Treatise on Toleration

One of the most important essays on religious tolerance and freedom of thoughtIn 1762 Jean Calas, a merchant from Toulouse, was executed after being falsely accused of killing his son. As it became clear that Calas was in fact persecuted for being a Protestant, Voltaire began a campaign to get his sentence overturned – and in the process made the case for some of the most important values upheld by the Enlightenment, from religious tolerance to freedom of thought. Treatise on Toleration is the story of this case and a screed against fanaticism – a book that is as fresh and urgent today as it was when it was first published in 1763.

Voltaire (Author) Fran ois-Marie Arouet, writing under the pseudonym Voltaire, was born in 1694 into a Parisian bourgeois family. He became notorious for lampoons on leading notables and was twice imprisoned in the Bastille. By his mid-thirties his literary activities precipitated a four-year exile in England where he won the praise of Swift and Pope for his political tracts. His publication, three years later in France, of Lettres philosophiques sur les Anglais (1733), an attack on French Church and State, forced him to flee again. For twenty years Voltaire lived mainly away from Paris. Among his best-known books are satirical tales such as Zadig (1747) and Candide (1759). He died in Paris in 1778.