The suicidal son who ruined his father's life

BarcelonaWe have spoken before about the erosion of the moral prestige of intellectuals. It's not that they have become immoral (there are exceptions, of course); it's that the majority of society has stopped believing in anything transcendental, anything particularly well-argued, or anything that transcends the mediocrity of the commonplace (there are exceptions, too, now).

These days, there are very few men or women with significant intellectual or moral standing who can influence, even slightly, the general opinion of a society. Noam ChomskyTo give a rare example, he is possibly the only intellectual in the United States who can modify the preconceived ideas of the (few) citizens of his country. Jürgen Habermas, in Germany, is still listened to.

But centuries ago, especially in the Age of Enlightenment, this was not yet the case: certain men of letters, such as Rousseau or Voltaire, were not only respected by the authorities and had credibility among the population, but they collaborated to the extent they could in preparing the new political and legal order derived from the French Revolution. The French Revolution was only partially the consequence of Enlightenment ideas; the factors that triggered it were of a financial and economic nature – Louis XVI emptied the state coffers in the American war, squeezed the bourgeoisie with taxes, and the sumptuousness of his court demanded fabulous sums.

But Voltaire, to mention his own case, stirred public opinion when he began publishing pamphlets in which he defended that poor Protestant family, the Calas, when the father was unjustly and without evidence accused of murdering one of his sons, who had hanged himself for a number of reasons: he could not bear that his son had embraced the Catholic faith. (It seems he went to Catholic churches only to hear music that was better than that of the austere Protestant churches; he was a music lover, not an apostate.) His father was subjected to the torture of "the wheel," still medieval, which consisted of tying the victim to a kind of cartwheel and beating him with sticks. The wife and other children were left completely destitute.

Until Voltaire raised his voice. His pamphlets were so widely read that the king was finally forced to restore the honor of this devout believer, and the family received financial compensation. All this was achieved by a single man through the combined force of his prestige and his arguments: these are what gave rise to... Treaty on Tolerance (1763), one of the most important texts at the time the Charter on Human Rights was drafted.