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And when, for a few blasphemous words, they send a boy like the Chevalier de La Barre to the scaffold, to be mutilated and killed, Voltaire's voice rings out with the full reverberation of outraged humanity and civilization: Ecrasez l'infâme! He believed that the Revolution, which he like so many others foresaw, would begin by an attack on the priests.
The second deadly heresy which threatens the dogma of the national State is the heresy of internationalism. It takes the form either of the black internationalism of the Catholic Church or the red internationalism of Social Democracy. Treitschke has fought Roman Catholicism and its champions, the Jesuits, with relentless hate. Through all his writings there sounds the watchword of Voltaire, the spiritual adviser of Frederick the Great, “Écrasez l’infâme,” and the battle-cry of Gambetta, “Le clericalisme, voil
Daddy the infidel Daddy stormed a good deal, and lamented himself still more, when these facts became known to him. Dora had become a superstitious, priest-ridden dolt, of no good to him or anyone else any more. What, indeed, was to become of him? Natural affection cannot stand against the priest. A daughter cannot love her father and go to confession. Down with the abomination ecrasez l'infame!
For, however irreligious and profane Voltaire and his associates might be, and however devoted to their avowed object of crushing Christ and his cause, so significantly indicated by their motto and watchword, "Ecrasez l'Infame;" yet they continued, as a party, to advocate Deism, and seemed at least to oppose the bolder speculations of the author of the "Systeme de la Nature."
'Ecrasez l'infame!" He had one unfailing remedy for all the evils of this world, and he preached it to every one; no matter whether the person's trouble was failure in business, or dyspepsia, or a quarrelsome mother-in-law, a twinkle would come into his eyes and he would say, "You know what to do about it vote the Socialist ticket!"
"Ecrasez l'infâme," cried the reforming Voltaire; his "infamous" was very much this perverting influence, exaggerated and armed with power, which had made the great organization of the Roman Church in his time a monstrous instrument of autocratic tradition, cruel, rapacious, blindly intolerant, jealous of light and liberty.
He had no time for the nice discriminations of an elaborate philosophy, and no desire for the careful balance of the judicial mind; his creed was simple and explicit, and it also possessed the supreme merit of brevity: 'Écrasez l'infâme! was enough for him. By Lucien Foulet. Confess, oh Moses!
Not in vain had Voltaire for years cried, 'Écrasez l'infâme, and Rousseau preached that the youth would all be wise and pure, if only the kind of education which he had had in the religious schools were made impossible. There was for many minds no alternative between clericalism and atheism.
But there was one theme to which he was perpetually recurring, which forms the subject for his bitterest jests, and which, in fact, dominates the whole of his work, 'Écrasez l'infame! was his constant exclamation; and the 'infamous thing' which he wished to see stamped underfoot was nothing less than religion.
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