{"id":83639,"date":"2015-03-13T16:10:10","date_gmt":"2015-03-13T20:10:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=83639"},"modified":"2015-03-13T16:18:31","modified_gmt":"2015-03-13T20:18:31","slug":"broken-on-the-wheel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/03\/13\/broken-on-the-wheel\/","title":{"rendered":"Broken on the Wheel"},"content":{"rendered":"

A gruesome legal case turned Voltaire into a crusader for the innocent.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"calas3\"<\/a>

The death of John Calas, depicted in an English chapbook.<\/p><\/div>\n

This article was reported and written by Ken Armstrong for\u00a0The Marshall Project<\/a>, a nonprofit news organization that covers the U.S. criminal-justice system.<\/i><\/p>\n

On the night of October 13, 1761, cries rang from the shop of Jean Calas, a cloth merchant who lived and worked in the commercial heart of Toulouse, in the South of France. The eldest of Calas\u2019s six children, Marc-Antoine, a moody, handsome man who was fond of billiards and gambling, had just been found dead. The family said he had been murdered\u2014perhaps stuck with a sword by someone who slipped into the darkened boutique from the cobblestone street.<\/p>\n

A crowd gathered outside the front door as investigators were summoned. A doctor and two surgeons, called to examine the body, found only a \u201clivid mark on the neck.\u201d They signed a report refuting the family\u2019s account of some intruder with a blade, concluding that Marc-Antoine, twenty-nine, had been \u201changed whilst alive, by himself or by others.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those last five words, \u201cby himself or by others,\u201d began an enduring mystery and a true cause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre, one that might have been the \u201ccrime of the century\u201d for the 1700s had the clich\u00e9 been in use back then. Voltaire, the philosopher, dramatist and propagandist\u2014\u201cthe greatest amuser of his age\u201d and the greatest polemicist\u2014became obsessed with the case, and for years worked to eradicate what he considered to be a stain on his country, church, and courts.<\/p>\n

Finally, a panel of forty judges sat in Paris to hear the case against Calas once again. The verdict they issued, 250 years ago this week, \u201cechoed and re-echoed\u201d in Europe and beyond. Voltaire, by appealing directly to the people, helped established the power of public opinion as a tool to fight injustice. To some legal scholars, the infamous case also marked the first stirrings of the global movement to end capital punishment. <\/p>\n

Chapter 1: Two French doors, half opened<\/strong><\/p>\n

Because France\u2019s justice system in the eighteenth century offered few, if any, safeguards for criminal suspects, a whisper could be as deadly as the plague. And in the crowd outside Jean Calas\u2019s shop, the whispers began.<\/p>\n

In the fall of 1761, Calas was sixty-three years old, a father to four sons and two daughters, with a wife who was distantly related to the philosopher Montesquieu. His shop, which specialized in cotton prints, \u201cgaily printed muslins and calicoes,\u201d did well enough. The family, those still at home, lived on the two floors above it.<\/p>\n

Calas was a Huguenot, or French Protestant. His country was decidedly, and unforgivingly, Catholic. French law forbade Protestant worship services and imposed restrictions on members of the faith, from what property they could sell to which professions they could enter. Medicine and the law were off-limits without a certificate of catholicity, which was sometimes contingent on proof of confession. Marc-Antoine had little interest in his father\u2019s business. He had obtained a law degree, but then refused to convert or compromise his faith, and was turned away from practice.<\/p>\n

\"calas2\"<\/a>

Jean Calas<\/p><\/div>\n

A couple of hours before he was found dead, Marc-Antoine had dined in the house with five people: his father and mother; his brother Pierre; a visitor; and the family\u2019s Catholic servant. The story the family told\u2014at least at first\u2014was that after Marc-Antoine had taken his leave, Pierre and the visitor had come down the stairs and found him on the shop floor, the victim of some mysterious intruder.<\/p>\n

But murmurs in the crowd suggested the killer had come from within. Suspicion turned to Marc-Antoine\u2019s family, fueled by a rumor that Marc-Antoine planned to abandon his faith, and that his father, to prevent the apostasy, must have conspired to kill him. Jean Calas and the four others were arrested that night.<\/p>\n

