CHAPTER XXVVOLTAIRE
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 influenceby 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 numberof 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 numberof 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 eradicatea 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 happylife 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 thereason 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 thecompanionship 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 whorefused 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 causedan 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. Theydragged 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 Calasand 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 hisbrother’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 shoulddare 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 positionat 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 theexecution 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 wasfast 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.