The Culture of Old Regime Europe385Regime, this poem was sufficient grounds for Voltaire’s
imprisonment without a trial. Thus, at age twenty-
three, Voltaire was thrown into the Bastille for eleven
months. Shortly after his release, Voltaire insulted an-
other powerful noble who arranged to have the young
poet beaten by a gang of thugs and imprisoned in the
Bastille a second time. Voltaire wisely chose exile in
England after his second release.
Voltaire’s principal criticism of Christianity was the
intolerance that he found among Christians. He was
not the first philosophe to adopt this theme. Daniel
Defoe had already written a stinging satire in 1702 en-
titled The Shortest Way with Dissenters,a book that per-
suaded too few people because Defoe was pilloried in
public stocks and sent to prison. Voltaire returned to
the theme so often that he made tolerance one of the
highest principles of the Enlightenment. In a Treatise on
Tolerance(1763), he denounced the Catholic Church for
the mentality that led to the cruel murder of Jean Calas,
a Protestant merchant who was tortured to death in
1761 on the fallacious charge that he had murdered his
son to prevent him from converting to Catholicism.
Voltaire demanded that Christians learn complete tol-
erance: “It does not require any great art of studied elo-
cution to prove that Christians ought to tolerate one
another. I will go even further and say that we ought to
look upon all men as our brothers. What! call a Turk, a
Jew, a Siamese, my brother? Yes, of course; for are we
not all children of the same father, and the creatures of
the same God?” Voltaire returned to this theme in his
Philosophical Dictionary(1764): “Of all religions, Chris-
tians ought doubtless to inspire the most tolerance, al-
though hitherto the Christians have been the most
intolerant of men.” By the end of the eighteenth cen-
tury, many other philosophes adopted Voltaire’s theme.
Moses Mendelssohn, the great Jewish philosopher of
the Enlightenment, published a powerful plea for the
freedom of conscience, the toleration of minorities, and
the separation of church and state—Jerusalem(1783).
Mendelssohn also served as the model for the title
character in Lessing’s passionate call for toleration,
Nathan the Wise(1779).
The criticism that the philosophes leveled upon
Christianity became so widespread that some historians
have called the eighteenth century an age of modern
paganism. However, the Enlightenment was not simply
an atheist campaign. Some of the most distinguished
philosophes were churchmen, such as the Anglo-Irish
philosopher George Berkeley, an Anglican bishop. The
institutional hostility of the Catholic Church to the En-
lightenment did not stop many individual CatholicDOCUMENT 20.3
Diderot: The Church
Denis Diderot studied to become a priest but instead became
one of the church’s sharpest critics. The following excerpt is
taken from a short work that he published in 1775, “Dis-
course of a Philosopher to a King.”Sire, if you want priests you do not need philoso-
phers, and if you want philosophers you do not
need priests; for the ones being by their calling the
friends of reason and the promoters of science, the
others the enemies of reason and the favorers of
ignorance, if the first do good, the others do evil.
You have both philosophers and priests;
philosophers who are poor and not very formida-
ble, priests who are rich and very dangerous. You
should not much concern yourself with enriching
your philosophers, because riches are harmful to
philosophy, but your design should be to keep
them; and you should strongly desire to impover-
ish your priests and to rid yourself of them....
But, you will say to me, I shall no longer have
any religion.
You are deceived, Sire, you will always have
one; for religion is a climbing and lively plant
which never perishes; it only changes form. That
religion which will result from the poverty and
degradation of its members will be the least
troublesome....
And if you deign to listen to me, I shall be the
most dangerous of all philosophers for the priests.
For the most dangerous is he who brings to the
monarch’s attention the immense sums which
these arrogant and useless loafers cost his state; he
who tells him, as I tell you, that you have a hun-
dred and fifty thousand men to whom you and
your subjects pay about a hundred and fifty thou-
sand crowns a day to bawl in a building and deafen
us with their bells....
Since you have the secret of making a philoso-
pher hold his tongue, why not employ it to silence
the priest?
Diederot, Dennis. “Disclosure of a Philosopher to a King.” In
Denis Diderot, Interpreter of Nature,trans. Jean Stewart and
Jonathan Kemp. New York: International Publishers, 1943.