Thirty-six hours later, Calas and the others, imprisoned in a dungeon, changed their story. Now they said Marc-Antoine had killed himself\u2014and had been found hanging. The father said he had insisted upon the tale of murder for fear of the truth\u2019s consequences. In France, the body of anyone committing suicide could be stripped naked and dragged through the streets.<\/p>\n

Now there were two competing versions of what had happened, with neither easy to credit. Either the father and mother (and brother \u2026 and visitor \u2026 and Catholic servant!) had worked together to strangle Marc-Antoine, whose body evidenced no sign of struggle; or he had committed suicide through means difficult to fathom.<\/p>\n

The family said Marc-Antoine had hung himself from a wooden rod placed across the tops of two French doors, half opened.<\/p>\n

This scenario would be analyzed for centuries to come. Doubters would say: Surely the rod would have rolled off, or Marc-Antoine, thrashing, would have kicked wide the doors. Believers would counter: The rod was flat on one side, and both doors sagged, dragging and then resting upon the floor. Frederic Herbert Maugham, a British judge who became Lord High Chancellor under Neville Chamberlain, epitomized Europe\u2019s enduring obsession with Marc-Antoine\u2019s exit. He would carry a piece of string in his pocket, and, in spare moments, tie it round a pencil, reconstructing the scaffold. (In his 1928 book on the case, Maugham sided with the believers, concluding: suicide.)<\/p>\n

Marc-Antoine\u2019s mental makeup would also be debated. He had just told a friend how excited he was about a new blue suit. Would a man contemplating suicide say that? To which, there was this rejoinder: here was a man, pushing thirty, denied entry to his field of study, clerking for his father in a shop he loathed, forever brooding over Hamlet\u2019s soliloquies, who, that very evening, had been reduced to fetching Roquefort to go with the evening\u2019s pigeon, with money handed him by his mother. No matter the century, that does not a happy portrait paint.<\/p>\n

\"calas1\"<\/a>

Two pages from The Case of Jean Calas<\/i>, a book written by Frederic Herbert Maugham, a British lawyer and judge, in 1928.<\/p><\/div>\n

Chapter 2: The question extraordinaire<\/strong><\/p>\n

In Toulouse, David de Beaudrigue, the titular Capitoul<\/em>, was sort of the police detective, prosecutor and magistrate, all in one. A \u201cbrutal and hasty man,\u201d in one author\u2019s words, David had bought his office, \u201cwhich was held for life and carried patents of nobility.\u201d<\/p>\n

David arrested Calas and the others without the necessary warrants. Then the call went out for witnesses\u2014with the threat of excommunication for anyone reluctant to come forward, and with an explicit demand for hearsay, embraced as evidence by the French courts. Although more than 100 witnesses surfaced, the investigation failed to turn up a confessor for Marc-Antoine or any other proof of his plans to convert. Instead, the testimony produced convoluted chains of what a tailor told a hosier told a baker\u2019s assistant told a barber\u2019s wife, turning a capital proceeding into a childhood game of Chinese whispers (or \u201ctelephone,\u201d take your pick), with predictable results. One writer captured the absurdity with this example:<\/p>\n

\u201cOne Massaleng, a widow, gave evidence that her daughter had told her that le sieur Pag\u00e8s had told her that M. Souli\u00e9 had told him that la demoiselle Guichardet had told him that la demoiselle Journu had made a statement to her from which she (Journu) had inferred that le p\u00e8re Lerraut<\/em>, a Jesuit, had been the confessor of Marc-Antoine Calas. When the reverend father Lerraut was summoned he showed that the whole of this was without foundation.\u201d<\/p>\n

The evidence was mostly rubbish\u2014but there was a lot of the rubbish, and in France at the time, even evidence deemed \u201chalf-complete\u201d or \u201cimperfect\u201d could convict, by adding fractions of a proof to make a whole. The church also threw in, putting its stamp on the prosecution\u2019s conjecture. Despite the lack of evidence of any conversion, Marc-Antoine received a Catholic funeral, with thousands turning out for the services.<\/p>\n

