ÉCRASEZ L’INFAME
In his later years the “grand monarch” fell under the spell of a
priest-ridden woman, made her his queen, and turned over his court to
Jesuit intrigue. The law tolerating Protestants was repealed, the best
schools in France were closed, and half a million of the most
intelligent people were driven from the country. At the same time wars
of conquest were undertaken, and a series of military disasters befell.
The king’s reign closed in darkness and despair, and the crowds of Paris
mocked his funeral pageant. But the people’s wrath had to fester for
seventy years longer before it broke the tyranny of this “ancient
regime.”
Two years after the “grand monarch’s” death, the regent sent to the
Bastille a young French poet and man of fashion, the son of a wealthy
lawyer of Paris. This youth, known to us as Voltaire, was accused of
having written a pamphlet ridiculing absolutist ideas; the charge
happened to be false, but needless to say, a year spent in prison
without redress did not increase the young man’s love for absolutism. He
was one of the wittiest mortals ever born on earth, and blessed, or
cursed, with an incessantly active mind. His jailers were comparatively
civilized--I mean, compared with jailers of capitalist absolutism in
America; they permitted the young man to write poetry and dramas, and
when he came out he continued the gay and dissolute life of a literary
fop of that period. He was welcomed in the salons of the great, and his
long epic poems and his rhymed verse tragedies were produced with great
success.
But in his pride as a man of letters Voltaire forgot his place in the
great world of France; he presumed to resent an insult from a noble
gentleman, whereupon this gentleman brought his lackeys, armed with
sticks, and had the poet cruelly beaten, while the noble gentleman sat
in his sedan-chair, jeering and directing the punishment. To the
amazement of the French aristocracy, the victim failed to accept this as
a proper form of discipline; he, a mere lawyer’s son, proceeded to train
himself to fight a duel with the nobleman--whereupon his great friends
turned their backs on him, and he was again thrown into the Bastille,
and got out only upon promise to leave France.
He went to England, where he lived for three years. It was a new
England, based upon the revolution which had driven out the Stuarts; a
Protestant England, prosperous, busy, and from the point of view of a
French refugee, amazingly free; an England in which Pope was preaching
common sense, and Swift was lashing hypocrisy, and Newton was
discovering the laws of the universe. When Voltaire returned to France,
it was no longer to be a society fop and darling of the aristocracy; it
was to be an intellectual pioneer, undermining the wall which French
absolutism had built about the country.
Voltaire wrote a book dealing with the things he had learned in England,
all the ideas of the new science and the new philosophy and the new
toleration. Refused permission to publish it, he had it published
secretly, whereupon it was solemnly banned by authority, and a copy was
burned by the hangman. This made the fortune of the book; it had a big
circulation, and all intellectual France fell to arguing about it. And
that was to be Voltaire’s life for some forty-five years thereafter;
writing forbidden books and pamphlets under an infinity of pen names,
having them secretly printed in England, or in Holland, or in
Switzerland, having them publicly burned, and no less publicly debated.
The name Voltaire thus means to us a champion of free thought, against
religious superstition; but we must get clear the fact that during his
life Voltaire was the most eminent poet and dramatist of France. Also it
is interesting to note that, revolutionary as he was in the field of
philosophy, he was a complete conservative in the field of art;
following the models of Corneille and Racine, and respecting the sacred
unities, the artificial laws whereby the French stage was fettered.
Among the discoveries he had made in England was a playwright by the
name of Shakespeare, whom he described as “a drunken savage, without the
smallest scrap of good taste, and without the least acquaintance with
the rules.” Voltaire was much annoyed when this dictum had the effect of
causing some Frenchmen to be curious about Shakespeare! As time passed,
he found that he had to give more and more energy to denouncing this
“drunken savage,” and rebuking those who professed to find merit in his
work.
All of which has a vital lesson for us; it shows us how tight is the
grip of culture conventions upon the educated mind. It is possible for
men to think for themselves concerning God and immortality, concerning
the divine right of emperors and kings, and even of oil magnates and
international financiers. But it is extremely difficult for them to
think freely on the subject of what constitutes good taste, and whether
or not they ought to permit themselves to enjoy a new and strange work
of art. I note with interest that our own young intellectuals, who count
themselves thorough-going revolters, who boast of unorthodoxy in
religion, politics, economics, and morals, are usually of Tory
inclination in matters of culture; cherishing the aristocratic
superstition that art exists for cultured classes, and that whatever is
popular is obviously contemptible.
We in America do not make any fuss about poets, so it is hard for us to
understand the power which Voltaire wielded over French society. He was
cynical, he was obscene, he was jealous and vain and exasperating; but
he was a kind of god, to whom critical authority bowed, even monarchs
with their worldly power. He produced a score of dramas, most of them
tragedies in the heroic style, and with few exceptions each was a
separate ovation, a coronation in the kingdom of letters. It never
occurred to anyone in Voltaire’s time that he was not the equal of
Racine, as a dramatist; while his epics were put above Homer and Virgil.
We today begin one of his plays with determination to go through to the
end, but we cannot make it; we desire some Greenwich Village wit to
produce it in mock heroic style, so that we can laugh heartily at these
pompous aristocrats raging and storming, stabbing and killing each
other. We laugh, because it is so apparent that the poet himself has
never felt any of this emotion, he has thought only how magnificent it
sounds.
