Edgar Quinet (1803–1875) was a French historian, writer, and statesman. This extract, based on a series of lectures undertaken with his friend, the famous historian Jules Michelet, gives his take on Voltaire's effect sixty-six years after his death. The notion that Voltaire had been sent by God to clean up his church had also been expressed in Voltaire's lifetime, even by churchmen, and would be taken up again in Victor Hugo's fiery speech for the centenary of Voltaire's death in the turmoil of 1878, at the dawn of a Third, and definitive, Republic in France.1

My eyes have been following, these last forty years, the reign of a man who, in himself alone, is the spiritual direction, not only of his country, but of his era. From the back of his chamber, he governs the Kingdom of Minds. Intellects adjust themselves each day to his. A word from his pen sails throughout Europe in a moment. Princes love him, kings fear him. They feel uncertain of their kingdoms if he is not on their side. The people, for their part, adopt without discussion and echo every syllable that falls from his pen with relish. Who exerts this incredible power, that had not been seen anywhere since the Middle Ages? Is it another Pope Gregory VII? Is it a pope? No, it's Voltaire.

How did the power of the former pass to the latter? Is it possible that the entire earth was duped by an evil genius, sent by hell? Why has this man been enthroned over Minds without contestation? First of all, it is because he has often done the work reserved to popes in the Middle Ages. Everywhere that violence, injustice occurs, I see him strike it with the anathema of the Spirit. What does it matter if the violence calls itself Inquisition, Saint Bartholomew's, or Holy War? He placed himself in a region above the papacy of the Middle Ages. Overriding all the sects and all the denominations, it was the first time ideal justice was seen to strike violence and lies wherever they occurred.

The Church, no one denies it, had committed grave faults. She had to be chastised sooner or later, and as these were crimes against the Spirit, she had to be punished by flagellations of the Spirit. Voltaire is the exterminating angel sent by God against his sinful Church.

He shatters, with his terrible laugh, the doors of the Church, which, set up by St. Peter, had opened for the Borgias. It is the laugh of the universal Spirit that disdains all particular forms as just that many deformities. It is the ideal mocking the real. In the name of mute generations the Church should have consoled, he arms himself with all the blood she spilled, all the burning stakes, all the scaffolds she raised that, sooner or later, had to turn against her. This irony mingled with wrath does not belong simply to one individual or to a generation. It is melded to the laughter of all the abused generations, all the tortured dead who, recalling that they found violence on earth instead of mildness, the wolf instead of the paschal lamb, are moved to mock in turn, from the bottom of their graves.

What makes Voltaire's wrath a grand act of Providence is that he strikes, he flouts and overwhelms the infidel Church with the arms of the Christian Spirit. Humanity, charity, fraternity—are these not the sentiments revealed by the Gospels? He turns them with irresistible force on the violence of the fake doctors of the Scriptures. The biblical angel of wrath pours both sulphur and bitumen over condemned cities, amidst great winds. Voltaire's spirit likewise wanders across the face of the divine city. He strikes it with lightning, the sword, and with sarcasm. He pours gall, irony, and ashes upon it. When he is weary, a voice awakes him and cries out, “Continue!” So he begins again, relentless. He digs up what he has already dug, unhinges what he has already unhinged, and shatters what he has already shattered! For a task that took so long, never interrupted and always successful, was not the affair of a single individual. It was the revenge of God cheated and wronged, who used man's irony as the instrument of his wrath.

No, this man was not his own man; he was conducted by a superior force. As he overthrows with one hand, he builds with the other; and that is the marvel of his destiny. He employs all the derision of his faculties to overthrow the barriers separate churches had erected, but there is another man inside him. Full of fervor, he establishes upon the ruins of orthodoxy common sense.

He feels the frauds, the lies, the injustice in his very fibers, not only in a given moment of time, but in every pulsation of the human race. The separate churches had founded Christian rights only for themselves. Voltaire made Christian rights the common right of all humanity. Before he came, we called ourselves universal, and this universality stopped at the threshold of a particular church or communion. Whoever was not a part of it was outside evangelical law. Voltaire enveloped the entire earth within its rights.

Where did this old man of eighty-four find the force, I ask you, to plead until the last hour of his life for the families of the Calases’, the Sirvens, the La Barres, and so many people he did not know? Where did he learn to feel like a contemporary to all ages, to feel wounded to the depths of his being by a given case of violence committed fifteen hundred years ago? What does this daily, worldwide protestation against the powers mean? This indignation that neither the distance of space nor of centuries can appease? What does this old man want, who, with only his inspiration, makes himself the fellow-citizen, the attorney and journalist of every society, past and present?

He awakes each morning, obsessed with the cries of extinct generations and civilizations! In the midst of the agitations and distractions of the eighteenth century, a cry, a sigh from Thebes, from Athens, from ancient Rome, from the Middle Ages busies, obsesses, and torments him, keeps him from sleep! On St. Bartholomew's Day, the twenty-fourth of August, he gets a fever.2 History is not a science for him, it's a screaming reality. What is the strange instinct that forces him to be sensitive to everything, and to be present in the past? Where does this new charity come from that traverses time and space?

What is it, I beg you, if it is not the Christian spirit itself, the universal spirit of solidarity, fraternity, of a vigilance that lives, feels, suffers, and remains in close communion with all humanity, past and present. And this is why the earth proclaimed this man the living word of humanity in the eighteenth century. We were not deceived by appearances. He tore words asunder and made the universal spirit burst forth. That is why we still proclaim him.

In good faith, what opposed him? What adversary entered battle against him? In the camp of the past, where did he appear, this fighter who, to vanquish Voltaire, would have had to have been more vigilant, more fervent, more universal than he in the cause of justice against force and violence?

In the hurried movement of our century, the dust rose up to heaven, beneath the feet of new generations. A few cried out in joy: Voltaire has disappeared! He has perished in the abyss with all his fame. But that was just one of the artifices of true glory. The mediocre alone were duped. The dust falls, and the light we thought extinguished reappears. It laughs at the mistaken joy of darkness. Like something resurrected, it shines with a purer light. And the century that had begun by renouncing it with pursed lips, ends in confirming everything that's immortal about it.