"Ridiculous fables" and "absurd horrors" in Voltaire's Traité sur la Tolérance (Treatise on Tolerance)

As others will one day pick the violet 
On a star I 
I descended alive into the horror of man 
(Aragon,Le Fou d'Elsa)

I. The relationship with reality

Contradictions of the genre, between essay and treatise

There is a genre, a rhetoric of the treatise : the object of a treatise is abstract  a treatise must set out a thesis, and demonstrate it on a theoretical level. A philosopher's work par excellence, the treatise's enunciation is set back from the public arena. Its aim is not circumstantial, but general; what it sets out to do is not action, but meditation. The treatise thus ambitiously lays claim to a certain nobility of discourse, weighed and thought out outside the conjuncture, away from the political arena. It seems to oppose in every way the modest posture, the low profile of the essay : the essay, unlike the treatise, ostensibly detaches itself from any systematic velleity, to compromise itself decidedly with the triviality of reality.

The reality of texts, of course, reveals a much less clear-cut opposition : categorization by genre, because it belongs to an external typology, foreign to the subjective intimacy of writing, cannot account for a poetics, an internal economy of the text, a structural logic of the work. At most, it functions as a " claim ", as a forerunner of what the text wants to give itself for, as an announced posture.

Voltaire's Traité sur la tolérance is a good example of this vacillation between the announced genre and the actual work of writing, a vacillation that calls into question the very relationship of the work to reality. The full title already poses the contradiction : Traité sur la tolérance à l'occasion de la mort de Jean Calas. The theoretical and systematic ambition, the meditative withdrawal of the treatise, is opposed by the empirical demand of the occasion  to react in the heat of the moment is to renounce noble discourse  the immediacy of political engagement demands a more immediate grasp of reality by the essay.

The Traité sur la tolérance should not be reduced to the Calas affair, on the occasion of which it was written, an affair that occupies only the first and last two chapters of the book, that is, three out of 26. Nor can we regard the Calas affair as the conjunctural beginning of the theoretical treatise, as an opportunity to write a treatise that would detach itself from the cause that motivated it by universalizing it. The movement of writing is neither generalization nor systematization. And the book closes not with the conclusion of a speech, of an argument, but with the account of the facts, the Conseil d'Etat ruling clearing Calas, as if the work of writing, the performance of the Voltairian Traité had consisted in reversing the injustice described in chapter I into the justice rendered in chapters XXV and following.

There is therefore a tilting of the Traité.

The text takes note of its own effectiveness : Voltaire has won. Writing has overturned the real, taken both as a circumstantial moment in which injustice, horror¹, barbarism, is experienced as historical time, and as an instance of the refoundation of law, as the legitimizing principle of discourse. The real is Calas's torture and the Council's ruling  it is the moment of discourse's defection, the absurdity of the facts derailing any narrative, failing any plea, and the principle of discourse's refoundation : it is not from abstract considerations, it is in ancient History and the most recent current events, in this same temporality of reality, therefore, that Voltaire seeks to found, to legitimize the object of the Tradition, the principle of tolerance.

Historical absurdities and horrors on the one hand, historical legitimization of the /// tolerance of the other : the Voltairian Traité works to turn one into the other, this dialectic of the occasion and the treaty espousing the very dynamic of the principle of reality, at once the deconstructive power of the real whose brute force undoes discourse and the refoundation from the real of a discourse.

Writing and the reality principle : from framing to horrification

The relationship with reality is the essential issue in Voltairian writing, an immediate, convulsive relationship that has nothing to do with a practice of imitation. The question of the relationship to reality is posed particularly acutely in the Traité sur la tolérance because of the circumstances and historical consequences of its writing. But it actually engages the entire work.

The Essai sur les mœurs was originally called Histoire universelle. Voltaire has shifted from the systematic, detached Bossuet-style discourse to the anthropological essay  his object is no longer universal history, but manners. In the introduction to Siècle de Louis XIV (1739), history is still rhetorically distributed, divided into great epochs of culture and legislation that the discourse superimposes, gauges and circumscribes :

" All times have produced heroes and politicians, all peoples have experienced revolutions, all histories are almost equal for whoever wants to put only facts in his memory ; but whoever thinks, and what is even rarer, whoever has taste, counts only four centuries in the history of the world. These four happy ages are those in which the arts were perfected, and which, serving as an epoch for the greatness of the human spirit, are the example for posterity. "

Against the disseminating power of facts, Voltaire here opposes the synthetic dynamics of thought and taste, drawing out the four " siècles ", or " âges ", or " époques " of humanity in a perspective of exemplarity (" l'exemple de la posterérité "). Historical discourse frames " epochs " ; it is framed by its exemplary purpose.

Voltaire takes this rhetorical framing of historical discourse from Bossuet, who explained it in the introduction to his Discours sur l'histoire universelle (1679) :

" But just as, to help one's memory in the connoissance of places, one retains certain principal cities, around which one places the others, each according to its distance  so, in the order of centuries, one must have certain times marked by some great event to which one relates all the rest. This is what is called Epoch, from a Greek word meaning stop, because we stop there, to consider as from a place of rest all that has come before or after, and by this means avoid anachronisms, that is, that sort of error which confuses times. "

With Bossuet, however, epochs are not distinguished by the arts and technological prowess of mankind, but by events taken in a providential design  they do not fix the philosopher's thought and taste but above all Christian chronology, which contrasts " the perpetual duration of religion, and [...] the causes of the great changes arrived in Empires ".

L'Essai sur les mœurs puis le Traité sur la tolérance et enfin le Dictionnaire philosophique initiate a radical epistemological and semiological break with this principle of discursive framing. The rationality of Voltairian history is no longer based on the harmonious distribution of eras, but on the permanence of the same device, which is not so much a matter of rehashing, as has often been said from a dubious psychologizing perspective, but of seeing it rehashed in reality. From the late '50s onwards, Voltairean history appears to be inhabited by the out-of-frame nature of the coup de force, of barbarism. /// Legitimacy always covers a usurpation, the law ratifies an old balance of power. The frame is inhabited by an original off-frame.

All historical discourse is a discourse of representation and, thereby, more or less knowingly, of legitimization of the frameworks of the real : the real imposes on discourse a framing and hence a posture that makes it suspect. It is in mores, that is, in the dimension outside discourse, outside the framework of reality, that reality can be dialectically (and not normatively) grasped. Manners are both the disseminating, deconstructive power of the real (the diversity, the picturesque insignificance of the world) and the principle of all symbolic refoundation: having manners refers to a universality, a unity of reason and law. In this ambivalence of morals, then, we find the fundamental reversal that inhabits Voltaire's relationship to reality, opening his writing to the reality principle : the deconstructive, horrifying power of reality undoes the primary satisfactions of the pleasure principle and precipitates writing towards the secondary processes of judgment².

The division into articles : dialogization

The establishment of this off-frame, off-mimesis relationship to reality affects the most intimate structures of the text : the division into chapters only imposes itself late in the Essai and, in the Traité, becomes as early as 1765 division into articles. In the 1763 edition, the last words of chapter XV, " C'est à eux que s'adresse le petit chapitre suivant ", and of chapter XVII, " c'est l'objet du chapitre suivant ", become in the 1765 edition and in later editions, " C'est à eux que s'adresse le petit dialogue ci-après ", and " c'est l'objet de l'article suivant ". By becoming " article " or " dialogue ", chapters cease to be numbered³.

In contrast, the Neaulme edition of the Abrégé de l'histoire universelle (1753)⁴ and all its revisions up to 1756 open with a " Table des articles ", the chapters not being numbered, and therefore not designated as such. It is not until the Cramer edition of 1756 that numbered chapters  appear: Voltaire has resumed a systematic perspective.

