Enlightenment & Revolutions
Voltaire
1694–1778 · Free expression
Detest the opinion, defend the right to speak it.
In their words
“Liberty of thought is the life of the soul.”
Voltaire used every form he could, plays and pamphlets and letters, to attack censorship, clerical privilege and judicial torture, and he took up the Calas and Sirven cases to expose judicial murder. The famous line about defending to the death a right to say what he despises is attributed to him rather than written by him, but it captures the program exactly: liberty of thought is the condition of everything else.
Why it matters for freedom
He made the case for toleration the foundation of civil peace, not a concession granted by the powerful.
Who they stood against
the church and the crown, in the name of the men they burned