The case against Jean Calas went before Toulouse\u2019s Parlement<\/em>, an appellate court that reviewed evidence and deliberated in private. On March 9, 1762, the Parlement<\/em> voted eight to five to convict and condemn. (And it wasn\u2019t really that close: Only one of the five voted for outright acquittal.) The sentence called for Calas to be questioned while tortured in two ways, then broken on the wheel, then burned. The assumption was that in the throes of agony, Calas would confess and implicate the four others, in addition to any other conspirators yet unknown.<\/p>\n

The following day, the sentence was carried out. The proceedings began in the torture chamber, with David conducting the interrogation. His initial round of questions preceded the torture\u2014and a record was kept of all that was asked and answered.<\/p>\n

\n

INTERROGATED<\/strong> if he has other accomplices than those who have been designated in the trial<\/p>\n

REPLIES<\/strong> that being innocent he has no accomplices<\/p>\n

EXHORTED<\/strong> further to tell the truth he says he has told it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And so it went, on and on. With no concession, the torture commenced. The first form\u2014\u201cThe Question Ordinaire,\u201d as it was labeled\u2014called for an elaborate pulling of limbs: \u201cWith his wrists tied tightly to a bar behind him, Calas was stretched by a system of cranks and pulleys that steadily drew his arms up while an iron weight kept his feet in place.\u201d But Calas did not confess.<\/p>\n

The second form\u2014or, \u201cThe Question Extraordinaire\u201d\u2014might sound familiar, having been much in the news in recent years. Calas\u2019s mouth was forced open with two sticks. Then came the water, pitcher after pitcher. \u201cHis head was held low and a cloth placed over his mouth and on the cloth a funnel,\u201d is how one author described this torture. \u201cHis nose was pinched, but from time to time released, then water was slowly poured through the funnel on to the cloth which was sucked in by the suffocating man.\u201d Still, Calas did not confess.<\/p>\n

For David, this had not gone as planned. But there were opportunities left, as the proceedings shifted from private chamber to public spectacle. Calas was taken through the streets to the city\u2019s main square, then led up to a scaffold and tied to an X-shaped cross. Whereupon an executioner, iron rod in hand, crushed Calas\u2019s bones, two blows apiece to the upper and lower arms, two to the upper and lower legs, three to the midsection. Calas, his body broken, was then tied to a wheel, face to the sky, where, for two hours, he refused to convert and refused to confess.<\/p>\n

\u201cI die innocent,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Afterward, he was strangled and his body thrown on a pyre.<\/p>\n

The effect was not what David had hoped for. Not only was he deprived of evidence against the others, but Calas\u2019s final hours had made a stirring impression, eliciting sympathy. Calas met his fate, one man later wrote, with \u201cmajestic perseverance.\u201d<\/p>\n

A week later, to David\u2019s consternation, the judges in Toulouse elected not to condemn any of the others. All were released\u2014although Pierre, Marc-Antoine\u2019s brother, was banished.<\/p>\n

\"calas4\"<\/a>

A 1821 print depicting Voltaire<\/p><\/div>\n

Chapter 3: \u201cI write in order to act\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 1762, Voltaire, who had been run out of Paris, had an estate in Ferney, in the east of France, close to the Swiss border. He was in his late sixties, famous throughout Europe for his wit, ego and sometimes quarrelsome nature. Twice in his youth he had served time in the Bastille\u2014\u201cfor being generally annoying,\u201d as one writer memorably phrased it<\/a>. He was rich\u2014not by inheritance, but by investment, for he was a whiz at high finance, once gaming the French lottery<\/a>\u2014and even now, as his eyesight dimmed, he worked crazy long hours, fueled, perhaps, by his reputed daily intake of up to fifty cups<\/a> of coffee.<\/p>\n

His writings tended to wind up in fires or on the papal Index of Forbidden Books, and he was forever spoiling for a fight. When Jean-Jacques Rousseau published \u201cThe Social Contract,\u201d contemplating how society corrupts, Voltaire wrote the author: \u201cOne longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours.\u201d Voltaire quipped of his rival: \u201cJean-Jacques writes only to write and I write in order to act.\u201d<\/p>\n

Less than two weeks after Calas\u2019s execution, news of the affair reached Voltaire. Writing a friend, he assumed the truth of the charge and penned a snide throwaway: \u201cWe may not be worth much, but the Huguenots are worse.\u201d But in the days and weeks to come, as Voltaire learned more, his mood shifted from condescension to concern to outrage.<\/p>\n

