VOLTAIRE
In this day and age we hear a great deal of talk about the nefarious
labors of the press agent and many good people denounce “publicity”
as an invention of the modern devil of success, a new-fangled and
disreputable method of attracting attention to a person or to a cause.
But this complaint is as old as the hills. Events of the past, when
examined without prejudice, completely contradict the popular notion that
publicity is something of recent origin.
The prophets of the Old Testament, both major and minor, were
past-masters in the art of attracting a crowd. Greek history and Roman
history are one long succession of what we people of the journalistic
profession call “publicity stunts.” Some of that publicity was dignified.
A great deal of it was of so patent and blatant a nature that today even
Broadway would refuse to fall for it.
Reformers like Luther and Calvin fully understood the tremendous value of
carefully pre-arranged publicity. And we cannot blame them. They were not
the sort of men who could be happy growing humbly by the side of the road
like the blushing daisies. They were very much in earnest. They wanted
their ideas to live. How could they hope to succeed without attracting a
crowd of followers?
A Thomas à Kempis can become a great moral influence by spending eighty
years in a quiet corner of a monastery, for such long voluntary exile,
if duly advertised (as it was), becomes an excellent selling point and
makes people curious to see the little book which was born of a lifetime
of prayer and meditation. But a Francis of Assisi or a Loyola, who hope
to see some tangible results of their work while they are still on this
planet, must willy-nilly resort to methods now usually associated with a
circus or a new movie star.
Christianity lays great stress upon modesty and praises those who are
humble of spirit. But the sermon which extols these virtues was delivered
under circumstances which have made it a subject of conversation to this
very day.
No wonder that those men and women who were denounced as the arch enemies
of the Church took a leaf out of the Holy Book and resorted to certain
rather obvious methods of publicity when they began their great fight
upon the spiritual tyranny which held the western world in bondage.
I offer this slight explanation because Voltaire, the greatest of all
virtuosos in the field of free advertisement, has very often been blamed
for the way in which he sometimes played upon the tom-tom of public
consciousness. Perhaps he did not always show the best of good taste. But
those whose lives he saved may have felt differently about it.
And furthermore, just as the proof of the pudding is in the eating,
the success or failure of a man like Voltaire should be measured by
the services he actually rendered to his fellow-men and not by his
predilection for certain sorts of dressing-gowns, jokes and wall-paper.
In an outburst of justifiable pride this strange creature once said,
“What of it if I have no scepter? I have got a pen.” And right he was.
He had a pen. Any number of pens. He was the born enemy of the goose
and used more quills than two dozen ordinary writers. He belonged to
that class of literary giants who all alone and under the most adverse
circumstances can turn out as much copy as an entire syndicate of modern
sport writers. He scribbled on the tables of dirty country inns. He
composed endless hexameters in the chilly guest-rooms of lonely country
houses. His scrawls littered the floors of dingy boarding-houses in
Greenwich. He spattered ink upon the carpets of the royal Prussian
residence and used reams of the private stationery which bore the
monogram of the governor of the Bastille. Before he had ceased to play
with a hoop and marbles, Ninon de Lenclos had presented him with a
considerable sum of pocket-money that he might “buy some books,” and
eighty years later, in the self-same town of Paris, we hear him ask for
a pad of foolscap and unlimited coffee that he may finish yet one more
volume before the inevitable hour of darkness and rest.
His tragedies, however, and his stories, his poetry and his treatises
upon philosophy and physics, do not entitle him to an entire chapter of
this book. He wrote no better verses than half a hundred other sonneteers
of that era. As a historian he was both unreliable and dull, while his
ventures in the realm of science were no better than the sort of stuff we
find in the Sunday papers.
But as the brave and unyielding enemy of all that was stupid and narrow
and bigoted and cruel, he wielded an influence which has endured until
the beginning of the Great Civil War of the year 1914.
