the Deity:

  Thou hast not given us hearts to hate, nor hands to kill, one another. Grant that we may aid one another to support the burden of this painful and transitory life! May the trifling differences in the garments that cover our frail bodies, in the mode of expressing our … thoughts, in our ridiculous customs and imperfect laws …—in a word, may the slight variations that are found amongst the atoms called men not be used by us as signals of mutual hatred and persecution! … May all men remember that they are brothers!57

  We do not know what share this appeal had in leading to the edict of toleration issued by Louis XVI in 1787; nor whether it reached or moved the ministers of Louis XV. In any case, after delays that tried the souls of the Calas family and their defenders, the King’s Council, on March 9, 1765, declared the condemnation of Jean Calas annulled, and pronounced him innocent; and Choiseul obtained from the King a grant of thirty thousand livres as compensation to the widow and her children for the loss of their property. When the news of the verdict reached Ferney, Voltaire wept with joy.

  Meanwhile (March 19, 1764) a municipal court at Mazamet, in south-central France, ordered Pierre Paul Sirven and his wife to be hanged on the charge of murdering their daughter Élisabeth to prevent her conversion to Catholicism. The judgment decreed that the two surviving daughters must witness the execution of their parents.58 The ceremony had to be performed in effigy, for the family had fled to Geneva (April, 1762), and had told their story to Voltaire.

  Sirven was a Protestant living in Castres, some forty miles east of Toulouse. On March 6, 1760, the youngest daughter, Élisabeth, disappeared. The parents sought for her in vain. The bishop of Castres summoned them, and informed them that he had sent the girl to a convent after she had confided to him her desire to become a Catholic. French law, established under Louis XIV, allowed Catholic authorities to remove from the parents, if necessary by force, any child above the age of seven who asked for conversion. In the convent Élisabeth had delusions, spoke to angels, tore the clothes from her body, and begged to be flogged. The nuns, at a loss for ways to handle her, notified the bishop, who ordered her restored to her parents.

  In July, 1761, the family moved to St.-Abby, fifty miles from Castres. There, one night in December, Élisabeth left her room, and did not return. On January 3 her corpse was found in a well. The people of St.-Abby were not inclined to charge the Sirvens with murder. Of forty-five witnesses called before the local court, all without exception expressed the opinion that the girl had committed suicide, or had fallen into the well by accident. The local prosecutor, Trinquier, sent notice of the case to the prosecutor general in Toulouse, who instructed him to proceed on the assumption that Sirven was guilty. This seemed improbable, for Sirven had been out of town on the night of Élisabeth’s disappearance. His wife was old and weak. One of the daughters was pregnant. It was hardly likely that these women could have pushed the girl into a well without a cry being heard. But on January 20 Trinquier ordered Sirven’s arrest.

  Sirven knew that some two months previously the municipal court of Toulouse had condemned Jean Calas to death on a similar charge, and on dubious evidence. Ultimately his own case, if he submitted to arrest and trial, would come before the Parlement of Toulouse. Having no confidence in these courts, he led his wife and daughters, in midwinter, across France and over the Cévennes Mountains to Geneva, hoping that the defender of Calas would come to his aid.

  Voltaire, still immersed in his campaign for Calas, thought it unwise to confuse the French mind with two causes at once. He contributed to the support of the family, whose property had been confiscated. But when the Toulouse authorities dragged their feet in responding to the demand for the Calas documents, Voltaire resumed the attack by beginning a campaign for Sirven. Again he appealed for help and funds; contributions came from Frederick II of Prussia and Christian VII of Denmark, and again from Catherine II of Russia and Stanislas Poniatowski, King of Poland. The Mazamet court refused Voltaire’s request for a copy of the trial record. We must not detail the struggle in this case; it went on till finally, in 1771, the Parlement of Toulouse reversed the verdict of the lower court, pronounced the Sirvens innocent, and restored their property. “It took two hours to condemn this man to death,” said Voltaire, “and nine years to render justice to his innocence.”59