This term article, borrowed from dictionaries and more particularly from the Encyclopédie, undoes the discursive sequence, installing writing in a brief form offered to the reader's handling, open to various journeys, comparisons, discussions. We have seen that the article can be designated as " dialogue ". Beyond its generic characterization, the article presupposes dialogism, as it establishes a new relationship with reality. At the end of chapter IV of the Traité, Voltaire writes :

" I suplie every impartial reader to weigh these truths, to rectify & to extend them. Attentive readers who communicate their thoughts to each other, always go further than the author. " (IV 53⁵.)

The Treaty is not given as writing, as discourse, but as " these truths " : it is the very authenticity of the real and as such escapes its author to mutate into a dialogic network. Truths are meant to be corrected, extended and, above all, communicated. Truths and thoughts are merged in the dialogical network : the deconstructive givenness of reality and the critical distancing that presides over symbolic elaboration are the two times that mark the advent of this principle of reality here at play and at work.

Thematic of the absurd /// and deconstruction

The off-frame relationship to the real thus doubly devalues discourse. By discourse, we mean here both broadly and abstractly a certain logic productive of meaning based on enchainment and linearity. The sequence of events identifies discourse with history; the sequence of arguments constitutes discourse as demonstration. From a semiological point of view, history (the narrative) and argumentation (the cause) obey the same discursive logic.

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Discourse is regulated by a production technique, rhetoric, which is the linear modelling of all speech grasped as pure utterance. (When rhetoric accounts for enunciation, it is as an ornament, a dressing up of discourse : discourse, i.e. utterance, is always regarded as the matrix of meaning, an anodyne presupposition, acceptable in appearance, blind and totalitarian in reality.) Discourse is, in the production of meaning, what obeys a rhetoric, the other logics productive of meaning (monstrative, iconic), or the effects of meaning outside the frame (obtuse meaning) obeying not a linear modeling (the line of discourse is then aberrant, or insignificant), but a spatial modeling (the device).

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History is defeated (both the history of Calas and the history of our culture)  the law is defeated (both respect for judicial procedure in the trial and what generally guarantees respect for and protection of individuals in the social community). Discourse is deconstructed as an account of reality and as a symbolic instance.

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This deconstructive work of writing in the Treaty is driven by the theme of the absurd, which places the real in contradiction with itself. The " absurd fanaticism " of the sectarians (I, 32), the " absurd banishment " of the Calas family (I, 37), " absurdity in intolerance " (XV, 111), finally the " absurd horrors " of the Inquisition⁶ (XXII, 138) finally refer to an irrational, destructive and even ineffective power of barbarism, i.e. of the real seized in its primary and negative force of irruption, abjection and defection.

The absurd manifests itself at the level of the real, but also, and above all, at the level of discourse, whose historical and ideological purpose it shatters. The absurdity of the discourse that carries this barbaric negativity of the real  then bursts forth: " absurd supposition " (I, 36), " the most absurd assertions " (V, 57), " absurd fable "⁷ (IX, 75), " absurd legends " (X, 81). The deconstruction is completed when it reaches the symbolic system itself : " the right of intolerance is therefore absurd and barbaric "⁸ (VI, 60).

The logic of sequencing then moves to a third level, beyond enunciation itself. The discursive continuity of the story is succeeded by the sensible continuum, i.e. a continuity based outside the text on the relationship of sociability, on emotional contact, on the socializing power of affect.

The deconstruction of discursive logic is apparent right from the title of chapter I : " Histoire abrégée de la mort de Jean Calas ". The starting point is history, and the introduction is narrative. But the story is abridged, in other words, the sequences are cut off: the title prepares the passage from discursive continuity to juxtaposition in a device. The expression " histoire abrégée " again recalls the floating title of the Essai sur les mœurs, which in 1753 was called Abrégé de l'histoire universelle. In Voltaire's mind, the work of abbreviation is the first work of discursive deconstruction.

For there is a /// ambiguity of the abstract. The abbreviation, if it already prepares the Voltairian picture of manners, still falls within the perspective of a discourse on universal history, as Bossuet defined it in his foreword addressed to the Dauphin :

" lest these histories and those you have yet to learn become confused in your mind, there is nothing more necessary than to represent to you distinctly, but in abbreviated form, the whole succession of centuries. "

Bossuet already envisages, in the rhetorical tradition of the arts of memory and the chambers of the mind, a spatial representation of his speech :

" This manner of universal history is, with respect to the histories of each country and each people, what a general map is with respect to particular maps. "

But the metaphor of the map does not deconstruct the discourse  on the contrary, it orders it as a journey, hierarchizes it as a succession of places and, in so doing, reinforces its linearity :

" in order to hear everything, we need to know the relationship that each story may have with the others, which is done by an abridgment, where we see, as if at a glance, the whole order of times. "

The abstract does not explode the absurdity of the discourse and the incomprehensible dimension of the story  on the contrary, it illuminates the meaning of events and makes explicit the purpose of the discourse :

" Such an abridgment, Monseigneur, offers you a grand spectacle. You see all the preceding centuries develop, as it were, in a few hours before you  you see how empires succeed one another, and how religion, in its various states, sustains itself equally from the beginning of the world to our time.

It is the sequence of these two things, I mean that of religion and that of empires, that you must print in your emmoire ; and, as religion and political government are the two points on which human things revolve, to see what concerns these things contained in an abstract, and to discover by this means all the order and all the sequence, is to understand in one's mind all that is great among men, and to hold, as it were, the thread of all the affairs of the universe.

The discursive thread orders Bossuet's project and unravels in the Voltairean enterprise : " tenir le fil " will become " Pour ne pas perdre le fil " in the Essai sur les mœurs (ch. 30, p. 410).

From the tragic model to the filiva device

The first page of the Traité precisely contrasts the historical narrative with what is at stake in the Voltairian text, defined from the outset as real outside the frame : " un des plus singuliers événements " (p. 31) and further on " cette étonnante aventure " (p. 39). Calas's death is curiously approached primarily in terms of poetic effect, tragic efficacy :

" One soon forgets this crowd of the dead who perished in battles without number, not only because it is the inevitable fatality of war, but because those who die by the fate of arms, could also give death to their enemies, & did not perish without defending themselves. [2]Where danger & advantage are equal, astonishment ceases, & pity even weakens ; but if an innocent father of a family is delivered into the hands of error, or passion, or fanaticism, if the accused has no defense but his virtue, if the arbiters of his life have only to risk in slitting his throat if they can kill with impunity by a decree  then the public outcry rises, everyone fears for himself, we see that no one is safe from his life before a Tribunal erected to watch over the lives of citizens, & all voices unite to demand vengeance. "

This, then, /// will be neither an epic nor a tragedy. But Voltaire promises us even more " astonishment " and " pity " ; we recognize here the Aristotelian springs of tragedy, φόβος καὶ ἔλεος. Then, we are presented with a veritable program of horrification, in the manner of an Argument or a Prologue to tragedy⁹.

