Crush the Infamous Thing

To crush something you have to know its edges, and Binoche spends real effort reconstructing what the philosophes actually had in their sights. The target was not belief in the privacy of a person's head. Voltaire, Diderot, d'Holbach and the rest were, to varying degrees, unbothered by what their neighbors chose to think about the afterlife. What they could not abide was religion as a public power: the capacity of a church, backed by a state, to decide who could hold office, who could marry, who could be buried in consecrated ground, and who could be broken on a wheel for the wrong confession.

The Calas affair is the case that organizes everything. In 1762 a Protestant merchant in Toulouse was accused of murdering his son to stop him converting to Catholicism — the son had in fact killed himself — and was executed after a trial soaked in sectarian suspicion. Voltaire took up the case, got the verdict overturned in 1765, and turned a judicial horror into the pivot of his campaign. The infamous thing was not an abstraction. It was a court that could kill a man because of what he worshipped, and a crowd that wanted it to.

The word tolerance did a lot of heavy lifting in the century, and Binoche is careful to show it was never as generous as its reputation. Even John Locke, whose Letter Concerning Toleration of 1689 is the founding text, drew hard lines: he would not extend toleration to atheists, on the grounds that a man who feared no God could not be trusted to keep an oath, and he was wary of Catholics as agents of a foreign power. Toleration, from the start, came with a list of exceptions. The question was never whether to exclude but whom.

Voltaire's own famous plea, the Treatise on Tolerance written in the wake of Calas in 1763, follows the same grammar. It is a magnificent argument for not killing people over doctrine, and it is also an argument with an inside and an outside. The tolerant society tolerates those who are willing to tolerate. It does not, and in its own terms cannot, tolerate the fanatic who would burn his neighbor. The fanatic sits outside the circle by definition, because he has refused the one condition of membership.

Step back from the eighteenth century and the shape Binoche has traced turns out to be general. No order of tolerance is unconditional. Every one of them, however liberal, draws a boundary and names something beyond it that it will not abide — and it usually names that thing as the intolerant, the fanatic, the enemy of the open society. The Enlightenment did not stumble into this. It discovered the structure and stated it plainly, which is why its slogan still unsettles us. Écrasez l'infâme is tolerance showing its teeth.

The twentieth century gave the paradox a name. Karl Popper called it the paradox of tolerance: a society that tolerates without limit, including tolerating those who would destroy toleration, will be destroyed by them, so unlimited tolerance is self-defeating. The tolerant are therefore entitled, perhaps obliged, to refuse tolerance to the intolerant. This is Voltaire's logic restated for an age of totalitarian movements. It is not a resolution of the difficulty. It is the difficulty, accepted and formalized.

Voltaire died in 1778, received back into Paris as a hero after decades of semi-exile, still crushing the infamous thing to the end. The Calas verdict had been reversed, the Treatise on Tolerance had circulated across Europe, and the slogan he abbreviated to dodge the censors had outlived the censors. He got much of what he wanted: a world where killing a man over his confession came to seem not pious but barbaric. The infamous thing, in his precise sense — religion as a power to persecute — did lose most of its grip.