The age in which he lived was a period of extremes. On the one hand, the
utter selfishness and corruption of a religious, social and economic
system which had long since outlived its usefulness. On the other side,
a large number of eager but overzealous young men and young women ready
to bring about a millennium which was based upon nothing more substantial
than their good intentions. A humorous fate dropped this pale and sickly
son of an inconspicuous notary public into this maelstrom of sharks and
pollywogs, and bade him sink or swim. He preferred to swim and struck
out for shore. The methods he employed during his long struggle with
adverse circumstances were often of a questionable nature. He begged and
flattered and played the clown. But this was in the days before royalties
and literary agents. And let the author who never wrote a potboiler throw
the first stone!
Not that Voltaire would have been greatly worried by a few additional
bricks. During a long and busy life devoted to warfare upon stupidity,
he had experienced too many defeats to worry about such trifles as a
public beating or a couple of well aimed banana peels. But he was a man
of indomitable good cheer. If today he must spend his leisure hours in
His Majesty’s prison, tomorrow he may find himself honored with a high
titulary position at the same court from which he has just been banished.
And if all his life he is obliged to listen to angry village priests
denouncing him as the enemy of the Christian religion, isn’t there
somewhere in a cupboard filled with old love letters that beautiful medal
presented to him by the Pope to prove that he can gain the approbation of
Holy Church as well as her disapproval?
It was all in the day’s work.
Meanwhile he fully intended to enjoy himself hugely and crowd his days
and weeks and months and years with a strange and colorful assortment of
the most variegated experiences.
By birth Voltaire belonged to the better middle class. His father was
what for the lack of a better term we might call a sort of private trust
company. He was the confidential handy-man of a number of rich nobles
and looked after their legal and financial interests. Young Arouet (for
that was the family name) was therefore accustomed to a society a little
better than that of his own people, something which later in life gave
him a great advantage over most of his literary rivals. His mother was
a certain Mademoiselle d’Aumard. She had been a poor girl who did not
bring her husband a cent of dowry. But she was possessed of that small
“d’” which all Frenchmen of the middle classes (and all Europeans in
general and a few Americans in particular) regard with humble awe, and
her husband thought himself pretty lucky to win such a prize. As for the
son, he also basked in the reflected glory of his ennobled grandparents
and as soon as he began to write, he exchanged the plebeian François
Marie Arouet for the more aristocratic François Marie de Voltaire, but
how and where he hit upon this surname is still a good deal of a mystery.
He had a brother and a sister. The sister, who took care of him after
his mother’s death, he loved very sincerely. The brother, on the other
hand, a faithful priest of the Jansenist denomination, full of zeal and
rectitude, bored him to distraction and was one of the reasons why he
spent as little time as possible underneath the paternal shingles.
Father Arouet was no fool and soon discovered that his little “Zozo”
promised to be a handful. Wherefore he sent him to the Jesuits that he
might become versed in Latin hexameters and Spartan discipline. The good
fathers did their best by him. They gave their spindly-legged pupil a
sound training in the rudiments of both the dead and living tongues. But
they found it impossible to eradicate a certain bump of “queerness”
which from the very beginning had set this child apart from the other
scholars.
At the age of seventeen they willingly let him go, and to please his
father, young François then took up the study of the law. Unfortunately
one could not read all day long. There were the long hours of the
lazy evenings. These hours François whiled away either writing funny
little pieces for the local newspapers or reading his latest literary
compositions to his cronies in the nearest coffee-house. Two centuries
ago such a life was generally believed to lead straight to perdition.
Father Arouet fully appreciated the danger his son was running. He went
to one of his many influential friends and obtained for M. François a
position as secretary to the French Legation at the Hague. The Dutch
capital, then as now, was exasperatingly dull. Out of sheer boredom
Voltaire began a love affair with the not particularly attractive
daughter of a terrible old woman who was a society reporter. The lady,
who hoped to marry her darling to a more promising party, rushed to the
French minister and asked him to please remove this dangerous Romeo
before the whole city knew about the scandal. His Excellency had troubles
enough of his own and was not eager for more. He bundled his secretary
into the next stage-coach for Paris and François, without a job, once
more found himself at the mercy of his father.