The text's generic regime is therefore shifted : this below, this reduction of tragedy will be more effective than a tragedy. The shift enables discursive deconstruction. From the outset, the program condenses and juxtaposes narrative paradigms. The anaphora of " si " (" si un père de famille... ", " si l'accusé... ", " si les arbitres... ", " s'ils peuvent... ") precipitates discourse towards the denudement of reality. The first proposition is still part of the noble discourse of tragedy, whose abstract formulas veil reality: " livré aux mains de " does not say what is being done to him  " l'erreur ", " la passion ", " fanatisme " do not refer to people. The second proposition sets up the face-to-face violence in more concrete terms: " accusé " and " défense " are immediately opposed, and this device takes over from a syntax that becomes lighter and simpler. In the third proposition, the materiality of the murder appears for the first time, but incidentally, at the turn of the sentence: the imagery of the hyperbole " en l'égorgeant ", which comes at the end of its breath, is violently opposed to the unreal lightness of " se tromper ". The material violence of the crime finally invades the fourth proposition, where the noble discourse of tragedy is abandoned once and for all.

The last word, " arrêt ", which refers to Calas's condemnation by the judges of Toulouse, marks at the same time the pause in the oratorical period, the passage from undone speech to cry. The four subordinates are answered by four main ones. The sentence revolts against itself  the demand for vengeance responds to the injustice  the singular figure of the critic responds to the collective figure of " cri public ", of " toutes les voix ". The schema is still tragic  the ὕβρις of the crime committed with impunity, the outraged justice call for the effect-return of destiny, the recourse of the chorus to the Erinyes. But this pattern does not translate into speech. Only the evocation of the cry remains.

The defeated continuity of discourse is then succeeded by another continuity, the sensitive continuum of the φιλία, of that loving relationship constitutive here of the social fabric :

" It was a question, in this strange affair, of religion, suicide, parricide : it was a question of knowing if a father & a mother had strangled their son to please God, if a brother had strangled his brother, if a friend had strangled his friend, & if the Judges had to blame themselves for having made an innocent father die on the wheel, or for having spared a guilty mother, brother, friend. "

Once again, the narrative is evaded in favor of an enumeration that demultiplies and discredits the story  it could not have been suicide and parricide  the three strangulations that are evoked with the return of the four " si " refer to a single crime, which Voltaire will endeavor to show precisely did not take place. Discourse is no longer simply disarticulated  it is, in its very inflation that feeds the dramatic atmosphere, de-emiotized in favor of filiva  relations: of father and mother with their son, of brother, of friend.

The shift from discourse to device continues throughout this first chapter. Voltaire evacuates the actual relation of facts :

" Here we skip all the details the lawyers have rendered /// count : the pain & the despair of the father & of the mother  will not be described: their cries were heard by the neighbors. " (P. 33.)

The narrative is elided, but the cry remains, as the zero degree of stripped-down discourse, until the horrifying barbarity of reality is uncovered.

II. Moving to the stage and writing the device

Working with historical material : stories of bonfires

The deconstruction of discourse affects not only the narrative of the Calas affair, but the historical narrative itself, which takes over from the affair to universalize the question of tolerance. The first chapter, which dismantled the narrative of the affair, recomposed itself around the terrible device of the torture, superimposing the memory of the 1562 massacre solemnized each year by a procession¹⁰, the burial with great pomp of the Calas son transformed into a Catholic martyr (p.34) and the father's Christ-like death (p.37). Similarly, in chapter III, the story of religious violence during the reign of François I is condensed to two dehistoricized spectacles: the burning at the stake of the Lutherans in Paris, and the massacre of the Vaudois at Mérindol and Cabrières. We can follow Voltaire's work on historical material, from his sources, Mézeray's Histoire de France, Daniel's, President de Thou's Histoire , through the Essai sur les mœurs, where the episodes are disjointed (chapters 125 and 138), the Traité sur la tolérance which brings them together (1763) and finally the Histoire du parlement de Paris (1769) where they undergo their most spectacular development. Just compare the staging of the Parisian torture.

Mézeray reports the event in the purest rhetorical tradition of Histoire :

" on the end of the previous year images were found broken in several temples, holy tabernacles overturned, and several placards and libels in public places. The king, justly irritated as a very Christian prince should be, had the perpetrators of these scandals diligently tracked down and sent to Paris. There, having come at the beginning of this year, both to appease the wrath of God which these impiety might have aroused in France, and to confirm his people by his own example in the religion of their ancestors, he had a solemn procession of all the clergy of Paris made, from the church of Saint-Germain to Notre-Dame, where he himself attended, bareheaded, with a white candle in his hand, with the queen his wife, the cardinal princes, ambassadors and lords of his court : the three children of France and the Duc de Vendôme, first prince of the blood, carrying the stove under which was the Blessed Sacrament, and the principal officers of the court of parliament the sacred relics of the holy chapel. After the procession and the holy sacrifice of mass, having ushered all the most notable figures into the bishop's hall, "he exhorted them, with tears in his eyes and with very pathetic words, to persist in the Catholic faith  he implored them to have their children carefully instructed in it, to take care that this plague did not creep into their families, to reveal to the magistrates those they believed to be infected And for his part, he protested to God that he was determined, if need be, to die for the religion of Saint Louis, but that he also wished to extirpate all errors that were contrary to it, and to preserve the purity of the Church so well that not only would he give his arm to be cut off if he knew it was infected with this venom, but he would also sacrifice his children himself if they were convinced of it." The effects followed the words: on the same day, six of those apprehended the previous year were burnt to death; and gallows and fiery chambers were erected in various parts of the kingdom to punish those caught without remission. So much so that Lutheran preachers, and those who had listened to them taking the /// fuite, il y a en peu de mois plusieurs centaines de proscrits, qui portèrent leurs misères et leurs plaintes aux cours des princes allemands. " (Mézeray, Histoire de France, " François I, roi LVII. ", 1643, 2nd ed. 1685, repr. Paris, 1830.)

The entire narrative is centered on the king's action, reported in the simple past tense. First, there is the circumstance, the given of reality, the first cause, reported by the verb that gives an account par excellence of the tuvch, " on trouva ". From this tychical datum of reality, the whole narrative develops as compensation, reparation, taking matters into one's own hands: " the king... had them searched... he had them made... he himself assisted... he urged them... he conjured them ". The gradation is skilfully orchestrated from the remote factitious to the presence of the thing, then to the personal intervention, first oratorical and theatrical, then even more urgent. Between each phrase, syntactic pegs, modeled on the Latin model, underline the sequence : " Dont le roi " (consequence), " Là où étant venu " and " là où il assista " (increasingly precise focus on place), " After the procession " (time).

The climax of the narrative is the king's speech : no device here, no stage. The spoken word is king, and sets off the performance effectively : " The effects follow the words ". The chastisement of the Lutherans, evoked in a brief sentence, does not make an image, but rather falls like the cleaver of the actio discursive that it concludes. The verbs employed in impersonal or passive turns of phrase disengage the person of the king, and the anonymity of the victims prohibits focalization.

In the Abrégé, Mézeray shifts the emphasis of his narrative. The king's speech disappears, and the narrative focuses on the procession and punishment :

" Sur la fin de l'année 1534. les Sacramentaires publient des libelles & affichent des placards contre le Divin Mystere du Saint Sacrement de l'Autel. At the beginning of 1535, to make reparation for these insults, King François ordered a general procession to Paris, where he attended in great devotion, torch in hand, with the Queen and her children. Then having carefully sought out the Authors of these scandals, he delivered half a dozen of them to the flames, & had several others taken, who were burned in various places : but for every two that were made to die, a hundred others were reborn from their ashes. " (Abrege chronologique de l'histoire de France par Le Sr de Mezeray, historiographe de France. Tome IV. A Amsterdam, chez Abraham Wolfgang, Prés de la Bourse, l'An 1673.)

