The same day I had a conversation with an old woman, his neighbor. I asked her if she had ever been unhappy for not understanding how her soul was made? She did not even comprehend my question. She had not, for the briefest moment in her life, had a thought about these subjects with which the good Brahmin had so tormented himself. She believed in the bottom of her heart in the metamorphoses of Vishnu, and provided she could get some of the sacred water of the Ganges in which to make her ablutions, she thought herself the happiest of women. Struck with the happiness of this poor creature, I returned to my philosopher, whom I thus addressed:
“Are you not ashamed to be thus miserable when, not fifty yards from you, there is an old automaton who thinks of nothing and lives contented?”
“You are right,” he replied. “I have said to myself a thousand times that I should be happy if I were but as ignorant as my old neighbor; and yet it is a happiness which I do not desire.”
This reply of the Brahmin made a greater impression on me than anything that had passed.62
Even if Philosophy should end in the total doubt of Montaigne’s “Que sais-je?”63 it is man’s greatest adventure, and his noblest. Let us learn to be content with modest advances in knowledge, rather than be forever weaving new systems out of our mendacious imagination.
We must not say, Let us begin by inventing principles whereby we may be able to explain everything; rather we must say, Let us make an exact analysis of the matter, and then we shall try to see, with much diffidence, if it fits in with any principle.64 . . . The Chancellor Bacon had shown the road which science might follow . . . . But then Descartes appeared and did just the contrary of what he should have done: instead of studying nature, he wished to divine her . . . . This best of mathematicians made only romances in philosophy.65 . . . It is given us to calculate, to weigh, to measure, to observe; this is natural philosophy; almost all the rest is chimera.66
VIII. Écrasez l’Infame
Under ordinary circumstances it is probable that Voltaire would never have passed out of the philosophic calm of this courteous scepticism to the arduous controversies of his later years. The aristocratic circles in which he moved agreed so readily with his point of view that there was no incentive to polemics; even the priests smiled with him over the difficulties of the faith, and cardinals considered whether, after all, they might not yet make him into a good Capuchin. What were the events that turned him from the polite persiflage of agnosticism to a bitter anti-clericalism which admitted no compromise, but waged relentless war to “crush the infamy” of ecclesiasticism?
Not far from Ferney lay Toulouse, the seventh city of France. In Voltaire’s day the Catholic clergy enjoyed absolute sovereignty there; the eity commemorated with frescoes the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (an edict which had given freedom of worship to Protestants), and celebrated as a great feast the day of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. No Protestant in Toulouse could be a lawyer, or a physician, or an apothecary, or a grocer, or a bookseller, or a printer; nor could a Catholic keep a Protestant servant or clerk—in 1748 a woman had been fined 3000 francs for using a Protestant midwife.
Now it happened that Jean Calas, a Protestant of Toulouse, had a daughter who became a Catholic, and a son who hanged himself, presumably because of disappointment in business. There was a law in Toulouse that every suicide should be placed naked on a hurdle, with face down, drawn thus through the streets, and then hanged on a gibbet. The father, to avert this, asked his relatives and his friends to testify to a natural death. In consequence, rumor began to talk of murder, and to hint that the father had killed the son to prevent his imminent conversion to Catholicism. Calas was arrested, put to the torture, and died soon after (1761). His family, ruined and hunted, fled to Ferney, and sought the aid of Voltaire. He took them into his home, comforted them, and marveled at the story of medieval persecution which they told.
About the same time (1762) came the death of Elizabeth Sirvens; again rumor charged that she had been pushed into a well just as she was about to announce her conversion to Catholicism. That a timid minority of Protestants would hardly dare to behave in this way was a rational consideration, and therefore out of the purview of rumor.—In 1765 a young man by the name of La Barre, aged sixteen, was arrested on the charge of having mutilated crucifixes. Subjected to torture, he confessed his guilt; his head was cut off, and his body was flung into the flames, while the crowd applauded. A copy of Voltaire’s Philosophic Dictionary, which had been found on the lad, was burned with him.
For almost the first time in his life, Voltaire became a thoroughly serious man. When d’Alembert, disgusted equally with state, church and people, wrote that hereafter he would merely mock at everything, Voltaire answered, “This is not a time for jesting; wit does not harmonize with massacres . . . . Is this the country of philosophy and pleasure? It is rather the country of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew.” It was with Voltaire now as with Zola and Anatole France in the case of Dreyfus; this tyrannous injustice lifted him up; he ceased to be merely a man of letters, and became a man of action too; he laid aside philosophy for war, or rather turned his philosophy into relentless dynamite. “During this time not a smile escaped me without my reproaching myself for it as for a crime.” It was now that he adopted his famous motto, Écrasez l’infame, and stirred the soul of France against the abuses of the church. He began to pour forth such intellectual fire and brimstone as melted mitres and sceptres, broke the power of the priesthood in France, and helped to overthrow a throne. He sent out a call to his friends and followers, summoning them to battle: “Come, brave Diderot, intrepid d’Alembert, ally yourselves; . . . overwhelm the fanatics and the knaves, destroy the insipid declamations, the miserable sophistries, the lying history, . . . the absurdities without number; do not let those who have sense be subjected to those who have none; and the generation which is being born will owe to us its reason and its liberty.”67
Just at this crisis an effort was made to buy him off; through Mme. de Pompadour he received an offer of a cardinal’s hat as the reward of reconciliation with the Church.68 As if the rule of a few tongue-tied bishops could interest a man who was the undisputed sovereign of the world of intellect! Voltaire refused; and like another Cato, began to end all his letters with “Crush the infamy.” He sent out his Treatise on Toleration: he said he would have borne with the absurdities of dogma had the clergy lived up to their sermons and had they tolerated differences; but “subtleties of which not a trace can be found in the Gospels are the source of the bloody quarrels of Christian history.”69 “The man who says to me, ‘Believe as I do, or God will damn you,’ will presently say, ‘Believe as I do, or I shall assassinate you.’”70 “By what right could a being created free force another to think like himself?”71 “A fanaticism composed of superstition and ignorance has been the sickness of all the centuries.”72 No such perpetual peace as the Abbé de St.-Pierre had pleaded for could ever be realized unless men learned to tolerate one another’s philosophic, political and religious differences. The very first step towards social health was the destruction of the ecclesiastical power in which intolerance had its root.