In this emergency Maître Arouet bethought himself of an expedient which
was often used by such Frenchmen as had a friend at court. He asked and
obtained a “lettre de cachet” and placed his son before the choice of
enforced leisure in a jail or industrious application in a law-school.
The son said that he would prefer the latter and promised that he would
be a model of industry and application. He was as good as his word and
applied himself to the happy life of a free lance pamphleteer with such
industry that the whole town talked about it. This was not according to
the agreement with his papa and the latter was entirely within his rights
when he decided to send his son away from the flesh-pots of the Seine and
packed him off to a friend in the country, where the young man was to
remain for a whole year.
There, with twenty-four hours leisure each day of the week (Sundays
included) Voltaire began the study of letters in all seriousness and
composed the first of his plays. After twelve months of fresh air and a
very healthy monotony, he was allowed to return to the scented atmosphere
of the capital and at once made up for lost time by a series of lampoons
upon the Regent, a nasty old man who deserved all that was said about him
but did not like this publicity the least little bit. Hence, a second
period of exile in the country, followed by more scribbling and at last
a short visit to the Bastille. But prison in those days, that is to say,
prison for young gentlemen of Voltaire’s social prominence, was not a bad
place. One was not allowed to leave the premises but otherwise did pretty
much as one pleased. And it was just what Voltaire needed. A lonely cell
in the heart of Paris gave him a chance to do some serious work. When
he was released, he had finished several plays and these were performed
with such tremendous success that one of them broke all records of the
eighteenth century and ran for forty-five nights in succession.
This brought him some money (which he needed badly) but it also
established his reputation as a wit, a most unfortunate thing for a
young man who still has to make his career. For hereafter he was held
responsible for every joke that enjoyed a few hours’ popularity on
the boulevards and in the coffee-houses. And incidentally it was the
reason why he went to England and took a post-graduate course in liberal
statesmanship.
It happened in the year 1725. Voltaire had (or had not) been funny about
the old but otherwise useless family of de Rohan. The Chevalier de Rohan
felt that his honor had been assailed and that something must be done
about it. Of course, it was impossible for a descendant of the ancient
rulers of Brittany to fight a duel with the son of a notary public and
the Chevalier delegated the work of revenge to his flunkeys.
One night Voltaire was dining with the Duc de Sully, one of his father’s
customers, when he was told that some one wished to speak to him outside.
He went to the door, was fallen upon by the lackeys of my Lord de Rohan
and was given a sound beating. The next day the story was all over the
town. Voltaire, even on his best days, looked like the caricature of
a very ugly little monkey. What with his eyes blackened and his head
bandaged, he was a fit subject for half a dozen popular reviews. Only
something very drastic could save his reputation from an untimely death
at the hands of the comic papers. And as soon as raw beefsteak had done
its work, M. de Voltaire sent his witnesses to M. le Chevalier de Rohan
and began his preparation for mortal combat by an intensive course in
fencing.
Alas! when the morning came for the great fight, Voltaire once more found
himself behind the bars. De Rohan, a cad unto the last, had given the
duel away to the police, and the battling scribe remained in custody
until, provided with a ticket for England, he was sent traveling in
a northwestern direction and was told not to return to France until
requested to do so by His Majesty’s gendarmes.
Four whole years Voltaire spent in and near London. The British kingdom
was not exactly a Paradise, but compared to France, it was a little bit
of Heaven.
A royal scaffold threw its shadow over the land. The thirtieth of January
of the year 1649 was a date remembered by all those in high places. What
had happened to sainted King Charles might (under slightly modified
circumstances) happen to any one else who dared to set himself above
the law. And as for the religion of the country, of course the official
church of the state was supposed to enjoy certain lucrative and agreeable
advantages, but those who preferred to worship elsewhere were left in
peace and the direct influence of the clerical officials upon the affairs
of state was, compared to France, almost negligible. Confessed Atheists
and certain bothersome non-conformists might occasionally succeed in
getting themselves into jail, but to a subject of King Louis XV the
general condition of life in England must have seemed wellnigh perfect.
