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NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY
ORATION
ON
VOLTAIRE
COLONEL H. G. INGERSOLL.
Price Threepence.
LONDON :
R. FORDER, 28 STONECUTTER STREET, E.CL
1892.
�On Saturday evening, October 8, Colonel K. Gr. Ingersoll
delivered his new lecture on “Voltaire” before the Chicago
Press Club, the audience numbering six thousand persons.
The delivery of the lecture occupied two hours and a half, and
from boginning to end the orator held the attention of the
audience completely, and was most vociferously cheered
throughout.
�B X73 V
Oration on Voltaire.
O
Ladies and Gentlemen,—The infidels of one age have often
been the aureoled saints of the next. The destroyers of the
old are the creators of the new. (Applause.)
As time sweeps on, the old passes away and the new in its
turn becomes old. There is in the intellectual world, as in
the physical, decay and growth, and ever by the grave of
buried age stand youth and joy. (Applause.)
The history of intellectual progress is written in the lives
of infidels. Political rights have been preserved by traitors;
liberty of mind by heretics. (Applause.)
To attack the king was treason; to dispute the priest was
blasphemy. For many centuries the sword and the cross
were allies. Together they attacked the rights of man. They
defended each other. The throne and the altar were twins—
two vultures from the same egg. (Applause.)
James I. said, “No Bishop, no King.” He might have
added, No cross, no crown. The king owned the bodies of
men; the priest the souls. One lived on taxes collected by
force, the other on alms collected by fear. Both robbers—
both beggars.
These robbers and these beggars controlled two worlds.
The king made laws, the priest made creeds. Both obtained
their authority from God; both were the agents of the
infinite. With bowed backs the people carried the burdens
of the one, and with Wonder’s open mouth received the
dogmas of the other. If the people aspired to be free, they
were crushed by the king; and every priest was a Herod
who slaughtered the children of the brain. (Applause)
�( 4 )
The king ruled by force, the priest by fear, and each sup
ported the other. The king said to the people, “ God made
you peasants, and he made me to be king; he made you to
labor and me to enjoy; he made rags and hovels for you,
robes and palaces for me. He made you to obey, and me to
command. Such is the justice of God.” And the priest
said, “ God made you ignorant and vile; he made me holy
and wise. You are the sheep and I am the shepherd; your
fleeces belong to me. If you do not obey me here, God will
punish you now and torment you for ever in another world.
Such is the mercy of God. You must not reason. Reason
is a rebel. You must not contradict; contradiction is born
of egotism. You must believe. ‘ He that hath ears to ear,
let him hear.’ Heaven is a question of ears.” (Laughter
and applause.)
Fortunately for us, there have been traitors and there have
been heretics, blasphemers, thinkers, investigators, lovers of
liberty, men of genius, who have given theii’ lives to better
the condition of their fellow-men.
It may be well enough here to ask the question, “ What is
greatness ?” A great man adds to the sum of knowledge,
extends the horizon of thought, releases souls from the
Bastille of fear, crosses unknown and mysterious seas, gives
new islands and new continents to the domain of thought,
new constellations to the firmament of mind. A great man
does not seek applause or place; he seeks for truth; he seeks
the road to happiness, and what he ascertains he gives to
others. (Applause.)
A great man throws pearls before swine, and the swine are
sometimes changed to men. (Applause.) If the great men
had always kept their pearls, vast multitudes would be bar
barians now. (Applause.)
A great man is a torch in the darkness, a beacon in super
stition’s night, an inspiration and a prophecy. Greatness is
�( 5 )
not the gift of majorities; it cannot be thrust upon any man;
men cannot give it to another; they can give place and
power, but not greatness. The place does not make the
man nor the sceptre the king. Greatness is from within.
(Applause.)
The great men are the heroes who have freed the bodies
of men; they are the philosophers and thinkers who have
given liberty to the soul; they are the poets who have trans
figured the common, and filled the lives of many millions
with love and song. (Great applause.) They are the artists
who have covered the bare walls of weary life with triumphs
of genius. They are the heroes who have slain the monsters
of ignorance and fear, who have outgazed the Gorgon and
driven the cruel gods from their thrones. They are the
inventors, the discoverers, the great mechanics, the kings of
the useful who have civilised this world. (Applause.)
At the head of this heroic army—foremost of all—stands
Voltaire, whose memory we are honoring to-night. (Great
applause.) Voltaire! A name that excites the admiration
of men, the malignity of priests. Pronounce that name in
the presence of a clergyman, and you will find that you have
made a declaration of war. Pronounce that name, and from
the face of the priest the mask of meekness will fall, and from
the mouth of forgiveness will pour a Niagara of vituperation
and calumny. And yet Voltaire was the greatest man of his
century, and did more for the human race than any other of
the sons of men.
VOLTAIRE COMES TO “THIS GREAT STAGE OE TOOLS.”
On Sunday, Nov. 21, 1694, a babe was born—a babe exceed
ingly frail, whose breath hesitated about remaining. This
babe became the greatest man of the eighteenth century.
When Voltaire came to “this great stage of fools,” his
country had been Christianised—not civilised—for about
fourteen hundred years. For a thousand years the religion of
�( 6 )
peace and goodwill had been supreme. The laws had been
given by Christian kings and sanctioned by “ wise and holy
men.” (Laughter.)
Under the benign reign of universal love, every court had
its chamber of torture, and every priest relied on the thumb
screw and rack. (Laughter and applause.) Such had been
the success of the blessed gospel that every science was an
outcast. To speak your honest thoughts, to teach your
fellow men, to investigate for yourself, to seek the truth—
these were all crimes; and the “ Holy Mother Church ”
pursued the criminals with sword and flame. (Great
applause.)
The believers in a God of love—an infinite father—punished
hundreds of offences with torture and death. Suspected
persons were tortured to make them confess. Convicted
persons were tortured to make them give the names of their
accomplices. Under the leadership of the Church, cruelty
had become the only reforming power. In this blessed year
1694 all authors were at the mercy of king and priest. The
most of them were cast into prisons, impoverished by fines
and costs, exiled or executed. The little timejthat hangmen
could snatch from professional duties was occupied in
burning books. (Laughter and applause.) The courts of
justice were traps in which the innocent were caught. The
judges were almost as malicious and cruel as though they
had been bishops or saints. There was no trial by jury, and
the rules of evidence allowed the conviction of the supposed
criminal by the proof of suspicion or hearsay. The witnesses,
being liable to be tortured, generally told what the judges
wished to hear. (Laughter.)
ALMOST UNIVERSAL CORRUPTION.
When Voltaire was born, the Church ruled and owned
France. It was a period of almost universal corruption. The
priests were mostly libertines, the judges cruel and venal.
�( 7 )
The royal palace was a house of prostitution. The nobles
were heartless, arrogant, proud, and cruel to the last degree.
The common people were treated as beasts. It took the
Church a thousand years to bring about this happy condition
of things. (Applause and laughter.)
The seeds of the Revolution were being scattered uncon
sciously by every noble and by every priest. They were
germinating slowly in the hearts of the wretched ; they were
being watered by the tears of agony ; blows began to bear
interest. There was a faint longing for blood. Workmen,
blackened by the sun, bowed by labor, deformed by want,
looked at the white throats of scornful ladies and thought
about cutting them. In those days, witnesses were crossexamined with instruments of torture ; the Church was the
arsenal of superstition; miracles, relics, angels and devils
were as common as lies.
Voltaire was of the people. In the language of that day,
he had no ancestors. His real name was François Marie
Arouet. His mother was Marguerite d’Aumard. This
mother died when he was seven years of age. He had an
elder brother, Armand, who was a devotee, very religious,
and exceedingly disagreeable. This elder brother used to
present offerings to the Church, hoping to make amends for
the unbelief of his brother. So far as we know, none of his
ancestors were literary people. The Arouets had never
written a line. The Abbé de Chaulieu was his godfather,
and, although an abbé, was a Deist who cared nothing about
his religion except in connection with his salary. (Laughter.)
Voltaire’s father wanted to make a lawyer of him, but he
had no taste for law. At the age of ten he entered the
College of Louis le Grand. This was a Jesuit school, and
here he remained for seven years, leaving at seventeen, and
never attending any other school. According to Voltaire,
�he learned nothing at this school but a little Greek, a good
deal of Latin, and a vast amount of nonsense.
TORTURE BEHIND THE CREED.
In this College of Louis le Grand they did not teach geo
graphy, history, mathematics, or any science. This was a
Catholic institution, controlled by the Jesuits. In that day
the religion was defended, was protected, or supported by
the State. Behind the entire creed was the bayonet, the
axe, the wheel, the faggot, and the torture-chamber. While
Voltaire was attending the College of Louis le Grand, the
soldiers of the king were hunting Protestants in the moun
tains of Cevennes for magistrates to hang on gibbets, to put
to torture, to break on the wheel, or to burn at the stake.
