Jean Calas

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.

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In France, he is a symbol of Christian religious intolerance, along with Jean-Fran?ois de la Barre and Pierre-Paul Sirven.

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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.

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Louis, one of the Calas' sons, converted to Catholicism in 1756.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Voltaire, contacted about the case, after initial suspicions that Calas was guilty of anti-Catholic fanaticism, began a campaign to get Calas' sentence overturned.

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On March 9, 1765, Jean Calas was found not guilty.

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1762: 1762 was a common year starting on Friday (see link for calendar)....

Toulouse: Toulouse (pronounced in standard French, in local Toulouse accent) (Occitan: Tolosa, pronounced ) is a city in southwest France on the banks of the Garonne River, half-way between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. With close to 1.1 million inhabitants in 2005, the Toulouse metropolitan...

France: The French Republic or France (: R?publique fran?aise or France) is a country whose metropolitan territory is located in Western Europe, and which is further made up of a collection of overseas islands and territories located in other continents....

Jean Calas related Images and Photos (experimental)

Jean Calas Discovering His Dead Son by Emmanuel Jean Nepomucene de Ghendt	Jean Kent	Jean Reno	Jean Marsh
Jean Marais	Jean Seberg	Jean Seberg	Jean Toomer
Jean Peters	Jean Borlin	Jean Parker	Jean Rogers