Voltaire was a great stimulator of the French Encyclop?dia, a work designed to convey to the many the information of the few. Here again the inspiration was English. It was the success of the Cyclopcedia of Arts and Sciences, edited by the Freethinker Ephraim Chambers, in 1728, which suggested the yet more famous work carried out by Diderot and D’Alembert, with the assistance of such men as Helvetius, Buffon, Turgot, and Condorcet. Voltaire took an ardent interest in the work, and contributed many important articles. The leading contributors were all Freethinkers, but they were under the necessity of advancing their ideas in a tentative way on account of the vigilant censorship. Voltaire not only wrote for the Encyclop?dia, but gave valuable hints and suggestions to Diderot and D’Alembert, as well as much sound advice. He cautioned them, for instance, against patriotic bias. “Why,” he asks D’Alembert, “do you say that the sciences are more indebted to France than to any other nation? Is it to the French that we are indebted for the quadrant, the fire-engine, the theory of light, inoculation, the seed-sower? Parbleu! you are jesting! We have invented only the wheelbarrow.” Voltaire wrote the section on History. The first page contained a Voltairean definition of sacred history which even an ignorant censor could hardly be expected to pass. “Sacred History is a series of operations, divine and miraculous, by which it pleased God formerly to conduct the Jewish nation, and to-day to exercise our faith.” The iron hand beneath the velvet glove was too evident for this to pass the censorship. Vexatious delay and the enforced excision of important articles attended the progress of the work.
It was the attempted suppression of l'Encyclopcedie which showed Voltaire that the time had come for battle.
In 1757 a new edict was issued, threatening with death any one who wrote, printed, or sold any work attacking religion or the royal authority. The same edict assigned the penalty of the galleys to whoever published writings without legal permit. Within six months advocate Barbier recorded in his diary some terrible sentences. La Martelière, verse-writer, for printing clandestinely Voltaire’s Pucelle and other “such” works, received nine years in the galleys; eight printers and binders employed in the same printing office, the pillory and three years’ banishment. Up to the period of the Revolution nothing could be legally printed in France, and no book could be imported, without Government authorisation. Mr. Lecky says, in his History of England in the Eighteenth Century: “During the whole of the reign of Lewis XV. there was scarcely a work of importance which was not burnt or suppressed, while the greater number of the writers who were at this time the special, almost the only, glory of France were imprisoned, banished, or fined.” Voltaire determined to render the bigots odious and contemptible, and henceforth waged incessant war, continued to the day of his death. In satire on one of the bigots he issued his Narrative of the Sickness, Confession, Death and Reappearance of the Jesuit Berthier, as rich a burlesque as that which Swift had written predicting and describing the death of the astrologer Partridge, in accordance with the prediction. Every sentence is a hit. A priest of a rival order is hastily summoned to confess the dying Jesuit, who is condemned to penance in purgatory for 333,333 years, 3 months, 3 weeks, and 3 days, and then will only be let out if some brother Jesuit be found humble and good enough to be willing to apply all his merits to Father Berthier. Even putting his enemy in purgatory, he only condemned the Jesuit every morning to mix the chocolate of a Jansenist, read aloud at dinner a Provincial Letter, and employ the rest of the day in mending the chemises of the nuns of Port Royal.
From Ferney he poured forth a wasp-swarm of such writings under all sorts of pen-names, and dated from London, Amsterdam, Berne, or Geneva. He had sufficient stimulus in the bigotry, intolerance, and atrocious iniquities perpetrated in the name of religion.
Voltaire, moreover, determined himself to uphold the work of the Encyclop?dia in more popular form. He put forward first his Questions upon the Encyclop?dia, in which he deals with some important articles of that work, with others of his own. This was the foundation of the most important of all his works, the Philosophical Dictionary, which he is said to have projected in the days when he was with Frederick at Berlin. In this work he showed how a dictionary could be made the most amusing reading in the world. Under an alphabetical arrangement, he brought together a vast variety of sparkling essays on all sorts of subjects connected with literature, science, politics and religion. Some of his headings were mere stalking-horses, under cover of which he shot at the enemy. Some are concerned with matters now out of date; but, on the whole, the work presents a vivid picture of his versatile genius. An abridged edition, containing articles of abiding interest, would be a service to Free-thought at the present day.
Here is a slight specimen of his style taken from the article on Fanaticism: “Some one spreads a rumor in the world that there is a giant in existence 70 feet high. Very soon all the doctors discuss the questions what color his hair must be, what is the size of his thumb, what the dimensions of his nails; there is outcry, caballing, fighting; those who maintain that the giant’s little finger is only an inch and a half in diameter, bring those to the stake who affirm that the little finger is a foot thick. ‘But, gentlemen, does your giant exist?’ says a bystander, modestly.
“‘What a horrible doubt!’ cry all the disputants; ‘what blasphemy! what absurdity!’ Then they all make a little truce to stone the bystander, and, after having assassinated him in due form, in a manner the most edifying, they fight among themselves, as before, on the subject of the little finger and the nails.”
“L’Infame.”
