Tribute to Anger

VOLTAIRE AND THE GALAS CASE (224 pp.)--Edna Nixon--Vanguard ($5.95).

In most countries, men of letters have had small success in righting the wrongs of an unjust trial. But France boasts two famous instances in which a literary man with the national destiny on the tip of his tongue has appeared to sear the public conscience. Most celebrated is Emile Zola's "J'accuse," which helped reverse the verdict in l'affaire Dreyfus. Less well known but historically probably more significant was Voltaire's angry intervention in l'affaire Calas.

The facts of the case were grotesque. Marc-Antoine Calas. 29, hanged himself in Toulouse on the night of Oct. 13, 1761. His father Jean attempted to mask the death as an accident to spare his family the disgrace of a suicide. Calas was then arrested, along with his wife and a younger son, and charged with the murder of Marc-Antoine. The authorities, well aware that no murder had been committed, knew what they were doing. The Calas family was openly Huguenot. The father had killed his son to prevent his conversion to Catholicism, the state claimed, citing a questionable passage from Calvin that seemed to demand the murder of converts. By convicting Calas, the authorities meant to discredit all Huguenots once and forever, with the hope that eventually they would be driven out of France entirely.

Voltaire, quarrelsome and sickly in his old age, was in Switzerland during the long months of the investigation and trial. By the time he heard of the case, judgment had been pronounced. Mme. Calas was released, her other son was banished from France. But Father Calas was executed upon the wheel; the judges' sentence stipulated that his arms, legs, loins and thighs were to be broken and "his face turned to the sky, to live in pain and repentance . . . as long as it pleases God to give him life."

The pious atrocity infuriated Voltaire, and he sent off a blizzard of letters demanding details. "Ah, monsters," he cried in a letter to the judges of Calas, "you owe it to men to account for the blood of men." In a fury compounded of old age, pessimism, anticlericalism and a passion for justice, he summoned the attention of all Europe to the case, until at last Louis XV reversed the verdict against the Calases and, in so doing, crippled with shame the official persecution of the Huguenots.

Author Nixon has done a superb job, gives life to her whole cast of characters, and appraises their actions with a strong sense of history. Even in her sober telling, the Calas case sounds like a cri de coeur. Popular history has too often dismissed Voltaire as an acerbic and with drawn pessimist. But in l'affaire Calas, he was supremely heroic in a dark and dangerous time, and Mrs. Nixon sees to it that his memory is well served.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.