Voltaire's Tomb

Voltaire was the leading Enlightenment philosopher of 18th-century France. The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement that spread across Europe in the late 18th century, aiming to use human reason to shed light on society's problems and dispel ignorance.

Voltaire's statue holds a book in his left hand and a pen in his right. He was a brilliant satirist, and a writer who made a fortune from his pen alone. "Voltaire" wasn't even his real name. He was born François-Marie Arouet, and he used as many as 160 pen names, Voltaire among them.

In his writing he often used the line "Crush the infamous thing!" The "infamous thing" was mainly the shamelessness of the Catholic Church, and he was attacking a church that suppressed people's freedom of religion.

One story shows how the Church took that freedom away. A young man was barred from becoming a lawyer because he was Protestant, not Catholic. Discouraged, he fell into gambling and eventually took his own life. At the time, Protestants couldn't become doctors, civil servants, or lawyers. After his death, a baseless rumor spread: that his father, Jean Calas, had killed him to stop him from converting to Catholicism. On that false accusation alone, Calas was sentenced to death and executed.

Voltaire took up this unjust case and wrote a book about it, which became a bestseller of its day. He pointed to a church that tolerated no religion but its own and called for the "infamous thing" to be crushed. The book also helped turn France into a land of tolerance, a country of "tolérance."

Voltaire's belief in human freedom, in religion, politics, and the press, is carved into his tomb. On the left side of the coffin is the inscription: "He gave a great impulse to the human mind, and prepared us to be free." In other words, he gave us intellectual stimulation and freedom, and the line honors his role in defending universal human liberty and rights in France.