The disappearance of the royal speech can be explained by the requirement for brevity. But the dramatic emphasis is shifted to the punishment of which the king becomes the direct author : " il livra aux flammes demie douzaine ". The conclusion then changes color  the impression of effectiveness given by the royal action in the first story, with the heretics seemingly annihilated, is succeeded by a disillusioned observation  " for every two that were put to death, a hundred others were reborn from their ashes ". The summary has insidiously deconstructed the narrative's discursive effectiveness.

At the end of the seventeenth century, the Jesuit Maimbourg restored this effectiveness by introducing a certain iconicity  into the narrative:

" ils firent imprimerent en Suisse un prodigieux nombre de Placards remplis d'exécrables blasphêmes contre la sainte Eucharistie, & d'horribles menaces contre la personne du Roy, & eurentent l'audace de les afficher non seulement aux carrefours, aux places publiques & aux portes des Eglises, mais aussi aux portes du Louvre, & mesme à celle de la Chambre du Roy, pendant son absence lors qu'il estoit à Blois. At this news, this great Monarch was horrified, much more by the atrocious insult done to the Divine Majesty, than by the insolent manner in which /// luy-mesme est outragé, revient promptement à Paris, fait prendre les auteurs & les complices d'un si abominable attentat, & decreter contre les Héretiques. And yet, to appease the wrath of God, and to make amends in the name of all France, he ordered the most majestic and devout procession ever seen in Paris. All the Religious Orders, all the Clergy of all the Churches, the Chancellor of France Antoine du Prat, the whole Council, the Parliament in its red robes, the Chambre des Comptes, the other Companies, all the Officers and the whole City attended, each in his own rank, with all the marks of extraordinary piety. The Bishop of Paris Jean du Bellay, who a few months later was [31] honored with the Purple of Cardinal, bore the Blessed Sacrament under a magnificent canopy carried by Monseigneur le Dauphin, by the Dukes of Orleans & d'Angoulesme his two brothers, & by the Duke of Vendosme first Prince of the Blood. The King followed immediately, bareheaded, torch in hand, followed by all the Princes, Officers of the Crown, Cardinals, Bishops, Ambassadors, & the whole court, walking two by two, each holding his lighted torch in profound silence, interrupted from time to time only by instruments & music. In this state, we proceeded from the Louvre parish to Nostre-Dame, where we concluded this holy and august ceremony by paying homage to Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament, to repair, as far as we could, the injustice that the heirs had done him.
After this, the King, having ascended to the great hall of the Evesche, accompanied by the whole Court and the principal Magistrates, followed by all those who could enter, made a very pathetic speech on a kind of high throne, which had been erected for this purpose, which brought tears to the eyes of all present. He exhorted them mightily to maintain with all their might, against the Heretics, the ancient & true Religion of the Kings Tres-Chestiens which had maintained for [32] so many centuries the French Monarchy, which could never be destroyed by heresy ; then to detect & to deliver to justice these enemies of God & of the Church, even if they were their close relatives : protesting before God that if he knew, so to speak, that one of his arms was infected with this plague, he would have it cut off, & that if one of his children was so unfortunate as to fall into this impiety, he himself would sacrifice it to divine Justice & to his own.
    This speech delivered with incredible force, by a naturally eloquent King, & who made it clear by his tears that he was penetrated by a very deep sorrow, was received with great acclamations from the whole Assembly who burst into tears, & all protested loudly that they would live & die in the Catholic Faith, & pursue the Heretics to death. And to show that they were determined not to spare them, but to rid France of this plague : on that very day, in the evening, six of those wretched rebels still called Lutherans, condemned by the Parliament, were burnt at the stake, in accordance with the rigor exercised against them at the time, & which has since been exercised often enough in various parts of Europe ; which has given the Protestans cause to make a large volume of their so-called Martyrs¹¹. " (Histoire du Calvinisme. by Monsieur Maimbourg. A Paris, chez Sebastien Mabre-Cramoisy, Imprimeur du Roy, ruë Saint-Jacques, aux Cigognes, MDCLXXXII. Avec approbatrion et privilege, pp. 30-31.)

In Maimbourg, as in Mézeray, the structure of the narrative is essentially narrative  it links events : the Lutherans " firent imprimer " ; " le roi " revient promptement à Paris ", " fait prendre ", " il ordonna " ; " Tous les Ordres Religieux [...] y /// assisterent " ; " on fut " (in the sense of " on alla ") ; " le Roy [...] fait [...] un discours très pathétique " ; " Le discours [...] fut receû " ; " six [...] furent bruslez ". The use of the simple past tense is, as in Mézeray, massive, with the exception of a historical present tense (" revient promptement ") which conveys the suddenness of the action and puts it, as it were, before the reader's eyes : Maimbourg resorts to hypotyposis.

Hypotyposis also enables him to proceed with the rhetorical amplification of the procession narrative, punctuated by two imperfect tenses, " L'Evesque [...] portoit " and " Le Roy suivoit ", and deploying a string of participles. But this theatrical description of the procession does not constitute a scene: it is not framed by any device, nor is it ordered as a temporal suspension of the moment : the procession, on the contrary, floats in the vague space of the route from Saint-Germain to Notre-Dame  it is a tableau without action, a purely ornamental presentation that comments on the royal order : " qu'on fist la plus majestueuse & la plus dévote Procession que l'on vit jamais dans Paris. " Hypotyposis thus invades the discourse, but does not call into question its logic, its efficacy, its semiological functioning.

Maimbourg, on the other hand, resorts to the device for the staging of the king's speech, delivered " on a espece de trône fort élevé " and " receû avec de grandes acclamations de toute l'Assemblée qui fondoit en larmes ". Here, the shifted ritual (the hall was not designed for this kind of speech), the face-to-face confrontation of king and assembly, the reversal of situation (from contrite procession to vengeful exclamations) tend to constitute a scene, even if the scenic effect, purely ornamental, is placed at the service of the discourse and not, as is the case in a scene proper, of subversion. Jesuit rhetoric both integrates and disarms the instruments of the new semiology.

The process is accentuated in Daniel, where the prevalence of discursive logic has more difficulty establishing itself :

Example of piety he gives before he sets out on the campaign.		The Lutherans were already beginning to emancipate themselves in the kingdom in a few places. There were some insolent enough, to post (a) impious placards against the Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist right into Paris, & even to the walls of the Louvre. The king had the perpetrators searched thoroughly, and six were found and arrested. He began by making public reparation for the outrage caused to the Blessed Sacrament. Bishop Jean du Bellay ordered a general procession, and he came expressly from Blois to Paris to attend it himself. The procession took place from the Church of Saint Germain l'Auxerrois to Notre-Dame. The bishop carried the Blessed Sacrament, which was accompanied by the most beautiful relics of the Sainte Chapelle. The king walked with a torch in his hand; Monsieur le Dauphin, his brothers the Dukes of Orléans and Angoulême, and the Duc de Vendôme, first prince of the blood, carried the canopy. The ambassadors of the princes, the cardinals and bishops who were in Paris, and all the most distinguished members of the court and the city attended. The king on this occasion said aloud and publicly these fine words, that if his arm were infected with the venom of the Lutheran heresy, he would cut it off himself, & that he would not spare it in his own children.
He had six Lutherans burned who had posted Placards in Paris against the Blessed Sacrament.		On the evening of the same day the six culprits were led to the public square, where fires had been prepared to burn them. In the middle of each pyre was a kind of high trap, where they were tied up; then the fire was lit. /// fire below them, & the executioners gently releasing the rope, let these wretches sink to the height of the fire to make them feel the most vivid impression ; then they were luffed up again ; & after making them suffer this cruel torment several times, they were let fall in the middle of the flames, where they expired. (Histoire de France depuis l'établissement de la monarchie françoise dans les Gaules, by Pere G. Daniel, de la Compagnie de Jesus ; nouvelle édition [...] Tome neuvieme [...] A Paris, chez les libraires associés. MDCCLV. Avec approbation et privilege du roi, pp. 417-418.)

