The Enlightenment gadfly Voltaire was a true social justice warrior who infuriated the comfortable and powerful and actually got shit done
I fell in love with a French guy in college. When my history class got to the European Enlightenment my ditzy college kid self was like, okay, whatever. But mah man Voltaire expedited my germinal liberalism forming around constitutional rights and my growing dislike for autocratic religion.
These old rationalist dudes questioned authority, not to mention the existence of God, or at least the authority of God, and whether God even wanted authority over us since maybe He only really interfered in human affairs when it was absolutely necessary to keep us from FUBARing everything. (It also sounded like a good argument to my mom for not going to church anymore.)
When we were assigned Candide, the work he’s most famous for, I cheaped out by borrowing a book on Voltaire’s collected works at the library. Candide didn’t blow my mind. But. That semester I spent my free time mostly alone, reading in the cafeteria or the Student Center. I read some of Voltaire’s other works. Like his Lettre on why the French should inoculate their kids against smallpox like their hated, sworn enemies the British.
Did you know they had smallpox vaccinations back then? Well, they did. They were cruder and riskier, but Voltaire noted the English were dying less of smallpox than the rest of Europe, which regarded the Brits as ‘mad…maniacs’ because they deliberately infected their infants by making a small cut and inserting some virus. The English noted (just like, Voltaire observed, ancient Circassian mothers) that infants stood a greater chance of surviving smallpox, with less scarring, than older children or adults.
Sure, some died, but many more survived, and regardless of what else might kill them at a young age, it wouldn’t be the scourge of Europe. I was totally ready to vaccinate my 18th-century baby!
How logical. How exceedingly rational. Voltaire’s reasoning was impeccable. I think he inoculated me against a lifetime of falling for dogmatic tripe.
Voltaire was a gadfly, an anti-elitist, pro-intellectual asshole. He became my kind of asshole with giant brass balls. He was forever on the run, one step ahead of the enemies of reason, rationalism, and calling out abusive power-mongers.
He challenged oppressive 18th-century Catholicism, and the puffery of nobility and clergy remaking society to benefit mostly themselves, much like our self-appointed academic elite masters and politicians today who think they know better than us critically-thinking rabble. Voltaire’s privileged, effete enemies were to perish twelve years after his death on the business end of the guillotine, but I’ll bet he would have vigorously condemned Robespierre and his Reign of Error.
I marvel at and admire his massive uncommon strength and courage at a time when cancellation meant the strappado, the rack, the wheel, and the thumbscrews, not just people calling you ‘Catholiphobic’. Today he would revile the left’s and right’s censormonkeys and blast XTwitter with a power greater than Elon Musk’s rocket ship. The radical Christian disdained most religions, but called for universal religious tolerance, never advocating obliterating them. In fact, nothing pissed off his nation’s elites as much as his intolerable calls for religious tolerance.
“I disagree with what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it.”
Voltaire’s attributed quote is actually a more succinct synopsis of a longer and klutizer written expression. What made my First Amendment heart pound was his delightfully sarcastic essay On The Horrible Danger Of Reading, an evisceration of Turkey’s recent edict banning printing, and weaving in criticism of French censorship to boot.
I printed it out and taped it over my typewriter, since I was working on a Great American Novel, that, had it ever gotten published, would have mightily pissed off the Republicans and their Christian Right masters.
In the early 1980s, the Religious Reich Right was on a tear, banning books and, if I recall correctly, although I can’t find evidence of it today, burning them. But they were definitely banning them, often classics that called for universal tolerance. (Sound familiar?)
So of course I read many of them. Never tell me what I can and can’t read.
Nothing pisses off power-mad elitists more than reading forbidden books. In Voltaire’s day the go-to list for your next great read was the Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books, who made him yesteryear’s equivalent of a regular on the NY Times bestseller list. Today books forbidden by agitating activists against Amazon and other book purveyors can be downloaded somewhere or you can boycott them until they return Abigail Schrier’s Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters right the hell now!
Voltaire was a rebel. A maverick. Sometimes, he was a racist, antisemitic, ‘anti-mahometan’ asshole, but he believed in free speech, freedom from censorship, freedom of opinion, freedom of religion, freedom from religion, and freedom from torture and any sort of oppression. He was the scourge of pompous asses, the intellectual Scarlet Pimpernel of freethinking.
He did time in the Bastille for pissing off the king. Twice.
He was forever dodging the Church, which didn’t measure up to his moral and intellectual standards. He detested their power, and unchecked power in general. He wrote a devastating article condemning the Church for the arrest, hideous torture, and execution of a Huguenot named Jean Calas in a deeply Catholic country, after examining the appalling French system of jurisprudence:
“As there are half-proofs, that is to say, half-truths, it is clear that there are half-innocent and half-guilty persons. So we start by giving them a half-death, after which we go to lunch.”
He succeeded, after a years-long campaign, in getting the French government to re-open the case and re-try Calas posthumously. This time he was acquitted.
Voltaire didn’t like Huguenots much, but he didn’t want to see one tortured and executed for something he didn’t do. It’s why I think he’d stand up for Jewish students in the face of the Islamofascist (‘Mahometan’) Reign of Terror.
“I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it.”