There is but one use for law, but one excuse for govern
ment—the preservation of liberty, to give to each man his
own ; to secure to the farmer what he produces from the
soil, to the mechanic what he invents and makes, to the
artist what he creates, to the thinker the right to express his
thoughts. Liberty is the breath of progress. In France the
people were the sport of a king’s caprice. Everywhere was
the shadow of the Bastille. It fell upon the sunniest field,
upon the happiest home. With the king walked the heads
man, and back of the throne was the torture-chamber. The
Church appealed to the rack; faith relied on the faggot.
Science was an outcast, and philosophy, so-called, was the
pander of superstition. Nobles and priests were sacred;
peasants were vermin. Idleness sat at the banquet, and
industry gathered the crusts and crumbs. (Applause.)
At seventeen Voltaire determined to devote his life to
literature. The father said, speaking of his two sons Armand
and François : “ I have a pair of fools for sons, one in verse,
the other in prose.” (Laughter and applause.) In 1713,
Voltaire in a small way became a diplomat. He went to the
�( 9 )
Hague attached to the French Minister. There he fell in
love. The girl’s mother objected. Voltaire sent his clothes
to the young lady that she might visit him. Everything was
discovered and he was dismissed. To this girl he wrote a
letter, and in it you will find the key-note of Voltaire :
“ Do not expose yourself to the fury of your mother. You
know what she is capable of. You have experienced it too
well. Dissemble; it is your only chance. Tell her that you
have forgotten me, that you hate me. Then, after telling
her, love me all the more.”
On account of this episode, Voltaire was formally disin
herited by his father, who procured an order of arrest and
gave his son the choice of going to prison or beyond the seas.
Voltaire finally consented to become a lawyer, and says: “I
have already been a week at work in the office of a solicitor,
learning the trade of a pettifogger.” (Laughter.) About
this time he competed for a prize, writing a poem on the
king’s generosity in building the new choir in the Oathedral
of Notre Dame. He did not win it. After being with the
solicitor but a little while, he learnt to hate the law. He
began to write poetry and the outlines of tragedy. Great
questions were then agitating the public mind—questions
that throw a flood of light upon this epoch.
IN PRISON NOT KNOWING WHY.
Louis XIV. having died, the Regent took possession, and
then the prisons were opened. The Regent called for a list
of all persons then in the prisons sent there at the will of the
king, and he found that, as to many prisoners, nobody knew
any cause Why they had been in prison. They had been for
gotten. Many of the prisoners did not know themselves, and
could not guess why they had been arrested. One Italian had
been in the Bastille thirty-three years without ever knowing
why. On his arrival in Paris thirty-three years before, he was
�( 10 )
arrested and sent to prison. He had grown old. He had
survived his family and friends. When the rest were liberated,
he asked to remain where he was, and lived there the rest of
his life. The old prisoners were pardoned, but in a little while
their places were taken by new ones. At this time Voltaire
was not interested in the great world—knew very little of
religion or of government. He was busy writing poetry,
busy thinking of comedies and tragedies. He was full
of life. All his fancies were winged like moths. He was
charged with having written some cutting epigrams. He
was exiled to Tulle, three hundred miles away. From this
place he wrote in the true vein : “ I am at a chateau, a place
that would be the most agreeable in the world if I had not
been exiled to it, and where there is nothing wanting to my
perfect happiness except the liberty of leaving. It would be
delicious to remain if I only were allowed to go.” At last
the exile was allowed to return. Again he was arrested;
this time sent to the ¡Bastille, where he remained for nearly
a year. While in prison he changed his name from Francois
Marie Arouet to Voltaire, and by that name he has since been
known. Voltaire began to think, to doubt, to inquire. He
studied the history of the Church and of the creed. He found
that the religion of his time rested on the inspiration of the
scriptures—the infallibility of the Church—the dreams of
insane hermits—the absurdities of the fathers—the mistakes
and falsehoods of saints—the hysteria of nuns—the cunning
of priests and the stupidity of the people. He found that the
Emperor Constantine, who lifted Christianity into power,
murdered his wife Fausta and his eldest son Crispus the
same year that he convened the Council of Nice to decide
whether Christ was a man or the son of God. The Council
decided in the year 325, that Christ was consubstantial with
the Father. He found that the Church was indebted to a
husband who assassinated his wife—a father who murdered
�( 11 )
his son—for settling the vexed question of the divinity of the
Savior. He found that Theodosius called a council at Con
stantinople m 381 by which it was decided that the Holy Ghost
proceeded from the Father—that Theodosius, the younger,
assembled a council at Ephesus in 431 that declared the Virgin
Mary to be the mother of God—that the Emperor Marcian
called another council at Ohalcedon in 451 that decided that
Christ had two wills — that Pognatius called another
in 680, that declared that Christ had two natu'res to go with
his two wills—and that in 1274, at the Council of Lyons, the
important fact was found that the Holy Ghost “ proceeded ”
not only from the Father,, but also from the Son at the same
time. (Laughter and applause.)
WHAT THE GREAT EBENCHMAN MOCKED.
So Voltaire has been called a mocker ! What did he mopk P
He mocked kings that were unjust ; kings who cared nothing
for the sufferings of their subjects. He mocked the titled
fools of his day. He mocked the corruption of courts; the
meanness, the tyranny, and the brutality of judges. He
mocked the absurd and cruel laws, the barbarous customs.
He mocked popes and cardinals, bishops and priests, and all
the hypocrites on the earth. He mocked historians who filled
their books with lies, and philosophers who defended super
stition. He mocked the haters of liberty, the persecutors of
their fellow men. He mocked the arrogance, the cruelty the impudence, and the unspeakable baseness of his time.
(Applause.)
He has been blamed because he used the weapon of ridicule.
Hypocrisy has always hated laughter, and always will. Ab
surdity detests humor and stupidity despises wit. Voltaire
was the master of ridicule. He ridiculed the absurd, the
impossible. He ridiculed the mythologies and the miracles,
the stupid lives and lies of saints. He found pretence and
�( 12 )
mendacity crowned by credulity. He found the ignorant
many controlled by the cunning and cruel few. He found the
historian, saturated with superstition, filling his volumes with
the details of the impossible, and he found the scientists
satisfied with “ they say.” (Laughter.) Voltaire had the
instinct of the probable. He knew the law of average; the
sea level; he had the idea of proportion, and so he ridiculed
the mental monstrosities—the non sequiturs—of his day.
Aristotle said women had more teeth than men. This was
repeated again and again by the Catholic scientists of the
eighteenth century. Voltaire counted the teeth. The rest
were satisfied with “ they say.” (Laughter.)
THE APOSTLE OE COMMON SENSE.
We may, however, get an idea of the condition of France
from the fact that Voltaire regarded England as the land of
liberty. While he was in England he saw the body of Sir
Isaac Newton deposited in Westminster Abbey. He read the
works of this great man and afterwards gave to France the
philosophy of this great Englishman. (Applause.) Voltaire
was the apostle of common sense. He knew that there could
have been no primitive or first language from which all
human languages had been formed. He knew that every
language had been influenced by the surroundings of the
people. He knew that the language of snow and ice was not
the language of palm and flower. (Applause.) He knew also
that there had been no miracle in language. He knew it was
impossible that the story of the Tower of Babel should be
true. That everything in the whole world should be natural.
He was the enemy of alchemy, not only in language but in
science. One passage from him is enough to show his philo
sophy in this regard. He says: “To transmute iron into
gold two things are necessary. First, the annihilation of
iron; second, the creation of gold.” Voltaire was a man of
�( 13 )
humor, of good nature, of cheerfulness. He despised with
all his heart the philosophy of Calvin, the creed of the sombre,
of the severe, of the unnatural. He pitied those who needed
the aid of religion to be honest, to be cheerful. He had
the courage to enjoy the present and the philosophy to bear
what the future might bring. And yet for more than a
hundred and fifty years the Christian world has fought this
man and has maligned his memory. In every Christian
pulpit his name has been pronounced with scorn, and every
pulpit has been an arsenal of slander. He is one man of
whom no orthodox minister has ever told the truth. He has
been denounced equally by Catholics and Protestants.
Priests and ministers, bishops and exhorters, presiding
elders and popes have filled the world with slanders, with
calumnies about Voltaire. I am amazed that ministers will
not or cannot tell the truth about an enemy of the church.
As a matter of fact, for more than one thousand years
almost every pulpit has been a mint in which slanders were
coined.
PILLED EUROPE WITH HIS THOUGHTS.