Voltaire met with Calas\u2019s youngest son, Donat, who had been away when Marc-Antoine died. Expecting a \u201croustabout, such as you sometimes find the country,\u201d Voltaire was instead struck by Donat\u2019s gentle disposition and tearful defense of his parents\u2019 character. Won over, Voltaire launched what would become a three-year crusade.<\/p>\n

After convincing Calas\u2019s widow to appeal the verdict, Voltaire organized and helped finance the fight. He ghost-wrote legal documents; enlisted eminent lawyers; tapped his vast network of aristocratic acquaintances for support; and dispatched a young merchant to Toulouse, to investigate.<\/p>\n

Voltaire became steeped in the country\u2019s rules of criminal procedure, a labyrinth he found appalling: \u201cAs there are half-proofs, that is to say, half-truths, it is clear that there are half-innocent and half-guilty persons. So we start by giving them a half-death, after which we go to lunch.\u201d He fretted at how France appeared to other nations\u2014\u201cDo they not say that we know how to break a man on the wheel but do not know how to fight?\u201d\u2014and steamed at the judicial system\u2019s secrecy, which allowed Toulouse\u2019s Parlement<\/em> to keep to itself the evidence used to convict.<\/p>\n

In 1763, Voltaire broke through: The French government re-opened the case. It also ordered the trial records forwarded to Paris, breaking the seal of secrecy. (In a move emulated by some public agencies to this day, the Toulouse authorities, feeling put upon, demanded an exorbitant sum to copy the file. If you can\u2019t deny, make it cost.)<\/p>\n

A high-ranking government official advised Voltaire to back off\u2014\u201clet the world wag its own way,\u201d he wrote\u2014but Voltaire refused. In typically unsparing fashion, he called David a \u201cscoundrel\u201d and the judges \u201cbarbarous Druids\u201d and \u201cassassins en robe noire.<\/em>\u201d He produced pamphlets and other writings in French, English, German, and Dutch. To Maugham\u2014the British author who came to share Voltaire\u2019s belief in Calas\u2019s innocence\u2014this propaganda campaign was \u201cenergetic, widespread, persistent and, it must be said, unscrupulous. Voltaire did not hesitate to colour or distort the facts in favour of Jean Calas \u2026 \u201d (Voltaire, for example, added five years to Calas\u2019s age, a benefit in mocking the scenario of an old man overpowering his adult son.)<\/p>\n

The same year the case was re-opened, Voltaire published his \u201cTreatise on Tolerance,\u201d a transcendent work that used the Calas affair to argue for conciliation among faiths.<\/p>\n

In 1764, Voltaire\u2019s campaign saw its second breakthrough: The French government threw out Calas\u2019s conviction and ordered a new trial, to be conducted in Paris. The momentum was such that the outcome seemed inevitable. Voltaire, from afar, continued to work the case, corresponding with the lawyers and helping prepare the last arguments. But months passed without word. For Voltaire, a playwright, here was a drama he had staged, but, for the final act, could not attend.<\/p>\n

Then, on March 9, 1765, three years to the day since Jean Calas was convicted, a panel of forty judges, called Masters of Requests, announced its unanimous verdict: Jean Calas was acquitted. Unable to restore his life, the court restored his good name.<\/p>\n

\"calas5\"<\/a>

To raise money for the Calas family, prints were sold in Europe depicting the case. In this scene, Gaubert Lavaysse, a visitor at the Calas house the night Marc-Antoine died, reads aloud a defense document as Pierre Calas looks over his shoulder and Jean Calas\u2019s servant, daughters and wife listen.<\/p><\/div>\n

Epilogue: \u201cThe affair was, and remains, a mystery\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cMy tragedies are not so tragic,\u201d Voltaire wrote early on of the Calas affair. And in one way at least, the story\u2019s closing did push the bounds of theater. David, the Capitoul<\/em> who so vigorously pursued Calas, was removed from office and thereafter lost his mind. He committed suicide, throwing himself out a window. (He made the attempt twice: The first time, he survived.)<\/p>\n

