Voltaire and the Calas affair
1762 · Event
Jean Calas, a Protestant merchant of Toulouse, is broken on the wheel for supposedly murdering a son who wanted to convert to Catholicism — a son who had in fact killed himself. Voltaire, convinced of the injustice, spends three years mobilising Europe with pamphlets and his Treatise on Toleration until the verdict is annulled and the family compensated: the Enlightenment's first great public-opinion campaign, fought under his war cry 'écrasez l'infâme'.
On these timelines: The Enlightenment, Master, France, Christianity, Major Religions
More from The Enlightenment
- Age of Enlightenment (1685)
- Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)
- Kant's 'What is Enlightenment?' (1784)
- Locke's A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689)
- Voltaire's Treatise on Tolerance (1763)
- Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality (1755)
- The Paris salons (1720)
- Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary (1764)
Around 1762
- Seven Years' War (1756)
- Presidency of George Washington (1789)
- Industrial Revolution (1760)
- American Declaration of Independence (1776)
- American Revolution (1765)
- Haitian Revolution (1791)
- Jacobite rising of 1745 (1745)
- French Revolution (1789)
- Latin American wars of independence (1808)
- Industrial Revolution begins (1760)