On This Day in History: March 10

The Horrible Death of Jean Calas

AUDIO VERSION HERE

There are shitty ways to die, and then there is the way Jean Calas died. Picture this. You find your son has taken his own life. Distraught, you make it look like a murder, because 18^th-century Catholicism wasn’t tolerant for shit. And then the government blames you for the “murder” and tortures you to death. Sucks.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: March 10, 1762--

In 16^th-century France there was plenty o’ killin’ of Protestants because Catholics didn’t like that. Two centuries later things had relaxed, but it still wasn’t a great place to be Protestant. Catholicism was the official state religion and there was no legal right to practice any other form of invisible sky fairy. Reaction to Protestantism had evolved from “Let’s kill those motherfuckers” to “We shall just barely tolerate those motherfuckers.”

Jean Calas was a Protestant merchant who lived in Toulouse. In 1756 his son Louis converted to Catholicism, possibly because it involved less suffering, even though Catholicism kind of digs the whole suffering thing. Anyway, five years later the family found their other son, Marc-Antoine, had hanged himself in the family home. Suicide was considered a terrible crime against the self and to teach the dead a lesson the practice was to defile the corpse. So, the family said he’d been murdered. The authorities saw a chance to fuck over a dirty Protestant and said that Marc-Antoine was going to convert to Catholicism just like your other son did and you didn’t like that so you killed him, Jean. Come with us for some torturing, please.

Calas then said no really he took his own life and the judge said ha ha no backies you’re guilty, time for some agonizing pain. For two days they publicly tortured Calas on “the wheel.” His arms and legs were dislocated, their bones broken. He had gallons of water poured down his throat. All the while, he proclaimed his innocence, right up until his death on March 10, 1762.

The philosopher Voltaire said that was some fucking bullshit. No fan of the Catholic Church, Voltaire launched a successful campaign to prove that Marc-Antoine had killed himself over gambling debts and saw that Jean Calas was posthumously exonerated and the family awarded financial compensation by the king as a “yeah sorry we killed your dad/husband in the most horrible way possible.”

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