In 1729, Voltaire returned to France, but although he was permitted to
live in Paris, he rarely availed himself of that privilege. He was like
a scared animal, willing to accept bits of sugar from the hands of his
friends, but forever on the alert and ready to escape at the slightest
sign of danger. He worked very hard. He wrote prodigiously and with a
sublime disregard for dates and facts, and choosing for himself subjects
which ran all the way from Lima, Peru, to Moscow, Russia, he composed a
series of such learned and popular histories, tragedies and comedies that
at the age of forty he was by far the most successful man of letters of
his time.
Followed another episode which was to bring him into contact with a
different kind of civilization.
In distant Prussia, good King Frederick, yawning audibly among the yokels
of his rustic court, sadly pined for the companionship of a few amusing
people. He felt a tremendous admiration for Voltaire and for years he had
tried to induce him to come to Berlin. But to a Frenchman of the year
1750 such a migration seemed like moving into the wilds of Virginia and
it was not until Frederick had repeatedly raised the ante that Voltaire
at last condescended to accept.
He traveled to Berlin and the fight was on. Two such hopeless egotists
as the Prussian king and the French playwright could not possibly hope
to live under one and the same roof without coming to hate each other.
After two years of sublime disagreement, a violent quarrel about nothing
in particular drove Voltaire back to what he felt inclined to call
“civilization.”
But he had learned another useful lesson. Perhaps he was right, and the
French poetry of the Prussian king was atrocious. But His Majesty’s
attitude upon the subject of religious liberty left nothing to be desired
and that was more than could be said of any other European monarch.
And when at the age of almost sixty Voltaire returned to his native
land, he was in no mood to accept the brutal sentences by which the
French courts tried to maintain order without some very scathing words of
protest. All his life he had been greatly angered by man’s unwillingness
to use that divine spark of intelligence which the Lord on the sixth
day of creation had bestowed upon the most sublime product of His
handiwork. He (Voltaire) hated and loathed stupidity in every shape, form
and manner. The “infamous enemy” against whom he directed most of his
anger and whom, Cato-like, he was forever threatening to demolish, this
“infamous enemy” was nothing more or less than the lazy stupidity of the
mass of the people who refused to think for themselves as long as they
had enough to eat and to drink and a place to sleep.
From the days of his earliest childhood he had felt himself pursued by a
gigantic machine which seemed to move through sheer force of lethargy and
combined the cruelty of Huitzilopochtli with the relentless persistency
of Juggernaut. To destroy or at least upset this contraption become the
obsession of his old years, and the French government, to give this
particular devil his due, ably assisted him in his efforts by providing
the world with a choice collection of legal scandals.
The first one occurred in the year 1761.
In the town of Toulouse in the southern part of France there lived a
certain Jean Calas, a shop-keeper and a Protestant. Toulouse had always
been a pious city. No Protestant was there allowed to hold office or
to be a doctor or a lawyer, a bookseller or a midwife. No Catholic was
permitted to keep a Protestant servant. And on August 23rd and 24th
of each year the entire community celebrated the glorious anniversary
of the massacre of St. Bartholomew with a solemn feast of praise and
thanksgiving.
Notwithstanding these many disadvantages, Calas had lived all his life in
complete harmony with his neighbors. One of his sons had turned Catholic,
but the father had continued to be on friendly terms with the boy and
had let it be known that as far as he was concerned, his children were
entirely free to choose whatever religion pleased them best.
