The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Thursday, September 4, 2025

Notably: Pope Paul V in 1606 was dead serious when he told the ambassador from Venice: “Do you not know that so much reading of Scripture ruins the Catholic religion?” The church did not like its flock to read the bible. It did not like its flock to read. It created the Index (Index Librorum Prohibitorum, or Index of Forbidden Books) in the mid16th century, and did not abolish it until 1966, though in a March 1957 essay Flannery O’Connor was all for it, or at least for its principle: “The business of protecting souls from dangerous literature belongs properly to the Church,” she wrote. “All fiction, even when it satisfies the requirements of art, will not turn out to be suitable for everyone’s consumption, and if in some instance, the Church sees fit to forbid the faithful to read a work without permission, the author, if he is a Catholic, will be thankful that the Church is willing to perform this service for him. It means that he can limit himself to the demands of art.” A writer supporting censorship: like a doctor approving of cancer. “Frankly, I’m always amazed that there are men who forbid other men from reading,” Voltaire wrote in a 1763 letter. He may have been a champion of free thought, but he could be Flannery when it suited him: “It is of the utmost importance that the Lettres Toulousaines not be published in France,” he wrote the same year, referring to an obscure work that apparently interfered with one of his great, noble cases against miscarriages of justice (the Calas Affair, in which Jean Calas, a protestant, was falsely accused of murdering his son over his decision to convert to Catholicism). Look how similar Voltaire’s language was to O’Connor: “Works that can be written on this delicate subject can only be entrusted to reliable people who are fit for service. This is the position taken by the author of the Treatise on Tolerance [meaning, ironically, Voltaire himself]. A letter has been written to Lausanne to request that the author of the Lettres Toulousaines suspend the publication of his book until the Calas trial is resolved.” On the whole though his calls for censorship were the exception, his eloquence on the freedom to think, write and publish more eloquent, less pompous and certainly less self-serving than Milton’s: “In every country we must let the rabble speak. It would be better if it did not speak; but we cannot tear out its tongue.” And even O’Connor, ever the curveball pitcher, shatters you–and your assumptions about her–with insights out of her very seeming dogmatism. In the same essay quoted above, she noted: “Catholic readers are constantly being offended and scandalized by novels that they don’t have the fundamental equipment to read in the first place, and often these are works that are permeated with a Christian spirit.”

—P.T.

A disenchanted Madame de Staël soon found that her France had become “a garrison where military discipline and boredom rule.” Perhaps more than from direct political persecution, artists under Napoleon suffered from the restrictive, stifling atmosphere that was produced by a combination of fear, flattery, and censorship. Certainly it was in this atmosphere, and in her constant opposition to Napoleon’s authoritarian rule, that Madame de Staël, her salon having become a focus of the opposition, was forced into exile in Switzerland in 1803, again in 1806, and definitively-after the seizure of her highly critical De l’Allemagne in 1810.

–From Alistair Horn’s The Age of Napoleon (2006).

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