  Amid these labors he was alarmed to learn that he himself was involved in a case that had flared up at Abbeville on the Channel Coast. On the night of August 8–9, 1765, a wooden crucifix on the Pont-Neuf over the Somme was mutilated, and a crucifix in the Cemetery of St.-Catherine was smeared with ordure. When these profanations were discovered the clergy and people of the town were horrified. The bishop of Amiens came to Abbeville and, barefoot, led a procession which nearly all the population followed, begging forgiveness of God. A monitoire was read in all the churches decreeing severe penalties for all who could shed light on the mystery and failed to come forward. Magistrate Duval heard seventy-seven witnesses. Some of them testified that they had noticed three young men pass a Corpus Christi procession without either bending a knee or removing their hats. Others alleged that a band of youths in Abbeville, including Duval’s son, made a practice of burlesquing religious ceremonies and singing licentious songs.60 On August 26 warrants were issued for Gaillard d’Étallonde, for Chevalier Jean François Lefebre de La Barre, and for a youth of seventeen known to history only as Moisnel. D’Étallonde fled to Prussia, Moisnel and La Barre were arrested. Moisnel won partial pardon by confessing that he a
nd the others were guilty of the acts alleged. He accused La Barre of having spat upon pictures of the saints, of having sung an obscene litany called “La Madeleine,” of having lent him the Dictionnaire philosophique and Epître à Uranie of Voltaire; and he claimed to have seen d’Étallonde strike the crucifix on the bridge and sully the cross in the cemetery.

  La Barre was the grandson of an impoverished general. He confessed to being a heretic. A witness reported that La Barre, on being asked why he had not removed his hat before the Corpus Christi procession, had replied that he “regarded the Host as a piece of wax,” and could not understand why anyone would adore a God of dough. La Barre admitted that he might have said something of the kind; he had (he said) heard other young men express such sentiments, and thought he might harmlessly hold them, too. His library was examined; among his books were Voltaire’s Dictionnaire, Helvétius’ De l’Esprit, and other volumes satirizing religion. At first he disclaimed all knowledge of d’Étallonde’s desecrations, but when he learned that Moisnel had revealed them, he confessed that it was true. The final indictment charged La Barre with “uttėring blasphemies against God, the Holy Eucharist, the Holy Virgin, the religion and commandments of God and of the Church; singing two songs filled with execrable and abominable blasphemies, … rendering marks of adoration and respect to infamous books; profaning the sign of the cross, the mystery of the consecration of the wine, and the benedictions in use in churches and among Christians.”61

  On February 28, 1766, the Abbeville court pronounced sentence. La Barre, and d’Étallonde if apprehended, were to be put to the torture to elicit the names of accomplices; they were to do public penance before the principal church of the city; their tongues were to be torn out by the roots, they were then to be beheaded, and their bodies were to be burned to ashes. The Dictionnaire philosophique of Voltaire was to be thrown into the same fire. The sentence was appealed to the Parlement of Paris. Some members pleaded for mitigation; Councilor Pasquier replied that a signal and frightening punishment was needed to stem the tide of godlessness that was threatening all moral and social stability; the real criminal, he argued, was Voltaire, but as that source of the evil was beyond reach of the Parlement, his disciple should suffer in his stead. Two members voted to commute the sentence; fifteen voted for its full execution. On July 1, 1766, it was carried out, except that there was no tearing out of the tongue. La Barre bore his fate without implicating any of his friends. The executioner severed the head with a well-directed blow, to the applause of the crowd.62

  Voltaire was shocked by the severity of the punishment; this, he felt, was a barbarity worthy of the Spanish Inquisition at its worst. The bishop of Annecy wrote to the French court demanding that all the penalties prescribed in the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes be applied to Voltaire. “That rascally bishop,” wrote Voltaire to d’Alembert, “still swears … that he will have me burned in this world or the other.… To escape being burned I am laying in a supply of holy water.”63 Fearing that he might be summoned before the Parlement of Dijon, he took the opportunity to try the medicinal waters at Rolle in Switzerland. Then he returned to Ferney, and resumed his efforts for Sirven.

