After several stays in prison, the combined efforts of the parlement of Paris, the Inquisition, and the theological faculty of the Sorbonne resulted in his conviction for heresy and a death sentence.

"[1] Accordingly, in 1521, he left for Paris, where he studied Latin for five years with Nicolas Bérault, who also taught Gaspard II de Coligny.

On the death of Villanova, Étienne Dolet served as secretary to Jean de Langeac, bishop of Limoges and French ambassador to the Republic of Venice.

In October 1533, he delivered a violent indictment of the "backwardness and hostility to humanism and classical scholarship"[5] of the city of Toulouse, going so far as to describe it barbarism.

[6] He was imprisoned in March 1534 and, despite the protection of Jean de Pins (a prominent humanist and bishop), he was banished by the Parliament of Toulouse in 1534.

[5] Its members included Clément Marot and Rabelais, as well as Guillaume and Maurice Scève, Jean de Tourne père and the printer Sébastien Gryphe, for whom he became a proofreader.

In addition to these friends and close associates, Dolet also acquired in Lyon a number of sworn enemies who would "follow him all the way to the pyre.

"[3] In 1535, thanks to Sébastien Gryphe, Dolet published his tract, the Dialogus de imitatione Ciceroniana, which revived the quarrel over Ciceronianism.

[3][7] On March 6, 1537, Francis I granted Dolet a highly advantageous privilege[5] that gave him the exclusive right for ten years to print any work in Latin, Greek, Italian or French, whether from his pen or under his supervision.

[1]With the financial assistance of Hellouin Dulin,[12] Dolet opened a print shop on the rue Mercière in Lyon.

[14][15] The Cato Christianus was not only banned as soon as it was released, it was also condemned on October 2, 1542 and burned on the square in front of Notre-Dame de Paris in February 1544.

In August of that year, he was incarcerated in the prisons of Lyon, accused of being the author of pernicious works and of not believing in the immortality of the soul.

Convicted of having printed certain of these pernicious works, eating meat during Lent and claiming to prefer the sermon to the mass, he appealed to the Parliament of Paris, which had him transferred from the prisons of Roanne to the Conciergerie where he remained for 15 months.

In accordance with an act of mercy in his judgment, he was offered the possibility of being hanged, before being thrown with his books onto his pyre on Place Maubert in Paris.

The religious character of a large number of the books which he translated or published is sometimes cited in opposition to these charges, as is his advocacy of reading the Scriptures in the vernacular tongue.

[19] From the eighteenth century onwards, Dolet has been remembered as a martyr to intolerance and as a symbol of free speech and freedom of the press.

[7] During the religious conflicts of the Third Republic, the statue became "not only the virtual emblem of anticlerical freethinkers, but also served as a rallying point for Parisian militants, who paraded before his monument every year.