In 1733, four years after his return from England, where he’d been exiled for humiliating a French aristocrat, Voltaire wrote a series of philosophical letters describing England’s system of government and its embrace of free trade and religious tolerance. Written in a deliberately faux-naif style, Voltaire’s Letters Regarding the English Nation appear, at first glance, to be a satire of England’s peculiar customs. The English are “fools and madmen,” Voltaire begins his eleventh letter, On Inoculation: “Fools, because they give their children the smallpox to prevent their catching it; and madmen, because they wantonly communicate a certain and dreadful distemper to their children, merely to prevent an uncertain evil.”
Voltaire was not describing vaccination as we know it today but its precursor, variolation, whereby practitioners would take a small amount of pus from a lesion on a smallpox victim and introduce it under another person’s skin in the hope of inducing an immune response. However, on closer reading, it’s clear that far from being an anti-vaxxer, Voltaire was a supporter of variolation and his real targets were opponents of empirical science. Describing smallpox as a “cruel disorder” that kills one in three of those infected and leaves survivors “horribly disfigured,” Voltaire asks rhetorically: “Aren’t the French fond of life? Do their women not care about their beauty?”
Voltaire was right to be concerned by French resistance to the procedure. In 1723, smallpox killed 20,000 Parisians, including Voltaire’s close friend Génonville (Voltaire also contracted the disease but, after being copiously bled by a doctor, miraculously survived). By contrast, Voltaire explains, in England and countries such as Turkey where variolation had been widely adopted, no one inoculated against smallpox had “ever [been] known to die” and “no one is marked” by the disease.
Were he alive today, Voltaire would no doubt be appalled to learn that despite three hundred years of scientific progress, France remains the most vaccine-hesitant nation in the world, with one in three French people believing that vaccines are unsafe and nearly half saying in November 2020 they would turn down a coronavirus jab, compared to 21 percent in the UK.
On the other hand, he would be encouraged to learn that, thanks to President Emmanuel Macron’s decision in the summer of 2021 to issue vaccine passes, with proof of a second shot required to visit a restaurant, gym, concert hall, or sporting event, 80 percent of the population is now double-jabbed. Yet, in Britain, where the government has so far resisted mandatory vaccines and been reluctant to adopt strict Covid-19 control measures, immunization rates are stuck at 70 percent.