Georges-Marc Benamou is a screenwriter and producer of the
adventures of young voltaire
, a series broadcast on France 2 at 9:05 p.m. since February 8.
FIGAROVOX.-Coming back to the “Adventures of Young Voltaire”, you have decided to explore the Age of Enlightenment.
What made you want to revisit this period today?
Georges-Marc BENAMOU.-
As for many, the rereading of Voltaire was imposed on me in 2015, after the terrorist attacks in Paris.
The phenomenon is then global as well as intimate.
We rediscover Voltaire and the Treaty of Tolerance, the man who did not want to be silent, the fighter of religious fanaticism ... We realize that we live free thanks to the heritage of Voltaire, and to his founding struggles of contemporary France which , once again, was threatened by religious fanaticism.
It is not for nothing that following this jihadist offensive, many of us wondered where the Enlightenment had gone.
And which in France and in particular on the left, had been able to extinguish them.
Today, Voltaire's opponents would remain the same, they have simply changed in appearance.
Voltaire was fighting against the Church, the power, the moral order… Would his adversaries of yesterday be those of today?
Comparison is not right of course!
But the fights between fanatic Churches or against the Moral Order (and its new finery) are still topical.
Today it is not the narrowest Catholicism, or the Jansenism of the time, which threatens freedom, but political Islam.
Today it is not the masculine moral order that dominates, but a kind of strange, hybrid neo-Puritanism, coming from across the Atlantic.
The opponents remain the same, they just changed their appearance.
To read also:
Bérénice Levet: "Voltaire is the great writer that the French need to read today"
Is Islamism its main enemy?
Would he write in Charlie Hebdo?
Difficult to get Voltaire to speak, imprudent.
Delicate.
But there is good reason to think so.
Voltaire is described in your series as a libertine.
Would he recognize himself in current neo-feminism?
In any case, what we discovered with Alain Tasma, who directed and wrote with me, is that he was a feminist, a pioneer in the 18th century.
He became so in particular under the influence of the formidable Émilie Du Chatelet, this great scientist, and also very great party girl, who would become his mistress, let's say historical.
He is a feminist in the most Beauvoirian sense of the term.
But I doubt that her lucid, free and sarcastic mind could have taken for an authentic feminism this caricature which you call the “
current neo-feminism
”.
Voltaire, with the encyclopedists who will follow, will offer us the framework of contemporary France that we love.
Libertine, provocateur, nonconformist, could Voltaire exist in our time of political correctness?
His influence is such in French culture that we all have something of Voltaire, as the other would say.
The taste for freedom, the will to destroy castes and privileges, the insurrection of the spirit against superstitions.
Voltaire's legacy is immense.
With him, with his rival Rousseau, with Diderot and the encyclopedists who will follow, he will offer us the framework of contemporary France that we love.
Would he have voted for the death of the king?
Would he have tasted 93 and the Terror Machine?
This is obviously unlikely.
Voltaire is 89, a liberal in the full sense of the term, because we must not forget his taste for England, economic liberalism and the fluidity of Protestant societies.
To read also:
Nicolas Bedos: "Political correctness is a scourge"
Our society, under its veneer of modernity, is it ultimately closer to the old regime than it seems?
We are still the Old Regime of something!
It is true that in the political, media, sociological functioning, our mode is exhausted, especially in France.
It finds its limits, sometimes seems, by dint of heaviness, and "
strange defeats
", to exhaust itself.
And forget the lessons of Voltaire.
