Voltaire: Treatise on Tolerance. Вольтер
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so warm that both were obliged to enter protests against each other’s proceedings, and retire into the country.
But by a strange fatality, the judge who had been on the favorable side had the delicacy to persist in his exceptions, and the other returned to give his vote against those on whom he could no longer sit as judge; and it was his single vote which carried the sentence of being broken upon the wheel against them, there being eight voices against five, one of the six merciful judges being at last, after much contestation, brought over to the rigorous side.
In my opinion, in cases of parricide, and where the master of a family is to be devoted to the most dreadful punishment, the sentence ought to be unanimous, inasmuch as the proofs of so unparalleled3 a crime ought to be proved in such a manner as to satisfy all the world, and the least shadow of a doubt in a case of this nature should be sufficient to make the judge tremble who is about to pass sentence of death. The weakness of our reason, and the insufficiency of our laws, become every day more obvious; but surely there cannot be a greater example of this deficiency than that one single casting vote should be sufficient to condemn a fellow-citizen to be broken alive on the wheel; the Athenians required at least fifty voices, over and above the one-half of the judges, before they would dare to pronounce sentence of death; but to what does all this tend? Why, to what we know, but make very little use of, that the Greeks were wiser and more humane than ourselves.
It appeared altogether impossible that John Calas, who was an old man of sixty-eight, and had a long while been troubled with a swelling and weakness in his legs, should have been able by himself to have mastered his son and hanged him, who was a stout young fellow of eight and twenty, and more than commonly robust; therefore he must absolutely have been assisted in this act by his wife, his other son, Peter Calas, Lavaisse, and by the servant-maid, and they had been together the whole night of this fatal adventure. But this supposition is altogether as absurd as the other; for can any one believe that a servant, who was a zealous Catholic, would have permitted those whom she looked on as heretics to murder a young man whom she herself had brought up, for his attachment to a religion to which she herself was devoted; that Lavaisse would have come purposely from Bordeaux to assist in hanging his friend, of whose pretended conversion he knew nothing, or that an affectionate mother would have joined in laying violent hands on her own son? And lastly, how could they all together have been able to strangle a young man stronger than them all, without a long and violent struggle, or without his making such a noise as must have been heard by the whole neighborhood, without repeated blows passing between them, without any marks of violence, or without any of their clothes being in the least soiled or disordered!
It was evident that if this murder could in the nature of things have been committed, the accused persons were all of them equally guilty, because they did not quit each other’s company an instant the whole night; but then it was equally evident that they were not guilty, and that the father alone could not be so, and yet, by the sentence of the judges, the father alone was condemned to suffer.
The motive on which this sentence was passed was as unaccountable as all the rest of the proceeding. Those judges who had given their opinion for the execution of John Calas persuaded the others that this poor old man, unable to support the torments, would, when on the wheel, make a full confession of his own guilt and that of his accomplices; but how wretchedly were they confounded, when yielding up his breath on that instrument of execution, he called God as a witness of his innocence, and besought Him to forgive his judges!
They were afterwards obliged to pass a second decree, which contradicted the first, namely to set at liberty the mother, her son Peter, young Lavaisse, and the maid-servant; but one of the counsellors having made them sensible that this latter decree contradicted the other, and that they condemned themselves, inasmuch as, it having been proved that all the accused parties had been constantly together during the whole time the murder was supposed to be committed, the setting at liberty the survivors was an incontestable proof of the innocence of the master of the family whom they had ordered to be executed; on this it was determined to banish Peter Calas, the son, which was an act as ill-grounded and absurd as any of the rest, for Peter Calas was either guilty or not guilty of the murder; if he was guilty, he ought to have suffered in the same manner as his father; if he was innocent, there was no reason for banishing him. But the judges, frightened with the sufferings of the father, and with that affecting piety with which he had resigned his life, thought to preserve their characters by making people believe that they showed mercy to the son; as if this was not a new degree of prevarication, and that, thinking no bad consequences could arise from banishing this young man, who was poor and destitute of friends, was not a very great additional act of injustice after that which they had been already so unfortunate as to commit.
They now began to go to work with Peter Calas in his confinement, threatening to treat him as they had done his father, if he would not abjure his religion. This the young man has declared on oath, as follows:
“A Dominican friar came to me to my cell, and threatened me with the same kind of death if I did not abjure; this I attest before God, this 23d day of July, 1762.
PETER CALAS.”
As Peter was going out of the town, he was met by one of the abbés with a converting spirit, who made him return back to Toulouse, where he was shut up in a convent of Dominicans, and there compelled to perform all the functions of a convert to the Catholic religion; this was in part what his persecutors aimed at, it was the price of his father’s blood, and due atonement now seemed to be made to the religion of which they looked on themselves as the avengers.
The daughters were next taken from their mother, and shut up in a convent. This unhappy woman, who had been, as it were, sprinkled with the blood of her husband, who had held her eldest son lifeless within her arms, had seen the other banished, her daughters taken from her, herself stripped of her effects, and left alone in the wide world destitute of bread, and bereft of hopes, was almost weighed down to the grave with the excess of her misfortunes. Some certain persons, who had maturely weighed all the circumstances of this horrible adventure, were so struck with them that they pressed Mrs. Calas, who now led a life of retirement and solitude, to exert herself, and go and demand justice at the foot of the throne. At this time she was scarcely able to drag about the remains of a miserable life; besides, having been born in England and brought over to a distant province in France when very young, the very name of the city of Paris frightened her. She imagined that in the capital of the kingdom they must be still more cruel than in Toulouse; at length, however, the duty of revenging the death of her husband got the better of her weakness. She set out for Paris, arrived there half dead, and was surprised to find herself received with tenderness, sympathy, and offers of assistance.
In Paris reason always triumphs over enthusiasm, however great, whereas in the more distant provinces of the kingdom, enthusiasm almost always triumphs over reason.
M. de Beaumont, a famous lawyer of the Parliament of Paris, immediately took her cause in hand, and drew up an opinion, which was signed by fifteen other lawyers. M. Loiseau, equally famous for his eloquence, likewise drew up a memorial in favor of this unhappy family; and M. Mariette, solicitor to the council, drew up a formal statement of the case, which struck every one who read it with conviction.
These three noble defenders of the laws and of innocence made the widow a present of all the profits arising from the publication of these pieces,4 which filled not only Paris but all Europe with pity for this unfortunate woman, and every one cried aloud for justice to be done her. In a word, the public passed sentence on this affair long before it was determined by the council.
The soft infection made its way even to the Cabinet, notwithstanding the continual round of business, which often excludes pity, and the familiarity of beholding miserable objects, which too frequently steels the heart of the statesman against the cries of distress. The daughters were restored to their disconsolate mother, and all three in deep mourning, and bathed in tears, drew a sympathetic flood from the eyes of their judges, before whom they prostrated themselves in thankful acknowledgment.
Nevertheless, this family had still some enemies to encounter, for it is to be considered that this was an affair of religion. Several persons, whom in France we call dévots,5 declared publicly that it was much better to suffer