A virulent pamphleteer, Voltaire speaks out against fanaticism, prejudices and obscurantism in criminal cases such as Calas, Sirven and La Barre’s trials. By imposing torture, the death penalty and discipline, the royal justice system, is, by its very nature, opposed to Voltaire’s modernity, moderation and secularism regarding crimes and punishments. Close to Beccaria’s reformism, his penal philosophy shows the linkage between judicial liberalism and Enlightenment. The impassioned trial brought by Voltaire against the royal justice system has lost none of its hermeneutic modernity, something which is too often caricatured by a historiography that is hostile to the Enlightenment “philosophers.”