Chapter Ten - Voltaire vs. the World

CHAPTER TEN

Voltaire vs. the World

BY NOW, VOLTAIRE wasn’t just famous. He was a problem.

The French monarchy wanted him silenced. The Catholic Church wanted him excommunicated. Posthumously if necessary. Even other Enlightenment thinkers, the more delicate, polite ones, sometimes rolled their eyes at how loud he was.

Voltaire didn’t care. He was too busy winning.

He had more readers than anyone. His letters circulated like wildfire. His books were banned, pirated, quoted, and smuggled across borders. He could destroy a politician with a sentence and ruin a theologian with a paragraph. If you said something stupid in public, Voltaire probably had a comeback written before breakfast.

And he was everywhere. He inserted himself into legal cases, feuds, debates, scandals, you name it. He would side with Protestants, Jews, atheists, anyone getting stomped by the system. Not necessarily because he agreed with them, but because he hated bullies more than anything.

By this point, “Voltaire” wasn’t just a name. It was a verb.

He’d turned into a full-time Enlightenment troublemaker. He had so many enemies that they started to cancel each other out. The monarchy couldn’t touch him without making him a martyr. The Church couldn’t kill his ideas because people were laughing at them too hard. Even foreign governments hesitated to go after him, mostly because they were reading him.

He wasn’t trying to be liked. He was trying to outlive his enemies.

And he was doing a great job of it.