For Voltaire, the Calas case was but the beginning of his life\u2019s last chapter. In his twilight years he became an eighteenth century version of the Innocence Project, taking on, and prevailing in, one case after another. For so long a darling of high society, he became a champion of the people. In time, his influence extended beyond Europe to America, where he was read and revered by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, who shared Voltaire\u2019s zeal for separating church and state.<\/p>\n

In 1778, Voltaire was welcomed back to Paris, where people hailed him as l\u2019homme aux Calas<\/em>, the man of Calas. There, he met Benjamin Franklin\u2014creating quite the scene, according to John Adams, who was there. The assembled crowd roared as the \u201ctwo aged actors upon this great theatre of philosophy and frivolity\u201d hugged, then kissed each other\u2019s cheeks. \u201cAnd then the tumult subsided, and the cry immediately spread through the whole kingdom, and I suppose, all over Europe, \u2018Qu\u2019il etait charmant de voir embrasser Solon et Sophocle!\u2019\u201d [\u201cHow charming to have seen Solon and Sophocles embrace!\u201d] Voltaire died later that year, at the age of eighty-three.<\/p>\n

As for the Calas case, the trial records were not only made public, they were preserved, providing scholars with ample opportunity to revisit and re-argue how Marc-Antoine died. \u201cFrustrating though it may be, the affair was, and remains, a mystery,\u201d David B. Bien, a longtime history professor at the University of Michigan, wrote in 1960.<\/p>\n

One writer on capital punishment described this case as \u201cthe beginning of the abolition movement.\u201d With its formal finding of a wrongful execution, the case became exhibit No. 1 in what has emerged as a key argument against the death penalty\u2014that sometimes, we misfire. The British philosopher Jeremy Bentham made that argument as far back as 1775, citing \u201cthe melancholy affair of Calas.\u201d The interrogation and execution of the Toulouse shopkeeper also helped galvanize opposition to torture, as chronicled in historian Lynn Hunt\u2019s book, \u201cInventing Human Rights.\u201d<\/p>\n

In all of this, of course, there is some danger in looking back and looking abroad with an air of superiority. Waterboarding has not gone away. What has changed is the euphemism, from question extraordinaire to enhanced interrogation. And as the Calas case shows, France in the 1700s had one form of redress that the American Bar Association only wishes we had now. Last year the ABA passed a resolution calling on our federal government\u2014and every state with the death penalty\u2014to create a forum in which claims of wrongful execution can be heard.<\/p>\n

That resolution<\/a> has been ignored.<\/p>\n

This article was reported and written by Ken Armstrong for\u00a0The Marshall Project<\/a>, a nonprofit news organization that covers the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their\u00a0newsletter<\/a>, or follow The Marshall Project on\u00a0Facebook\u00a0<\/a>or\u00a0Twitter<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n

Ken Armstrong is a Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning investigative reporter who previously worked at <\/em>The Seattle Times and <\/em>Chicago Tribune, where his work helped prompt the Illinois governor to suspend executions and later empty death row. He has been the McGraw Professor of Writing at Princeton and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A gruesome legal case turned Voltaire into a crusader for the innocent. This article was reported and written by Ken Armstrong for\u00a0The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that covers the U.S. criminal-justice system. On the night of October 13, 1761, cries rang from the shop of Jean Calas, a cloth merchant who lived and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":808,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7554],"tags":[17410,14976,6215,17405,17402,13439,17408,865,15942,17403,17401,17406,1826,17409,17404,6024,9472,17407],"class_list":["post-83639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history-2","tag-accusation","tag-capital-punishment","tag-catholicism","tag-courts","tag-criminal-justice","tag-eighteenth-century","tag-execution","tag-france","tag-french-literature","tag-huguenots","tag-jean-calas","tag-marc-antoine-calas","tag-murder","tag-parlement","tag-protestantism","tag-suicide","tag-voltaire","tag-wrongfully-accused"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Gruesome Case That Made Voltaire a Crusader for the Innocent<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In eighteenth-century France, the wrongful execution of Jean Calas sparked the interest of Voltaire, an unlikely advocate who fought to set the record straight.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/03\/13\/broken-on-the-wheel\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Broken on the Wheel by Ken Armstrong\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"March 13, 2015 \u2013 A gruesome legal case turned Voltaire into a crusader for the innocent. 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