Career
In France, he became a symbolic victim of religious intolerance, along with François-Jean de la Barre and Pierre-Paul Sirven. On 13–14 October 1761, another of the Calas sons, Marc-Antoine, was found dead on the ground floor of the family"s home. 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. Calas was tortured in an attempt to get him to admit that he was guilty.
His arms and legs were stretched until they pulled out of their sockets. Thirty pints (more than 17 litres) of water were poured down his throat.
He was tied to a cross in the cathedral square where each of his limbs were broken twice by an iron Barometer
Yet with all this torture he continued to declare his innocence. On March 9, 1762 the parlement (regional legislature that also tried cases) of Toulouse sentenced Jean Calas to death on the wheel. On March 10, at the age of 64, he died tortured on the wheel, while still very firmly claiming his innocence.
French philosopher Voltaire was contacted about the case, and after initial suspicions that Calas was guilty of anti-Catholic fanaticism were dispelled by his investigations, he began a campaign to get Calas" sentence overturned, claiming 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 king Louis XV received the family and had the sentence annulled in 1764. The king fired the chief magistrate of Toulouse, the Capitoul, the trial was done over by a fair court, and in 1765 Jean Calas was posthumously exonerated on all charges, with the family paid 36,000 francs by the king in compensation.
Voltaire used the case to blast the Church for its intolerant and fanatical views in his 1763 work Treatise on Tolerance.
