Chapter I.

       A Brief Account Of The Death Of John Calas.

       Table of Contents

      The murder of John Calas, committed in Toulouse with the sword of justice, the 9th of March, 1762, is an event which, on account of its singularity, calls for the attention of the present age, and that of posterity. We soon forget the crowd of victims who have fallen in the course of innumerable battles, not only because this is a destiny inevitably connected with a life of warfare, but because those who thus fell might also have given death to their enemies, and did not lose their lives till after having first stood in their own defence. Where the danger and the advantage are equal, our wonder ceases, and even pity itself is in some measure lessened; but where the father of an innocent family is delivered up to the sword of error, prejudice, or enthusiasm, where the accused person has no other defence but his conscious virtue; where the arbiters of his destiny have nothing to hazard in putting him to death but the having been mistaken, and where they may murder with impunity under the sanction of a judicial process, then every one is ready to cry out, every one brings the case home to himself, and sees with fear and trembling that no person’s life is in safety in a court erected to watch over the lives of the subject, the public unite in demanding vengeance.

      In this strange affair, we find religion, self-murder and parricide blended. The object of inquiry was, whether a father and a mother had murdered their own son with a view to please God, and whether a brother had murdered his brother, or a friend his friend; or whether the judges had to reproach themselves with having publicly executed an innocent father, or with having acquitted a guilty mother, brother, and friend.

      John Calas, a person of sixty-eight years of age, had followed the profession of a merchant in Toulouse for upwards of forty years, and had always borne the character of a tender parent in his family and neighborhood; he was himself by religion a Protestant, as was also his wife, and all his children, one son only excepted, who had abjured heresy, and to whom the father allowed a small annuity; indeed, the good man appeared so far from being infected with that