But there was a skeleton in the Calas closet. That was Marc Antony, the
oldest son. Marc was an unfortunate fellow. He wanted to be a lawyer but
that career was closed to Protestants. He was a devout Calvinist and
refused to change his creed. The mental conflict had caused an attack
of melancholia and this in time seemed to prey upon the young man’s
mind. He began to entertain his father and mother with long recitations
of Hamlet’s well known soliloquy. He took long solitary walks. To his
friends he often spoke of the superior advantages of suicide.
This went on for some time and then one night, while the family was
entertaining a friend, the poor boy slipped into his father’s storeroom,
took a piece of packing rope and hanged himself from the doorpost.
There his father found him a few hours later, his coat and vest neatly
folded upon the counter.
The family was in despair. In those days the body of a person who had
committed suicide was dragged nude and face downward through the streets
of the town and was hanged on a gibbet outside the gate to be eaten by
the birds.
The Calas were respectable folks and hated to think of such a disgrace.
They stood around and talked of what they ought to do and what they were
going to do until one of the neighbors, hearing the commotion, sent
for the police, and the scandal spreading rapidly, their street was
immediately filled with an angry crowd which loudly clamored for the
death of old Calas “because he had murdered his son to prevent him from
becoming a Catholic.”
In a little town all things are possible and in a provincial nest of
eighteenth century France, with boredom like a black funeral pall hanging
heavily upon the entire community, the most idiotic and fantastic yarns
were given credence with a sigh of profound and eager relief.
The high magistrates, fully aware of their duty under such suspicious
circumstances, at once arrested the entire family, their guests and
their servants and every one who had recently been seen in or near the
Calas home. They dragged their prisoners to the town hall, put them in
irons and threw them into the dungeons provided for the most desperate
criminals. The next day they were examined. All of them told the same
story. How Marc Antony had come into the house in his usual spirits, how
he had left the room, how they thought that he had gone for one of his
solitary walks, etc., etc.
By this time, however, the clergy of the town of Toulouse had taken
a hand in the matter and with their help the dreadful news of this
bloodthirsty Huguenot, who had killed one of his own children because he
was about to return to the true faith, had spread far and wide throughout
the land of Languedoc.
Those familiar with modern methods of detecting crime might think that
the authorities would have spent that day inspecting the scene of the
murder. Marc Antony enjoyed quite a reputation as an athlete. He was
twenty-eight and his father was sixty-three. The chances of the father
having hanged his son from his own doorpost without a struggle were
small indeed. But none of the town councilors bothered about such little
details. They were too busy with the body of the victim. For Marc Antony,
the suicide, had by now assumed the dignity of a martyr and for three
weeks his corpse was kept at the town hall and thereupon it was most
solemnly buried by the White Penitents who for some mysterious reason had
made the defunct Calvinist an ex-officio member of their own order and
who conducted his embalmed remains to the Cathedral with the circumstance
and the pomp usually reserved for an archbishop or an exceedingly rich
patron of the local Basilica.
During these three weeks, from every pulpit in town, the good people of
Toulouse had been urged to bring whatever testimony they could against
the person of Jean Calas and his family and finally, after the case had
been thoroughly thrashed out in the public press, and five months after
the suicide, the trial began.
One of the judges in a moment of great lucidity suggested that the shop
of the old man be visited to see whether such a suicide as he described
would have been possible, but he was overridden and with twelve votes
against one, Calas was sentenced to be tortured and to be broken on the
wheel.
He was taken to the torture room and was hanged by his wrists until his
feet were a meter from the ground. Then his body was stretched until the
limbs were “drawn from their sockets.” (I am copying from the official
report.) As he refused to confess to a crime which he had not committed,
he was then taken down and was forced to swallow such vast quantities of
water that his body had soon “swollen to twice its natural size.” As he
persisted in his diabolical refusal to confess his guilt, he was placed
on a tumbril and was dragged to the place of execution where his arms
and legs were broken in two places by the executioner. During the next
two hours, while he lay helpless on the block, magistrates and priests
continued to bother him with their questions. With incredible courage the
old man continued to proclaim his innocence. Until the chief justice,
exasperated by such obstinate lying, gave him up as a hopeless case and
ordered him to be strangled to death.
