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Sirven was advised to return to Toulouse, and offer himself as a prisoner. He did so. The case was tried with the same results as before; the advocates, acting under Voltaire's instructions and with his help, succeeded in obtaining the judges' unanimous decision that Sirven was innocent of the crime for which he had already been sentenced to death.
If Voltaire could not write like Fénelon, at least he could never talk like Tartufe; he responded to no tale of wrong with words about his mission, with strings of antitheses, but always with royal anger and the spring of alert and puissant endeavour. In an hour of oppression one would rather have been the friend of the saviour of the Calas and of Sirven, than of the vindicator of theism.
In the same way Voltaire wrote pungent pages against the narrow practices of Calvinism and yet espoused the causes of Calas and Sirven, even as Zola has espoused that of Dreyfus. He is no ranter, no lover of words for words' sake, no fiery enthusiast. Each of his books is a most laborious, painstaking piece of work.
One of the ordinary practices of the Catholics was to seize the children of Protestants and carry them off to some nunnery to be educated at the expense of their parents. The priests of Toulouse had obtained a lettre de cachet to take away the daughter of a Protestant named Sirven, to compel her to change her religion. She was accordingly seized and carried off to a nunnery.
This scandal could only have happened in the provinces, according to Voltaire: at Paris, he says, fanaticism, powerful though it may be, is always controlled by reason. The case of Sirven, though it did not end tragically, was similar, and the government of Toulouse was again responsible.
Such were his noble defence of the Calas family, his successful attack upon the outrages committed upon Sirven and his family, securing the liberation of Espinasse from the galleys, the vindication of General Lally, and the brave battle for D'Etalonde and La Barre, together with many other cases in which his powerful pen proved its strength in defence of the weak against the oppression of civil and ecclesiastical tyranny.
There has come into fashion a strange and easy manner of suppressing the revelations of history, of invalidating the commentaries of philosophy, of eliding all embarrassing facts and all gloomy questions. A matter for declamations, say the clever. Declamations, repeat the foolish. Jean-Jacques a declaimer; Diderot a declaimer; Voltaire on Calas, Labarre, and Sirven, declaimers.
Rousseau, however, whose biographer has no such stories to tell as those of Calas and La Barre, Sirven and Lally, but only tales of a maiden wrongfully accused of theft, and a friend left senseless on the pavement of a strange town, and a benefactress abandoned to the cruelty of her fate, still was moved in the midst of his erotic visions in the forest of Montmorency to speak a jealous word in vindication of the divine government of our world.
After the trials of Calas and Sirven, the punishment of the galleys was evidently drawing to an end. Only two persons were sent to the galleys during the year in which Pastor Rochette was hanged. But a circumstance came to light respecting one of the galley-slaves who had been liberated in that very year , which had the effect of eventually putting an end to the cruelty.
For years he filled Europe with the echoes of the groans of Jean Calas. He succeeded. The horrible judgment was annulled the poor victim declared innocent and thousands of dollars raised to support the mother and family. This was the work of Voltaire. Sirven, a Protestant, lived in Languedoc with his wife and three daughters.
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