For many years this restless man filled Europe with the
products of his brain. Essays, epigrams, epics, comedies,
tragedies, histories, poems, novels, representing every phase
and every faculty of the human mind. At the same time
engrossed in business, full of speculation, making money like
a millionaire, busy with the gossip of courts, and even with
scandals of priests. At the same time alive to all the dis
coveries of science and the theories of philosophers, and in
this babel never forgetting for a moment to assail the monster
of superstition. Sleeping and waking he hated the Church.
With the eyes of Argus he watched, and with the arms of
Briareius he struck. For sixty years he waged continuous
and unrelenting war, sometimes in the open field, sometimes
striking from the hedges of opportunity, taking care during
�( 14 )
all this time to remain independent of all men. He was in
the highest sense successful. He lived like a prince, became
one of the powers of Europe, and in him, for the first time,
literature was crowned. (Applause.) Voltaire, in spite of
his surroundings, in spite of almost universal tyranny and
oppression, was a believer in God and in what he was pleased
to call the religion of nature. He attacked the creed of his
time because it was dishonorable to his God. He thought of
the Deity as a father, as the fountain of justice, intelligence,
and mercy, and the creed of the Catholic Church made him a
monster of cruelty and stupidity. He attacked the Bible
with all the weapons at his command. He assailed its
geology, its astronomy, its idea of justice, its laws and cus
toms, its absurd and useless miracles, its foolish wonders, its
ignorance on all subjects, its insane prophecies, its cruel
threats, and its extravagant promises. At the same time he
praised the God of nature, the God who gives us rain and
light, and food and flowers, and health and happiness—
he who fills the world with youth and beauty. (Applause.)
LISBON EARTHQUAKE CHANGES VOLTAIRE.
In 1755 came the earthquake of Lisbon. This frightful
disaster became an immense interrogation. The optimist
was compelled to ask, “ What was my God doing? Why did
the Universal Father crush to shapelessness thousands of his
poor children, even at the moment when they were upon their
knees returning thanks to him ?” What could be done with
this horror P If earthquake there must be, why did it not
occur in some uninhabited desert, on some wide waste of
sea ? This frightful fact changed the theology of Voltaire.
He became convinced that this is not the best possible of all
worlds. He became convinced that evil is evil here now and
for ever. (Applause.)
Who can establish the existence of an infinite being ? It
is beyond the conception—the reason—the imagination of
�( 15 )
man—probably or possibly—where the zenith and nadir meet
this God can be found. (Applause.)
Voltaire, attacked on every side, fought with every weapon
that wit, logic, reason, scorn, contempt, laughter, pathos, and
indignation could sharpen, form, devise, or use. He often
apologised, and the apology was an insult. He often recanted,
and the recantation was a thousand times worse than the
thing recanted. He took it back by giving more. In the
name of eulogy he flayed his victim. In his praise there was
poison. He often advanced by retreating, and asserted by
retraction. He did not intend to give priests the satisfaction
of seeing him burn or suffer. Upon this very point of
recanting he wrote:
“ They say I must retract. Very willingly. I will declare
that Pascal is always right. That if St. Luke and St. Mark
contradict one another it is only anothei’ proof of the truth
of religion to those who know how to understand such things ;
and that another lovely proof of religion is that it is unintel
ligible. I will even avow that all priests are gentle and dis
interested; that Jesuits are honest people; that monks are
neither proud nor given to intrigue, and that their odor is
agreeable; that the Holy Inquisition is the triumph of
humanity and tolerance. In a word, I will say all that may
be desired of me, provided they leave me in repose, and wi’l
not prosecute a man who has done harm to none.”
He gave the best years of his wonderous life to succor
the oppressed, to shield the defenceless, to reverse infamous
decrees, to rescue the innocent, to reform the laws of France,
to do way with torture, to soften the hearts of priests,
to enlighten judges, to instruct kings, to civilise the people,
and to banish from the heart of man the love and lust
of war. (Applause.)
THE RELIGION OP HUMANITY.
Voltaire was not a saint.
He was educated by the
�( IB )
Jesuits. He was never troubled about the salvation of
his soul. All the theological disputes excited his laughter,
the creeds his pity, and the conduct of bigots his contempt.
He was much better than a saint. (Applause.) Most of
the Christians in his day kept their religion not for everyday
use but for disaster, as ships carry lifeboats to be used
only in the stress of storm. (Applause.)
Voltaire believed in the religion of humanity—of good
and generous deeds. For many centuries the Church had
painted virtue so ugly, sour, and cold, that vice was regarded
as beautiful. Voltaire taught the beauty of the useful,
the hatefulness and hideousness of superstition. He was
not the greatest of poets, or of dramatists, but he was the
greatest man in his time, the greatest friend of freedom,
and the deadliest foe of superstition.
(Applause.) He
wrote the best French plays—but they were not wonderful.
He wrote verses polished and perfect in their way. He
filled the air with painted moths—but not with Shakespeare
eagles.
You may think that I have said too much; that I have
placed this man too high. Let me tell you what Goethe,
the great German, said of this man: “ If you wish depth,
genius, imagination, taste, reason, sensibility, philosophy,
elevation, originality, nature, intellect, fancy, rectitude,
facility, flexibility, precision, art, abundance, variety, fertility,
warmth, magic, charm, grace, force, an eagle sweep of
vision, vast understanding, instruction rich, tone excellent,
urbanity, suavity, delicacy, correctness, purity, cleanliness,
eloquence, harmony, brilliancy, rapidity, gaiety, pathos,
sublimity, and universality, perfection indeed, behold
Voltaire.” (Applause.)
Even Carlyle, that old Scotch-terrier, with the growl
of a grizzly bear, who attacked shams, as I have sometimes
thought, because he hated rivals, was forced to admit that
�( 17 )
Voltaire gave the death-stab to modern superstition. It
was the hand of Voltaire that sowed the seeds of liberty
in the heart and brain of Franklin, of Jefferson, and of
Thomas Paine. (Applause.)
IN IGNORANT TOULOUSE.
Toulouse was a favored town. It was rich in relics.
The people were as ignorant as wooden images—(laughter)—
but they had in their possession the dried bones of seven
apostles—the bones of many of the infants slain by Herod—
part of a dress of the Virgin Mary, and lots of skulls and
skeletons of the infallible idiots known as saints. (Laughter
and applause.)
In this city the people celebrated every year with great
joy two holy events: The expulsion of the Huguenots and
the blessed massacre of Sb. Bartholomew. (Laughter.) The
citizens of Toulouse had been educated and civilised by
the Church. (Laughter.) A few Protestants, mild because
they were in the minority, lived among these jackals and
tigers. One of these Protestants was Jean Galas—a small
dealer in dry goods. For forty years he had been in this
business, and his character was without a stain. He was
honest, kind and agreeable. He had a wife and six children—
four sons and two daughters. One of his sons became a Catholic.
The eldest son, Marc Antoine, disliked his father’s business
and studied law. He could not be allowed to practise unless
he became a Catholic. He tried to get his license by conceal
ing that he was a Protestant. He was discovered—grew
morose. Finally he became discouraged and committed
suicide by hanging himself in his father’s store. The bigots
of Toulouse started the story that his parents had killed him
to prevent his becoming a Catholic. On this frightful charge
the father, mother, one son, one servant, and one guest at
their house were arrested. The dead son was considered a
B
�( 18 )
martyr, the Church taking possession of the body. This hap
pened in 1761. There was what was called a trial. There was
no evidence, not the slightest, except hearsay. All the facts
were in favor of the accused. The united strength of the
defendants could not have done the deed.
DOOMED TO DEATH UPON THE WHEEL.
Jean Calas was doomed to torture and to ^death upon the
wheel. This was on March 9, 1762, and the sentence was to
be carried out the next day. On the morning of the 10th the
father was to be taken to the toi’ture-room. The executioner
and his assistants were sworn on the cross to administer the
torture according to the judgment of the court. They bound
him by the wrists to an iron ring in the stone wall four feet
from the ground, and his feet to another ring in the floor.
Then they shortened the l’opes and chains until every joint
in his arms and legs were dislocated. Then he was ques
tioned. He declared that he was innocent. Then the ropes
were again shortened until life fluttered in the torn body;
but he remained firm. This was called the question ordinaire.
(Laughter.) Again the magistrates exhorted the victim to
confess, and again he refused, saying there was nothing to
confess. Then came the question extraordinaire. (Laughter.)
