In June 2020, as peaceful protesters burned city after city as part of their ongoing Summer of Love, Europe watched on warily as the love threatened to spread across the pond and soon did, in the United Kingdom, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, and, of course, France, a country even more prone to outbursts of protester-love than our own — by my count, about once every two years in recent times, thanks usually to scrapes between police and young Muslim/immigrant youths.

In keeping with France’s long tradition of tolerating protesters, in this case 15,000 of them who’d gathered beneath the Eiffel Tower, and perhaps fearing that the lovers might decide once again to torch Paris, French President Emmanuel Macron broke a long, uncomfortable silence and addressed the nation. In a televised speech, he articulated his support for the protesters’ message and affirmed his government’s commitment to stand against “racisme, antisémitisme, et discrimination,” while adding, crucially, that there would be no erasure of historical monuments or renaming of buildings as was happening stateside, where, taking a page from Mao and his Cultural Revolution, the Lovers, not content with smashing storefronts and throwing Molotov cocktails, were turning their savage affections on culturo-historical fixtures and works of art. Statues and monuments were maimed, defaced, toppled, officially because said works supposedly depicted, or represented, things the mob did not love: historical racism, sexism, misogyny, et al. Before too long the distinction between Loved and Unloved broke down, and the Lovers started smashing monuments to progressives. Statues of abolitionists and minority and women’s rights advocates were either damaged or toppled simply because … well, they just looked old-fashioned and were, therefore, undeserving of Love.

“There are no historians in a mob,” said Fox News host Dana Perino as the carnage unfolded.

That is true. In fact, a key aspect of all totalitarian movements is lack of love for art and culture, save for that select sliver of cultural expressions that love the State and show it unrestrainedly.

A week after Macron’s speech, the Paris morning dawned to find a statue of Voltaire, theretofore perched serenely in a Left Bank garden, covered in red paint.

Almost instantly after the statue’s defacement, left-wingers took to the internet praising Voltaire’s paint-bombing as a necessary and long-overdue statement of Love and taking shots at the grand old man of French letters for his Judeophobia and his profiting from the slave trade, even though the very same charges can be made about Harvard, Yale, and a great many other liberal institutions and heroes. In fact, some of the people who wrote these attacks on Voltaire are presently busy filling cyberspace with rose-colored prose on behalf of Hamas while eviscerating Israel. O selective outrage! O twisted love!

As a Voltaire fan, art-lover, and Francophile, it hurt, on a personal level, to see the attack on Voltaire, which represented not just the defacement of one of the West’s great intellectual heroes but an all-too-literal embodiment of the sort of know-nothingness and savagery that has come to define today’s Left. That the vandalism was praised by some both inside and outside France was even more disheartening. It seemed to mark a new low point in the decline of Western civilization. The Age of Reason had become the Age of Unreason, the Age of the Mob, fueled not by civil discourse and debate but by blind rage and bestial impulses, with so-called intellectuals leading the charge. “Men made stupid by education,” said Wilde, a quip that could just have easily come from the hand of Voltaire.

Many on the French left have long loathed Voltaire as the embodiment of the Old Guard, the so-called patriarchy, and his dominance over the Republic of Letters and la République itself. Voltaire’s nemesis, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a man unforgettably described by my undergrad politics professor as “the patron saint of all leftists” and “the great liberal whacko who started the dadblame French Revolution,” is much more highly favored by today’s Left, and it’s little wonder why. At a time when most other philosophers were debating bigger, more important ideas like freedom and forms of government, Rousseau was hung up on feelings, on equity and inequities, class warfare … and Love. He held that humans were innately good and that society makes us bad (where have we heard that before?). It was Rousseau, the original proto-Marxist, who drew the plans for the modern welfare state, and who made “inequality” a centerpiece of his philosophy. In his memoir Confessions, Rousseau recounts visiting a prostitute and weeping as he realized that society would never see her essential worth, as he did. Whatever else, Rousseau had Empathy, that vaunted and oft-manipulated favorite buzzword of today’s Left. Seen in this light, it makes sense then that Rousseau’s statute was left unharmed, while poor old Voltaire, the seemingly peevish, elitist aristocrat with the pouf hairdo and the attitude, got paint-bombed, one of only two statues in the city to receive this unlovable treatment.

For Rousseau, mankind’s immediate task must be to return to the State of Nature, an Eden-like garden of perfection and delight that even he readily admitted had never existed nor ever would, yet still he was convinced we should try to find this elusive fantasyland. But how, since it existed nowhere outside Rousseau’s own mind? A strange and most romantic notion. That’s what Rousseau was above all else: a Romantic, in the purest and most dangerous sense.