Voltaire didn’t suffer fools gladly, which is why he was such a wolverine about Jean Calas. The case had snowballed when Calas, accused of murdering his own son who’d pretty clearly hung himself, initially claimed his son was murdered to avoid his naked corpse getting dragged through the streets as a suicide. The local gossips, though, were like, “Oh, that sonofachienne Jean murdered him!” and there he was, broken on the wheel and suffocated with an early iteration of waterboarding, declaring his innocence until the blessed end.
Voltaire’s obsession with exonerating him embarrassed the Church mightily. It’s no wonder he was always hustling out of France to avoid being assassinated or executed.
He pissed off fellow philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a very bright man who could nevertheless go off on weird hippie tangents about how people should maybe go back to nature and just get it on with the wild and offer a massive collective finger flip to civilization. Voltaire wrote him a sarcastic letter saying that, even at his own advanced age, he’d like to get down on all fours and crawl around the forest. Rousseau got all snowflakey about it and the two feuded, in the sense that Rousseau hated Voltaire who thought the former was just freaking hilarious.
Sarcasm kept Voltaire in a steady state of trouble throughout his long life, which ended at eighty-three, by natural causes rather than someone finally whacking him. Although in his various letters to friends, Voltaire the Hypochondriac spent the last fifty years complaining of his ills and warning the end may be near. No one took longer to die than Voltaire, no, not even PeeWee Herman at the end of the movie Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
Writing ‘to act’
Voltaire’s polemics against religious intolerance included extolling King Henry IV for bringing peace to England and converting from Catholicism to Protestantism. While in England, he scrawled out essays about how great the English government was although, not, to my knowledge, similar paeans to the food. Without explicitly mentioning how poorly the French government fell short, it was still wickedly obvious who he was excoriating yet again, so the French government banned his Letters to the English. His most unforgiveable up-yours was his observation that England’s Royal Exchange brought together men of all faiths and the only ‘infidels’ were those dumbasses who went bankrupt. Religious tolerance was definitely a non-non for French authorities and this peaceable observation was, therefore, intolerable.
He wrote ‘to act’, to change opinions which can bring about social justice, and he did. I expect today he’d notice and call out how religious-y progressive politics have gotten, with mandated dogma and severe consequences for deviation. Can you imagine what he’d make of today’s Transquisition? Betcha he would have read the WPATH Files and the Cass Review!
Afflicting the comfortable
His first stay in Club Bastille began with an essay criticizing the government. Not being one much for learning his lessons, he wrote yet another one while warming his cell bench, this time criticizing rather than praising Henry IV for some damn thing and, just to be a gadfly pissant, he trash-talked religious extremists some more. It got published after his release which led to a violent brouhaha with an angry nobleman and, well, they’d saved his cell for him, the bench still warm from his butt.
Getting rather tired of this whole prison thing, he asked if he could spend the rest of his sentence in England, which was almost as bad for a Frenchman used to food that doesn’t taste like paste. But it’s where he learned to love freedom of speech and religion, so it all worked out. For us, anyway, less so for the French government and the Church.
The 21st-century Voltaire
What still strikes me, forty years after I fell in love, is just what a courageous maverick Voltaire was. He dodged his enemies while throwing over his shoulder ever-more-vitriolic condemnations.
Voltaire was his pen name, but 18th-century anonymity didn’t exist when you were the most famous and read writer in Europe. He couldn’t gush virulence at night disguised as @ecrasezlinfame and wander down to the market in the morning for breakfast without being recognized—or potentially stabbed. Pissing off the Church was akin to irritating Hamas today. If they’d gotten their hands on him, he might have wished for a death as ‘easy’ as Jean Calas’s. Which ended broken on the notorious Wheel.
He afflicted the comfortable and comforted the afflicted, the genuinely marginalized victims of his day. His most detested sin was irrationalism. He would have adored the downfall of TV evangelists and assured them God had ordained it. He stood up, unpopularly, for an executed man in an unpopular religion, one Voltaire himself scorned, but his dislike of social injustice far exceeded his dislike of Huguenots. He spoke what the masses didn’t dare say, the most vicious gadfly up the arses of all their enemies.
What would he and his Enlightenment buddies make of the chowderheads and peabrains running the GOP and the Democrats, how much they’d eviscerate wokeness and MAGAtry with their sharpest of verbal rapiers. How much their words would crush the anti-semites and hateful elitists.
Voltaire would fulminate relentlessly against academic, journalistic, and political doxing, SWATting, and deplatforming of public speakers. He’d condemn everyone’s book-banners. He’d likely recognize woke ideology as a mind-numbing religion, and call it out for paying lip service to the weak and helpless while elitely obsessing about whether the term ‘field work’ is racist. He’d call out the semi-literate morons on XTwitter far more sarcastically, and with better spelling and English syntax.
Voltaire died before the French Revolution which is a shame; I strongly suspect he’d have condemned Robespierre and defended the very nobles who loathed him. I wonder if he could have saved lives by ripping Robey a new anal exit, maybe from England. (Critics blamed Voltaire posthumously for the French Revolution.)
Thanks to freethinkers like Voltaire, the monarchy eventually disappeared and the Catholic Church lost much of its power. They inspired The Founding Fathers’ nascent democracy in the American Colonies.
The same can be done to the woke and MAGA, both the enemies of free speech, free thought, and universal tolerance.
Because bad ideas never last. Although, pretty arguably, maybe for the next four years.
Good luck with the election next week.
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