Of course we're back to Voltaire.
Ian Davidson's new book, Voltaire in Exile, focuses on the Voltaire I thought I saw when I taught Candide last fall. Adam Gopnik's smart review (I haven''t got the book in my hands yet) tells me in more exact detail than I'd known that Francois-Marie Arouet was not just a paradigm-shattering thinker. That he practiced the "sturdy activism" I hailed in that earlier post, and worked to cultivate his garden by working hard to stop torture and mistreatment.
I'd call Arouet a role model, though only in arrogance - how to emulate such a father, who at that time had wealth and fame as well as art at his disposal? But how not to make an avatar of the writer and thinker moved to action -- even while, as Gopnik says, "an old man who was
still busy writing plays and arguing with his neighbors about leases
and noises"? Italics mine, below:
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It is in the years after
the publication of the supposedly cynical and even quietist “Candide”
that he began the campaigns against persecution—and, more broadly,
against torture and cruelty in punishment—from which, as Davidson says,
most civilized societies can trace their liberation from organized
cruelty and state killing.
Voltaire was no mere petition signer; he was intensely engaged with individual cases, and deserves credit for exposing at least two horrible judicial murders. He first took on the case of Jean Calas, a Protestant in Normandy who was wrongly accused of murdering his own son (it seems likely that the son committed suicide) to keep him from converting to Roman Catholicism. Calas was executed: publicly tortured by a judicial lynch mob of priests and local officials, and then broken on the wheel. Voltaire, after years of work, was able to show that Calas’s execution had been a frame-up, and even managed to get official recompense for his family. He did the same thing, at greater personal risk, in the case of the teen-age Chevalier de La Barre, who had been accused by the Catholic authorities of desecrating a statue of the Crucifixion, under the influence of Voltaire’s Dictionnaire Philosophique. Voltaire could not save his life—La Barre was tortured, and sentenced to have his tongue cut out, before he was killed and burned, along with Voltaire’s book—but his writings helped make certain that La Barre was the last man to be murdered in France for blasphemy.
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A combination of muckracking journalist, Michael Moore hectoring, and personal politics a la Paul Rusesabagina - all at a time when it was literally revolutionary to say that such tortures were aberrant.
Now that we've firmly entered another era where much of the public applauds such torture, making up for the Lisbon earthquake of 9/11 with an auto-da-fe that seems to have no end,Voltaire's signature cri holds up ever more. Gopnik again:
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He coined his most famous phrase, écrasez l’infâme—“Crush
the horror”—and began to use it, in jauntily (and evasively)
abbreviated form. Historians have fussed for centuries about exactly
what Voltaire meant by it—the Catholic Church? the Court?—but it’s
clear. The horror was the alliance of religious fanaticism with the
instruments of the state, and the two combined for torture and official
murder.
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We can argue all day about how theocratic this administration's ideas really are -- but the certainty in Bush's, Rumsfeld's eyes, let alone those of their supporters, has the Inquisitor's sharpness, and Gonzales helped unsheath those "instruments of the state."
I wonder if Seymour Hersh, Bob Herbert, Mark Danner
and Jane Mayer have looked at Voltaire lately.
Maybe we all need T-shirts that say "Ecrasez l'infame!"
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