A Philosophical Dictionary, Volume 07

by Voltaire

Letter To The Marquis Of Beccaria, Professor Of Public Law At Milan, On The Subject Of M. De Morangies, 1772.

Sir:—You are a teacher of laws in Italy, a country from which we derive all laws except those which have been transmitted to us by our own absurd and contradictory customs, the remains of that ancient barbarism, the rust of which subsists to this day in one of the most flourishing kingdoms of the earth.

Your book upon crimes and punishments opened the eyes of many of the lawyers of Europe who had been brought up in absurd and inhuman usages; and men began everywhere to blush at finding themselves still wearing their ancient dress of savages.

Your opinion was requested on the dreadful execution to which two young gentlemen, just out of their childhood, had been sentenced; one of whom, having escaped the tortures he was destined to, has become a most excellent officer in the service of the great king, while the other, who had inspired the brightest hopes, died like a sage, by a horrible death, without ostentation and without pusillanimity, surrounded by no less than five executioners. These lads were accused of indecency in action and words, a fault which three months' imprisonment would have sufficiently punished, and which would have been infallibly corrected by time. You replied, that their judges were assassins, and that all Europe was of your opinion.

I consulted you on the cannibal sentences passed on Calas, on Sirven, and Montbailli; and you anticipated the decrees which you afterwards issued from the chief courts and officers of law in the kingdom, which justified injured innocence and re-established the honor of the nation.

I at present consult you on a cause of a very different nature. It is at once civil and criminal. It is the case of a man of quality, a major-general in the army, who maintains alone his honor and fortune against a whole family of poor and obscure citizens, and against an immense multitude consisting of the dregs of the people, whose execrations against him are echoed through the whole of France. The poor family accuses the general officer of taking from it by fraud and violence a hundred thousand crowns.

The general officer accuses these poor persons of trying to obtain from him a hundred thousand crowns by means equally criminal. They complain that they are not merely in danger of losing an immense property, which they never appeared to possess, but also of being oppressed, insulted, and beaten by the officers of justice, who compelled them to declare themselves guilty and consent to their own ruin and punishment. The general solemnly protests, that these imputations of fraud and violence are atrocious calumnies. The advocates of the two parties contradict each other on all the facts, on all the inductions, and even on all the reasonings; their memorials are called tissues of falsehoods; and each treats the adverse party as inconsistent and absurd,—an invariable practice in every dispute.

When you have had the goodness, sir, to read their memorials, which I have now the honor of sending to you, you will, I trust, permit me to suggest the difficulties which I feel in this case; they are dictated by perfect impartiality. I know neither of the parties, and neither of the advocates; but having, in the course of four and twenty years, seen calumny and injustice so often triumph, I may be permitted to endeavor to penetrate the labyrinth in which these monsters unfortunately find shelter.

Presumptions Against The Verron Family.

1. In the first place, there are four bills, payable to order, for a hundred thousand crowns, drawn with perfect regularity by an officer otherwise deeply involved in debt; they are payable for the benefit of a woman of the name of Verron, who called herself the widow of a banker. They are presented by her grandson, Du Jonquay, her heir, recently admitted a doctor of laws, although he is ignorant even of orthography. Is this enough? Yes, in an ordinary case it would be so; but if, in this very extraordinary case, there is an extreme probability, that the doctor of laws never did and never could carry the money which he pretends to have delivered in his grandmother's name; if the grandmother, who maintained herself with difficulty in a garret, by the miserable occupation of pawnbroking, never could have been in the possession of the hundred thousand crowns; if, in short, the grandson and his mother have spontaneously confessed, and attested the written confession by their actual signatures, that they attempted to rob the general, and that he never received more than twelve hundred francs instead of three hundred thousand livres;—in this case, is not the cause sufficiently cleared up? Is not the public sufficiently able to judge from these preliminaries?