Condorcet, a well-known philosopher, mathematician and political scientist in his own right, visited Voltaire twice in his twenties, when Voltaire was in his seventies. He befriended Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson during their years in Paris, and wrote one of the first biographies of Voltaire, Vie de Voltaire, from which this is an extract. It contains a few factual errors but provides an eyewitness account of Voltaire's “écrasez-l'infâme” campaign and its effects, as well as some details on the persecutions of Jean Calas, the Count de Lally, and the young Chevalier de La Barre, whose cases Voltaire championed.
A great revolution was preparing itself in the minds of the times. Ever since the rebirth of philosophy, religion, established exclusively in all of Europe, had only been attacked in England. Leibnitz, Fontenelle, and other less-famous philosophers accused of being freethinkers, had all shown it respect in their writings. Bayle himself, using a precaution necessary to his safety while permitting himself all the objections, had seemed to only want to prove that revelation alone could resolve them and wrote as though he had formed the project of debasing reason to uplift faith. In England, the attacks had had little success and little consequence. The powers that be in that nation believed it was useful to leave the people in ignorance, apparently so that the habit of adoring the mysteries of the Bible would fortify their faith in those of the constitution. They made a sort of social propriety out of respect for the established religion. Besides, in a country where the Chamber of Commons alone can lead to fortune, and where its members are tumultuously elected by the people, apparent respect for its opinions must necessarily be erected as a virtue by all ambitious men.
A few bold works had appeared in France, but their attacks were only indirect. Even the book Spirit [of the Laws] was only aimed at religious principles in general. It attacked the bases of all religions and left to its readers the care of drawing their own conclusions and applying them. Rousseau's Emile appeared. “The Savoyard Vicar's Profession of Faith” it contained said nothing on the belief in God for moral purposes nor on the inutility of revelation that was not already in Voltaire's Poem on Natural Law; but those who were being attacked were warned that it was indeed of them that we were speaking. It was under their own names that they were being placed upon the stage, and not under the names of the priests of India or Tibet.1 This boldness surprised Voltaire and excited his emulation.2 The success of Emile encouraged him, and its persecution did not frighten him in the least. A warrant had been issued for Rousseau only for having put his name on the book. He had been persecuted in Geneva mainly for having said, in another section of Emile, that the people could not renounce the right to reform a vicious constitution. This doctrine authorized the citizens of this republic to destroy the aristocracy that its magistrates had established, and which concentrated hereditary authority in a few rich families.
Voltaire could imagine himself sure of avoiding persecution by hiding his name and, while taking care to treat governments with consideration, to direct all his blows against religion, and to even interest the civil powers in weakening its empire. A flood of works, in which he alternately employs eloquence, discussion, and above all pleasantries, spread across all Europe, in every form that the necessity of veiling the truth or making it sting could invent. His zeal against a religion that he considered the source of the fanaticism that had desolated Europe from its inception and of the superstition that had besotted it, and as the source of all the evils these enemies of humanity continued to exert, seemed to double his activity and his might. “I am weary,” he said one day, “of hearing them repeat that a dozen men sufficed to establish Christianity, and I feel like proving to them that it would only take one to destroy it.”
The critique of works that Christians consider inspired, the history of the dogmas that have succeeded each other since the beginning of this religion, the ridiculous and blood-drenched quarrels they have excited, the miracles, the prophecies, the fables spread throughout ecclesiastic and legendary histories, the religious wars, the massacres ordered in God's name, the scaffolds covering Europe at the cries of priests, the fanaticism depopulating the Americas, the blood of kings running from the swords of assassins; all of these subjects ceaselessly reappeared under a thousand guises in all his works. He excited indignation, made tears flow, and poured out torrents of ridicule. We shuddered at an atrocious act, we laughed at an absurdity. And he didn't worry about painting the pictures too often or repeating arguments. “I am told that I repeat myself,” he wrote. “Oh well! Then I will repeat myself until it is corrected.”
In any case, these works, severely forbidden in France, Italy, Vienna, Portugal, and Spain, only spread slowly.3 Not all of them reached all readers, but there was not a single desolate corner of any province, nor any foreign nation crushed beneath the yoke of intolerance, that at least a few of them didn't reach.
The freethinkers, who only existed before in a few cities where the sciences were cultivated and only among men of letters, scientists, or men in high places, multiplied at his voice to all the classes of society, as well as in all nations. Soon, realizing their numbers and their force, they dared to show themselves, and Europe was astonished to discover itself a nonbeliever.
This same zeal, however, made enemies for Voltaire of all those who had obtained or expected to earn their existence and fortune from this religion. But their ranks no longer had a Bossuet, an Arnaud, or a Nicole.4 Those who had replaced them through their talent, philosophy, or learning had passed into the opposition; and the members of the clergy who were among the least inferior, ceding to the interest of not losing face in the opinions of enlightened men, kept their distance, or limited themselves to upholding the political utility of a belief they would have been ashamed to share with the common people, and substituted a sort of religious Machiavellianism for the credulous superstitions of their predecessors.
Masses of libels and refutations came out; but Voltaire alone, in responding to them, could have retained the names of these works, read uniquely by those they were useless to and who could not or would not listen to the objections or responses.
To the shrieks of the fanatics, Voltaire opposed the benevolence of monarchs. The Empress of Russia, the King of Prussia, those of Poland, Denmark, and Sweden took interest in his endeavors, read his works, sought to merit his praise, and at times seconded his good works. In every country, the ministers and those in high positions who aspired to glory, who wanted their names known throughout Europe, courted the suffrage of the Philosopher of Ferney, confiding in him their hopes and fears for the progress of reason, their plans for the growth of enlightenment and for the destruction of fanaticism. He had formed a league throughout Europe of which he was the soul, whose rallying cry was reason and tolerance. When some great injustice took place in a nation, or some act of fanaticism was heard of, or some insult was made to humanity, a writing by Voltaire denounced the guilty to all Europe. And who knows how many times the fear of this terrible swift vengeance stilled the arms of the oppressors!
