◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Écrasez l’Infâme Part I: The Infamous Thing I was born François-Marie Arouet in Paris in 1694. I died in Paris in 1778 on the triumphant return I had been forbidden to make for twenty-eight years. Between those dates I made enemies of three kings, two popes, the Sorbonne, the Jesuits, the Jansenists, the Parlement of Paris, and every fool with a position to lose. I am buried in the Panthéon. They moved my body there in 1791. The same authorities who had threatened to deny me consecrated burial in 1778 carried me there on their shoulders. I was educated by the Jesuits at Louis-le-Grand. I owe them my Latin and my contempt. I took the name Voltaire when I was twenty-three. The original name was an obstacle to what I needed to do. I was imprisoned twice in the Bastille. The first time for satirizing the Regent. The second time after an aristocrat had me beaten by his servants in the street and I challenged him to a duel. They could not punish him. They could not stop me. So they imprisoned me. I went to England for three years. I saw a society where Protestants and Catholics and Jews and freethinkers were permitted to argue without burning each other. I saw a free press. I saw a parliament that limited the king. I came back to France and wrote about it. My book was banned. The copies were burned. The police came to arrest me. I went into hiding. In 1758 I bought the estate of Ferney on the Swiss border. I could escape into Switzerland in twenty minutes if the king’s officers came. I lived there for twenty years. I wrote Candide in 1759 after the Lisbon earthquake had killed thirty thousand and the Seven Years’ War had killed a million. Optimism is an obscenity in the face of these. In 1762 the Parlement of Toulouse tortured to death an old Protestant named Jean Calas on the false charge that he had murdered his son to prevent the son’s conversion to Catholicism. They broke him on the wheel. I learned of this in Ferney. I took up the case. I wrote the Treatise on Tolerance in 1763. I conducted the campaign for three years. In 1765 the verdict was reversed. Calas was exonerated. The family was indemnified. I was sixty-eight years old. This was the moment I understood what the pen could do that the sword could not. In 1766 the Chevalier de La Barre, age nineteen, was tortured and beheaded for blasphemy — for failing to remove his hat as a religious procession passed, and for owning a copy of my Philosophical Dictionary. I could not save him. I tried. I failed. The phrase that opened and closed my correspondence for twenty years: écrasez l’infâme. Crush the infamous thing. The infamous thing was clerical fanaticism fused with state power. Part II: Crush It I am watching from where the dead watch. I had hopes for your country. In the last weeks of my life I met Benjamin Franklin in Paris. He had come to negotiate the treaty that would make your country possible. He brought his grandson to my deathbed and asked me to bless the boy. I said: God and Liberty. I died believing your revolution might do what mine could not. The infamous thing has returned. It has put on American clothing. It has taken your federal government. It is doing in your country what it did in mine — fusing religious identity with state power, producing the Calas cases at industrial scale, declaring the forbidden words, banning the books. Your library purges are my burned books. Your “Don’t Say Gay” laws are my blasphemy prosecutions. Your Christian nationalism is my fused church and crown. I would know it anywhere. Here is the instruction. Écrasez l’infâme. Crush it in the legislatures. Crush it in the courts. Crush it in the books they have not yet banned. Crush it with mockery. Mockery is the weapon they fear most because they cannot answer it. They depend on solemnity. Remove the solemnity. When they declare themselves chosen of God, ask them which God. The God of love? The God who commanded the slaughter at Jericho? The God who demanded Abraham kill his son? Demand they spell the name. They will choke on the question. Their costumes look ridiculous when you laugh at them. Defend the Calases. There are thousands of them now in your country. The immigrant in detention. The trans child denied medicine. The Florida teacher fired for showing a Disney film. The protester charged with terrorism for blocking a road. The librarian fired for refusing to remove the books. The Indian student detained for an op-ed. Take up their causes. Write. Argue. Pay the lawyers. Free them. Speak the forbidden word. They will tell you what you may not say. Say it. The willingness to speak it is the citizenship. Take refuge in the Ferneys. Find the borders, the universities, the cities, the publications where the work can continue. There are always Ferneys. I died on May 30, 1778. The state and the church almost denied me burial. My nephew smuggled my body out of Paris. Thirteen years later your French revolutionary forerunners brought me back to the Panthéon and put me under the inscription: he enlarged the human spirit and taught it to be free. The state and the church had to swallow. This is how it goes. The dead writer the regime tried to silence is carried to the highest shrine by the descendants of his enemies. You cannot see your own reversal from inside the moment. It is coming anyway. The pen is the weapon. The mockery is the weapon. The refusal to be silent is the weapon. Écrasez l’infâme. I am dead. The work continues.