In 1717 a satirical poem directed at the late Louis XIV, his mistress, and the new regent made the rounds of French society.

One day, while the 22-year-old Voltaire was sauntering through the royal gardens, he happened upon the regent, the Duke of Orleans, who challenged him:

I bet you, M. Arouet, I will show you something you have never seen before.

The next morning Voltaire was awakened by an official who served him with a lettre de cachet, searched his room thoroughly, arrested him, and hustled him off to the Bastille. He was not allowed to contact family members, friends, or a lawyer. For eleven months Voltaire was kept in the infamous prison, neither charged with a crime nor tried.¹

Had the regent been as swift to try Voltaire in a fair trial as he was to arrest him, he and the other authorities would have learned that, contrary to the report from their spy Beauregard, Voltaire was not the author of the offending poem. On the other hand, had the brilliant young playwright been subjected to a partisan trial, the result would have been a long term in the Bastille. A partisan trial, in all likelihood, would not have discovered that Voltaire did not write the satire. He was capable of writing it; he had written other imprudent and impudent verses, and he might have written it. For a partisan trial, as for indefinite detention without a trial under the lettre de cachet, the truth, guilt, or innocence is irrelevant. A partisan trial, for the purposes of justice, is the same as no trial at all. But partisan trials do serve other purposes.

Partisan trials have only one agenda, power, and one issue, expediency, which serves as the substitute for justice. They are outside the rule of law, often enveloped within an ideological wonderland. If most ordinary trials operate from a legal agenda with no political overtones, partisan trials are the opposite: only a political agenda covered with a thin veneer of legality.