But at this time French culture was supreme throughout Europe, and
Voltaire, cynic and skeptic, was at once the idol and the terror of the
courts. He was a good business man, and invested the money he made from
his plays, and become enormously rich. He purchased an estate in
Switzerland, just over the French border; an admirable strategic
location, a sort of literary emplacement for a high-caliber gun. He
could have his pamphlets printed in Germany and Holland, and secretly
shipped into France, and the French police were powerless to touch him.
The Swiss Calvinists were glad to have attacks made upon French and
Catholic absolutism, so they let the poet alone.
Voltaire was a frail ghost of a man, almost a skeleton, but with quick
bright eyes in his bare skull. He was ill most of his life; when he
visited King Frederick he described himself as suffering from four
mortal diseases, yet he lived to the age of eighty-four, and worked
under terrific pressure all the time. He carried on an enormous
correspondence--more than ten thousand of his letters have been edited
and published. He was capable of almost every kind of meanness and
malice, but he was also capable of heroic and unselfish idealism, as the
world was now to see.
In the city of Toulouse, in southern France, a young man named Calas
committed suicide, as result of religious mania; he was a member of a
Protestant family, and the Catholic authorities in Toulouse accused the
father of having murdered the boy to keep him from turning Catholic.
They had no shred of evidence, but they cruelly tortured the old man,
and finally executed him, and confiscated the property of the family.
Voltaire took up the case in a frenzy of indignation; he employed
investigators and lawyers, he wrote pamphlets and circulated them, he
wrote innumerable letters and appeals; for three years he devoted his
time to making the case a political and religious issue in France. No
man could have displayed nobler public spirit, or more genuine human
sympathy; for three years, so he wrote, he never smiled without feeling
that he had committed a crime. When at last the verdict of the Toulouse
courts was reversed, he fell into the arms of one of the Calas lads, and
wept like a child. He said--he, the veteran playwright: “This is the
most splendid fifth act I have ever seen on any stage!”
There came one such case after another. Just as in Russia the Black
Hundreds spread the rumor that the Jews were accustomed to shed the
blood of Christian children, so this Catholic machine made war on the
Protestants by accusing them of hideous crimes. Voltaire espoused the
“Sirven case” in the same fury of indignation; it had taken the courts
two hours to condemn the victims, he said, and nine years to do them
justice! Out of his agony of protest came one of his greatest works, the
“Treatise on Toleration”--burned by the hangman, like everything else.
Also there came his immortal slogan, which he took to putting on all his
letters: “Écrasez l’infame”--that is, crush the infamous thing, meaning
Catholic absolutism.
Now America also has its “infame,” which is capitalist absolutism; and
we await the arrival of some man of letters, capable of the heroic and
unselfish idealism of Voltaire. To him there were brought ten or a dozen
cases of cruelty and torture in the course of twenty years; but hardly a
month passes that my mail does not contain a story of cruelty and
torture equally hideous, committed by the powers which are now
destroying liberty and enlightenment in America. Consider, for example,
the case of the Centralia prisoners, a story of brutality, torture,
murder, terrorism, and the subornation of the law by the lumber barons
of the Northwest; a story just as pitiful, just as revolting, just as
worthy of Voltaire’s immortal slogan.
“If you are not careful,” says Mrs. Ogi, “you will be accused of putting
propaganda into this chapter!”
It was as the champion of freedom of thought that Voltaire stood before
the French people; he, with his wealth and fame, was able to do what
they did not dare to do. From his mountain retreat he sent his ideas all
over Europe; and meantime the blind, deluded rulers of France did all
they could to plow the soil for his sowing. The great-grandson of the
“grand monarch,” who ascended the throne as a child in 1715, ruled for
almost sixty years. Beginning with the name of “the well-beloved,” he
squandered the revenues of the state upon his mistresses, and led his
country to a series of disasters, including the loss of the American
colonies and India. He left the nation bankrupt, and died with the
famous phrase, “After us the deluge.”
Four years later, the old Voltaire, made bold by all his honors, came
down from his mountain fortress and entered Paris. He had a pageant like
a conquering hero; his plays were produced to enormous audiences, and
even the Academy of Richelieu welcomed him--strange irony of history!
It was like Tolstoi in Russia; the authorities would have liked to chop
off his head, but they could only gnash their teeth in impotence.
However, what their hatred could not do, the love of the people
accomplished; Voltaire was literally killed by kindness, and died amid
the excitements of this holiday. It is interesting to us to note that
among those he met in Paris was Benjamin Franklin, fellow skeptic,
scientist, and revolutionary propagandist from the new world. This was
in 1778, two years after the Declaration of Independence, and less than
ten years before the French revolution.
In the case of Voltaire we see a man of letters who ranks as one of the
great world forces, and purely and simply because of his propaganda. If
he had written nothing but heroic tragedies and sublime epics, he would
be a forgotten name today; it was only because he took upon himself the
task of setting free the mind of his country, and labored at it
incessantly for the greater part of his life, that we know of him and
honor him as one of the glories of France. Great as were his faults, no
one can deny that he stood to all the world for the fundamental idea of
freedom of thought.