Titans of History

Punishment could be still more gruesome. The execution in Paris, in 1757, of Robert Damiens, the man who tried to stab Louis XV, was incomparably grisly. First of all, as decreed by France’s Parlement, the hand that had wielded the knife was burned. The executioner then used pincers to tear away chunks of flesh, filling the wounds with molten lead. For over quarter of an hour, four horses, pulling in different directions, tried to dismember Damiens’ broken body until finally his thighs and arms were severed with a knife. It was said that the would-be regicide was still just alive when his dismembered trunk was thrown on the fire.

Until the 18th century, torture was an accepted part of the judicial system. It was a means of wrenching the truth from the recalcitrant human will, a way of punishing the guilty in the most heinous way possible. The thinkers of the Enlightenment saw it otherwise—as a barbaric practice that had nothing to do with justice, one that risked punishing the innocent as well as the guilty.

Inflicting such intense pain on a man, argued the Italian Cesare Beccaria in 1764, in one of the age’s most influential tracts, would only compel the victim to “accuse himself of crimes of which he is innocent.” Hearing of the case of Jean Calas, a Huguenot (French Protestant) from Toulouse who in 1762 was accused of murdering his son, then tortured to obtain a confession and finally broken on the wheel, Voltaire raged against the superstitious barbarism of the Catholic Church and its excessive judicial influence.

During the latter half of the 18th century, Prussia, Sweden, France, Austria and Tuscany all abolished judicial torture. In 1801, under Tsar Paul, Russia decreed that “the very name of torture, bringing shame and reproach on mankind, should be forever erased from the public memory.”

It was far from a distant memory; but now torture was a shameful secret rather than a commendable practice. And while the bloodbath of France’s Terror has totally sullied its name, Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin’s invention for swiftly and painlessly beheading the condemned was meant to be a step away from the savage methods of the past. The deist Voltaire’s Treatise on Tolerance (1763) expanded on his belief that reason should be government’s abiding principle, and his assertion that religious freedom was not harmful to the state’s well-being has become a fundamental principle of modern government. “The right to persecute,” he declared, “is absurd and barbaric.”

By now Voltaire’s fame had spread across Europe: Frederick the Great and Catherine the Great, with whom he enjoyed a prolific correspondence, basked in his reflected glory, projecting themselves as adherents of “enlightened absolutism.” Both repeatedly invited him to visit and he duly stayed with Frederick (1750–53), but the realities of the Prussian court soured Voltaire’s rapport with the man he now described as a “likable whore,” and who once described him as a “monkey.” He resisted Catherine’s invitations, but it was he who flattered her by dubbing her “the Great.” Luminaries from across the continent flocked to see Voltaire, and at Ferney he became the self-described “innkeeper of Europe.” The brilliant schoolboy, described by his father-confessor as being “devoured by a thirst for celebrity,” had become “King Voltaire,” revered and reviled in equal measure across Europe as the scourge of authority, injustice and hypocrisy. As he lay dying in Paris in 1778, his rooms were crammed with crowds of people, all determined to catch a last glimpse of a legendary man.

The shrine to Voltaire erected by the French revolutionaries in the Panthéon acknowledges their debt to him. It bears the inscription: “He taught us how to be free.” Voltaire had begun the process of translating the ideals of the Enlightenment into reality, and his words became the first bomb thrown against the ancien régime. He once told a friend, “I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it.”

SAMUEL JOHNSON

1709–1784

Here lies Sam Johnson:—Reader, have a care,

Tread lightly, lest you wake a sleeping bear:

Religious, moral, generous, and humane

He was: but self-sufficient, proud, and vain,

Fond of, and overbearing in dispute,

A Christian and a scholar—but a brute.

Soame Jenyns, suggested epitaph for Dr. Johnson (1784)