The life of Voltaire

by Evelyn Beatrice Hall

Friend and foe still remember him by that motto. The one has idly forgotten, and the other carefully misunderstands, what it means and meant. To many Christians, “Écrasez l’infâme” is but the blasphemous outcry against the dearest and most sacred mysteries of their religion; and l’infâme means Christ.

But to Voltaire, if it meant Christianity at all, it meant that which was taught in Rome in the eighteenth century, and not by the Sea of Galilee in the first. If it was Christianity at all, it was not the Christianity of Christ. L’infâme did mean religion, but it meant the religion which lit the fires of Smithfield and prompted the tortures of the Inquisition; which terrified feeble brains to madness with the burning flames of a material hell, and flung to the barren uselessness of the cloister hundreds of unwilling victims, quick and meet for the life for which they had been created.

L’infâme was the religion which enforced its doctrines by the sword, the fire, and the prison; which massacred on the Night of St. Bartholomew; and, glossing lightly over royal sins, refused its last consolations to dying Jansenists who would not accept the Bull Unigenitus. It was the religion which thrust itself between wife and husband in the person of the confessor—himself condemned to an unnatural life which not one in a thousand can live honestly and aright; it was the religion of Indulgences, and the rich: for those who could pay for the remission of their sins and for large impunity to sin afresh; it was the religion which served as a cloak for tyranny and oppression, ground down the face of the poor, and kept wretchedness wretched for ever.

And above all, l’infâme was that spirit which was the natural enemy of all learning and advancement; which loved darkness and hated light because its deeds were evil; which found the better knowledge of His works, treason to God; and an exercise of the reason and the judgment He had given, an insult to the Giver.

If there was ever a chance for the foolish to become learned, l’infâme deprived them of it. If the light fought its way through the gross darkness of superstition, l’infâme quenched it. It prohibited Newton; burnt Bayle; and cursed the “Encyclopædia.” If men were once enlightened, l’infâme would be cast down from the high places where it sat—as Pope or as King, as Calvinist or as Cardinal; but always as the enemy of that Justice which drives out oppression, as the sun drives out the night.

L’infâme cannot be translated by any single word. But if it must be, the best rendering of it is Intolerance.

No one can have any knowledge of the career or of the character of Voltaire without seeing that this Thing, to which in the year 1759 was first given the name of Infâme, was his one, great, lifelong enemy. Loathing of it coursed in his bourgeois blood and was bred in his bones. The boy who had seen France starve to pay for the Sun King’s wars, and Paris persecuted to please his mistress and his confessor, had felt surge in him the first waves of that tireless indignation which was to turn a courtier into a reformer, and make a light soul, deep. By the time he himself became the Voice crying in the wilderness of men’s sorrows, the utterer of hard truths, l’infâme had imprisoned, persecuted, and exiled him. And who is there who does not better hate wrong-doing when he has himself been wronged? He had revealed God to sages through Newton; and the hangman burnt the “English Letters.” He had studied history, especially the history of the religious wars, and he knew what l’infâme had done in the past as well as in the present. He declared, with that extraordinary mixture of levity and passion which is his alone, that he always had an access of fever on St. Bartholomew’s Day. He had seen the works of Boyer—fanatic and tyrant—the product of a shameful system, and not the less harmful in fact because he was honest in intention. He had seen l’infâme prompt Damiens’s knife; and then, in its besotted inconsequence, avenge the crime of its own scholar by prohibiting all the works of enlightenment in France.

In 1757, in writing to d’Alembert, Voltaire had first given l’infâme a name—the Phantom. A few days later he called it the Colossus. Under any name a d’Alembert would recognise it. On May 18, 1759, Frederick the Great spoke of it by that title it was to bear for ever, in one of those bitter yearning letters he wrote to his old friend. “You will still caress l’infâme with one hand and scratch it with the other; you will treat it as you have treated me and all the world.” And in June Voltaire replied: “Your Majesty reproaches me with sometimes caressing l’infâme. My God, no! I only work to extirpate it.” And the next year—June 3, 1760—“I want you to crush l’infâme; that is the great point. It must be reduced to the same condition as it is in England. You can do it if you will. It is the greatest service one can render to humankind.”

Henceforward, his allusions to it in his letters became more and more frequent. Sometimes, he abbreviated it to Écr. l’Inf. Sometimes he wrote in one corner “É. l’I.” “The first of duties is to annihilate l’inf.; confound l’inf. as much as you can.”

“This Mr. Écrlinf does not write badly, said these worthy people.” One of his theories was that truths cannot be too often insisted on. “Rub it in! rub it in!” he would cry. He rubbed in his infâme. Now in passionate earnest, now in jest, now cynically, now bitterly, he alluded to it at all times and seasons and to all kinds of persons. To Damilaville, who was to take Theriot’s place as his correspondent and who himself loathed l’infâme with a deadly intensity, Voltaire hardly wrote a letter without that “Crush the monster!” It was a catchword at last. “I end all my letters by saying Écr. l’inf., as Cato always said, That is my opinion and Carthage must be destroyed.” By it, he heated the zeal of his fellow-workers in the cause; quickened the “phlegmatic perseverance” of d’Alembert; and rallied to new effort Helvétius, Marmontel, Holbach, and a dozen lesser men.