Daniel's story, too, does present itself as a narrative in the simple past. But his writing, much less oratorical, multiplies verbs in the indicative and neglects syntactic pegs. We can't really speak of parataxis, but it's as if the writing is affected by a syntactic dryness tending towards parataxis. The rhetorical oratorical model, so present in Mézeray and Maimbourg, is no longer the dominant model in Daniel. The king's long speech is reduced to the focal effect of an expression, to the iconicity of " ces belles paroles " dramatizing the gesture-sign of the severed arm.

Daniel's narrative is thus no longer inhabited, as in Mézeray or Maimbourg, by the rhetorical breath, by the discursive continuity of the actio oratory. This shift is not merely stylistic, but engages the very content of the narrative, which here undergoes a decisive reworking: until then, the episode was divided into two beats, constituting two performances, the procession as a call to contrition and the royal speech as a call to punishment. Mézeray's Abrégé was already an exception, substituting the retribution narrative for the king's speech. Daniel goes much further: the torture is no longer described as a performance and reparation, but as an autonomous spectacle, pathetic to the point of revolting. The stage is set for a revolt that tends to turn the effect of the torture against its instigators. Daniel seems to have created the sadistic detail from scratch, perhaps by distorting Maimbourg's narrative: " une espece de trône fort élevé ", where Maimbourg placed the king in his speech after the procession, becomes " une espece d'estrapade élevée ". The staging of the speech then becomes a torture scene in its own right, isolated and framed in the text by the marginal title, and in the image conveyed by the text, by the wooden construction. The action of the scene is the horrific movement of the executioners " gently releasing the rope ", immobilizing, eternalizing martyrdom in the instant preceding death. This arrested action, whose suspense is imaged by the rope, is characteristic of the scene's defining moment. The sadistic outrageousness of the torture goes beyond the exemplarity of religious punishment: Daniel, who speaks of " cruel torment ", does not adhere like his predecessors to the justice of the process.

The slight distance introduced by this discreet commiseration marks the still timid transition from a mechanistic semiotics of sequencing to a semiotics of sensible continuity. However, we must be careful: Daniel is not taking a stand against the legitimacy of punishment. Rather, it's an effect of writing, an autonomization of the torture scene that comes close to escaping the Catholic purpose of this Jesuit narrative. All Voltaire has to do is seize this semiological loophole and exploit it. He immediately reads Daniel's text as a device, no longer as a narrative, but first and foremost as a page layout organizing a back-and-forth between the body of the text and the marginal headings :

" It was in 1535 that these unfortunates were burned in Paris. Fr. Daniel puts in the margin : Example of piety. This example of piety consisted in hanging the patients from a high gallows, from which they were repeatedly made to fall on /// the stake: an example indeed of refined barbarity, which inspires as much horror against the historians who praise it as against the judges who ordered it.
Daniel adds that François I publicly said he would put his own children to death if they were heretics. However, he wrote at that very time to Mélanchton, one of the founders of Lutheranism, to urge him to come to his court. " (Essai sur les mœurs, chapter CXXV, addition of 1761, ed. Pomeau, Garnier, t. 2, p. 194.)

From the outset, the narrative sequence is abandoned, even if the scene of horror that becomes the structuring pole still appears in 1761 mediated by discourse : it's the contrast between Daniel's marginal title and the story it tells, between the discourse and its setting therefore, that brings the horror out of the real. The title doesn't just summarize the facts, it also guides the reading ideologically. The marginal title replaces the lost clausule. Meaning is no longer established at the end of a sequence, but in the visual juxtaposition of contiguous spaces. Voltaire also cheats; in Daniel's case, it was the procession, not the torture, that constituted an example of piety. It is through this shift that the layout of Daniel's text, traditional and commonplace especially in Jesuit literature, becomes dispositif¹².

Following the same logic of subversive juxtaposition, it's the contradiction between Francis I's speech about his children and his speech to Melanchton that engages the process of deconstruction and horrification. Here again, Voltaire cheats, as Mézeray and Daniel agree that François I planned to write the letter to Mélanchton, urged on by Marguerite de Navarre, but gave it up after the intervention of Cardinal de Tournon: in practical terms, the letter never existed.

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Already, a semiology of revolt is at work : horrification turns from the authors of the torture against the historians who justify themselves, from the object of the text against the text itself and its logic.

In his 1763 version, Voltaire targets a different audience and adopts a different reading regime, less erudite, more immediately reactive. He therefore eliminates all references to historians.

" The King, who protected them, & bribed them in Germany, [25]march'd through Paris at the head of a procession, after which several of these unfortunates were executed ; & here's what that execution was. They were suspended from the end of a long beam, which swung on an end tree¹³  a large fire was lit under them, they were plunged into it, & they were alternately raised ; they experienced the torments &¹⁴ death by degrees, until they expired by the longest & the most [26]awful torment that barbarism ever invented. " (Traité sur la tolérance, 1763, chapter III, GF p. 44.)

The contradiction in royal policy, highlighted in the Essai sur les mœurs just before the 1761 addition, is mentioned briefly. The procession is evoked fleetingly, as if to establish here the transition from linear narrative to spatial device : bribing is a matter of narrative  walking is already a narrative in space. Voltaire then pauses to dramatize the scenic device: " Et voici quelle fut cette exécution ". The change to the imperfect tense marks the pause in the discourse, the shift towards vision, towards the iconic logic of the spectacle. The infinite detail of the description, which outdoes Daniel¹⁵, makes us feel the length of the torture. The perpetrators of the torment are not named : first it's an undefined " on "¹⁶ (" On exécuta ", " on les suspendait ", " on y plongeait "), then it's barbarism itself that invents the torture (" le plus long et le plus affreux supplice que jamais ait inventé la barbarie ").

Here something new enters the scene in the text : the barbaric horror of reality is stripped bare and empowered. The monstrative power of a device that no discourse frames, and which is held together only by its geometric structure (the beam, the tree, the fire), single-handedly implements the ideological reversal of the Catholic discourse of intolerance and the materialist refoundation of History.

It's here that something new enters the scene in the text.

In the 1769 text, the device is multiplied. Voltaire recovers all the elements of the narrative bequeathed by tradition and restores them in the new semiology : the procession is given to be seen, then the torture, finally the " discours pathétique " of François Ier, soon qualified as " discours abominable ".

" François I himself, by favoring letters, had brought about the twilight in the light of which we began to see in France all the abuses of the church ; but he was always under the necessity of sparing the Pope as well as the Turk, in order to support himself against the Emperor Charles the Fifth. This policy led him, despite the pleas of his sister, the Queen of Navarre, who was already a Calvinist, to burn anyone found to be adhering to the so-called reformation. At the beginning of 1535, Jean du Bellai, bishop of Paris, had him indicate a general procession, which he attended with a torch in his hand, as if to make amends for the profanations of the sectarians. The bishop carried the encharistie; the dauphin, the dukes of Orléans, Angoulême and Vendôme, held the cords of the canopy; all the religious orders and all the clergy preceded. Cardinals, bishops, ambassadors and the great officers of the crown followed immediately after the king. Parliament, the Audit Office and all the other companies closed the march. In this order, they went to the church of Notre-Dame, after which part of the procession split up to go to the Estrapade to watch the burning of six burghers whom the Tournelle chamber of parliament had condemned in the morning for their new opinions. They were suspended from the end of a long beam, placed on a pulley above a twenty-foot-high post, and lowered repeatedly onto a large flaming pyre. The ordeal lasted two hours, and wearied even the executioners and the zeal of the spectators.
    The two Jesuits Maimbourg and Daniel report, after Mézerai, that during this execution, François Ier had a throne erected in the bishop's hall¹⁷, and that he declared in a pathetic speech, " that if his children were unfortunate enough to fall into the same errors, he would sacrifice them as well. "Daniel adds that this speech moved all those present to tears.
    I don't know where these authors found that François Ier¹⁸ had delivered this abominable speech. " (Histoire du Parlement de Paris, 1769, chapter XIX.)

