CATÓLICOS X PROTESTANTES
Jean Calas was sixty‑three years old, a cloth merchant in Toulouse, and by every account a perfectly ordinary man. He had a wife, several children, a shop, and one problem he could do nothing about: he was a Protestant. France in 1761 was officially Catholic, and there was no legal right to be anything else. Toulouse was one of the worst places in the country to be a Huguenot — the city still held an annual festival celebrating the massacre of four thousand Protestants two centuries earlier. Protestants there were tolerated, barely, on sufferance, and everybody knew it. The Calas household was quiet. Mixed, even — one of Jean’s sons, Louis, had converted to Catholicism, and his father had accepted it and continued supporting him. Their long‑serving maid, Jeanne Viguière, was a devout Catholic who had lived with the family for decades and adored them. Then, on the night of the 13th of October 1761, Jean’s eldest son Marc‑Antoine was found dead in the family’s shop. He had taken his own ...