Flaubert said that Voltaire's “Ecrasez- l'infâme” writings had the effect of a cri de guerre on him.1 After having laid low certain enemies of the philosophes with other pamphlets in 1759–60,² this text reads like the opening shots in a broader war about to begin. It is also a forceful summary of points already made in his Letters on England in 1734 and in his reply to Jean Racine in 1722. Heightened confidence in the intelligence of the masses is also in evidence.

If the governed masses were composed of cattle, and the small number governing of cowherds, then the small number would do very well to maintain the masses in ignorance.

But such is not the case. Several nations that wore horns and ruminated for a very long time have begun to think.

And once the time for thinking has begun, it is impossible to rob minds of the force they have acquired. Thinking beings must be treated like thinking beings, just as brutes must be treated like brutes.

It would be impossible for the Knights of the Garter, assembled at London's City Hall, to make people believe today that their patron Saint George is watching them from heaven, lance in hand, mounted on his charger.

King William, Queen Anne, George I, and George II have never cured anyone of scrofula. Formerly, a king who refused to perform this holy service would have caused his nation to revolt. Today, a king who would wish to perform it would cause his entire nation to laugh.³

The son of the great Racine, in a poem entitled Grace, had this to say about England:

England, formerly a source of great light,
By accepting all religions today
Has become nothing more than a sad heap of mad visions.

M. Racine is mistaken. England was plunged in ignorance and bad taste until the days of Chancellor Bacon. It is free thought that has sprouted so many excellent books in England. Men became bold only because they had been enlightened, and they reaped rewards for transporting their wheat over the seas only because they had become bold. It is this liberty that has made all the arts flourish and that has covered the ocean with vessels.

Regarding the mad visions with which the author of the poem Grace reproaches them, it is true that they have abandoned disputes over efficient and sufficient and concomitant grace, but in compensation, they have given us logarithms, the position of three thousand stars, the aberrations of light, as well as its physical properties, the mathematical entity known as infinity and the mathematical law per which all the globes of the universe gravitate toward one another. It must be admitted that the Sorbonne, although highly superior, has not yet made any such discoveries.

These little yearnings to make an impression by inveighing against our era, by leading men from issues of substance to food for squirrels and by incessantly repeating irrelevant and worn-out clichés, will no longer make a man's fortune.

It is ridiculous to think that an enlightened nation is no happier than an ignorant one. It is horrid to insinuate that tolerance is dangerous when we can see England and Holland at our doorstep, populated and enriched by this same tolerance, and other beautiful kingdoms, lying fallow and depopulated by the contrary opinion.

Men who think freely are not persecuted because they are thought dangerous, since assuredly nary a one of them has ever caused four rascals to mob Maubert Square or the king's reception hall. No philosopher has ever spoken to Jacques Clément, or to Barrière or Chastel, or to Ravaillac or Damiens.

No philosopher has ever prevented anyone from paying taxes necessary to the state's defense, nor ever disturbed the procession of the relics of St. Geneviève through the streets of Paris to bring us rain or sunshine. And when the convulsionaries sought heavenly intercession, no philosopher ever bludgeoned them with logs.

When the Jesuits used slander, the confessional, and secret warrants of arrests against all those they accused of being Jansenists, in other words a rival order, and when the Jansenists revenged themselves as well as they could against the insolent persecutions of the Jesuits, the philosophers took no part whatsoever in their quarrels. They made these quarrels look contemptible and rendered the nation an eternal service by doing so.

If a papal bull, written in bad Latin and sealed with the Fisherman's Ring, no longer decides the destiny of states; if a Papal Nuncio no longer gives orders to our kings or takes a tenth of our incomes, to whom are we obliged? To the maxims of the Hospital Knight, who was a philosopher; to the writings of Gerson who was also a philosopher; to the wisdom of Attorney General Cugnières, who passed for a philosopher; and especially to the solid writings of our day, which have so ridiculed the follies of our fathers that it has become impossible for their children to be as foolish as they were.

True men of letters and true philosophers deserve more esteem than a Hercules, an Orpheus, or a Theseus because it is finer and far more difficult to tear civilized men from their prejudices than to civilize crass men. It is rarer to correct than to establish.

Where then does the rage of a few bourgeois and a few inferior writers against these highly estimable and useful citizens come from? From the fact that these bourgeois and little writers, deep in their hearts, have felt themselves contemptible in the eyes of these men of genius and have been brazen enough to get jealous. A man accustomed to being praised in the obscurity of his little circle goes wild with rage when he finds himself despised in the world at large.

Haman wanted to have all the Jews hanged because Mordecai hadn't bowed down before him. Acanthos wanted to have all the sages burnt because one sage had said that one of Acanthos’ discourses was worthless.

Oh Acanthos!4 Have Reverend Father Croiset's Meditations bound in Moroccan leather and, if it seems like a good book, run and denounce it to all those who won't read it anyway. But if you burn a useful book, the sparks will fly back in your face.