  Now he proposed to d’Alembert and Diderot that he and they and other philosophes leave benighted France and settle in Cleves under the protection of Frederick the Great. Neither they nor Frederick enthused over the plan. Frederick agreed that the punishment of La Barre was extreme; for his part he would rather have condemned the youth to read the entire Summa theologica of Thomas Aquinas; this, he thought, would be a fate worse than death. Frederick proceeded to give Voltaire a bit of advice:

  The scene which has occurred at Abbeville is tragic, but was there not some fault in those who were punished? Should we directly attack the prejudices that time has consecrated in the mind of nations? And if we wish to enjoy liberty of thought, must we insult established belief? A man who does not wish to make a disturbance is rarely persecuted. Remember Fontenelle’s saying: “If my hand were full of truths, I should think more than once before opening it.”64

  As to the proposed colony of philosophes at Cleves, Frederick offered protection, but on condition that they keep the peace and respect the faith of the people. He added:

  The average man does not deserve to be enlightened.… If the philosophers were to form a government, the people, after 150 years, would forge some new superstition, and would either pray to little idols, or to the graves in which the great men were buried, or invoke the sun, or commit some similar nonsense. Superstition is a weakness of the human mind, which is inseparably tied up with it; it has always existed, and always will.65

  Voltaire persisted in his campaign. He sent forth a simple Narrative of the Death of the Chevalier de La Barre. He wrote to his royal friends asking them to intercede with Louis XV to have the dead youth in some way rehabilitated; and when these efforts failed he sent to Louis XVI (1775) a letter entitled “The Cry of Innocent Blood.” The judgment against La Barre was never reversed, but Voltaire had the satisfaction of seeing Turgot revise the criminal code that had sanctioned the execution of a youth for offenses that seemed to merit something less than decapitation. With an energy remarkable at his age, Voltaire continued to the end of his life to lead the crusade against the excesses of Church and state. In 1764 he secured the liberation of Claude Chaumont, who had been condemned to the galleys for attending Protestant services. When Comte Thomas de Lally, the French commander who had been defeated by the English in India, was beheaded in Paris (1766) on charges of treason and cowardice, Voltaire, appealed to by Lally’s son, wrote a 300-page volume, Historical Fragments on India, exonerating the Count; and he urged Mme. du Barry to intercede with Louis XV. The sentence was annulled in 1778, shortly before Voltaire’s death.

  These labors exhausted the octogenarian warrior, but they made him the hero of liberal France. Diderot remarked, in Le Neveu de Rameau, “[Voltaire’s] Mahomet is a sublime work, but I would like better to have vindicated Calas.”66 Pomaret, a Protestant minister in Geneva, said to Voltaire: “You seem to attack Christianity, and yet you do the work of a Christian.”67 And Frederick, after all his cautions, joined in the tributes to the man who had made himself the conscience of Europe: “How splendid it is that a philosopher makes his voice heard from his refuge, and that the human race, whose spokesman he is, forces the judges to revise an unjust sentence. If nothing else spoke in favor of M. de Voltaire, this alone would be enough to earn him a place among the benefactors of mankind.”68

  VI. ÉCRASEZ L’INFME!

  It was in the ardor of these struggles that Voltaire’s opposition to Christianity became a hatred that almost consumed a decade of his life (1759–69). He had begun with a youthful scorn of the miracles, mysteries, and myths that comforted the people; and he passed on to a mocking skepticism of those Christian doctrines, like the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Atonement, which St. Thomas Aquinas had frankly confessed to be beyond the reach of reason. But these moods of rebellion were natural in an active mind feeling the sap of growth; Voltaire might have passed through them to the man of the world’s genial connivance at beliefs so dear to the masses and so useful as an aid to social order and moral discipline. In the first half of the eighteenth century the French clergy were relatively tolerant, and the hierarchy shared in the advancing Enlightenment. But the growth of unbelief, and the acclaim that greeted the Encyclopédie, frightened them, and they seized upon the terror inspired in the King by Damiens’ attempt at assassination (1757) to draw from the state an edict (1759) making any attack upon the Church a crime to be punished with death. The philosophes saw in this a declaration of war, and felt that henceforth they need spare no feelings, no traditions, in attacking what seemed to them a murderous absurdity. Behind the beauty and poetry of religion they saw propaganda conscripting art; behind the support that Christianity had given to morality they saw a thousand heretics burned at the stake, the Albigensians crushed out in a homicidal crusade, Spain and Portugal darkened
with autos-da-fé, France torn apart by rival mythologies, and all the future of the human spirit subject in every land to the repeated resurrection of superstition, priestcraft, and persecution. They would fight such a medieval reaction with the last years of their life.