Treatise on Tolerance is a book written by Voltaire, following the trial of Jean Calas (1698-1762), a French Protestant merchant accused of murdering his son Marc-Antoine to prevent his supposed conversion to the Catholic Church.
Struck with the extreme injustice of the case, Voltaire undertook a private and public campaign to exonerate Jean Calas.
In 1765, after Louis XV of France fired the chief magistrate and the case was retried by another court, Calas was posthumously exonerated and his family paid 36 thousand francs.V "There are about forty millions of inhabitants in Europe who are not members of the Church of Rome; should we say to every one of them, 'Sir, since you are infallibly damned, I shall neither eat, converse, nor have any connections with you?
If you have a cruel heart, if, while you adore he whose whole law consists of these few words, "Love God and your neighbor'..." "I see all the dead of past ages and of our own appearing in His presence.
Are you very sure that our Creator and Father will say to the wise and virtuous Confucius, to the legislator Solon, to Pythagoras, Zaleucus, Socrates, Plato, the divine Antonins, the good Trajan, to Titus, the delights of mankind, to Epictetus, and to many others, models of men: 'Go, monsters, go and suffer torments that are infinite in intensity and duration.