Voltaire

This is the story of a man who cast a gigantic shadow down the corridor of history. This democracy we live in, all democracies, are his true and eternal monuments. The time is 1762, a Specter-Haunt's Europe.

It is fifteen years before the first shot will be fired at Bunker Hill. It is nineteen years before the wall to the Bastille will come thundering down under the wild onslaught of the French Revolution.

across the teaming world. Somewhere amongst the multitudes, still obscures yet, move the dim significant figures of Rob's Pierra, Marah, Washington, Tom Payne. This is an on-track tier, a prologue before the curtain rises upon the immense cataclysm of revolution. NBC University of the Air presents We Came This Way, a new historical series for our listeners at home and overseas, with

With Clifton Utley as the narrator, we present Chapter Ten, a story of Voltaire's fight for justice in We Came This Way. In France, Louis XV lounges upon the throne and walks in the gardens of Versailles, with the Fair Bejeweled Madame Depompadour.

France, like the palace itself, faces the world in magnificent gilded's flender, but inwardly suffers disease and corruption. is a lackie to feudal king and princes. Cruel, narrow-minded superstitions sits on the bench with the judges. Bonatticism delivers up victims daily to the public executioners. Men are tortured, broken on the wheel, put to the rack, burned and hinged for crimes which are not crimes

in the eyes of enlightened men, and not crimes in the eyes of that other king of France, Emperor of wit and tongue, Francois Marie Arway de Voltaire, who feared nothing and lashed everything. In France, the judges of Parperian in official robes. It is he who deserves to be hanged rather than his fellow citizens whom he condemns to