Voltaire’s Treatise on Tolerance (1763)

Treatise on Tolerance is a book written by Voltaire following the trial of Jean Calas (1698–1762), a French Protestant merchant accused of murdering his son Marc-Antoine to prevent his supposed conversion to the Catholic Church. Calas was executed in Toulouse on March 10, 1762, after being tortured; he never confessed to a crime that completely lacked evidence. The execution was largely driven by an angry mob and the zeal of some local magistrates.

Struck by the extreme injustice, Voltaire undertook a private and public campaign to exonerate Jean Calas, exposing Catholic prejudice and fanaticism along the way. In 1765, after Louis XV dismissed the chief magistrate and the case was retried, Calas was posthumously exonerated and his family received 36 thousand francs.

“There are about forty million inhabitants in Europe who are not members of the Church of Rome; should we say to every one of them, ‘Sir, since you are infallibly damned, I shall neither eat, converse, nor have any connections with you?’”

“O different worshipers of a peaceful God! If you have a cruel heart, if, while you adore He whose whole law consists of these few words, ‘Love God and your neighbor’…”

“I see all the dead of past ages and of our own appearing in His presence. Are you very sure that our Creator and Father will say to the wise and virtuous Confucius, to the legislator Solon, to Pythagoras, Zaleucus, Socrates, Plato, the divine Antonins, the good Trajan, to Titus, the delights of mankind, to Epictetus, and to many others, models of men: ‘Go, monsters, go and suffer torments that are infinite in intensity and duration. Let your punishment be eternal as I am. But you, my beloved ones, Jean Châtel, Ravaillac, Damiens, Cartouche, etc. who have died according to the prescribed rules, sit forever at my right hand and share my empire and my felicity.’ You draw back with horror at these words; and after they have escaped me, I have nothing more to say to you.”

Voltaire finished the work by January 2, 1763, and it was printed by the Cramer brothers in Geneva in April 1763. After copies had been distributed to selected recipients—including Madame de Pompadour, ministers of the French privy council, Frederick the Great, and some German princes—it began to circulate publicly in October 1763, only to be quickly banned. Nevertheless, the book reached the public, becoming extremely popular in Paris and across Europe.

In January 2015, after the Charlie Hebdo shooting, it was reported that Treatise on Tolerance had become a bestseller in France more than 250 years after its first publication.

Voltaire’s supposed words “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”—in relation to the burning of On Mind by the atheist philosopher Helvétius, a book he privately dismissed as a trivial “omelette”—went viral, but even those tweeting them often knew that they were only attributed to him (by, bizarrely, an Edwardian British biographer, Evelyn Hall, whose attempted paraphrase came to be treated as a real quotation).

Like George Orwell, Voltaire is an awkward bedfellow, intolerant of hypocrisy, stupidity, and zealotry, and always liable to turn his ironic gaze on you.

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