Écrasez l'infâme

"Écrasez l'infâme" (écrasez l'infâme, "crush the infamous thing") is a motto of the French writer Voltaire (1694 to 1778), which he repeated in his private letters from the early 1760s as a rallying cry against religious intolerance and the persecutions it produced. A modern summary of his career describes its target as "contemporaneous abuses of power by royal and religious authorities, and the superstition and intolerance fomented by the clergy".^[1]

Écrasez is the imperative of écraser, "to crush", in the plural or polite form, so the order is addressed to several people at once, or to one person formally. Infâme is an adjective, "infamous" or "vile", used here as a noun with the article l''', which in French hides the gender of the word that follows a vowel. The motto therefore leaves open whether the infamous thing is a la or a le.

By 1760 Voltaire was living at Ferney, on the French side of the border with Geneva, within reach of both countries. The Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford dates the first use of the battle cry to the period of 1762, when "Voltaire's attacks on the Christian establishment came to a head with the case of Jean Calas".^[2] Calas, a Protestant merchant of Toulouse, was accused of killing his son to prevent his conversion to Catholicism, and on March 10, 1762, he was broken on the wheel and strangled. Voltaire, persuaded that the family was innocent, campaigned for three years, wrote the Treatise on Tolerance (1763) about the case, and in 1765 saw the conviction overturned.^[1]

The motto stayed in his letters through the 1760s. In 1766 the chevalier de La Barre, a young nobleman of about twenty, was executed at Abbeville for blasphemy, after a crucifix on a bridge was damaged and he was said to have kept his hat on while a procession passed. A copy of Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary was burned with his body.

Voltaire treated one earlier victim of a church court with less sympathy. Joan of Arc, burned at Rouen in 1431 after a trial before a bishop, is the heroine of his mock-epic poem La Pucelle d'Orléans'', which circulated in manuscript for years and was first printed, without his permission, in 1755.

On March 28, 2026, Kent Kemmish, the founder of Molecular Reality Corporation, posted a note to the company's members under the title "2022 sci-tech overview", introducing a document of 2022 that spoke of the company's "IP portfolio". He disowned the phrase: "I don't pitch the project anymore with any reference to 'our IP portfolio'. I never believed that biotech should run on intellectual property, but I was pandering." He went on that he had "more battle scars now" and was "willing to pay the price to ecrasez l'infame", and named the infamous thing as the part of the biotechnology industry that profits from hoarding patients' data.^[3] He wrote it without accents and without naming Voltaire.

The next day a message titled "Ecrasez l'infame!" arrived in the members' inboxes from Jeanne d'Arc, one of the sender personas in which the founder posts to EQBio-OS. It linked to "234 answers by real humans to the question 'what excites you most about what we're building?'" and added: "Every so often I look at this and remember we're not crazy and/or alone in wanting to see this project come to fruition."^[4]

The policy behind the motto is the company's radical openness. Its website had promised in February 2026 that "our schematics and protocols will all become public domain".^[5] The company's patent on sliding occlusion lapsed in 2025, and on October 21, 2026, the design of the MR1 Nanopore Reader was released into the public domain under CC0 1.0.^[6]

• Patent US 10,908,144
• GNU Affero General Public License