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Why was Jean Calas executed in 1762?

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Life-sized plaster sculpture Seated Voltaire by Jean-Antoine Houdon shows Voltaire draped in a robe, seated with a thoughtful expression and a ribbon crown, against a dark background. — Voltaire *Voltaire*, plaster sculpture by Jean-Antoine Houdon; in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California.

Jean Calas, a Huguenot cloth merchant, was executed in 1762 due to intense anti-Protestant prejudice following the death of his son, Marc-Antoine. After his son was found hanged in their textile shop in Toulouse, local authorities falsely accused Calas of murdering him to prevent or punish his potential conversion to Roman Catholicism.1

Despite Calas’s insistence that his son had committed suicide, the local Parlement condemned him to death. He was publicly broken on the wheel and executed on March 10, 1762. This miscarriage of justice, driven by religious intolerance, prompted Voltaire to launch a vigorous public campaign that eventually led to the reversal of the conviction in 1765 and strengthened the movement for criminal law reform and religious toleration in France.12