Marriage Quote by Voltaire

Voltaire turns a domestic institution into a timeline gag, then uses the punchline to smuggle in his real argument: whatever sanctity marriage claims, human dissent has been stapled to it from the start. The joke hinges on mock-scholarly precision. “Probably,” “I believe,” “some weeks” mimic the careful hedging of a historian, but the subject is ludicrously unquantifiable. That false exactness is the knife. By pretending you can date marriage and divorce like archaeological strata, he punctures the moralizing certainty that treats divorce as a modern decadence rather than an old, persistent fact of life.

The subtext is classic Enlightenment anticlericalism without naming the Church. In Voltaire’s France, marriage was less a romantic choice than a legal and religious contract tied to property, lineage, and social order. Divorce, in various forms, was constrained or stigmatized; the official story leaned hard on permanence. Voltaire’s line doesn’t argue policy directly. It implies that institutional claims about “indissolubility” are cosmetic, maintained by authority and rhetoric rather than human behavior.

The “some weeks” is doing cultural work: it concedes, with theatrical politeness, that marriage may have gotten a ceremonial head start, but only barely. The laugh lands because it reframes divorce not as a scandalous exception but as marriage’s shadow twin - the practical amendment people invent the moment ideals collide with lived experience. Voltaire’s intent isn’t to sneer at commitment; it’s to sneer at systems that pretend commitment has ever been simple, unanimous, or enforceable by decree.