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Updated: June 8, 2025
The king at the same time granted Madame Calas and her children a gratuity of thirty-six thousand livres, a tacit and inadequate compensation for the expenses and losses caused them by the fanatical injustice of the Parliament of Toulouse. Madame Calas asked no more.
He has written much, much will be forgiven him. He has lately rendered an immortal service, for which I could almost love him, were it possible to love him at all. He undertook with bold courage the defence of the unhappy Jean Calas, who was murdered by fanatical French priests. The priests, perhaps, will condemn him; we, however, honor him."
When Voltaire visited Paris in 1778 he was acclaimed by crowds as the defender of Calas and the Sirvens. His disinterested practical activity against persecution was of far more value than the treatise on Toleration which he wrote in connexion with the Calas episode. It is a poor work compared with those of Locke and Bayle.
The most infamous case was that of Jean Calas, a Protestant merchant of Toulouse, whose son committed suicide. A report was set abroad that the young man had decided to join the Catholic Church, and that his father, mother, and brother, filled with Protestant bigotry, killed him, with the help of a friend.
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.
That is the true merit, the great good of the theatres; there is achieved what can never be achieved by the frigid declamations of an orator paid to bore the whole of an audience for an hour. David the capitoul, who, without emotion, caused and saw the death of innocent Calas on the wheel, would have shed tears at the sight of his own crime in a well-written and well-spoken tragedy.
Here you have an example of what the Catholic revival does. It first breaks Calas on the wheel; and then, because Voltaire took up his cause, it makes modern Frenchmen, if they are Catholics, believe that Calas deserved it:
He then tried Berlin, finding it equally untenable ground; eventually he withdrew to Ferney in the territory of Geneva, whence he kept up incessant war against all the injustices which touched his heart. His defence of Calas, of Servin, of the luckless Lally, all date from this time.
Of the fierce tragedies which were played in Toulouse, even to the days of the great Revolution, few traces remain, the stern, orthodox figure of Simon de Montfort, and of Count Raymond, his too politic foe, and the anguish of the Crusaders' siege, the bent form of Jean Calas and the shrewd, keen face of Voltaire, who vindicated him from afar, these memories seem dimmed; and those which live are of light-hearted troubadours and gaily dressed ladies of the city of the gay, insouciant Renaissance to whom an auto-da-fè was a gala between the blithesome robing of the morning and the serenade in the moonlight.
To all these he spoke vehemently of Calas and his sentence. He gave himself no rest until he had inflamed the minds of all men against the horrible injustice. At length, the case of Calas became known all over France, and in fact all over Europe. The press of Paris rang with it. In the boudoirs and salons, Calas was the subject of conversation.
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