Voltaire had other provocations to his attack on the bigots, and as he greatly concerned himself with these, they must be briefly mentioned. In 1761 a tragedy of mingled judicial bigotry, ignorance, and cruelty was enacted in Languedoc. On October 13th of that year, Marc Antoine, the son of Jean Calas, a respectable Protestant merchant in Toulouse, a young man of dissolute habits, who had lived the life of a scapegrace, hanged himself in his father’s shop while the family were upstairs. The priestly party got hold of the case and turned it into a religious crime. The Huguenot parents were charged with murdering their son to prevent his turning Catholic. Solemn services were held for the repose of the soul of Marc Antoine, and his body was borne to the grave with more than royal pomp, as that of a martyr to the holy cause of religion. In the church of the White Penitents a hired skeleton was exhibited, holding in one hand a branch of palm, emblem of martyrdom, and in the other an inscription, in large letters, “abjuration of heresy.’’ The populace, who were accustomed yearly to celebrate with rejoicing the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day, 1572, were excited against the family. The father, who for sixty years had lived without reproach, was arrested, with his wife and children. The court before whom the case was brought, at first was disposed to put the whole family to the torture, never doubting that the murder would be confessed by one or other of them. But they ended by only condemning the father to be tortured, in order to extract a confession of guilt before being broken on the wheel, after which his body was to be burned and the ashes scattered to the winds. He was submitted first to the question ordinaire. In sight of the rack he was asked to reveal his crime. His answer was that no crime had been committed. He was stretched on the rack until every limb was dislocated and the body drawn out several inches beyond. He was then subjected to the question extraordinaire. This consisted in pouring water into his mouth from a horn, while his nose was pinched, till his body was swollen to twice its size, and the sufferer endured the anguish of a hundred drownings. He submitted without flinching to all the excruciating agony. Finally, he was placed upon a tumbril and carried through the howling mob to the place of execution. “I am innocent.” he muttered from time to time. At the scaffold he was exhorted to confess by a priest: “What!” said he, “you, too, believe a father can kill his own son!” They bound him to a wooden cross, and the executioner, with an iron bar, broke each of his limbs in two places, striking eleven blows in all, and then left him for two hours to die. The executioner mercifully strangled him at last, before burning the body at the stake. To the last he persisted in his innocence: he had no confession to make. By his unutterable agony he saved the lives of his wife and family. Two daughters were thrown into a convent, and the property was confiscated. The widow and son escaped, and were provided for by Voltaire.
He spared no time, trouble, or money to arrive at the truth, and that once reached, he was as assiduous in his search for justice. He went to work with an energy and thoroughness all his own. He interested the Pompadour herself in the case. By his own efforts he forced justice to be heard. “The worst of the worthy sort of people,” he said, “is that they are such cowards. A man groans over his wrong, shuts his lips, takes his supper, and forgets.” Voltaire was not of that fibre. Wrong went as a knife to his heart. He suffered with the victim, and might have justly used the words of Shelley, who compared himself unto “a nerve, o’er which do creep the else unfelt oppressions of the world.” Voltaire had to fire others with his own fervor. He issued pamphlet after pamphlet in which the shameful story was told with pathetic simplicity. He employed the best lawyers he could find to vindicate the memory of the murdered man. For three years he left no stone unturned, until all that was possible was done to right the foul wrong of those in authority. During this time no smile escaped him of which he did not reproach himself as a crime. Carlyle speaks of this as “Voltaire’s noblest outburst, into mere transcendant blaze of pity, virtuous wrath, and determination to bring rescue and help against the whole world.”
He had his pamphlets on the Calas case, seven in number, translated and published in England and Germany, where they produced a profound effect. A subscription for the Calas family was headed by the young Queen of George III. When at length judgment was given, reversing the sentence, he wrote to Damilaville: “My dear brother, there is, then, justice upon the earth! There is, then, such a thing as humanity! Men are not all wicked rascals, as they say! It is the day of your triumph, my dear brother; you have served the family better than anyone.”
It was while the Calas case was pending that Voltaire composed his noble Treatise on Toleration, a work which, besides its great effect in Europe, caused Catherine II. to promise, if not to grant, universal religious toleration throughout the vast empire she governed.
This Calas case was scarce ended when another, almost as bad an exhibition of intolerance, occurred. Sirven, a respectable Protestant land surveyor, had a Catholic housekeeper, who, with the assent of the Bishop of Castres, spirited away his daughter for the good of her soul, and placed her in a convent, with a view to her conversion. She returned to her parents in a state of insanity, her body covered with the marks of the whip. She never recovered from the cruelties she had endured at the convent. One day, when her father was absent on his professional duties, she threw herself into a well, at the bottom of which she was found drowned. It was obvious to the authorities that the parents had murdered their child because she wished to become a Roman Catholic. They most wisely did not appear, and were sentenced to be hanged when they could be caught. In their flight the married daughter gave premature birth to a child, and Madame Sirven died in despair.
