The terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo was an attack on the freedom of expression that we in the West cherish very highly.

We owe this freedom to the thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment, especially to Voltaire, who waged a lifelong campaign against religious intolerance and obscurantism. The movement that he led was the dominant power in European thought.

Will Durant concludes The Age of Voltaire, published in 1965, before the rise of religious fundamentalism, as follows:

“To the 18th century thinkers – and to the perhaps profounder philosophers of the 17th – we owe the relative freedom that we enjoy in our thought and speech and creeds; we owe the multiplication of schools, libraries and universities; we owe a hundred humane reforms in law and government, in the treatment of crime, sickness, and insanity... Because of those men we, here and now, can write without fear, though not without reproach. When we cease to honour Voltaire, we shall be unworthy of freedom.”