The fury of the populace had by this time spent itself and none of the
other members of the family were killed. The widow, deprived of all her
goods, was allowed to go into retirement and starve as best she could in
the company of her faithful maid. As for the children, they were sent to
different convents with the exception of the youngest who had been away
at school at Nîmes at the time of his brother’s suicide and who had
wisely fled to the territory of the sovereign city of Geneva.
The case had attracted a great deal of attention. Voltaire in his castle
of Ferney (conveniently built near the frontier of Switzerland so that a
few minutes’ walk could carry him to foreign ground) heard of it but at
first refused to be interested. He was forever at loggerheads with the
Calvinist ministers of Geneva who regarded his private little theater
which stood within sight of their own city as a direct provocation and
the work of Satan. Hence Voltaire, in one of his supercilious moods,
wrote that he could not work up any enthusiasm for this so-called
Protestant martyr, for if the Catholics were bad, how much worse those
terribly bigoted Huguenots, who boycotted his plays! Besides, it
seemed impossible to him (as to a great many other people) that twelve
supposedly respectable judges would have condemned an innocent man to
such a terrible death without very good reason.
But a few days later the sage of Ferney, who kept open house to all
comers and no questions asked, had a visit from an honest merchant from
Marseilles who had happened to be in Toulouse at the time of the trial
and who was able to give him some first-hand information. Then at last he
began to understand the horror of the crime that had been committed and
from that moment on he could think of nothing else.
There are many sorts of courage, but a special order of merit is reserved
for those rare souls who, practically alone, dare to face the entire
established order of society and who loudly cry for justice when the high
courts of the land have pronounced sentence and when the community at
large has accepted their verdict as equitable and just.
Voltaire well knew the storm that would break if he should dare to
accuse the court of Toulouse of a judicial murder, and he prepared
his case as carefully as if he had been a professional attorney. He
interviewed the Calas boy who had escaped to Geneva. He wrote to every
one who could possibly know something of the inside of the case. He hired
counsel to examine and if possible to correct his own conclusions, lest
his anger and his indignation carry him away. And when he felt sure of
his ground, he opened his campaign.
First of all he induced every man of some influence whom he knew within
the realm of France (and he knew most of them) to write to the Chancellor
of the Kingdom and ask for a revision of the Calas case. Then he set
about to find the widow and as soon as she had been located, he ordered
her to be brought to Paris at his own expense and engaged one of the
best known lawyers to look after her. The spirit of the woman had been
completely broken. She vaguely prayed that she might get her daughters
out of the convent before she died. Beyond that, her hopes did not extend.
Then he got into communication with the other son who was a Catholic,
made it possible for him to escape from his school and to join him in
Geneva. And finally he published all the facts in a short pamphlet
entitled “Original Documents Concerning the Calas Family,” which
consisted of letters written by the survivors of the tragedy and
contained no reference whatsoever to Voltaire himself.
Afterwards, too, during the revision of the case, he remained carefully
behind the scenes, but so well did he handle his publicity campaign that
soon the cause of the Calas family was the cause of all families in all
countries of Europe and that thousands of people everywhere (including
the King of England and the Empress of Russia) contributed to the funds
that were being raised to help the defense.
Eventually Voltaire gained his victory, but not until he had fought one
of the most desperate battle of his entire career.
The throne of France just then was occupied by Louis XV of unsavory
memory. Fortunately his mistress hated the Jesuits and all their works
(including the Church) with a most cordial hatred and was therefore
on the side of Voltaire. But the King loved his ease above all other
things and was greatly annoyed at all the fuss made about an obscure and
dead Protestant. And of course as long as His Majesty refused to sign a
warrant for a new trial, the Chancellor would not take action, and as
long as the Chancellor would not take action, the tribunal of Toulouse
was perfectly safe and so strong did they feel themselves that they
defied public opinion in a most high-handed fashion and refused to let
Voltaire or his lawyers have access to the original documents upon which
they had based their conviction.