Into the mouth of the victim was placed a horn holding three
pints of water. In this way thirty pints of water were forced
into the body of the sufferer. The pain was beyond descrip
tion, and yet Jean Calas remained firm. He was then carried
to the scaffold in a tumbril. He was bound to a wooden cross
that lay on the scaffold. The executioner then took a bar of
iron, broke each arm and leg in two places, striking eleven
blows in all. He was then left to die if he could. He lived
for two hours, declaring his innocence to the last. He was
slow to die, and so the executioner strangled him. Then his
poor lacerated, bleeding and broken body was chained to a
�( 19 )
y
stake and burned. All this was a spectacle—a festival for
the savages of Toulouse. What would they have done if their
hearts had not been softened by the glad tidings of great joy,
peace on earth, goodwill to men ? (Laughter and applause.)
But this was not all. The property of the family was con
fiscated ; the son was released on condition that he became a
Catholic; the servant if she would enter a convent. The two
daughters were consigned to a convent, and the heart-broken
widow was allowed to wander where she would.
Voltaire heard of this case. In a moment his soul was on
fire. He took one of the sons under his roof. He wrote a
history of the case; he corresponded with Kings and Queens,
with chancellors and lawyers. If money was needed he
advanced it. For years he filled Europe with the echoes and
the groans of Jean Calas. He succeeded. The horrible judg
ment was annulled, the poor victim declared innocent and
thousands of dollars raised to support the mother and family.
(Applause.) This was the work of Voltaire.
Sirven, a Protestant, lived in Languedoc with his wife and
three daughters. The housekeeper of the Bishop wanted to
make one of the daughters a Catholic. The law allowed the
Bishop to take the child of Protestants from its parents for
the sake of its soul. This little girl was so taken and placed
in a convent. She ran away and came back to her parents.
Her poor little body was covered with marks of the convent
whip. “ Suffer little children to come unto me.” (Laughter
and applause.) The child was out of her mind. Suddenly
she disappeared, and a few days after her little body was
found in a well, three miles from home. The cry was raised
that her folks had murdered her to keep her from becoming
a Catholic. This happened only a little way from the
Christian city of Toulouse while Jean Calas was in prison.
The Sirvens knew that a trial would end in conviction. They
fled. In their absence they were convicted, theii’ property
�( 20 )
confiscated, the parents sentenced to die by the hangman,
the daughters to be under the gallows during the execution
of their mother, and then to be exiled. The family fled in
the midst of winter; the married daughter gave birth to a
child in the snows of the Alps; the mother died, and at last
the father, reaching Switzerland, found himself without
means of support. They went to Voltaire; he espoused their
cause; he took care of them, gave them the means to live,
and labored to annul the sentence that had been pronounced
against them for nine long and weary years. He appealed
to kings for money, to Catherine II. of Russia, and to
hundreds of others. He was successful. He said of this
case: The Sirvens were tried and condemned in two hours
in January, 1762; and now in January, 1772, after ten years
of effort, they have been restored to their rights. (Applause.)
This was the work of Voltaire. Why should the wor
shippers of God hate the lovers of men ? (Applause.)
THE ESPENASSE CASE.
Espenasse was a Protestant of good estate. In 1740 he
received into his house a Protestant clergyman, to whom he
gave supper and lodging. In a country where priests
repeated the parable of the “ Good Samaritan ” this was a
crime. (Laughter.) For this crime Espenasse was tried,
convicted, and sentenced to the galleys for life. When he
had been imprisoned for twenty-three years his case came
to the knowledge of Voltaire, and he was, through the
efforts of Voltaire, released and restored to his family,
(Applause.)
This was the work of Voltaire. There is not time to tell
of the case of General Lally, of the English General Byng,
of the niece of Corneille, of the Jesuit Adam, of the writers,
dramatists, actors, widows, and orphans for whose benefit he
gave his influence, his money, and his time.
But I will tell another case. In 1765, at the town of Abbe-
�( 21 )
ville, an old wooden cross on a bridge had been mutilated—
whittled with a knife—a terrible crime. (Laughter.) Sticks,
when crossing each other, were far more sacred than flesh
and blood. Two young men were suspected-—the Chevalier
de la Barre and d’Etallonde. D’Etallonde fled to Prussia and
enlisted as a common soldier.
La Barre remained and stood his trial. He was convicted
without the slightest evidence, and he and D’Etallonde were
both sentenced : First, to endure the torture, ordinary and
extraordinary; second, to have their tongues torn out by the
roots with pincers of iron; third, to have their right hands
cut off at the door of the church; and fourth, to be bound to
stakes by chains of iron and burned to death by a slow fire.
“ Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass
against ils.” (Laughter.) Remembering this, the judges
mitigated the sentence by providing that their heads should
be cut off before their bodies were given to the flames.
(Laughter.) The case was appealed to Paris; heard by a
court composed of twenty-five judges learned in law, and
the judgment was confirmed. The sentence was carried out
the 1st day of July, 1776.
WITH EVERY WEAPON OP GENIUS.
L
Voltaire had fought with every weapon that genius could
devise or use. He was the greatest of all caricaturists, and
he used this wonderful gift without mercy. Foi’ pure crystal
lised wit he had no equal. The art of flattery was carried by
him to the height of an exact science. He knew and practised
every subterfuge. He fought the army of hypocrisy and
pretence, the army of faith and falsehood. Voltaire was
annoyed by the meaner and baser spirits of his time, by the
cringers and crawlers, by the fawners and pretenders, by
those who wished to gain the favor of the priests, the
patronage of nobles. Sometimes he allowed himself to be
annoyed by these scorpions; sometimes he attacked them.
�( 22 )
And but for these attacks, long ago they would have been
forgotten. In the amber of his genius Voltaire preserved
these insects, these tarantulas, these scorpions. (Applause.)
It is fashionable to say that he was not profound. This
is because he was not stupid. In the presence of absurdity
he laughed, and was called irreverent. He thought God
would not damn even a priest forever. (Laughter.) This
was regarded as blasphemy. He endeavored to prevent
Christians from murdering each other, and did what he
could to civilise the disciples of Christ. (Laughter.) Had
he founded a sect, obtained control of some country, and
burned a few heretics at slow fires, he would have won
the admiration, respect, and love of the Christian world.
Had he only pretended to believe all the fables of antiquity,
had he mumbled Latin prayers, counted beads, crossed
himself, devoured now and then the flesh of God, and
carried faggots to the feet of Philosophy in the name of
Christ, he might have been in heaven this moment enjoying
a sight of the damned. (Laughter and applause.)
If he had only adopted the creed of his time—if he had
asserted that a God of infinite power and mercy had created
millions and billions of human beings to suffer eternal
pain, and all for the sake of his glorious justice—(laughter)—
that he had given his power of attorney to a cunning
and cruel Italian Pope, authorising him to save the soul
of his mistress and send honest wives to hell—if he had
given to the nostrils of this God the odor of burning
flesh—the incense of the faggot—if he had filled his ears
with the shrieks of the tortured—the music of the rack,
he would now be known as St. Voltaire. (Laughter and
applause.)
ALL RELIGIONS PRACTISE PERSECUTION.
Instead of doing these things he wilfully closed his eyes to
the light of the gospel, examined the Bible for himself,
�( 23 )
advocated intellectual liberty, struck from the brain the
fetters of an arrogant faith, assisted the weak, cried out
against the torture of man, appealed to reason, endeavored
to establish universal toleration, succored the indigent, and
defended the oppressed. (Applause.) He demonstrated that
the origin of all religions is the same, the same mysteries—
the same miracles—the same imposture—the same temples
and ceremonies—the same kind of founders, apostles and
dupes—the same promises and threats—the same pretence of
goodness and forgiveness and the practice of the same perse
cution and murder. He proved that religion made enemies
—philosophy, friends—and that above the rights of gods
were the rights of man. (Applause.) These were his crimes.
(Laughter.) Such a man God would not suffer to die in
peace. If allowed to meet death with a smile, others might
follow his example, until none would be left to light the holy
fires of the auto da fe. (Laughter.) It would not do for so
great, so successful an enemy of the Church to die without
leaving some shriek of fear, some shudder of remorse, some
ghastly prayer of shattered horror, uttered by lips covered
with blood and foam. For many centuries the theologians
have taught that an unbeliever—an infidel—one who spoke
or wrote against their creed, could not meet death with com
posure ; that in his last moment God would fill his conscience
with the serpents of remorse. For a thousand years the
clergy have manufactured the facts to fit this theory—this
infamous conception of the duty of man and the justice of
God. (Applause.) The theologians have insisted that crimes
against men were, and are, as nothing compared with crimes
against God. That, while kings and priestB did nothing
worse than to make their fellows wretched, that so long as
they only butchered and burnt the innocent and helpless,
God would maintain the strictest neutrality—(laughter)—but
when some honest man, some great and tender soul, expressed
�a doubt as to the truth of the scriptures, or prayed to the
wrong God, or to the right one by the wrong name, then the
real God leaped like a wounded tiger upon his victim, and
from his quiver-flesh tore his wretched soul. (Applause.)
