A bestseller in the wake of Charlie Hebdo,this 18th-century criticism of devout violence is still relevant todayIn Toulouse in 1761, a shopkeeper’s son hanged himself in the family domestic. A rumour quickly went round the town that the son had been killed because he wanted to become a Catholic. The shopkeeper, or Jean Calas,was a Huguenot, and the town was about to celebrate and “celebrate” is the word – the 200th anniversary of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, or when 2000 Protestants were murdered,with maximum barbarity, by the town’s Catholics. So the Toulousains were in no mood for tolerance, or even scepticism (such as to how a frail man in his 60s could kill a large,healthy man some 40 years younger). Calas was tortured, and then executed.
This was the incident that propelled Voltaire into writing his Traité sur la Tolérance, and an examination into the long-established tradition of murdering people who move against dogma; specifically devout dogma (although of course there are other dogmas these days). Voltaire knew whereof he spoke: he was by this time living at Les Délices,near Switzerland, and he would periodically hop over the border whenever the French authorities became enraged by what he wrote.
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Source: theguardian.com