As this polemic crystallized and grew in both energy and influence, Voltaire embraced its terms and made them his cause. He formed particularly close ties with d’Alembert, and with him began to generalize a broad program for Enlightenment centered on rallying the newly self-conscious philosophes (a term often used synonymously with the Encyclopédistes) toward political and intellectual change. In this program, the philosophes were not unified by any shared philosophy but through a commitment to the program of defending philosophie itself against its perceived enemies. They were also imagined as activists fighting to eradicate error and superstition from the world. The ongoing defense of the Encyclopédie was one rallying point, and soon the removal of the Jesuits—the great enemies of Enlightenment, the philosophes proclaimed—became a second unifying cause. This effort achieved victory in 1763, and soon the philosophes were attempting to infiltrate the academies and other institutions of knowledge in France. One climax in this effort was reached in 1774 when the Encyclopédiste and friend of Voltaire and the philosophes, Anne-Robert Jacques Turgot, was named Controller-General of France, the most powerful ministerial position in the kingdom, by the newly crowned King Louis XVI. Voltaire and his allies had paved the way for this victory through a barrage of writings throughout the 1760s and 1770s that presented philosophie like that espoused by Turgot as an agent of enlightened reform and its critics as prejudicial defenders of an ossified tradition.