This is the interview episode for Week 15 of Self-Evident: The Road to 1776, "The Fork in the Road": Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Two Enlightenments. Tuesday's episode ended on the levy of February 1793 and the revolt in the Vendée: "they have killed our king, chased away our priests, and now they want to take our bodies."

This December, Selective Service registration becomes automatic. The duty to sign up moves from the man to the government, and the agency that has to run it withdrew its implementing rules in July without ever publishing them.

What is covered: the Calas affair and the four arguments of the Treatise on Tolerance; the general will versus the will of all; the real limits Rousseau set on his sovereign, and the question he did not clearly answer, which is who applies them; the "noble savage" phrase that is not his, and the famous Voltaire line that Voltaire never wrote; what Americans actually read of each man; how Robespierre invoked Rousseau, and why invocation is not derivation; how Edmund Burke and

Voltaire reached them early and reached them as a historian and a dramatist more than as a philosopher. His histories were in colonial libraries; his plays were performed; Candide circulated. The part that bears on this article is the toleration argument, which also circulated, and which arrived in a colonial world already working out its own settlements between churches and civil authority.³⁰ None of that makes a French book the source of any American measure, and the surviv