Voltaire knew what to say about would-be despots like Donald Trump

Robert Zaretsky
March 14, 2025

“Let us hope,” Justice John Paul Stevens said in a 1992 address at Yale titled “The Freedom of Speech,” that whenever we decide to tolerate intolerant speech, the speaker as well as the audience will understand that we do so to express our deep commitment to the value of tolerance — a value protected by every clause in the single sentence called the First Amendment.”

Somewhere in the middle of his meticulous legal dissection of the three clauses that form the single sentence of the First Amendment, Stevens, who leaned towards an absolutist interpretation of the amendment, took a short historical detour. In a footnote, of all places, Stevens cited a quotation he had, he confessed, used in other cases. The quotation, he said, is “attributed to Voltaire as characterizing our zealous adherence to the principle that the government cannot tell a citizen what he may or may not say. Referring to a suggestion that the violent overthrow of tyranny might be legitimate, Voltaire said, ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to my death your right to say it.”

For reasons both obvious and, if only at first, obscure, Voltaire’s misattributed bon mot throws a bright light on what we can call l’affaire Khalil. A week ago, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a 30-year-old graduate student at Columbia University who was one of the leaders of the campus protests last spring that condemned Israel’s attack on Gaza as genocidal. Whisked to a detention center in Louisiana, Khalil has since been denied private meetings with his lawyers. Though he holds a green card — permanent residents enjoy a wide panoply of constitutional rights — Khalil now faces the prospect of deportation.

The Department of Justice has yet to make public the reasons for the arrest; in fact, Khalil has yet to be charged with a crime. The evolving and clearly ad hoc justifications offered by various officials allude to Khalil’s support of Hamas, yet they have not been accompanied by proof. As for the many queries made by journalists for clarification and substantiation from ICE and the DOJ officials, they have been met with the same silence that now envelops Khalil.

Yet other officials have cited a minor provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act, stating that the Secretary of State can deport an individual when the Secretary has reasonable grounds to believe their “presence or activities have potentially adverse foreign policy consequences.” It seems that there is just one case, in 1996, in which a federal judge has judged the constitutionality of this obscure and ambiguous clause. The judge tossed out the government’s case, finding the law unconstitutional. In the words of one legal scholar, the judge concluded that the provision “denied a non-citizen due process by not giving him a meaningful opportunity to contest the charges, and that it was unconstitutionally vague because it gave non-citizens no way to know what it prohibited, and that it gave the Secretary of State unbounded discretion that permitted no check on potential abuse.”

It happens that the judge who presided over this case was Maryanne Trump Barry, the recently deceased sister of our very much alive president. This also happens to be the same sister who, in private conversations recorded by their niece Mary L. Trump, judged her younger brother as incapable of telling the truth and all too capable of cruelty. “I’m talking too freely, but you know, she told her niece, “The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying. Holy shit.” She later added, “It’s the phoniness of it all. It’s the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel.” In one last revelation, if only for someone just woken from a four-year coma, Judge Barry expressed her horror at her brother’s family separation policy on the southern border: “All he wants to do his appeal to his base,”

Judge Barry’s asides are not beside the point in this case. Instead, they are as much the point as is her ruling. Playing to his base; his lack of preparation; his changing stories; his lying, phoniness and cruelty —: all of these traits embodied by our president are on display in Khalil’s arrest. We face an affair which features a clash between the voracious ego of a man freed of all constraints and the vital foundation to our lives as free women and men: the First Amendment of the Constitution.

This is where Voltaire saunters onto stage. As Stevens suggested, Voltaire did not pen those famous words attributed to him. Instead, they seem to have been coined by an early 20th historian, Evelyn Hall, in her book The Friends of Voltaire. (Clearly, she numbered herself among those friends.)  But though scholars have combed through the dozens upon dozens of volumes of Voltaire’s writings, including his seemingly endless correspondence, and failed to find the phrase, it could easily have been written by him.  Not just because of his sharp wit, but also because of his great courage in defending the freedom of expression and belief, especially in a time and place where such freedoms barely flickered.

The most celebrated instance of his life-long commitment to these freedoms was his role in the Calas Affair. In 1762, the heyday of the Enlightenment, Jean Calas, a Protestant merchant in Toulouse, was falsely accused by local Catholic authorities of murdering his son who had decided to convert to Catholicism; Calas was publicly tortured, strangled, then burned at the stake.

When Voltaire learned of this event, he blurted “My tragedies are not so tragic.” But he was not content to lament this act of inhumanity. Instead, he launched a shock and awe campaign on behalf of tolerance. Let’s call it “Operation Crush the Evil Thing.” In the salvos of letters sent to the powerful and influential and the sprays of pamphlets and books dashed off to publishers, Voltaire called on his readers to écrasez l’infâme — to stamp out those infamous things, superstition and obscurantism, exploited by France’s religious and secular rulers. Three years later, the crown acknowledged the fault, cleared Calas’ name, and returned his property to his family.

Especially horrifying for Voltaire was lèse-majesté: the crime of offending the majesty of the monarch, whose power to rule was unchecked and immunity was unlimited. The crime was punishable by the same tortures exacted on Calas — limbs pulled from their sockets by cranks and ropes; mouth wedged open by two sticks and water poured down the throat (back then, it was called “la question extraordinaire; nowadays, it is called “enhanced interrogation); finally tied to a wheel and the bones of the arms and legs shattered by the executioner. This climaxed in the same death: garroting.

Voltaire never lost faith in the eventual victory of reason and tolerance. In the two and half centuries, and the countless other tragedies, trivial and global, humankind has since known, the temptation is overwhelming to roll our eyes over such optimism. Or simply close our eyes when we are confronted by a president who, styling himself as king and believing he is the state, seeks to trample our constitutional rights. But we must resist this temptation especially when we are called upon to apply these fundamental rights to those with whom we fundamentally disagree. While this was a golden rule for Voltaire, he never lost sight of the risks it involved. As he warned in his history of France under Louis XIV, “It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.”

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