First of all, the placard affair disappears completely from the narrative : Voltaire thus decisively breaks with the narrative economy, which overbordered the procession, the speech and the punishment to a triggering event, to an immediate and circumstantial cause.

Here, the starting point is the contrast between " the twilight " of humanism and " this policy " which pits Francis I against Charles V. The ideal of tolerance and reform on the one hand, and the pragmatic and cynical necessity of a coup de force on the other, are confronted and juxtaposed. From the outset, events emerge not from a linear causal sequence, but from a contradictory situation, /// of a double constraint. The story is not inscribed in the discursive rationality of a design, but in the absurd device of this double constraint, from which Voltaire follows the slide into horror.

It is precisely because he had " favored ", " given birth " to the reform movement that François I escalates his repression. The text does not follow the chronological order of events at all  the punishment is announced before the procession (" l'engagea... à faure brûler ")  the speech no longer precedes, but accompanies the torture (" pendant cette exécution "). The desired effect is to cancel out temporal succession in favor of a juxtaposition of spaces, procession to Notre-Dame, pyre at the Estrapade, speech in the Salle de l'Evêché.

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The verb " voir ", which appears three times, also induces an interesting superposition : " on commençait à voir en France tous les abus de l'église " orders the first vision, abject and subversive. Then " on voyait les cardinaux " introduces an external viewpoint on the procession (whereas in Mézeray, Maimbourg and Daniel, the procession stems from the royal order and unfolds from it). Finally, " pour aller à l'Estrapade voir brûler à petit feu six bourgeois " sets up the torture as a spectacle equivalent to that of the procession. The procession screens the spectacle of the Church's abuses  the torture turns the glorifying spectacle of the procession into a horrifying spectacle : the text is thus organized around a double reversal and deploys the three fields of the gaze, symbolic field first, where the condemnation of the institution's turpitudes is marked  geometrical field second, as the procession installs depth, the journey, the habitation of space  scopic field lastly, where the torture traps the eye in the fascinated contemplation of its absurd horrors.

Representation now passes through the device. François I, according to Voltaire, has the throne erected from which he will deliver his speech : the device precedes, causes the scenic action. We have seen that none of the authors from whom Voltaire drew and whom he cites here as guarantors spoke of such a premeditated installation of the performative space.

In the same vein, the indications of numbers (six bourgeois, twenty feet, two hours) mark the exit from the noble discourse of tragedy and the entry into the geometrical accounting of reality. It is the juxtaposition of the three spectacles - the glorifying, the horrifying and the pathetic - that makes sense, or rather precisely produces that " sense in nonsense " of which Freud speaks to define the witz¹⁹ and where Voltairean writing converges. The Voltairian deconstruction of discursive logic, by denuding the " horrible things " of reality, produces the device of the tragic scene²⁰ that combines barbarism and " no-meaning ".

The incomprehensible as the principal scene

Here we touch on the incomprehensible, though Voltaire never uses the word to designate that horrifying dimension of reality that springs brutally to the face of undone discourse. Not that the word is absent from Voltaire's text, but it undergoes a displacement²¹. Writing deconstructs the discursive logics that cover reality to reveal, through condensation, juxtaposition, the passage from discourse to device, the incomprehensible dimension of reality. The horrifying ordeal of this incomprehensible violence (what Voltaire calls " horreurs absurdes ") triggers the semiological revolt  turning the sentence against itself, Voltaire's indignation, symbolic refoundation based on the principles enumerated negatively at the end of chapter III  " l'humanité, /// indulgence, and freedom of conscience " (p. 45).

There is thus a terrible moment, a scene of " absurd horror " that constitutes the recurring focal point, both the principial foundation and the deconstructive aim of Voltairean writing. The entire Voltairean imaginary strives to objectify and multiply this primitive scene in History, whose barbaric episodes both nourish and conjure up its petrifying, disarming power. Voltaire is not the soothing apostle of a politically correct tolerance, of a "Love one another " bastardized into a vague permissiveness. Nor was Voltaire the light-hearted writer of well-turned facetiousness and elegant irony. Evoking these real aspects of the work misses its core, its disquieting matrix, this ordeal of barbarism unceasingly recommenced, which casts a rather different light on the phantasmatic power and ideological stakes of Voltairean writing.

III. Irony

Towards a poetics of horror

In a first part, we showed how the Traité sur la tolérance, escaping the rhetorical logic of categorization by genre, engaged a novel relationship with reality, on the basis of which it established a face-to-face encounter of writing with the " absurd horrors " of history.

These " absurd horrors " which constitute the ceaselessly reconvened object of the Traité and, beyond that, of all the Ferney patriarch's committed work, must not be read simply as the desolate spectacle of human barbarism : for Voltaire, they are a way of thinking about the link between the permanent and terrifying power of history's cruelties, and the failure of the discourse of history that attempts to account for them, a discourse that Voltaire stigmatizes as a ridiculous fable, a word struck with nonsense. The meaning of history has to do with the nonsense of the historical fable  the ordeal of historical horror allows us to grasp in reality the double movement of defection and refoundation of the law (barbarism flouts the law ; the law creates a tolerable relationship with an earlier barbarity, either by denying it or denouncing it)   the " absurd horrors " thus expose the discourse of legitimization and reveal, behind it, the exercise of brute force. Voltairian writing thus establishes a distance from historical discourse, which it parodically stylizes as a ridiculous fable to reveal, beneath it, the horrifying scene of reality.

But neither is it simply a matter of Voltaire denouncing a certain ideological recuperation of history by discourse. What is at stake is the very movement of history, in which barbarism escapes the linear causality of a chain of events to manifest itself as the moment of passage to the device : history's slide into barbarism is the moment of exit from discursive rationality and entry into another logic, where symptom and revolt, horror and convulsion take the place of rationality. History is no longer a narrative. It opens up a space, a field of unleashed force, which writing will strive to apprehend and ward off. This space, this field, are not ornamental variations on the same Voltairean restatement (the same scene of horror repeated in different historical contexts), as Voltaire is still accused of doing today. They inaugurate a revolutionary semiological mode of writing, the emergence of which we have attempted to trace in our second part, based on the episode of the Lutherans burned during the Closet Affair. This is the only way to account for barbarism, which contemporary history is becoming aware of as the fundamental core of historical reflection. Voltaire is the decisive actor in this shift from history as representation to history as representation. /// of values to history as a monstration of barbarism. It is on this semiological level, much more than on the thematic one of politically correct tolerance, that he inaugurates what, even today, we are caught up in.

We would now like to attempt to model the very functioning of this semiotically new writing, by showing how the horror that punctuates the text is integrated, arranged in a certain process of structuring the chapters, a process in which the very dynamics of Voltairian writing can be spotted.

