Jean Calas
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Jean Calas (1698 - 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.
Jean Calas, along with his wife, was a Protestant. France was then a mostly Catholic country; Catholicism was the state religion. While the harsh repression 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 October 13-14, 1761, another of the Calas' sons, Marc-Antoine, was found dead in the ground floor of the familial home. Rumors contend that Jean Calas killed his son because he, too, intended to convert to Catholicism.
The family, interrogated, first pretended that Marc-Antoine had been killed by a marauder. Then, they declared that they had found Marc-Antoine dead, hanged; since suicide was then considered a highly heinous crime against oneself, and the dead bodies of the suicided were defiled, they had arranged so that their son's suicide would look like a murder.
On March 9, 1762 the parlement (appellate court) of Toulouse sentenced Jean Calas to death on the wheel. On March 10, Jean Calas 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, began a campaign to get Calas' sentence overturned.
On March 9, 1765, Jean Calas was found not guilty.
External links
- l'Affaire Calas (http://www.site-magister.com/afcal.htm) (in French)
- Voltaire's Traité sur la Tolérance à l'occasion de la mort de Jean Calas (http://perso.wanadoo.fr/dboudin/VOLTAIRE/Traite.htm) (in French)