CRUELTIES IN THE WORLD.
There is no recorded instance where the uplifted hand of
murder has been paralysed—no truthful account in all the
literature of the world of the innocent child being shielded
by God. Thousands of crimes are committed every day
men are at this moment lying in wait for their human prey
—wives are whipped and crushed, driven to insanity and
death—little children begging for mercy, lifting imploring,
tear-filled eyes to the brutal faces of fathers and mothers—
sweet girls are deceived, lured and outraged, but God has no
time to prevent these things—no time to defend the good and
protect the pure. He is too busy numbering hairs and
watching sparrows. (Laughter.) He listens for blasphemy;
looks for persons who laugh at priests; examines baptismal
registers; watches professors in college who begin to doubt
the geology of Moses and the astronomy of Joshua. (Laughter
and applause.) He does not particularly object to stealing
if you don’t swear. (Laughter.)
A great many persons have fallen dead in the act of taking
God’s name in vain, but millions of men, women and children
have been stolen from their homes and used as beasts of
burden, but no one engaged in this infamy has ever been
touched by the wrathful hand of God. All kinds of criminals,
except infidels, meet death with reasonable serenity. As a
rule, there is nothing in the death of a pirate to cast any
discredit on his profession. (Laughter.) The murderer upon
the scaffold, with a priest on either side, smilingly exhorts
the multitude to meet him in heaven. The man who has
succeeded in making his home a hell meets death without a
�( 25 )
quiver, provided he has never expressed any doubt as to the
divinity of Christ or the eternal “ procession ” of the Holy
Ghost. (Laughter and applause.)
KILLED E0R SPEAKING THE TRUTH.
Now and then a man of genius, of sense, of intellectual
honesty, has appeared. Such men have denounced the
superstitions of their day. They have pitied the multitude
To see priests devour the substance of the people—priests
who made begging one of the learned professions—filled
them with loathing and contempt. These men were honest
enough to tell their thoughts, brave enough to speak the
truth. Then they were denounced, tried, tortured, killed by
rack or flame. But some escaped the fury of the fiends who
loved their enemies and died naturally ,in their beds. It
would not do for the Church to admit that they died peace
fully. That would never do. That would show that religion
was not essential at the last moment. Superstition gets its
power from the terror of death. It would not do to have the
common people understand that a man could deny the Bible,
refuse to kiss the cross, contend that humanity was greater
than Christ, and then die as sweetly as Torquemada did
after pouring molten lead into the ears of an honest man—
(laughter)—or as calmly as Calvin after he had burned Servetus, or as peacefully as King David after advising, with his
last breath, one son to assassinate another. (Laughter and
applause.)
The Church has taken great pains to show that the last
moments of all infidels (that Christians did not succeed in
burning)—(laughter)—were infinitely wretched and despair
ing. It was alleged that words could not paint the horrors
that were endured by a dying infidel. Every good Christian
was expected to, and generally did, believe these accounts.
(Laughter.) They have been told and retold in every pulpit
�( 26 )
of the world. Protestant ministers have repeated the lies
invented by Catholic priests, and Catholic, by a kind of
theological comity, have sworn to the lies told by the Protes
tants. (Laughter and applause.) Upon this point they
have always stood together, and will as long as the same
falsehood can be used by both. Upon the death-bed subject
the clergy grow eloquent. When describing the shudderings
and shrieks of the dying unbeliever their eyes glitter with
delight. It is a festival. (Laughter.) They are no longer
men; they become hyenas; they dig open graves; they
devour the dead. (Laughter.) It is a banquet. Unsatisfied
still, they paint the terrors of hell. ¿They gaze at the souls
of the infidels writhing in the coils of the worm that never
dies. They see them in flames—in oceans of fire—in abysses
of despair. They shout with joy; they applaud.
“let
me die in peace.”
It is an auto da fe, presided over by God. But let us come
back to Voltaire—to the dying philosopher. He was an old
man of 84. He had been surrounded with the comforts, the
luxuries of life. He was a man of great wealth, the richest
writer that the world bad known. Among the literary men
of the earth he stood first. He was an intellectual monarch
—one who had built his own throne and woven the purple of
his own power. He was a man of genius. The Catholic God
had allowed him the appearance of success. (Laughter.) His
last years were filled with the intoxication of flattery—of
almost worship. He stood at the summit of his age. The
priests became anxious. (Laughter.) They began to fear
that God would forget, in a multiplicity of business, to make
a terrible example of Voltaire. (Laughter and applause.)
Towards the last of May, 1778, it was whispered in Paris that
Voltaire was dying. Upon the fences of expectation gathered
the unclean birds of superstition, impatiently waiting for
�( 27 )
their prey. Two days before his death, his nephew went to
seek the curé of St. Sulplice and the Abbé Gautier, and
brought thorn to his uncle’s sick chamber, who being informed
that they were there, said : “ Ah, well, give them my compli
ments and my thanks.” The abbé spoke some words to him,
exhorting him to patience. The curé of St. Sulplice then
came forward, having announced himself, and asked of
Voltaire, elevating his voice, if he acknowledged the divinity
of our Lord Jesus Christ. (Laughter.) The sick man pushed
one of his hands against the curé’s coif, shoving him back,
and cried, turning abruptly to the other side, “ Let me die in *
peace.” The curé seemingly considered his person soiled and
his coif dishonored by the touch of a philosopher. He made
the nurse give him a little brushing and went out with the
Abbé Gautier. He expired, says Wagniere, on May 30, 1778,
at about a quarter past eleven at night, with the most perfeet
tranquillity. A few moments before his last breath he took
the hand of Morand, his valet de chambre, who was watching
by him« pressed it, and said : “ Adieu, my dear Morand, I am
gone.” These were his last words. Like a peaceful river,
with green and shaded banks, he flowed without a murmur
into the waveless sea, where life is rest. (Applause.)
“ SHAMELESS LIES ” ABOUT HIS DEATH.
From this death, so simple and serere, so kind, so
philosophic and tender, so natural and peaceful ; from these
words so utterly destitute of cant or dramatic touch, all
the frightful pictures, all the despairing utterances have
been drawn and made. From these materials, and from
these alone, or rather, in spite of these facts, have been
constructed by priests and clergymen and their dupes,
all the shameless lies about the death of that great and
wonderful man. A man, compared with whom all of his
calumniators, dead and living, were, and are, but dust and
�( 28 )
vermin. (Applause.) Let us be honest. Did all the priests
of Rome increase the mental wealth of man as much as
BrunoP Did all the priests of France do as great a work
for the civilisation of the world as Voltaire or Diderot ? Did
all the ministers of Scotland add as much to the sum of
human knowledge as David Hume ? Have all the clergymen,
monks, friars, ministers, priests, bishops, cardinals, and
popes, from the day of Pentecost to the last election, done
as much for human liberty as Thomas Paine ? (Applause.)
What would the world be if infidels had never been P The
infidels have been the brave and thoughtful men; the flower
of the world; the pioneers and heralds of the blessed day
of liberty and love; the generous spirits of an unworthy
past; the seers and prophets of our race; the great chivalric
souls, proud victors on the battle-fields of thought, the
creditors of all the years to be. (Applause.)
VOLTAIRE’S SECRET BURIAL.
In those days the philosophers—that is to say, the thinkers
—were not buried in holy ground. It was feared that
their principles might contaminate the ashes of the just.
(Laughter.) And it was also feared that on the morning of
the Resurrection they might, in a moment of confusion, slip
into heaven. (Laughter.) Some were burned and their
ashes scattered, and the bodies of some were thrown naked to
beasts, and others were buried in unholy earth. Voltaire
knew the history of Adrienne De Oouvreur, a beautiful
actress denied burial. After all, we do feel an interest in
what is to become of our bodies. There is a modesty that
belongs to death. Upon this subject Voltaire was very
sensitive, and it was that he might be buried that he went
through the farce of confession, of absolution, and of the last
sacrament. The priests knew that he was not in earnest,
and Voltaire knew that they would not allow him to be
buried in any of the cemeteries of Paris. His death was kept
�( 29 )
a secret. The Abbé Mignot made arrangements for the
burial at Romilli-on-the-Seine, more than one hundred miles
from Paris. Sunday evening, on the last day of May, 177&,
the body of Voltaire, clad in a dressing-gown, clothed to
resemble an invalid, posed to simulate life, was placed in a
carriage ; at its side was a servant, whose business it was to
keep it in position. To this carriage were attached six
horses, so that people might think a great lord was going to
his estates. Another carriage followed, in which were a
grand-nephew and two cousins of Voltaire. All night they
travelled, and on the following day arrived at the court-yard
of the abbey. The necessary papers were shown, the mass
was performed in the presence of the body, and Voltaire
found burial. A few moments afterwards the Prior, who
« for charity had given a little earth,” received from his
bishop a menacing letter forbidding the burial of Voltaire.