It took Voltaire eight years to get this abominable sentence reversed, and to turn wrong into right. He was now between seventy and eighty years of age, yet he threw himself into the cause of the Sirvens with the zeal and energy which has vindicated Calas; appealing to Paris and Europe, issuing pamphlets, feeing lawyers, and raising a handsome subscription for the family.
Another case was that of the Chevalier de la Barre. In 1766 a crucifix was injured—perhaps wantonly, perhaps by accident. The Bishop of Amiens called for vengeance. Two young officers were accused; one escaped, and obtained by Voltaire’s request a commission in the Prussian service. The other, La Barre, was tortured to confess, and then condemned to have his tongue cut out, his hand cut off, and to be burned alive. Voltaire, seventy years old, devoted himself with untiring energy to save him. Failing in that, he wrote one of his little pamphlets, a simple, graphic Narrative of the Death of Chevalier de la Barre, which stirred every humane heart in France. For twelve years this infidel vindicated the memory of the murdered man and exposed his oppressors. One of the authorities concerned in this judicial atrocity threatened Voltaire with vengeance for holding them up to the execration of Europe. Voltaire replied by a Chinese anecdote. “I forbid you,” said a tyrannical emperor to the historiographer, “to speak a word more of me.” The mandarin began to write. “What are you doing now?” asked the emperor. “I am writing down the order that your majesty has just given me.” Voltaire had sought to save Admiral Byng. He contended in a similar case at home. Count Lally had failed to save India from the English, had been taken prisoner, but allowed to go to Paris to clear his name from charges made against him. The French people, infuriate at the loss of their possession, demanded a victim, and Lally, after a process tainted with every kind of illegality, was condemned to death on the vague charge of abuse of authority. The murdered man’s son, known in the Revolution as Lally Tollendal, was joined by Voltaire in the honorable work of procuring revision of the proceedings, and one of the last crowning triumphs of Voltaire’s days was the news brought to him on his dying bed that his long effort had availed.
“Ecrasez L'infàme.”
These are samples of what was occuring when Voltaire was exhorting his friends to crush the infamous—a phrase which gave rise to much misunderstanding, and which priests have even alleged was applied to Jesus, their idol. A sufficient disproof, if any were needed, is that Voltaire treats “l’infàme” as feminine. Si vous pouvez écraser l'infame, ecrasez-la, et aimez-moi.” That oft-repeated phrase was directed at no person. Nor was it, as some Protestants have alleged, directed only at Roman Catholicism. As Voltaire saw and said, “fanatic Papists and fanatic Calvanism are tarred with one brush.” “L’infàme” was Christian superstition claiming supernatural authority and enforcing its claim, as it has ever sought to do, by pains and penalties. He meant by it the whole spirit of exclusiveness, intolerance, and bigotry, persecuting and privileged orthodoxy, which he saw-as the outcome of the divine faith. Practically, as D. F. Strauss justly remarked, “when Voltaire writes to D’Alembert that he wishes to see the ‘Infame’ reduced in France to the same condition in which she finds herself in England, and when Frederick writes to Voltaire that philosophers flourished amongst the Greeks and Romans, because their religion had no dogmas—‘*mais les dogmes de notre infàme gatent tout’—it is clear we must understand by the ‘Infame,’ whose destruction was the watchword of the Voltairian circle, the Christian Church, without distinction of communions, Catholic or Protestant.”
The Catholic Joseph de Maistre shrieks: “With a fury without example, this insolent blasphemer declared himself the personal enemy of the Savior of men, dared from the depths of his nothingness to give him a name of ridicule, and that adorable law which the Man-God brought to earth he called ‘l’infame.’” This is a judgment worthy of a bigot, who dares not look into the reason why his creed is detested. Let us try and understand this insolent blasphemer to-day.
Voltaire looked deep into the heart of the atrocities that wrung his every nerve with anguish. They were not new: only the humanity and courage that assailed them were new. They were the natural outcome of what had been Christian teaching. It was not simply that, as a matter of fact, priests and theologians were the opponents of every kind of rational progress, but their intolerance was the logical result of their creed. These atrocities could not have been perpetrated had not priests and magistrates had behind them a credulous and fanatical populace, whose minds were suborned from childhood to believing that they had themselves the one and divine faith, and that all heretics were enemies of God. He saw that to destroy the intolerance he must sap the superstition from which it sprang. He saw that the core of the Christian superstition lay in Bibliolatry, and that while Christians believed they had an exclusive and infallibly divine revelation, they would deem all opposition to their own beliefs a sin, meriting punishment. Mr. Morley says, with truth: “If we find ourselves walking amid a generation of cruel, unjust, and darkened spirits, we may be assured that it is their beliefs on what they deem highest that have made them so. There is no counting with certainty on the justice of men who are capable of fashioning and worshipping an unjust divinity; nor on their humanity, so long as they incorporate inhuman motives in their most sacred dogma; nor on their reasonableness, while they rigorously decline to accept reason as a test of truth.”
Voltaire warred on Christian superstition because he keenly felt its evils. He saw that intolerance naturally flowed from the exclusive and dogmatic claims which alone differentiated it from other faiths. Its inducements to right-doing he ............