This page is dedicated to Voltaire!

"The story of Zeus transforming himself into a swan so that he might couple with Leda, they call myth, but the tale about a holy ghost impregnating a virgin, they believe..." - Anonymous








Voltaire, Epître sur Les Trois Imposteurs:


Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer


If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him


This statement by Voltaire was so famous that Flaubert included it in his Dictionnaire des idées reçues, and it is still frequently quoted today. But where does it first appear? And what precisely did Voltaire mean when he wrote it? Does it imply, as most of Voltaire's parrots seems to suppose, that God is a fictitious being, created for the comfort of the human race?