Voltaire and the Invention of the Intellectual

In July 1791, a hundred thousand Parisians escort to the Panthéon the bones of a man their city had banished in his lifetime. What triumphs that day? Not a system: Voltaire had none. A new function. This essay follows, piece by piece, the making of a new kind of power: the private writer become a public force the state must reckon with. From a young man's beating in the street to the Calas affair, where a private individual holding no office has a sovereign verdict overturned by mobilizing the opinion of all Europe, Voltaire invents, a hundred and thirty years before Dreyfus, the role of the intellectual. The book also measures its price: the antisemitism lodged at the very heart of the crusade for toleration. Twin volume to Crush the Infamous Thing.

Contents