It was above all in France that he exercised this ministry of reason. From the Calas affair on,5 every victim unjustly immolated or pursued by the steel of the laws found in him a supporter or avenger.
The torture of the Count de Lally aroused his indignation. Legal experts judging in Paris the conduct of a general in India; a death sentence pronounced without it being possible to cite a single clear-cut crime, and on top of that announcing only a suspicion of the gravest accusations; a judgment rendered on the testimony of his declared enemies, on the memoirs of a Jesuit who had composed two in contradiction with each other, uncertain of whether he should accuse the general or his enemies, not knowing whom he hated the most, or whom it would be of most use to him to condemn: such a sentence should have aroused the indignation of every friend of justice, despite the opprobrium poured on the poor general's head. And the horrible barbarity of dragging him off to the torture chamber, gagged, should have made the last fibers of every heart not hardened by the habit of disposing of men's lives shudder.
Nevertheless, Voltaire was long the only one to speak out. Most employees of the Compagnie des Indes, interested in throwing the consequences of their own fatal behavior on a man who no longer existed, the powerful tribunal that had condemned him, and all the men who had sold their voices to it, plus other bodies united to it by similar functions and interests, considered its cause as their own, along with the ministry, ashamed of having had the weakness or cruel policy of sacrificing the Count de Lally to the hope of hiding in his tomb all the errors that had caused the loss of India: everything seemed to oppose a belated justice. But Voltaire, in returning often to this subject, triumphed over the interests fighting to conserve themselves and snuff it out. Good people only needed to be informed of it, which drew others. And when the son of the Count de Lally, so famous for his eloquence and courage, reached the age where he could plead for justice, minds were prepared to applaud him and solicit for him. Voltaire was dying, twelve years later, when this unjust conviction was overturned. He heard the news, was revived, and wrote: “I die content for I see that the king loves justice.” These were the last words written by the hand that had so long upheld the cause of humanity and of justice.
In the same year of 1766, another arrest surprised Europe, which, from reading the works of our philosophers, had believed that enlightenment had spread throughout France—at least in the classes of society where education is a duty and where, after fifteen years, the colleagues of Montesquieu had had the time to absorb its principles.
A wooden crucifix on the bridge of Abbeville was violated during the night. The scandalized townsfolk had their emotions enflamed and prolonged by the ridiculous ceremony of an amende honorable.6 The Bishop of Amiens, governed in his old age by fanatics, and no longer in a condition to foresee the consequences of this religious farce, excited them further by his presence. During this time, the hatred of a bourgeois of Abbeville directed the suspicions of the people to the Chevalier de La Barre, a young soldier of a noble family with ties to the magistrate, who was living with his aunt, the Abbess of Villencourt, just outside of Abbeville. The trial began. The judges condemned the Chevalier de La Barre and his friend d'Etallonde, who had had the good sense to flee, to tortures that would terrify the imagination of a cannibal. The Chevalier de La Barre had put himself in the hands of justice. He had more to lose in leaving France and counted on the protection of his relations who held high posts in Parlement and in the Council. His hopes were deceived. His family feared drawing the attention of the public to this trial instead of seeking the support of public opinion, and at the age of about seventeen, he was condemned, by a majority of two votes, to having his head chopped off, after having his tongue torn out and submitting to the torments of the question [torture].
This horrible sentence was carried out, even though the accusations were as ridiculous as the tortures were atrocious. He was only vehemently suspected of having had some role in the affair of the crucifix. But he was declared guilty of having sung, in some wanton party, a few of those songs, half obscene and half religious that, despite their coarseness, amuse young boys of this age, due to their contrast with the respect and scruples education inspires on these subjects; of having recited an ode, whose well-known author was then collecting a pension from the king; of having genuflected passing before some libertine works in vogue at a time where men, lost in the austerity of religious morals, are no longer able to distinguish between pleasure and debauchery; and at last, of having spoken in a manner worthy of these songs and works.
All these accusations were upheld by the testimony of the type of people who had served these young men in their pleasure outings, or the gate-keepers of convents, so easily scandalized.
The arrest revolted every mind. No law pronounced the death penalty for the breaking of images nor for blasphemies of this nature,7 and so the judges had even gone beyond the penalties imposed by the laws that all enlightened men see with horror still soiling our criminal code. There was no father of any family who must not have trembled, since there are few youths who escape similar indiscretions, and the judges condemned one to an atrocious death for words most of them had permitted themselves in their own youth, and perhaps still permit themselves, and whose children were as guilty as those they had condemned.
Voltaire was outraged and terrified at the same time. They had adroitly placed The Philosophical Dictionary among the number of books before which it was said the Chevalier de La Barre had bowed. It was meant to show that the reading of Voltaire's books had been the cause of all these foolish impieties. However, the danger to himself did not prevent him from taking up the defense of these victims of fanaticism. D'Etallonde, hiding in Wesel, obtained at his recommendation a post in a Prussian regiment. Several works informed all Europe of the details of this affair and the judges were terrified, in their very tribunes, of the appalling judgments that tore them from their obscurity to condemn them to an immortality of shame.
…Voltaire outlived this injustice for twelve years, and never lost sight of the hope of obtaining reparation for the boy; but he never had the consolation of succeeding.