It was too late. He could not then be removed, and he was
allowed to remain in peace until 1791.
LABOR AND THOUGHT BECAME FRIENDS.
Voltaire was dead. The foundations of State and throne
had been sapped. The people were becoming acquainted
with the real kings and with the actual priests. Unknown
men born in misery and want, men whose fathers and
mothers had been pavement for the rich, were rising towards
the light and their shadowy faces were emerging from
darkness. Labor and thought became friends. That
is, the gutter and the attic fraternised. The monsters
of the night and the angels of dawn—the first thinking of
revenge and the others dreaming of equality, liberty and
fraternity. (Applause.) For 400 years the Bastille had been
the outward symbol of oppression. Within its walls the
noblest had perished. It was a perpetual threat. It was the
last and often the first argument of king and priest. Its
�( 30 )
dungeons, damp and rayless, its massive towers, its secret
cells, its instruments of torture, denied the existence of God.
In 1789, on the 14th of July, the people, the multitude,
frenzied by suffering, stormed and captured the Bastille.
(Applause.) The battle-cry was “ Vive le Voltaire.” (Ap
plause.)
In 1791 permission was given to place in the Pantheon the
ashes of Voltaire. He had been buried 110 miles from Paris.
Buried by stealth, he was to be removed by a nation. A
funeral procession of a hundred miles; every village with its
flags and arches in his honor; all the people anxious to honor
the philosopher of France—the savior of Calas—the destroyer
of superstition! On reaching Paris the great procession
moved along the B>ue St. Antoine. Here it paused, and for
one night upon the ruins of the Bastille rested the body of
Voltaire—rested in triumph, in glory—rested on fallen wall
and broken arch, on crumbling stone still damp with tears,
on rusting chain, and bar, and useless bolt—above the
dungeons dark and deep, where light had faded from the
lives of men and hope had died in breaking hearts. (Ap
plause.) The conqueror resting upon the conquered. Throned
upon the Bastille, the fallen fortress of night, the body of
Voltaire, from whose brain had issued the dawn. (Applause.)
For a moment his ashes must have felt the Promethean fire,
and the old smile must have illumined once more the face of
the dead. (Applause.)
While the vast multitude were trembling with love and
awe, a priest was heard to cry : “ God shall be avenged 1”
voltaire’s grave violated.'
The grave of Voltaire was violated. The cry of the priest
“ God shall be avenged !” had borne its fruit. Priests, skulking
in the shadows, with faces sinister as night—ghouls—in the
name of the Gospel, desecrated the grave. They carried away
�( 31 )
the body of Voltaire. The tomb was empty. God was
avenged! The tomb is empty, but the world is filled with
Voltaire’s fame. Man has conquered!
What cardinal, what bishop, what priest raised his voice
for the rights of men ? What ecclesiastic, what nobleman,
took the side of the oppressed—of the peasant? Who
denounced the frightful criminal code—the torture of sus
pect ed persons ? What priest pleaded for the liberty of the
citizen? What bishop pitied the victims of the rack? Is
there the grave of a priest in France on which a lover of
liberty would now drop a flower or a tear ? Is there a tomb
holding the ashes of a saint from which emerges one ray of
light ? (Applause.) If there be another life, a day of judg
ment, no God can afford to torture in anothei’ world a man
who abolished torture in this. (Applause.) If God be the
keeper of an eternal penitentiary—(laughter)—he should not
imprison there those who broke the chains of slavery here.
(Applause.) He cannot afford to make eternal convicts of
Franklin, of Jefferson, of Paine, of Voltaire. (Applause.)
PERFECT EQUIPMENT FOR HIS WORK.
Voltaire was perfectly equipped for his work. A perfect
master of the French language, knowing all its moods,
tens es, and declinations—in fact and in feeling playing upon
it as skilfully as Paganini on his violin, finding expression
for every thought and fancy, writing on the most serious
subjects with the gaiety of a harlequin, plucking jests from
the mouth of death, graceful as the waving of willows,
dealing in double meanings that covered the asp with
flowers and flattery, master of satire and compliment,
mingling them often in the same line, always interested
himself, therefore interesting others, handling thoughts,
questions, subjects as a juggler does balls, keeping them in
the air with perfect ease, dressing old words in new meanings,
�( 32 )
charming, grotesque, pathetic, mingling mirth with tears,
wit and wisdom, and sometimes wickedness, logic and
laughter. (Applause.) With a woman’s instinct, knowing
the sensitive nerves—just where to touch—hating arrogance
of place, the stupidity of the solemn, snatching masks from
priest and king, knowing the springs of action and ambi
tion s ends, perfectly familiar with the great world, the inti
mate of kings and their favorites, sympathising with the
oppressed and imprisoned, with the unfortunate and poor,
hating tyranny, despising superstition, and loving liberty
with all his heart. Such was Voltaire writing “ CEdipus ” at
seventeen, “ Irene ” at eighty-three, and crowding between
these two tragedies the accomplishment of a thousand lives
(Long-continued applause.)
Printed and Published by G-. W. Foote, at 28 Stonecutter-street,
London, E.C.
�
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Victorian Blogging
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Oration on Voltaire
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Ingersoll, Robert Green [1833-1899]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 32 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: Lecture delivered before the Chicago Press Club on 8 October [189?]. Printed and published by G.W. Foote. No. 88d in Stein checklist. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
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R. Forder
Date
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1892
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N381
Subject
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Voltaire
Philosophy
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application/pdf
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Text
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English
French Philosophy
NSS
Philosophers-France
Voltaire
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NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY
VICTOR HUGO’S
ORATION
PRICE
on
VOLTAIRE,
OUST ZE
ZE’ZEHSTJSrX"-
------ ♦------
LONDON:
PROGRESSIVE PUBLISHING COMPANY,
28 Stonecutter Street, E.C.
�LONDON :
PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY RAMSEY AND FOOTE,
AT STONECUTTER STREET, E.O.
�&Z6 07
VICTOR HUGO’S
Oration on Voltaire.
Delivered at Paris, May 30, 1878, the hundredth anni
versary of Voltaire’s death.
TRANSLATED BY JAMES PARTON.
A hundred years ago to-day a man died. He died
immortal. He departed laden with years, laden with
works, laden with the most illustrious and the most
fearful of responsibilities, the responsibility of the
human conscience informed and rectified. He went
cursed and blessed—cursed by the psst, blessed by
the future; and these, gentlemen, are the two superb
forms of glory. On his death-bed he had, on the
one hand, the acclaim of contemporaries and of pos
terity ; on the other, that triumph of hooting and of
hate which the implacable past bestows upon those
who have combated it. He was more than a man;
he was an age. He had exercised a function and
fulfilled a mission. He had been evidently chosen
for the work which he had done, by the supreme will,
which manifests itself as visibly in the laws of destiny
as in the laws of nature.
The eighty-four years which this man lived occupy
the interval that separates the monarchy at its apogee
�4
from the revolution in its dawn. When he was born
Louis XIV. still reigned; when he died Louis AVI.
reigned already ; so that his cradle could see the last
rays of the great throne and his coffin the first gleams
from the great abyss.
,
Before going further, let us come to an understand
ing gentlemen, upon the word abyss. There are
good abysses : such are the abysses in which evil is
^Gentlemen, since I have interrupted myself, allow
me to complete my thought. No word imprudent or
unsound will be pronounced here. We are here to
perform an act of civilisation. We are here to make
affirmation of progress, to pay respect to philosophers
for the benefits of philosophy, to bring to the
eighteenth century the testimony of the nineteenth,
to honor magnanimous combatants and good servants,
to felicitate the noble effort of peoples, industry,
science, the valiant march in advance, the toil to
cement human concord ; in one word, to glorify peace,
that sublime, universal desire. Peace is the virtue
of civilisation; war is its crime We are here, at
this grand moment, in this solemn hour, to bow
religiously before the moral law, and to say to the
worid, which hears France, this: There is only one
power, conscience in the service of justice ; and there
is only one glory, genius in the service of truth.
That said, I continue.
o4.w,z»
Before the revolution, gentlemen, the social struc
ture was this:
At the base, the people ;
Above the people, religion represented by the
451 Bythe side of religion, justice represented by the
^And^at’that period of human society, what was
the people ? It was ignorance. What was religion ?
�5
It was intolerance. And what was justice ? It
was injustice. Am I going too far m my words .
k
I will confine myself to the citation of two facts,
but decisive.
