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The Great Irony of Censorship – Ada Palmer
TL;DR
Censors usually fixate on the wrong threat — Ada Palmer’s core point is that authorities obsess over tiny doctrinal disputes like Jansenism or Protestant minutiae while missing ideas that later reshape the world, like Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Machiavelli, and Lucretius.
The Inquisition treated Jansenist theology as more dangerous than the Enlightenment — Palmer describes raids where officials effectively shrugged at Voltaire, Rousseau, and the banned Encyclopédie but wanted to “throw the book” at texts debating the Trinity.
France literally staged a fake burn rather than destroy the Encyclopédie — Even after Rome ordered Paris to ban Diderot and d’Holbach’s encyclopedia, French authorities marched it to the fire ceremonially and burned Jansenist treatises instead because the king, queen, and public all loved the book.
Elite censors dismissed genuinely radical works as harmless because only scholars read them — Palmer cites inquisitors saying Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura didn’t need censorship since “learned people” would know the false parts were false, a massive historical misread in hindsight.
The archival details make the irony vivid — In the 1545 Index of banned books, Palmer excitedly flips to see “arch-heretics” in all caps and finds not Machiavelli but minor Protestant theologians like Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and Melanchthon, revealing what censors thought actually mattered.
The Breakdown
The big thesis: censorship has terrible instincts
Ada Palmer opens with the provocation that when you study the history of censorship, the censors are “always wrong from our perspective” about what they should have been worried about. If we had a time machine, she says, we’d go back and try to redirect their attention toward the ideas that actually changed history.
The French Enlightenment and the Inquisition’s bizarre priorities
Her favorite example is Enlightenment Europe, where Voltaire, Rousseau, the Marquis de Sade, and La Mettrie’s materialist atheism are circulating — and yet the Inquisition is fixated on Jansenism. Palmer gleefully dunks on it as basically “all the grimness of Calvinism and all of the authoritarian centrality of the Roman Catholics,” then points out the absurdity: this petty heresy drew more heat than Voltaire.
The bookshop raid that says everything
She cites a scene from Matthiesen’s book: officials raid a clandestine bookshop and react to “Voltaire, fine… Rousseau, fine” and even the banned Encyclopédie, fine. But Jansenist treatises on the Trinity? That’s the real scandal, the one they want to “throw the book at,” which perfectly captures how censors obsess over insider theological turf wars instead of civilizational shifts.
How the Encyclopédie got saved by people who loved it
Palmer then turns to the Encyclopédie itself, Diderot and d’Holbach’s universal education project, framed so grandly that one surviving copy could help humanity rebuild after a new dark age. Rome banned it, but Paris didn’t want to: the king liked it, the queen liked it, and Palmer adds the wonderfully specific detail that Marie Antoinette loved being able to look up how her silk pantyhose were made.
The ceremonial burning that burned the wrong books
So when Rome demanded a ban, France staged the ritual. They marched the Encyclopédie up to the fire — and then burned Jansenist treatises instead, because that was the material they actually wanted gone. It’s Palmer’s whole thesis in miniature: institutions perform censorship around prestige politics while their real anxieties are elsewhere.
Lucretius, Machiavelli, and what the Inquisition missed
She widens the lens to the 1540s: if we could advise the Inquisition, she says, we’d tell them to pay attention to Machiavelli or Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura. Instead, inquisitors literally wrote that Lucretius didn’t need censoring because only learned readers could handle it — a calm, confident dismissal of a text later treated as hugely consequential.
The all-caps heretics and the tiny dramas censors cared about
Palmer ends with a delicious archival anecdote from the 1545 Index of banned books, whose introduction promises that “arch-heretics” will appear in all caps. She eagerly flips to M hoping for Machiavelli and finds… not him, because from their viewpoint he wasn’t important enough; the all-caps names are Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Melanchthon, and other Protestant theologians. That leads to her closing jab: authorities are forever panicking about dynastic marriages while someone in the background says, “We’ve discovered another continent,” and they barely look up.
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