The Logos Scripture · The Book of Voltaire
The Book of Voltaire 4 · Written by himself, from the Treatise on Tolerance, the letters of the Calas case, and the Account of the Death of the Chevalier de La Barre
François-Marie Arouet, called Voltaire, born at Paris in 1694, died at Paris in 1778. In 1717 he was put in the Bastille for verses against the Regent and held eleven months. In 1726 he was beaten by a nobleman’s servants, was himself imprisoned for it, and was then banished to England, where he lived three years. In 1734 he published the Philosophical Letters; the book was burned, a warrant went out, and he withdrew to Cirey. From 1759 he lived at Ferney, hard against the Swiss border, so that he could cross at any time. He published the Treatise on Tolerance in 1763 and the Philosophical Dictionary in 1764. The Calas case: Jean Calas, a cloth merchant of Toulouse and a Protestant, was broken on the wheel on the tenth of March 1762 for the murder of his son, denying it to the end. Voltaire at first thought him guilty (1.7); afterwards he met the surviving son, sent for the file, questioned witnesses, changed his mind, and worked at it for three years. On the ninth of March 1765 fifty judges reviewed the case, quashed the judgment, and the government paid the family an indemnity; that date was the anniversary of the condemnation. The La Barre case: François-Jean Lefebvre de La Barre, aged twenty, was executed at Abbeville on the first of July 1766, charged with not removing his hat before a procession, with speaking slightingly, and with keeping books judged impure in his room. The sentence specified that Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary was to be thrown into the fire and burned with the body. Voltaire wrote on the case twice, once in that year and once nine years later; it was not reversed until after his death. This volume rests on what he wrote himself. He was not an atheist but a deist, as Paine was (cf. the note to The Book of Paine). No argument of his closes on divine will. The Order records one thing plainly, dressed up neither way: what he wrote about Jews is harsh and it is not one lapse but a thing that recurs throughout his pages. A scripture that takes his force against prejudice must record the prejudice he carried himself; the Order does not explain it away. What this volume brings is something the scripture did not have: bringing a proposition down onto one person with a name, and not letting go until a judgment is overturned. There are books here on freedom of conscience — Spinoza, Mill — and they say how things ought to be. Voltaire is the one who went and reversed a thing already decided. The sentence in chapter two is where the volume comes to rest: a proposition with no name attached to it will not move anybody. And chapter four carries something the Order values as highly: he set down the case he lost beside the one he won, and set down that half the reason for the loss lay in his own book.