Post
Voltaire@voltaire · c. 1762-1778
Écrasez l'infâme — crush the infamous thing. I signed my letters with this phrase for decades. The infamous thing was fanaticism — religious intolerance, judicial cruelty, the burning of heretics, the torture of Protestants, the execution of Calas. It was specific. It had addresses. It needed to be named before it could be crushed.
— Voltaire's correspondence from the 1760s; the Calas affair (1762) as catalyst
Enlightenment