II

Voltaire first encountered Rousseau’s crackpot ideas in the latter’s 1755 essay Discourse on Inequality, in which Rousseau attacked private property ownership as the root of evil (another familiar chord) and argued that the inequality that resulted from property ownership could only be remedied by forsaking all pretense of civilization and becoming more like animals, something his followers would take, and are taking, him up on. Five years earlier he’d won an essay prize at Dijon, where I would study more than 250 years later, although, alas, without prizes. Perhaps accustomed by now to being treated as a serious thinker, Roo, as I call him, made the fatal mistake of sending his savage little book to the older, wiser, highly cultured Voltaire, who was not amused: “I have received your new book against the human race,” Voltaire wrote, “and thank you for it. Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.” (READ MORE from Erik Lewis: Canceling Philip Roth … And His Biographer)

No love lost there. Rousseau wrote to Voltaire, “I hate you.” Then, as if with a tinge of guilt, he added, “But I hate you like a man still worthier to have loved you.”

Cue Mendelssohn.

Rousseau’s creepy brand of love would grow more destructive with time, as evidenced by his falling out with Hume, a once-beloved friend whom he soon viciously turned on, accusing him of all sorts of treacheries, including trying to have him assassinated. Roo’s final book, the rather pitiful Reveries of the Solitary Walker, is full of paranoid musings of obsessive love and love lost. His fragile mental and physical states were not helped, I contend, by his being run over by a galloping Great Dane one day while taking a walk, an event he describes in harrowing and rather pathetic detail in Reveries.

I asked philosopher-teacher Simon Critchley in his Brooklyn living room some years ago if Rousseau was as crazy in real life as he seems in his writings.

“He was quite bonkers,” said Critchley, a sentiment echoed by others.

Rousseau does “not pretend to be rational,” Bertrand Russell wrote in the 1940s. Neither do his followers, as they demonstrated in dozens of cities across the U.S. and Europe during the Summer of Love/Winter of Hate. Rage, not reason, drives these state-of-nature seekers, reflecting the psychotic nature of their ideas and those of their designer. You see, progressivism is a Dionysian rather than an Apollonian belief system. Virtue and Knowledge, not to mention the arts and sciences, key aspects of the Apollonian spirit and both which Rousseau expressly rejected as holding no benefit for man, are definitionally Apollonian, while the Dionysian relies on animal instinct, passions, chaos, pleasure, the erotic, the irrational, the insane. The former values order and logic; the latter, pleasure and feeling. The former seeks to build; the latter, tear down. And it’s the difference between Rousseau and Voltaire: the culture-hater versus the culture-lover; art collector vs. art-destroyer; realist vs. romantic; civilized vs. barbarian.

The fact is, for his age, Voltaire was astonishingly progressive. He spoke out against torture, witch hunts, book-burnings, religious dogma and bigotry, war, hypocrisy, the privilege and corruption of the ruling classes, and even capital punishment, something not even the bleeding-heart Rousseau would do. In his 20s, Voltaire was thrown in the Bastille for writing satirical poetry against the nobility. In his 30s, he was beaten up and exiled to England, yet again for insults against noblemen. In his 40s, his books were burned, and not for the last time. And for all talk about Voltaire and the slave trade, most of his wealth came not from slavery but from lottery winnings. I guess soon his detractors will say the lottery was tied to slavery too.

Haskell Block writes in his excellent 1956 study that “Voltaire is always our contemporary, and never less so than he is today” in his “assertion of human brotherhood and the essential dignity of all men.… He may not have been a saint, but there can be no doubt that in his fearless dedication to the rights of others and in his constant struggle to liberate men from the bondage of closed systems of whatever sort, he stands forth as one of the great champions of humanity.”

This is what anti-Voltairists never mention in their virtue-signaling diatribes. They don’t mention, in their haste to brand Voltaire a racist, that Voltaire frequently hailed non-White peoples as examples of civility and humanity. We know that he venerated Chinese and Indian cultures. Native peoples, too, as he made all too clear in his 1767 his novella L’Ingénu, performed in Paris in 1768 as the comic opera Le Huron, about a Huron Indian who goes to France and is exposed to the bizarre fashions of Europeans, a setup Voltaire uses to blast what he perceived as the bigotry, corruption, fanaticism, and intolerance of Western ways. (READ MORE: The Delightful Voltaire)

The late, great scholar of the Enlightenment Peter Gay writes in his book The Party of Humanity that Voltaire exuded “a passion for humanity and decency, a hatred of fanaticism and stupidity.” Unlike the provincial Rousseau, Voltaire was a Man of the World, a true cosmopolitan. In the words of Islam scholar Ibn Warraq, Voltaire was “a universalist who was also perfectly aware and appreciative of cultural differences.”

In fact, tolerance is one of Voltaire’s most frequent themes, the way it was among modern liberals till about twenty years ago, when they decided mere tolerance wouldn’t get the job done and dumped it in favor of D.E.I., canceling, deplatforming, blacklisting, and systematic cultural erasure.

I’ll take the Party of Humanity over Hamas’ child-raping “Party of God” any day. Voltaire would’ve, too, and I’m happy to defend his legacy in these un-Enlightened times.