Note 39 — Chapter XVII · FRENCH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

8. With the ground prepared as we have seen, freethought was bound to progress in France in the age of Louis XV; but it chanced that the lead fell into the hands of the most brilliant and fecund of all the writers of the century. Voltaire39 (1694–1778) was already something of a freethinker when a mere child. So common was deism already become in Paris at the end of the seventeenth century that his godfather, an abbé, is said to have taught him, at the age of three, a poem by J. B. Rousseau,40 then privately circulated, in which Moses in particular and religious revelations in general are derided as fraudulent.41 Knowing this poem by heart in his childhood, the boy was well on the way to his life’s work. It is on record that many of his school-fellows were, like himself, already deists, though his brother, a juvenile Jansenist, made vows to propitiate the deity on the small unbeliever’s behalf.42 It may have been a general reputation for audacious thinking that led to his being charged with the authorship of a stinging philippic published in 1715, after the death of Louis XIV. The unknown author, a young man, enumerated the manifold abuses and iniquities of the reign, concluding: “I have seen all these, and I am not twenty years old.” Voltaire was then twenty-two; but D’Argenson, who in the poem had been called “the enemy of the human race,” finding no likelier author for the verses, put him under surveillance and exiled him from Paris; and on his imprudent return imprisoned him for nearly a year in the Bastille (1716), releasing him only when the real author of the verses avowed himself. Unconquerable then as always, Voltaire devoted himself in prison to his literary ambitions, planning his Henriade and completing his Œdipe, which was produced in 1718 with signal success.