[by Violaine Géraud, University Professor]

In a recently published article, the group The Conversation, which lives off subscriptions from institutions where its authors speak, published a virulent attack against the spirit of the Enlightenment accused of being “reactionary”This is not their first attempt, since two years ago they learnedly stated that the " pandemic had got the better of the spirit of enlightenment« . The matter is therefore settled, and the anti-Enlightenment editorial policy of the Editorial Board seems to be gradually asserting itself. We asked the editorial staff to shed a slightly different light on the subject, but it seems that the "Fuck Voltaire" of the photo that served as their illustration is now their only argument used. Here are some ideas from Violaine Géraud's pen that will help our readers get an idea.

"Democracy is what remains of the Republic when the Enlightenment is extinguished." This sentence pronounced by Régis Debray summarizes an article he published in the Nouvel Observateur in 1995. It states that it is the philosophers of the 1789th century who are the foundation of our Republic. France, because it carries in the very etymology of its name the idea of ​​liberty, is not a nation like any other. It is not a democracy like any other. It alone speaks of the link between citizens as a fraternity that sublimates equality and liberty. It is in France that for the first time in the world, political power, in 1793 and especially in XNUMX, tore itself away from religious influence. In a republic, it must be remembered, the state is free from any God, it is secular. 

The father of this specifically French secularism is undoubtedly Voltaire. He devoted his life to "crushing the infamous" (i.e. religious fanaticism); his battle cry was "Écrelâfe", "let us crush the infamous". Rebelling against the killing of the young Chevalier de la Barre, who had not raised his hat as a procession passed, Voltaire imposed that blasphemy should no longer be conceived as a crime in our country. From then on, one can only deplore the terrible regression (truly reactionary and contrary to any idea of ​​progress) that the affair of the caricatures of Allah constitutes. The fact that the statue of Voltaire (who had suffered much abuse) has not found its place in the Square Honoré Champion in Paris, and that it is now behind the gates of the Faculty of Medicine is a very sad symbol, while an Islamist fanatic stabbed Salman Rushdie, a writer with Voltairean humor on whom a fatwa for apostasy had long weighed. In his Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire defines a fanatic as "a man who is sure to deserve heaven by slitting your throat." The apostasy of which Salman Rushdie is said to have been guilty and which consists of turning away from Allah can be punishable by death, at least if we take the Koran literally: "But if they turn their backs, seize them then, and kill them wherever you find them." IV, 89. Islamism (the cancer of Islam) is waging a merciless war against us and is jeopardizing our national cohesion; it is a factor of regression: the fate of women and homosexuals is the most striking proof of this. More than ever, it is in the Enlightenment, in Voltaire's universal theism as in Diderot's materialist atheism that we must draw the strength to resist the obscurantist powers that have taken hold of part of our youth: the Enlightenment had been removed from school curricula (under the Vallaud-Belkacem ministry in 2015 it was "non-obligatory") in favor of colonialism, of course, which has been rehashed. But there is worse than the occultation of the Enlightenment: there is its perversion. Montesquieu to whom we owe the separation of powers that founds any truly democratic political system, Montesquieu who denounced in his Persian letters the fate of women by the followers of Mohammed (moreover, the suicide of Roxane, who preferred death to deprivation of liberty, gives meaning to the courage of Iranian women and makes us understand what the veiling of women really is, namely a regression), Montesquieu, all of whose works were put on the index, wrote a text in The Spirit of the Laws to condemn black slavery. To defend the idea that all men are equal, whatever their skin color, and that they are even all children of the same father, the God of the Christians, our philosopher uses irony.

The text has become a prototype of the use of irony in the fight that our philosophers, sometimes encyclopedists (they also fight to widely disseminate knowledge) ardently lead against obscurantism. If they rely on this figure of thought by which we say something completely different, and often the opposite of what we think, it is because it has been, since Socrates, emancipatory: it attacks those who think badly, not by vituperating against them, but by pretending to give them a voice and by making them express themselves in such a way that their speech is disqualified and ridiculed: "It is impossible for us to suppose that these people are men, because, if we supposed them to be men, people would begin to believe that we are not Christians ourselves." This is how Montesquieu gives the slave owners a voice, in order to expose the scandal of their racism. Now, in order to extinguish the Enlightenment, some so-called "thinkers", whom we would not dare believe to be uneducated, and whom we will credit for being above all in bad faith, have dared to accuse Montesquieu of racism. This leaves one speechless! Indeed, Montesquieu is like Voltaire convinced that humanity is one, behind its apparent diversity. Here is what Voltaire writes in his Treatise on Tolerance : "I tell you that we must regard all men as our brothers. - What? My brother the Turk? My brother the Chinese? The Jew? The Siamese? - Yes, without doubt: are we not all children of the same father, and creatures of the same God? "(chap. XXIII) Let us be careful: to extinguish the Enlightenment as some want, while allowing the religious symbols of Islam to invade all spaces, is to undermine our Republic; it is to replace the fraternity that only secularism engenders by communitarianism, if not by the confrontation between communities, in short it is a terrible regression: the real reactionaries are those who want to extinguish the Enlightenment. But this is eternal, like the aspiration of all the women of the world to be treated as equals to men, like the aspiration of all the peoples of the world to live free.