,
„
,
At Toulouse, October 13, 1761, there was found,
in a lower story of a house, a young man hanged.
The crowd gathered, the clergy fulminated, the magis
tracy investigated. It was a suicide; they made ot
it an assassination. In what interest ? In the interest
of religion. And who was accused ? The father. He
was a Huguenot, and he wished to hinder his son from
becoming a Catholic. There was here a moral mons
trosity and a material impossibility. No matter .
This father had killed his son; this old man had
hanged this young man. Justice set to work, and this
was the result. On the month of March, 1762, a man
with white hair, Jean Calas, was conducted to a public
place, stripped naked, stretched upon a wheel, the
limbs bound upon it, the head hanging. three
men are there upon a scaffold—a magistrate, named
David, charged to superintend the punishment, a
priest to hold the crucifix, and the executioner, with
a bar of iron in his hand. The patient, stupefied with
terror, regards not the priest, and looks at the exe
cutioner. The executioner lifts the bar of iron, and
breaks one of his arms. The victim groans and swoons.
The magistrate comes forward. They make the con
demned inhale salts. He returns to life. ^en
another stroke of the bar. Another groan. Calas
loses consciousness. They revive him, and the exe
cutioner begins again ; and, as each limb befoie being
broken in two places receives two blows, that makes
eight punishments. After the eighth swooning the
priest offers him the crucifix to kiss. Calas turns
away his head, and the executioner gives him the
coup do grace—that is to say, crushes in his chest
�6
with the thick end of the bar of iron. So died Jean
Calas.
That lasted two hours. After his death, the evi
dence of the suicide came to light. But an assassina
tion had been committed. By whom ? By the
judges.
Another fact. After the old man, the young man.
Three years later, in 1765, at Abbeville, the day after
a night of storm and high wind, there was found
upon the pavement of a bridge an old crucifix of
worm-eaten wood, which for three centuries had
been fastened to the parapet. Who had thrown
down this crucifix ? Who committed this sacrilege ?
It is not known. Perhaps a passer-by. Perhaps
the wind. Who is the guilty one ? The Bishop of
Amiens launches a momioire. Note what a monitoire
was : it was an order to all the faithful, on pain of
hell, to declare what they knew, or believed they
knew, of some fact or other—a murderous injunc
tion, when addressed by fanaticism to ignorance.
The monitoire of the Bishop of Amiens does its work;
the town gossip takes upon itself the work of denun
ciation. Justice discovers, or believes it discovers,
that on the night when the crucifix was thrown down
two men, two officers, one named La Barre, the other
d’Etallonde, passed over the bridge of Abbeville,
that they were drunk, and that they sang a guard
room song. The tribunal was the Seneschalcy of
Abbeville. The Seneschalcy of Abbeville was like
the court of the Capitouls of Toulouse. It was
not less just. Two orders for arrest were issued.
D’Etallonde escaped, La Barre was taken. Him they
delivered to judicial examination. He denied having
crossed the bridge; he confessed to having sung the
song. The Seneschalcy of Abbeville condemned
him; he appealed to the Parliament of Paris. He
was conducted to Paris; the sentence was found
�7
good and confirmed. He was conducted back to Abbe
ville in chains. labridge. The monstrous hour arrives.
They begin by subjecting the Chevalier de La Barre
to the torture, ordinary and extraordinary, to make
him reveal his accomplices. Accomplices in what ?
In having crossed a bridge and sung a song. During
the torture one of his knees was broken; his con
fessor, on hearing the bones crack, fainted away.
The next day, June 5, 1766, La Barre was drawn to
the great square of Abbeville, where flamed a peni
tential fire; the sentence was read to La Barre;
then they cut off one of his hands ; then they tore out
his tongue with iron pincers; then, in mercy, his
head was cut off and thrown into the fire. So died
the Chevalier de La Barre. He was nineteen years
of age.
Then, O Voltaire ! thou didst utter a cry of horror,
and it will be thine eternal glory!
Then didst thou enter upon the appalling trial of
the past; thou didst plead against tyrants and mon
sters the cause of the human race, and thou didst
gain it. Great man, blessed be thou for ever!
Gentlemen, the frightful things which I have
recalled took place in the midst of a polite
society ; its life was gay and light; people went and
came; they looked neither above nor below them
selves ; their indifference had become carelessness;
graceful poets, Saint-Aulaire, Bouffiers, Gentil-Bernard, composed pretty verses; the court wa? all
festival; Versailles was brilliant; Paris ignored
what was passing; and then it was that through
religious ferocity the judges made an old man die upon
the wheel, and the priests tore out a child's tongue
for a song.
In the presence of this society, frivolous and dismal,
Voltaire alone, having before his eyes those united
forces, the court, the nobility, the capitalist; that
�■8
unconscious power, the blind multitude; that terrible
magistracy, so severe to subjects, so docile to the
master, crushing and flattering, kneeling upon the
people before the king ; that clergy, vile compound of
hypocrisy and fanaticism; Voltaire alone, I repeat it,
declared war against that coalition of all the social
iniquities, against that enormous and terrible world,
and he accepted battle with it. And what was his
weapon ? That which has the lightness of the wind
and the power of the thunder-bolt—a pen.
With that weapon he fought: with that weapon
he conquered.
Gentlemen, let us salute that memory.
..Voltaire conquered. Voltaire waged the splendid
kind of warfare, the war of one alone against all—that is to say, the grand warfare; the war of thought
against matter; the war of reason against prejudice,
the war of the just against the unjust; the war for
the oppressed against the oppressor; the war of good
ness ; the war of kindness. He had the tenderness
of a woman and the wrath of a hero. He was a great
mind, and an immense heart.
He conquered the old code and the old dogma.
He conquered the feudal lord, the Gothic judge, the
Roman priest. He raised the populace to the dignity
of people. He taught, pacified and civilised. He
fought for Sirven and Montbailly, as for Calas and
La Barre. He accepted all the menaces, all the perse
cutions, calumny and exile. He was indefatigable
and immovable. He conquered violence by a smile,
despotism by sarcasm, infallibility by irony, obstinacy
by perseverance, ignorance by truth.
I have just pronounced the word smile. I pause at
it. Smile ! It is Voltaire.
Let us say it, gentlemen, pacification (apaisement)
is the great work of philosophy. In Voltaire the
equilibrium always re-establishes itself at last. What-
�9
ever may be bis just wrath, it passes, and the irritated
Voltaire always gives place to the Voltaire calmed.
Then in that profound eye the smile appears.
That smile is wisdom. That smile, I repeat, is
Voltaire. That smile sometimes becomes laughter,
but the philosophic sadness tempers it. Towards the
strong it is mockery ; towards the weak it is a caress.
It disquiets the oppressor, and reassures the oppressed.
Against the great, it is raillery; for the little, it is
pity. Ah, let us be moved by that smile ! It had in
it the rays of the dawn. It illuminated the true, the
just, the good, and what there is of worthy in the
useful. It lighted up the interior of superstitions.
Those ugly things it is salutary to see : he has shown
them. Luminous, that smile was fruitful also. The
new society, the desire for equality and concession,
and that beginning of fraternity which called itself
tolerance, reciprocal good-will, the just accord of men
and rights, reason recognised as the supreme law, the
annihilation of prejudices and fixed opinions, the
serenity of souls, the spirit of indulgence and of
pardon, harmony, peace—behold what has come from
that great smile 1
On the day—very near, without any doubt—when
the identity of wisdom and clemency will be recog
nised, the day when the amnesty will be proclaimed,
I affirm it, up there, in the stars, Voltaire will smile.
Gentlemen, between two servants of Humanity,
who appeared eighteen hundred years apart, there is
a mysterious relation.
To combat Pharisaism; to unmask imposture; to
overthrow tyrannies, usurpations, prejudices, false
hoods, superstitions ; to demolish the temple in order
to rebuild it—that is to say, to replace the false by
the true; to attack a ferocious magistracy ; to attack
a sanguinary priesthood; to take a whip and drive
the money-changers from the sanctuary; to reclaim
�10
the heritage of the disinherited; to protect the weak,
the poor, the suffering, the overwhelmed ; to struggle
for the persecuted and oppressed—that was the war
of Jesus Christ! And who waged that war ? It was
Voltaire.
The completion of the evangelical work is the philo
sophical work; the spirit of meekness began, the
spirit of tolerance continued. Let us say it with a
sentiment of profound respect: Jesus wept ; Voltaire
smiled. Of that divine tear and of that human smile
is composed the sweetness of the present civilisation.
Did Voltaire always smile? No. He was often
indignant. You remarked it in my first words.
