It was the evening of October 13 1761, shortly after 9:30pm, that Pierre Calas discovered the body of his older brother, 29-year-old Marc-Antoine, hanging in a downstairs doorway of the family home in Toulouse. Their father, Jean, a cloth merchant, had his premises on the ground floor.
The family had been dining in an upstairs room with Gaubert Lavaysse, a young friend. Marc-Antoine had left the table early, around 8pm; they supposed he wanted some air, or wished to visit the billiards club where he had lately taken to gambling, without success. Lack of success was something of a hallmark: Marc-Antoine had trained to be a lawyer, but as a Calvinist – the family was Huguenot – he couldn’t practice without a Catholic priest confirming the orthodoxy of his faith. Some priests were happy to be flexible on this score; Marc-Antoine was unable to find one.
Any family faced with such a tragedy would be distraught. But in Toulouse there was another factor: the bodies of suicides were dragged face down through the city’s streets by a horse before being thrown on the city’s refuse heap. Jean and his wife Anne-Rose decided to claim that Marc-Antoine had been murdered by persons unknown.
But rumours soon spread that Marc-Antoine had been murdered by his father. Toulouse, like France itself, was predominantly Catholic, and fear of protestant heresy ran high. Jean Calas had strangled his son, it was said, because Marc-Antoine had intended to convert to the true faith. (That another son, Louis, had already become Catholic four years earlier yet remained unharmed, persuaded no-one.)
All those present that evening were arrested. Doctors who examined the victim’s body reported ligature marks around the neck, but no signs of a struggle. Despite no evidence that Marc-Antoine had received confession, or intended to renounce his family’s faith, he was given a martyr’s funeral in the city’s cathedral of Saint-Étienne.
By now the family had changed their story. Their son had not been murdered, they now said. He had hanged himself. To no avail. The authorities – and in particular David de Beaudrigue, who led the investigation – did not believe them.
Jean Calas, aged 64, was sentenced to be broken on the wheel in the public square in front of the cathedral. The execution was set for 10 March 1762. Earlier in the day, though, he was tortured, by de Beaudrigue and others, to confirm the guilt of his wife, and his son Pierre. Once he confessed, they could break Pierre on the wheel too, and hang Anne-Rose. They warned him his pain and torment would be redoubled if he did not confess. They were right about that.
Calas was interrogated repeatedly and racked; they called it la question ordinaire. Then came la question extraordinaire, what we would call waterboarding: replicating the experience of drowning with pitcher after pitcher of water. Calas suffered it twice, and still maintained his innocence.
Calas was taken to the square and strapped to the wheel, his face to the sky, as the sentence commanded. Then his limbs were smashed with an iron bar. If the authorities thought the prospect of death and heavenly judgement would compel a confession, they were mistaken. They left him on the wheel for two hours before the executioner finally strangled him. It was meant to be some kind of mercy.
Voltaire, hearing of the case in Switzerland, used it as the basis for his Traité sur la tolérance, published in 1763. Calas was exonerated a year later. David de Beaudrigue lost his mind and made two attempts to kill himself. He did not survive the second.
But what exactly did happen in that house on the night of 13 October 1761 remains a mystery.
This is an extended version of a piece that first appeared in the March 2023 issue of History Today.
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Mathew Lyons 
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