1765
Jean Calas is vindicated
In October 1761, Marc-Antoine Calas was found dead on the floor of his family home. At first, his parents claimed that the man had been murdered but then changed their story to say that they had found him hanging and, wishing to avoid the scandal of suicide, cut him down. The father, Jean Calas, a prosperous merchant of Toulouse, was arrested and charged with the murder of his son. The motive imputed to him was that the younger Calas wished to convert to Catholicism and the father, a Protestant, killed him to prevent that. To the mob and the authorities, Marc-Antoine was a Catholic martyr. Under horrible torture, Calas refused to confess and even during his execution by being broken on the wheel, he clung to the story of suicide. His body was then burnt, his daughters were forced into a convent, his wife and sons forced to flee and his property was confiscated.
The case was taken up by the philosophe Voltaire who used it as a way of attacking the Catholic Church, accusing them of perverting justice in order to kill a Protestant. Since the 1685 Edict of Fontainebleau by Louis XIV, Catholicism had been the country’s only legal religion and Huguenots (French Protestants) always worshipped and lived under a cloud. In his Traité sur la Tolerance à l’occasion de la mort de Jean Calas Voltaire excoriated the Church for its bigotry, obscurantism and fanaticism. The case became a cause célebre throughout Europe and did much to discredit religion in the eyes of those who considered themselves enlightened.
What is less well known is the reaction of the court of Louis XV. Within less than three years of the trial, the king ordered a new panel to reconsider the evidence. They voted to rehabilitate the reputation of Jean Calas and vacate the guilty sentence. Louis XV also paid restitution to the family.