During nine terrible months, Voltaire kept up his agitation until finally
in March of the year 1765 the Chancellor ordered the Tribunal of Toulouse
to surrender all the records in the Calas case and moved that there be
a new trial. The widow of Jean Calas and her two daughters, who had at
last been returned to their mother, were present in Versailles when this
decision was made public. A year later the special court which had been
ordered to investigate the appeal reported that Jean Calas had been done
to death for a crime which he had not committed. By herculean efforts the
King was induced to bestow a small gift of money upon the widow and her
children. Furthermore the magistrates who had handled the Calas case were
deprived of their office and it was politely suggested to the people of
Toulouse that such a thing must not happen again.
But although the French government might take a lukewarm view of the
incident, the people of France had been stirred to the very depths of
their outraged souls. And suddenly Voltaire became aware that this was
not the only miscarriage of justice on record, that there were many
others who had suffered as innocently as Calas.
In the year 1760 a Protestant country squire of the neighborhood of
Toulouse had offered the hospitality of his house to a visiting Calvinist
minister. For this hideous crime he had been deprived of his estate and
had been sent to the galleys for life. He must have been a terribly
strong man for thirteen years later he was still alive. Then Voltaire was
told of his plight. He set to work, got the unfortunate man away from
the galleys, brought him to Switzerland where his wife and children were
being supported by public charity and looked after the family until the
crown was induced to surrender a part of the confiscated property and the
family were given permission to return to their deserted homestead.
Next came the case of Chaumont, a poor devil who had been caught at
an open-air meeting of Protestants and who for that crime had been
dispatched to the galleys for an indeterminate period, but who now, at
the intercession of Voltaire, was set free.
These cases, however, were merely a sort of grewsome hors d’œuvre to what
was to follow.
Once more the scene was laid in Languedoc, that long suffering part of
France which after the extermination of the Albigensian and Waldensian
heretics had been left a wilderness of ignorance and bigotry.
In a village near Toulouse there lived an old Protestant by the name of
Sirven, a most respectable citizen who made a living as an expert in
medieval law, a lucrative position at a time when the feudal judicial
system had grown so complicated that ordinary rent-sheets looked like an
income tax blank.
Sirven had three daughters. The youngest was a harmless idiot, much given
to brooding. In March of the year 1764 she left her home. The parents
searched far and wide but found no trace of the child until a few days
later when the bishop of the district informed the father that the girl
had visited him, had expressed a desire to become a nun and was now in a
convent.
Centuries of persecution had successfully broken the spirit of the
Protestants in that part of France. Sirven humbly answered that
everything undoubtedly would be for the best in this worst of all
possible worlds and meekly accepted the inevitable. But in the
unaccustomed atmosphere of the cloister, the poor child had soon lost the
last vestiges of reason and when she began to make a nuisance of herself,
she was returned to her own people. She was then in a state of terrible
mental depression and in such continual horror of voices and spooks that
her parents feared for her life. A short time afterwards she once more
disappeared. Two weeks later her body was fished out of an old well.
At that time Jean Calas was up for trial and the people were in a mood
to believe anything that was said against a Protestant. The Sirvens,
remembering what had just happened to innocent Jean Calas, decided not
to court a similar fate. They fled and after a terrible trip through
the Alps, during which one of their grandchildren froze to death, they
at last reached Switzerland. They had not left a moment too soon. A few
months later, both the father and the mother were found guilty (in their
absence) of the crime of having murdered their child and were ordered
to be hanged. The daughters were condemned to witness the execution of
their parents and thereafter to be banished for life.
