Jean Calas
Jean Calas (1698 – 10 March 1762) was a merchant living in Toulouse, France, famous for having been the victim of a biased trial due to his being a Protestant. In France, he is a symbol of Christian religious intolerance, along with Jean-François de la Barre and Pierre-Paul Sirven.
Calas, along with his wife, was a Protestant. France was then a mostly Catholic country; Catholicism was the state religion. While the harsh oppression of Protestantism initiated by King Louis XIV had largely receded, Protestants were, at best, tolerated. Louis, one of the Calas' sons, converted to Catholicism in 1756. On 13–14 October 1761, another of the Calas' sons, Marc-Antoine, was found dead on the ground floor of the family's home. Rumors had it that Jean Calas had killed his son because he, too, intended to convert to Catholicism. The family, interrogated, first claimed that Marc-Antoine had been killed by a murderer. Then they declared that they had found Marc-Antoine dead, hanged; since suicide was then considered a heinous crime against oneself, and the dead bodies of suicides were defiled, they had arranged for their son's suicide to look like a murder.
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On 9 March 1762, the parlement (regional legislature that also tried cases) of Toulouse sentenced Jean Calas to death on the wheel. On 10 March, at the age of 64, he died tortured on the wheel, while still very firmly claiming his innocence.
Voltaire, contacted about the case, after initial suspicions that Calas was guilty of anti-Catholic fanaticism had subsided, began a campaign to get Calas's sentence overturned. He claimed that Marc-Antoine had committed suicide because of gambling debts and not being able to finish his university studies due to his confession. Voltaire's efforts were successful, and in 1765 the unfortunate Jean Calas was posthumously exonerated on all charges. His family were paid 36,000 Francs by the king in compensation.[1]
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- l'Affaire Calas (in French)
- Voltaire's Traité sur la Tolérance à l'occasion de la mort de Jean Calas (in French)
"The Calas Case". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. 1913.- Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Calas, Jean". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
