A few days ago I began reading Ian Davidson's history of the last twenty-five years of the life of Voltaire, Voltaire in Exile. Born in 1694, François Marie Arouet took the name of "Voltaire" when he was 24 years old. Today, he is best known as the author of Candide, the picaresque tale that satirizes religious fanaticism, the excesses of power, and blind optimism in the face of horrible human suffering. The last twenty-five years of his life, Voltaire was in exile from Paris and the French court; it was during those years that he began championing the rights of ordinary people unjustly accused and punished by a state ruled by an absolute monarch and "buttressed by the superstitions of the Catholic Church." In his prologue, Davidson writes "that Voltaire's individual campaigns, together with the development of his thinking about the general principles and practices of the French justice system, were landmarks in the history of penal reform in France and Europe."
Eighteenth-century France was quite different from twenty-first-century America, but reading of the first case that Voltaire championed, I couldn't help but think of how power breeds similar despotic behavior even in democratic societies. We might be freer to check that power, but if the voice of reason is muted by fear, nationalism, fanaticism or fundamentalism, the powerful force of that freedom is diminished.
The case that Voltaire challenged was the case of a Protestant family led by its patriarch, Jean Calas, a prosperous cloth merchant. The Calas family were Protestant, except for one son who had converted to Catholicism. In France at that time, Protestants were terribly oppressed:
Protestant services of worship were forbidden, male offenders were liable to a life sentence in the galleys, female offenders to life imprisonment and preachers to execution. The only valid marriages were those sanctified by the Catholic Church, and all newborn children were required to be baptised and brought up as Catholics. Many professions, including that of the law, were open only to those who could prove they were practicing Catholics. Protestant families were required to employ Catholic servants.
One evening, this particular family discovered one of the adult sons dead in the family shop downstairs from the family's domicile. When the authorities were called, the family first said that the young man had been found dead on the floor. Later, they changed their story, saying that they had found the young man hanging in the shop; they had hoped to keep the suicide private because in France at that time, suicides were denied honorable burials. The brutal magistrate arrested the entire family on the assumption that the family had murdered the son to prevent him from converting to Catholicism (though there was no proof that this son was contemplating such an action), ignoring the fact that one son had already converted and wasn't murdered by his loved ones. However, the populace was superstitious, easily inflamed, and religiously intolerant; public opinion turned against the Calas family, even though no proof was ever discovered to tie the death of the son to the father. And anyway, the son was young and strong at twenty-nine-years of age; the old father much feebler at sixty-four. The family's Catholic servant was also present in the house.
Although the father was tortured--stretched on the rack, forced to drink ten jugs of water twice, and had his legs and arms broken with an iron bar--he did not confess. He was then strangled, and his body was burned.
A description of the typical trial process also reveals the extent of state repression in France at that time:
The accused was allowed a lawyer, who could make representations on his behalf outside the courtroom; but the lawyer was not permitted to be present at the questioning of the accused, which took place behind closed doors. The accused was not given any advance notice of the questions, nor of the evidence or witnesses arrayed against him, and he might even not know the details of the offence he was charged with.
We read of such torture and rigged trial proceedings and may well be happy that we don't live in such brutal times. But then perhaps we will remember the "enemy combatants" we kept for years (and continue to imprison) at Guantanamo Bay, men who for a long time had no access to legal representation and who were held without being charged. And now, the torture memos of the Bush administration are being released in which the following methods (i.e., torture!) were used to get prisoners to talk: slamming prisoners against a wall, pouring cold water on them, depriving them of food, making prisoners remain in stress positions, placing prisoners in close confines for hours, keeping prisoners awake for hours--even days, slapping prisoners in the face, making prisoners remain nude, confronting prisoners with things that they were terrified of, such as insects, waterboarding prisoners.
Over two-hundred years ago, Voltaire faced an oppressive regime that tortured with impunity with the support of many of its illiterate and superstitious citizens, and he had this to say to his friends:
You may ask, my divine angels, why I am so strongly interested in this Calas. It is because I am a man, because I see that all foreigners are indignant at a country which breaks a man on the wheel without any proof.
Trying to get the facts of the trial proved extremely difficult because trials were conducted in secret. In letters to friends, Voltaire championed transparency:
What do we ask? Nothing more than that justice should not be as dumb as it is blind, that it should speak, and say why it condemned Calas. What horror is this, a secret judgement, a condemnation without explanations! Is there a more execrable tyranny than that of spilling blood on a whim, without giving the least reason? . . .You owe an accounting to men for the blood of men. As for me, I do not ask anything more than the publication of the trial procedure. . . It is important for everybody that such decisions should be publicly justified.
Later, Voltaire published a ninety-page pamphlet criticizing the roles the Catholic Church and a prejudiced Catholic population played in this miscarriage of justice; he argued for tolerance and warned of how such events effect us all:
If an innocent father of a family is delivered into the hands of error, of passion, or of fanaticism; if the accused has no defence except his own virtue; if the arbiters of his life run no other risk in killing him, than that of making a mistake; if they can kill with impunity by a simple decree; then the public outcry is raised, every man feels he is in danger, one can see that no one's life is in safety in the face of a tribunal set up for watching over the life of the citizens, and all voices in unison demand vengeance.
These words of a flawed but brilliant man, a father of the Enlightenment, a champion of reason, speak to us today.
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