Voltaire's Final Battle With The Church

Voltaire is one of the towering figures of human history — the French writer, philosopher, and wit whose savage attacks on tyranny, superstition, and religious intolerance helped light the fuse of the Enlightenment and, ultimately, the French Revolution. And the story of his death, and the extraordinary journey of his corpse afterward, is one of the strangest and most darkly fitting endings ever to befall a great man — a final battle between the great sceptic and the Church he had spent his whole life fighting.

To understand it, you have to understand the war he had waged. Voltaire — born François-Marie Arouet in 1694 — spent more than sixty years as the sharpest pen in Europe, and he used it relentlessly against the Catholic Church and religious fanaticism. His rallying cry against the Church’s abuses was “Écrasez l’infâme” — “crush the infamous thing.” He championed the victims of religious persecution, taking up the cases of men like Jean Calas, a Protestant broken on the wheel on false charges, and the young Chevalier de la Barre, tortured and executed for blasphemy. Voltaire made himself the most famous enemy of religious intolerance in the world. He was, by his own careful description, not an atheist but a deist — he believed in a Creator, but despised organised religion and its cruelties. And the Church never forgave him for it.

So when Voltaire returned to Paris in early 1778, after decades of exile, an eighty-three-year-old man greeted by adoring crowds as a living hero, the Church saw its last chance. Because a person who died outside the Catholic faith could be denied a Christian burial — condemned to lie in unconsecrated ground, like an animal. And the Church very much wanted the century’s most notorious infidel to either publicly repent and submit, or to be buried in disgrace as a warning to others.

The Horror

As Voltaire’s health failed in the spring of 1778, the deathbed struggle began — and this is where the famous legend comes from. The story everyone knows is that a priest at his bedside urged him to renounce Satan, and the dying Voltaire, ever the wit, replied: “Now is not the time for making new enemies.” It is a brilliant line, perfectly in character — but it is almost certainly not true. The quip is an old joke, attached over the years to many dying men; it is a legend, not a fact. But here is what did happen, and it is documented, and it is arguably better. Priests really did come to his bedside to try to secure his soul. An abbé named Gautier heard his confession — but the Church demanded more: that Voltaire sign a full, formal profession of faith in Catholic doctrine and, at the very end, affirm the divinity of Christ. And Voltaire, dying, would not do it. He signed only an ambiguous, carefully worded note that conceded almost nothing — and he drew up his own defiant statement, which read: “I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition.” He would acknowledge his God on his own terms — but he would not submit to the Church, not even at the very end. He died on the 30th of May 1778, having refused to give the Church its victory.

And so the Church took its revenge on his body. Voltaire was officially denied a Christian burial in Paris. His corpse was now, in the eyes of the Church, an unburiable thing, barred from consecrated ground. But his devoted friends and family were determined that he would not be thrown into a pit in disgrace. So they resorted to an astonishing deception. They needed to get his body out of Paris and to a place where a sympathetic priest would inter him before the Church could formally forbid it. And to do that, they dressed the dead Voltaire, propped his corpse upright in a moving carriage as though he were merely a sleeping passenger, and drove him out of the city — pretending, to anyone who saw, that the greatest writer in Europe was still alive. His body was smuggled through the streets of Paris as a grim, seated puppet, and carried across the countryside to the Abbey of Scellières in the Champagne region, where the abbot — who happened to be the brother of Voltaire’s niece — quietly buried him in holy ground, just ahead of the order that would have forbidden it.

But even his body itself was divided. In keeping with practices of the time, before burial his heart and his brain were removed and embalmed separately, kept apart from his body as relics of the great man. Voltaire’s brain and heart would go on their own strange odysseys through history, passed between owners, displayed, and argued over for generations — the physical organs of the philosopher, scattered and preserved like the bones of a saint, which is a fate he might have found grimly hilarious.

The Modern Relic

And then came the final, triumphant reversal. Thirteen years after Voltaire was smuggled into his grave in the dead of the Church’s disapproval, France erupted in Revolution — a revolution that Voltaire’s own writings had helped to inspire. And the revolutionaries claimed him as one of their prophets. In 1791, the new National Assembly decreed that Voltaire’s remains be brought back to Paris in glory. His body was exhumed from the abbey and carried in a vast, spectacular procession to the Panthéon — the great secular temple the Revolution had created to honour the heroes of the nation. It was one of the largest public ceremonies of the age: by contemporary estimates, as many as a million people lined the streets of Paris to watch the return of the man the Church had tried to bury in shame. His funeral car bore the words: “He gave the human mind a great impetus; he prepared us for freedom.” The infidel the Church had denied holy ground was now enshrined as a founding hero of the French nation.

The relic is that he is still there. Voltaire’s tomb stands to this day in the crypt of the Panthéon in Paris, in a place of the highest honour — and directly across from him, in a final irony, lies the tomb of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, his great rival and fellow philosopher, the two of them facing each other for eternity. You can walk down into that crypt today and stand before the tomb of the man who spent his life crushing “the infamous thing,” and who was smuggled out of Paris as a corpse propped up to look alive, only to return in triumph before a million people. The whispered legend says his last act was a joke about not making new enemies. The documented truth is better: that even dying, he refused to sign the confession they demanded, and that the Church which tried to deny him a grave lost in the end so completely that his body now lies enshrined as a hero of France — his defiant own words, not the invented ones, carved into history: “I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition.”

← Back to the archive