A friend of Rousseau brought the case to the notice of Voltaire and as
soon as the Calas affair came to an end, he turned his attention to the
Sirvens. The wife meanwhile had died. Remained the duty of vindicating
the husband. It took exactly seven years to do this. Once again the
tribunal of Toulouse refused to give any information or to surrender
any documents. Once more Voltaire had to beat the tom-tom of publicity
and beg money from Frederick of Prussia and Catherine of Russia and
Poniatowski of Poland before he could force the crown to take an
interest. But finally, in the seventy-eighth year of his own life and in
the eighth year of this interminable lawsuit, the Sirvens were exonerated
and the survivors were allowed to go back to their homes.
So ended the second case.
The third one followed immediately.
In the month of August of the year 1765 in the town of Abbeville, not far
from Amiens, two crucifixes that stood by the side of the road were found
broken to pieces by an unknown hand. Three young boys were suspected
of this sacrilege and orders were given for their arrest. One of them
escaped and went to Prussia. The others were caught. Of these, the older
one, a certain Chevalier de la Barre, was suspected of being an atheist.
A copy of the Philosophical Dictionary, that famous work to which all the
great leaders of liberal thought had contributed, was found among his
books. This looked very suspicious and the judges decided to look into
the young man’s past. It was true they could not connect him with the
Abbeville case but had he not upon a previous occasion refused to kneel
down and uncover while a religious procession went by?
De la Barre said yes, but he had been in a hurry to catch a stage-coach
and had meant no offense.
Thereupon he was tortured, and being young and bearing the pain less
easily than old Calas, he readily confessed that he had mutilated one
of the two crucifixes and was condemned to death for “impiously and
deliberately walking before the Host without kneeling or uncovering,
singing blasphemous songs, tendering marks of adoration to profane
books,” and other crimes of a similar nature which were supposed to have
indicated a lack of respect for the Church.
The sentence was so barbarous (his tongue was to be torn out with hot
irons, his right hand was to be cut off, and he was to be slowly burned
to death, and all that only a century and a half ago!) that the public
was stirred into several expressions of disapproval. Even if he were
guilty of all the things enumerated in the bill of particulars, one could
not butcher a boy for a drunken prank! Petitions were sent to the King,
ministers were besieged with requests for a respite. But the country was
full of unrest and there must be an example, and de la Barre, having
undergone the same tortures as Calas, was taken to the scaffold, was
decapitated (as a sign of great and particular favor) and his corpse,
together with his Philosophical Dictionary and some volumes by our old
friend Bayle, were publicly burned by the hangman.
It was a day of rejoicing for those who dreaded the ever-growing
influence of the Sozzinis and the Spinozas and the Descartes. It showed
what invariably happened to those ill-guided young men who left the
narrow path between the right and the wrong and followed the leadership
of a group of radical philosophers.
Voltaire heard this and accepted the challenge. He was fast approaching
his eightieth birthday, but he plunged into the case with all his old
zeal and with a brain that burned with a clear white flame of outraged
decency.
De la Barre had been executed for “blasphemy.” First of all, Voltaire
tried to discover whether there existed a law by which people guilty
of that supposed crime could be condemned to death. He could not find
one. Then he asked his lawyer friends. They could not find one. And it
gradually dawned upon the community that the judges in their unholy
eagerness had “invented” this bit of legal fiction to get rid of their
prisoner.
There had been ugly rumors at the time of de la Barre’s execution. The
storm that now arose forced the judges to be very circumspect and the
trial of the third of the youthful prisoners was never finished. As for
de la Barre, he was never vindicated. The review of the case dragged on
for years and when Voltaire died, no decision had as yet been reached.
But the blows which he had struck, if not for tolerance at least against
intolerance, were beginning to tell.
The official acts of terror instigated by gossiping old women and senile
courts came to an end.
Tribunals that have religious axes to grind are only successful when they
can do their work in the dark and are able to surround themselves with
secrecy. The method of attack followed by Voltaire was one against which
such courts had no means of defense.
Voltaire turned on all the lights, hired a voluminous orchestra, invited
the public to attend, and then bade his enemies do their worst.
As a result, they did nothing at all.