Charlie Hebdo - and Voltaire

A street in South Kensington, London, January 9

 

By ADRIAN TAHOURDIN

Voltaire spent much of his long life railing against religious intolerance and fanaticism. In his Dictionnaire philosophique (1764), divided into themed sections, he discusses "Fanaticism":

"Le plus détestable example de fanatisme est celui des bourgeois de Paris qui coururent assassiner, égorger, jeter par les fenêtres, mettre en pièces, la nuit de la Saint-Barthélemy, leurs concitoyens qui n'allaient point à la messe."

(The most detestable example of fanaticism is that of the citizens of Paris who hurried to murder, slit the throats of, defenestrate, hack into pieces, on the night of St Bartholomew, their fellow citizens who didn't attend mass – my rough translation)

The Massacre of St Bartholomew, perpetrated by Catholics on Protestants, or Huguenots, took place in the centre of Paris in 1572.

Voltaire goes on:

"Lorsqu'une fois le fanatisme a gangrené un cerveau, la maladie est presque incurable."

(Once fanaticism has gangrenated the brain, the sickness is practically incurable.)

And

"Que répondre à un homme qui vous dit qu'il aime mieux obéir à Dieu qu'aux hommes, et qui, en conséquence, est sûr de mériter le ciel en vous égorgeant?"

Ce sont d'ordinaire les fripons qui conduisent les fanatiques, et qui mettent le poignard entre leurs mains; ils ressemblent à ce Vieux de la Montagne qui faisait, dit-on, goûter les joies du paradis à des imbéciles, et qui leur promettait une éternité de ces plaisirs dont il leur avait donné un avant-goût, à condition qu'ils iraient assassiner tous ceux qu'il leur nommerait."

(What to say to a man who tells you that he prefers obeying God to obeying man, and who, as a consequence, is sure that, in slitting your throat, he has guaranteed himself a place in paradise?

It’s normally the rogues who lead the fanatics, and who put a dagger in their hands; they resemble that Old Man on the Mountain who, they say, offered a taste of paradise to idiots, and who promised them an eternity of the pleasures of which he had given them a foretaste, on condition that they went off and murdered everybody he named.)

Under "Superstition" he concludes: "En un mot, moins de superstitions, moins de fanatisme; et moins de fanatisme, moins de malheurs."

(In a word, fewer superstitions, less fanaticism; and less fanaticism leads to fewer misfortunes.)

It hardly needs stating that, 250 years on, Voltaire’s observations are as relevant as ever. Not for nothing was his called the Age of Enlightenment.

It would be hard to overstate – beyond the horror and grief, and dignified stoicism – the depth of affront that the country that produced Voltaire (before, admittedly, driving him into Swiss exile) is feeling. On the widely listened to radio station France Inter yesterday there were displays of almost hysterical levity. These were after all in the main cartoonists who had been murdered. But from a distance across the Channel it made for curious listening.

France’s weightiest newspaper Le Monde appears in late afternoon and so was unavoidably behind in its print coverage of the atrocity. But the extra time gave it the opportunity to produce an extended edition the following day with the front-page heading “Le 11-Septembre Français” (in an editorial it qualifies the heading by quashing any suggestion that the attacks in Paris were on anything like the scale of 9/11). It was Le Monde that famously ran the headline, on September 12, 2001, “We are all Americans”.

By a curious irony the previous day’s Monde (dated January 8), gave prominent coverage (including a Muslim-themed cartoon) to the ageing enfant terrible Michel Houellebecq, whose new novel Soumission is just out. Houellebecq had also appeared on the cover of the most recent Charlie Hebdo. In Le Monde the paper’s reviewer Raphaëlle Leyris calls Soumission Houellebecq's "most mediocre novel so far". Among other things, the book imagines a presidential election in 2022 between the far-right National Front and a Muslim party, with the latter coming out on top.