Certainly, gentlemen, measure, reserve, proportion,
are reasons supreme law. We can say that modera
tion is the very respiration of the philosopher. The
effort of the wise man ought to be to condense into a
sort of serene certainty all the approximations of
which philosophy is composed. But at certain
moments the passion for the true rises powerful and
violent, and it is within its right in so doing, like the
stormy winds which purify. Never, I insist upon it,
will any wise man shake those two august supports of
social labor, justice and hope; and all will respect
the judge if he is embodied justice, and all will
venerate the priest if he represents hope. But if the
magistracy calls itself torture, if the Church calls
itself Inquisition, then Humanity looks them in the
face and says to the judge : “ I will none of thy
law !” and says to the priest: “ I will none of thy
dogma ! I will none of thy fire upon the earth and
thy hell in the future I” Then philosophy rises in
wrath, and arraigns the judge before justice and the
priest before God !
This is what Voltaire did. It was grand.
What Voltaire was, I have said; what his age was,
I am about to say.
�11
Gentlemen, great men rarely come alone; large trees
seem larger when they dominate a forest ; there they
are at home. There was a forest of minds around
Voltaire; that forest was the eighteenth century.
Among those minds there were summits, Montesquieu,
Buffon, Beaumarchais, and among others, two, the
highest after Voltaire—Rousseau and Diderot. Those
thinkers taught men to reason ; reasoning well leads
to acting well ; justness in the mind becomes justice
in the heart. Those toilers for progress labored use
fully. Buffon founded naturalism; Beaumarchais
discovered, outside of Molière, a kind of comedy till
then unknown, almost the social comedy ; Montes
quieu made in law some excavations so profound that
he succeeded in exhuming the right. As to Rousseau,
as to Diderot, let us pronounce those two names
apart. Diderot, a vast intelligence, inquisitive, a
tender heart, a thirst for justice, wished to give
certain notions as the foundation of true ideas, and
created the encyclopaedia. Rousseau rendered to
woman an admirable service, completing the mother
by the nurse, placing near one another those two
majesties of the cradle. Rousseau, a writer, eloquent
and pathetic, a profound oratorical dreamer, often
divined and proclaimed political truth ; his ideal
borders upon the real; he had the glory of being
the first man in France who called himself citizen.
The civic fibre vibrates in Rousseau ; that which
vibrates in Voltaire is the universal fibre. One can
say that in the fruitful eighteenth century Rousseau
represented the people; Voltaire, still more vast,
1 epresented Man. Those powerful writers disap
peared, but they left us their soul, the Revolu
tion.
Yes, the French Revolution was their soul. It was
their radiant manifestation. It came from them ; we
find them everywhere in that blest and superb
�12
catastrophe, which formed the conclusion of the past
and the opening of the future. In that clear light,
which is peculiar to revolutions, and which beyond
causes permits us to perceive effects, and beyond the
first plan the second, we see behind Danton Diderot,
behind Robespierre Rousseau, and behind Mirabeau
Voltaire. These formed those.
Gentlemen, to sum up epochs, by giving them the
names of men, to make of them in some sort human
personages, has only been done by three peoples,
Greece, Italy, France. We say, the Age of Pericles,
the Age of Augustus, the Age of Leo X., the Age of
Louis XIV., the Age of Voltaire. Those appellations
have a great significance. This privilege of giving
names to periods, belonging exclusively to Greece, to
Italy and to France, is the highest mark of civilisa
tion. Until Voltaire they were the names of the chiefs
of states. Voltaire is more than the chief of a
state; he is a chief of ideas. With Voltaire a new
cycle begins. We feel that henceforth the supreme
governmental power is to be Thought. Civilisation
obeyed force ; it will obey the ideal. It is the
sceptre and the sword broken, to be replaced by
the ray of light; that is to say, authority trans
figured into liberty. Henceforth no other sove
reignty than the law for the people and the conscience
for the individual. For each of us the two aspects
of progress separate themselves clearly, and they are
these : to exercise one’s right—that is to say, to be
a man ; to perform one’s duty—that is to say, to be
a citizen.
Such is the signification of that word, the Age of
Voltaire; such is the meaning of that august event,
the French Revolution.
The two memorable centuries which preceded the
eighteenth prepared for it ; Rabelais warned royalty
in “ Gargantua,” and Molière warned the church in
�13
“Tartuffe.” Hatred of force and respect for right
are visible in those two illustrious spirits.
Whoever says to-day, might makes right, performs
an act of the Middle Ages, and speaks to men three
hundred years behind their time.
Gentlemen, the nineteenth century glorifies the
eighteenth century. The eighteenth proposed, the
nineteenth decides. And my last word will be the
declaration, tranquil but inflexible, of progress.
The time has come. The right has found its formula
—human federation.
To-day force is called violence, and begins to be
judged. War is arraigned. Civilisation, upon the
complaint of the human race, orders the trial, and
draws up the great criminal indictment of conquerors
and captains. The witness, History, is summoned.
The reality appears. The factitious brilliancy is dis
sipated. In many cases, the hero is a species of
assassin. The peoples begin to comprehend that
increasing the magnitude of a crime cannot be its
diminution; that, if to kill is a crime, to kill much
cannot be an extenuating circumstance; that, if to
steal is a shame, to invade cannot be a glory ; that
Te Deums do not count for much in this matter ; that
homicide is homicide; that bloodshed is bloodshed ;
that it serves nothing to call one’s self Caesar or
Napoleon; and that, in the eyes of the eternal God,
the figure of a murderer is not changed because, in
stead of a gallow’s cap, there is placed upon his head
an emperor’s crown.
Ah ! let us proclaim absolute truths. Let us dis
honor war. No; glorious war does not exist. No ;
it is not good, and it is not useful, to make corpses.
No; it cannot be that life travails for death. No.
Oh, mothers who surround me, it cannot be that war,
the robber, should continue to take from you your
children 1 No; it cannot be that women should bear
�14
children in pain; that men should be born; that
people should plough and sow ; that the farmer should
fertilise the fields, and the workmen enrich the city that industry should produce marvels; that genius
should produce prodigies; that the vast human activity
should, in presence of the starry sky, multiply efforts
and creations—all to result in that frightful inter
national exposition which is called a field of battle !
The true field of battle, behold it here ! It is this
rendezvous of the masterpieces of human labor which
Pans offers the world at this moment.*
The true victory is the victory of Paris.
Alas ! we cannot hide it from ourselves, that the
present hour, worthy as it is of admiration and respect,
has still some mournful aspects; there are still
shadows upon the horizon; the tragedy of the peoples
is not finished; war, wicked war, is still there, and
it has the audacity to lift its head in the midst of this
august festival of peace. Princes, for two vears past
obstinately adhere to a fatal misunderstanding; their
discord forms an obstacle to our concord, and they
are ill-inspired to condemn us to the statement of such
a contrast.
Let this contrast lead us back to Voltaire. In the
presence of menacing possibilities, let us be more
pacific than ever. Let us turn toward that great
death, toward that great life, toward that great spirit.
Let us bend before the venerated tombs. Let us take
counsel of him whose life, useful to men, was extin
guished a hundred years ago, but whose work is
immortal. Let us take counsel of the other powerful
thinkers, the auxiliaries of this glorious Voltaire, of
Jean Jacques, of Diderot, of Montesquieu. Let us
give the word to those great voices. Let us stop the
effusion of human blood. Enough! enough! despots
* The Exposition of 1878 was then open in Paris.
�15
Ah ! barbarism persists. Then let civilisation be
indignant. Let the eighteenth century come to the
help of the nineteenth. The philosophers, our pre
decessors, are the apostles of the true ; let us invoke
those illustrious shades; let them, before monarchies
meditate wars, proclaim the right of man to life, the
right of conscience to liberty, the sovereignty of
reason, the holiness of labor, the beneficence of peace;
and since night issues from the thrones, let the light
come from the tombs.
Printed and Published by Rameey and Foote, at 28 Stonecutter Street, E.C.
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Handsomely printed on special paper, and bound in colored wrapper.
FORTY-EIGHT LARGE PAGES.
PRICE FOURPENCE.
Progressive Publishing Co., 28 Stonecutter Street.
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The only Complete Edition published in England; accurately re
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Victorian Blogging
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Victor Hugo's oration on Voltaire
Creator
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Hugo, Victor
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 15 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: Delivered at Paris, May 30 1878, the hundredth anniversary of Voltaire's death. Publisher's advertisements on back page. Printed by Ramsey & Foote, London, E.C. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
Publisher
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Progressive Publishing Company
Date
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1885
Identifier
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N314
Subject
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Voltaire
Enlightenment
Rights
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Victor Hugo's oration on Voltaire), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Contributor
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Parton, James (tr)
NSS
Voltaire