Catherine the Great

In March 1762, Voltaire learned that a sixty-four-year-old Protestant Huguenot, Jean Calas, a dealer in linens in Toulouse, had been executed under torture. His eldest son, suffering from depression, had committed suicide in the family’s house. The father, Jean, knowing that the law demanded that the body of a suicide be dragged naked through the streets, pelted with mud and stones, and then hanged, persuaded his family to join him in reporting a natural death. The police saw the rope marks on the son’s neck, however, and charged that Calas had murdered his son to prevent him from converting to Catholicism. A high court prescribed torture to make Calas confess. He was placed on the rack and his arms and legs were pulled from their sockets; in agony, he admitted that his son’s death was a suicide. This was not the confession the authorities wanted; they demanded that he confess to murder. Fifteen pints of water were poured down his throat; he still protested his own innocence. Another fifteen pints were forced into him; he was convinced that he was drowning, but still cried that he was innocent. He was stretched on a cross in the public square before the Toulouse cathedral. The public executioner took a heavy iron bar and crushed each of his four limbs in two places; the old man still proclaimed his innocence. He was strangled and died.

Donat Calas, the youngest of six Calas children, came to Ferney and begged Voltaire to defend his dead father’s innocence. Voltaire, appalled and infuriated by this cruelty, undertook the legal rehabilitation of the victim. For three years, from 1762 to 1765, he hired lawyers and mobilized European opinion. During the summer of 1763, he wrote Traité sur la Tolérance, which argued that Roman persecution of Christians in the early years of Christianity had now been surpassed by Christian persecution of other Christians who were “hanged, drowned, broken on the wheel, or burned for the love of God.” Eventually, Voltaire appealed to the high council of the kingdom, presided over by the king. There, eventually, Jean Calas was posthumously exonerated and his reputation rehabilitated.

This triumph was accompanied by another. Elisabeth, the daughter of Pierre Paul Sirven, a Protestant living near Toulouse, wished to convert to Catholicism and had been spirited away to a convent by a Catholic bishop. There, she ripped off her clothes and demanded to be flogged; prudently, the bishop returned her to her family. A few months later, Elisabeth disappeared. She was discovered drowned in a well. Forty-five local witnesses testified that the girl had committed suicide, but the prosecutor ordered her father’s arrest and accused him of having murdered his daughter to prevent her conversion. On March 19, 1764, Sirven and his wife were both condemned to be hanged; their two surviving daughters, one of them pregnant, were to be forced to watch. The family fled to Geneva, reached Ferney, and asked Voltaire to help them. The philosopher again took up his pen. He recruited Frederick of Prussia, Catherine of Russia, Stanislaus of Poland, and other monarchs to take up the cause. After nine years of endless argument, Sirven was acquitted. “It took two hours to condemn this man to death,” Voltaire said bitterly, “and nine years to prove his innocence.”

With Voltaire in eternal combat, his widowed niece, Mme Denis, acted as mistress of the house—and as his bedroom companion. Voltaire saw nothing wrong in sexual irregularity; he defined morality as “doing good to mankind.” In any case, it was an age of sexual irregularity, and Voltaire’s relationship with Mme Denis was straightforward. He concealed nothing; she was his mistress; he called her “my beloved.” In 1748, in the early years of their relationship (it continued until his death), he had written to her, “I shall be coming to Paris only for you.… In the meantime, I press a thousand kisses on your round breasts, on your ravishing bottom, on all your person, which has so often given me erections and plunged me into a flood of delight.”