Rhetorical irony and Socratic irony

Voltaire's writing is usually characterized by irony, and if any writer in our literature has embodied the lightness, so to speak, of the bounty of the witty word, the elegant dryness of the formula that hits the mark, the biting detachment of the murderous satire, it's Voltaire. How can we reconcile this spiritual image bequeathed to us by tradition - and rightly so, since we immediately feel its effects when we read it - with the no less undeniable and recurring presence, not only serious, but disorienting and disturbing, of horror and barbarism ?

In Voltaire's work, there is a fundamental articulation between irony as an increasingly assertive practice of his writing, on the one hand, and barbarism as the object, the aim of what writing seeks to circumscribe, on the other. This articulation, which gives Voltaire's treatment of history a unique coloring and perhaps veils its essential modernity, on the other hand enables us to grasp the deep spring of irony.

The rhetorical definition of irony as dissimulatio consisting in signifying the opposite of what is said²² reduces the process to a mechanical inversion that does not fundamentally question the relationship between signifier and signified. It has often been noted, however, that it is difficult to determine the boundaries of irony, the precise point in the text where one passes from serious to ironic enunciation. It meant recognizing that irony is not a simple inversion, but a process of ironic accentuation that gradually shifts the signifier away from the signified, sometimes to the point of inversion, sometimes below this point of reversal of discourse. The signifying chain then becomes autonomous, and is worked by de-emiotization : we better understand why, in Voltaire, the discourse of history is undone and parodically stylized as a ridiculous or absurd fable.

But why is it that classical rhetoric, which places great emphasis on irony as a trope (it's one of the four main ones, alongside metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche, according to Colonia²³) proposes such a restrictive definition of it ? To understand this, we need to go back to the Greek origins of irony, as practiced and reflected in the Socratic dialogues. If we take, for example, the heated exchange between Thrasymachus and Socrates at the beginning of The Republic (Book I, 337a-e), it's immediately apparent that irony has to do very clearly and consciously on the part of the interlocutors with the etymological origin of the word : it is questioning. Εἰρωνεύομαι neighbors, so to speak, systematically with ἀποκρίνομαι and with ἐρωτῶ. We must leave aside Bailly's definition, itself influenced by the rhetorical reduction of the word's meaning. By speaking of falsely naive questioning, he surreptitiously introduces this idea of dissimulation that nothing in the Platonic text solicits. Guided by the literary effects of the text, we note that Thasymachus defines Socrates' irony (337e)  as follows: " ἄλλου δ᾽ἀποκρινομένου λαμβάνῃ λόγον καὶ ἐλεγχῃ, the other having replied, he seizes upon his speech and refutes it ". Ἐλέγχω in Homer meant to ridicule. Irony /// thus appears as an absorption of the other's discourse and a refutation within the dialogue, a refutation that Thrasymachus perceives as ridicule. This is Voltaire's relationship with the discourse of the other, which his writing recovers and absorbs, conjuring it up through parodic stylization. Such is the device of Voltairean writing, which superimposes discourse and interrogation.

The philosopher's irony is unbearable for the sophist (the very one who professes rhetoric) : Thrasymachus sees the maieutic process only as the contemptuous inversion of the other's discourse. It would be a pity to remember irony only as Socrates' detractors saw it...

The violence of the exchange between Socrates and Thasymachus is enough to show the subversive stakes of irony, which confronts a ban on speech. Plato plays on the word, when he describes Socrates " forbidden to speak " by his opponent, περὶ τούτων ἀπειρημένον, the consonance of the middle perfect with εἰρωνεύομαι perhaps not being fortuitous. Irony has to do with a social ban on speech that it transgresses. Socrates needs this aggression : irony presupposes above all a certain brutality of speech and only develops in relation to this brutality, as a means of retorting to the power of symbolic prohibition uttered by the discourse of authority. There is the aggressive brutality of the other's speech and the revolting brutality of what, in the speech of the one who ironizes, aggresses others.

Socrates' response to this aggressive dimension of irony is well known. The withdrawal of his " I know I know nothing " points to the neantizing dimension of irony, the necessary defection from the discourse of the other. More profoundly, it indicates a relationship of irony with ignorance, or more precisely with the μὴ εἰδὼς, with that which is not part of a learning process. At the heart of irony lies this phenomenon of blurring meaning, this intellectual defection at the moment of the reversal of discourse, this revolting dimension, which all at once turns things upside down, brutalizes and questions them. Voltaire condenses this work of the incomprehensible in his formula of " horreurs absurdes ".

Irony is therefore first and foremost a dialogical device, superimposing a foreign discourse and an interrogation of that discourse ; irony then develops in the double brutality of an aggression suffered and retorted ; finally, irony has to do with the incomprehensible, with what Socrates designates as the μὴ εἰδὼς and Voltaire stigmatizes in the real as absurd horror²⁴.

 

The scopic dimension of irony

The Treaty on Tolerance is a text that comes after the discourse of the other and that declines this discourse in different forms : first there is the discourse of the condemnation of Calas, then, beyond that, a whole discourse of history whose Voltairian integration we followed in connection with the execution of the Lutherans of 1534. Finally, and even more massively, it is biblical discourse that occupies the essential liminal position from which Voltairean irony is to unfold. (We're of course using the word irony here in the extended sense we've just defined.)

To this discourse of the other, the Traité superimposes a questioning of the historical foundation and symbolic legitimacy of tolerance. The Socratic character of this Voltairian interrogation cannot be overemphasized: despite the appearance of a simple and even reiterated credo, it provides no clear-cut answer to this question, nor does it satisfy this demand. The exemplary figure of the Voltairean mh; eijdw;" is that of the Mandarin in chapter XIX, for whom the controversies of the Jesuit, the Dane and the Dutchman will always remain incomprehensible. Admittedly, the non-knowledge at stake here concerns theology, not theology. /// tolerance ; but we soon realize that tolerance is the flip side of theology, i.e. the negation of that which makes no sense. There is no affirmation of a Voltairean doctrine, but, after its interrogation, the double negation of the discourse of the other

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As for the brutality of the Traité, it's so striking that there's no point in coming back to it: we've already mentioned the Calas torture, the horrors of the religious wars  we could add the ironic masterpiece constituted by the dialogue between the dying man and the barbarian in chapter XVI, or the letter to the Jesuit Le Tellier in chapter XVII, which clearly mark that to the horror received from reality we must immediately and indissolubly articulate the horror produced by the text, the dialogue like the letter constituting fictions, that is to say a veritable turning of horror against its first instigators.

There is thus a reversal in brutality, and this reversal is constitutive of the process of ironic accentuation. This reversal, this revolting device, presupposes a moment of absolute denudation of the other's discourse, before its refounding double negation. This is the moment of passage to the scopic dimension of writing, when de-emiotization touches on the unnamable and creates a tableau. Discursive mediations fall away, and Voltairean irony combines the barbaric spectacle of horror with the comic detachment of the absurd. Here we touch on the properly scopic dimension of irony, a dimension irreducible to rhetorical modeling, but sensible, as if in a distant model, in the buffoonish and tragic posture of Socrates grappling with Thrasymachus.

This moment of scopic revolt, which passes so fleetingly through the process of ironic accentuation and is sometimes evaded when accentuation is not pushed to the point of reversal, finds an extraordinary development in chapter II of the Treaty, which is devoted almost entirely to it.

An example : hooded Europe

Let's return to the thread of the text. We saw how the first chapter of the Traité deconstructed the story of Calas and the argument for his condemnation. It's very important to note that the deconstruction first affects the narrative (which has no immediate and obvie rational justification) and then, only in a second step, the legal case (p. 36).

The second chapter pushes deconstruction to the absurd : the two discursive linearities of story and cause are transmuted into a parodic " spectacle ", the staging of the Catholic brotherhoods whose responsibility Voltaire pointed to in the fanatical outburst that distorted the trial.

