The morbid sacralization of Voltaire

Daniel Finkelstein has a post on Voltaire and on whether he would have defended the right to express exceptionally outrageous opinions to the death. He concludes that he would have and that he never even uttered the fashionable quote attributed to him expressing that idea. I found it extraordinarily peculiar that Voltaire has become in our time the most fashionable symbol of liberty and the epitome of the fight against censorship especially when the last century was filled with outstanding and better writers/philosophers who demonstrated more courage and more intellectual consistency than François-Marie Arouet.

I never understood why Camus never took the place of Voltaire when h more courage than him, he put humans above God and the expression of their sentiments as necessary. I even believe that Sartre, who is as flawed as Voltaire, with his belief in literature engagée and that freedom wasn’t just about choices, but also responsibility, expresses more poignantly the idea that censorship wasn’t just vile, but it is totalitarian and thus anti-human. Of course, Sartre ended up in the streets of Paris half-blind, selling copies of L’humanité, but Voltaire also by expressing what his defenders choose skillfully to call “anti-judaic” ideas at the end of his life betrayed whatever he expresses about tolerance and fanaticism.

Modern societies are in trouble if they have to go back to the so-called siècle of lumières to find adequate and efficient notions to defend our time against obscurantism and intolerance. Baudelaire wrote with frightening clairvoyance, “je m’ennuie en France surtout  parce que tout le monde y ressemble à Voltaire (I am bored n France mostly because everybody looks as Voltaire).” that Voltaire, to the contrary of Camus, never got to the human heart and never really tried to understand humanity because he thought philosophy was as close to Godliness when Camus always chose to look at people and never to isolate his philosophy from them and their daily struggles and alienations. My point isn’t that Voltaire is useless, but simply that he was never modern, when Camus and Sartre were.