The irony is undeniable, and we notice here and there this inversion of the signifier in relation to the signified, or in other words this dissimulatio to which rhetoric reduces it : speaking of the tragedy into which Toulouse fanatics have plunged the Calas family, Voltaire suggests with perfidious false caution that " this misfortune must sans doute render them penitent indeed for the rest of their lives " by which he actually expresses his indignation at the total lack of remorse on the part of those behind the barbaric precipitation of events. Then, speaking of himself with the Jesuitical modesty of the indefinite " on ", he affirms with his hand on his heart that " on respects all brotherhoods ", by which he marks his contempt and even horror for these factious secret societies where justice and reason have no place.

But the dissimulatio is not the mainspring of the text : there's no question here of paradoxically praising the confraternities, which Voltaire openly and unambiguously stigmatizes in the meantime. Does this mean that the text can be read alternately ironically and seriously? Or is the dissimulatio not rather one of the modalities of ironic accentuation, one of the forms that the general floating of the dissimulatio can take? /// the signifying chain that characterizes irony? Should we not see in this chapter, rather than a back-and-forth from irony to seriousness, a series of ironic modulations, among which the dissimulatio constitutes one means among others ?

Much more than dissimulatio, the phenomenon that massively affects the chapter is the shift from discourse to tableau, the opening up of the text to an iconic dimension. Between the beginning and end of the first paragraph, Voltaire first plays on the meaning of the word "penitent", taken first to refer socially to a particular religious brotherhood, and then, in its general moral sense, to one who does penance, who feels remorse. Superimposed on the moral discourse here is the image of the white penitents, " with a long white habit and a mask over their faces ", as Voltaire reminds us.

But the penitents themselves have " the habit of having visions " ; they are image-makers. Voltaire then imagines an ideological conditioning device :

" What would it be like if we established in confraternities these dark chambers, called meditation chambers, where we had devils armed with horns & claws, chasms of flames, crosses & daggers painted, with the holy name of Jesus above the picture ? What a spectacle for²⁵ eyes already fascinated, & for imaginations as inflamed as submissive to their directors ! " (II 42.)

The horror actually perpetrated by the penitents on the Calas family is here superimposed on the imaginary horror of an apocalyptic tableau offered up for the exalted gazes of the sect's members. Just as they hide their faces in white sheets, the tableau of the dark chambers screens the living spectacle of the barbarity committed.

It's clear from this outpouring of images that this chapter entitled " Consequences of the torture of Jean Calas " is not intended to enumerate consequences, or even to develop the slightest discourse. The consequence announced in the first paragraph, " this misfortune must no doubt make them penitent indeed for the rest of their lives " is ironic, as we have seen, which does not mean that it is the opposite consequence that is to be understood, but rather that the very idea of consequence has no meaning The title itself therefore appears ironic, pointing out that the exemplary aim of the historical narrative (a horrible torture, the consequence of which is this or that morality enunciated by the chronicler) is always the falsification of reality.

The text is actually there to put us in a certain state, to produce the monstration of the fanatical phenomenon. Voltaire installs a device of image saturation that precipitates from imaginary outpouring to real horror. Rather, it's the causal chain that's at issue here, taken in its iconic rationality of device.

But if Voltaire describes a device of fanatical fascination, Voltaire is not fascinated. It's with the distance of ironic accentuation that he accounts for the phenomenon. The fascinating effect does not fascinate; the power of horrification is captured in the ridiculousness and absurdity of what makes no sense, in the spiritual retreat of what Freud defines as the fundamental characteristic of witz, meaning in nonsense.

This is where the scopic reversal characteristic of the process of ironic accentuation comes in when pushed to its conclusion. The White Penitents of Toulouse make a tableau on the Voltairean stage, at least three times, as if Voltaire were trying out successive points of view, as if he were searching for the most biting angle of attack. First it was the evocation of the habit and the mask  then the dark rooms  now it's a curious spectacle whose comic unrealism seems to want to ward off the background. /// terrifying :

" It would be a fine sight if Europe were in a hood & in a mask, with two little round holes in front of the eyes !" "

The extraordinary thing about this " beautiful show " is its viewpoint, literally impregnable : it's seen from above ! All of a sudden, a distance, a depth opens up here, allowing us to step outside the absurdities of history to see what there, in an inenarrable way, makes a tableau, to see the world sub specie æternitatis, but parodically sub specie : I am in the spectacle and outside the spectacle  the spectacle is and is not  I watch and I am watched. The point of scopic reversal (or " pas-de-sens ") lies in this toggling back and forth between the penitent's mask (I am the penitent behind my mask /I look at the penitents and their masks) : we then move from focus to voyure, from the screen as a tragically incomprehensible mask (the first paragraph) to the screen as a comically absurd tableau (the penultimate paragraph).

The moment of refoundation

This end of chapter II, which constitutes the crucial moment of Voltairian pas-de-sens in the Traité, inaugurates the reversal of history as the defection of meaning into history as the foundation and legitimation of values. From chapter III onwards, the writing begins its journey backwards, from the " tableau raccourci " of the horrors of religious warfare in the sixteenth century towards the construction of a historical filiation, a genesis and, thereby, a legitimation of tolerance.

Chapter IV proposes a geography of tolerance : we're still in the spatial logic of the device ; chapter V reintroduces the " regime of reason " which through the " ridicule " makes it possible to erect " a powerful barrier against the extravagances of all sectarians " (p.56)  the point here is to re-establish the prerogatives of discourse, if only in its ironic and deconstructive efficacy. Chapter VI founds tolerance in nature  the state of nature is the legitimizing origin of the right of free opinion, at the tipping point of the anhistorical principle and the historicization of the symbolic institution. Chapter VII looks at tolerance among the Greeks. From there, Voltaire moves on to the Romans, the first Christians, then the Jews (chapters XII-XIII), and finally the Gospel. Each of these chapters (from VII to XIV) addresses the historical foundation of tolerance, i.e. the refoundation of a logic of discourse in Voltairean writing. Each time, this refoundation is achieved by looping backwards a reversal whose scopic dimension is more or less asserted  each time, writing puts to the test the incomprehensible that encircles the primitive scene of the absurd horror of reality.

 

However, Voltairian writing in the Traité is not, strictly speaking, stage writing, despite the author's solid theatrical experience, particularly in tragedies. The horror around which the text compulsively revolves is distanced by irony and almost always captured as " absurd horror ". The very picture of barbarism, when Voltaire unfolds it (he more often just alludes to it), stages, so to speak, an eclipse of the gaze : hooded Europe is a blinded Europe, seen from the impossible position of God.

 

Notes

We also find the noun couple : " All these centuries of barbarism are centuries of horrors and miracles " (Philosophie d el'histoire, p. 191). Finally, let us point out the title of the last chapter of Pyrrhonisme de l'histoire (1768) : " Chap. XLIII. Absurdity and /// horreur ", a diatribe against the Jesuitical rewriting of history, and the " Dix-huitième niaiserie ", in Un Chrétien contre six juifs (1776), " Sur Jean Chatel piacularis, assassin de Henri IV ; laquelle niaiserie tient à choses horribles ", where by means of a translation quarrel Voltaire again attacks the Jesuits.

Political combat, philosophical reflection as a non-literary confrontation with reality, are secondary processes that are grafted onto a primary state, situated in the factitious world of literature, regulated by pleasure and displeasure (here, jealousy towards Palissot, the sensation produced by " the horrible adventure of the Calas "), a state anterior to language and which triggers the cry (" crier et faire crier ").

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