Calas

Calas, Jean, was born in 1698, in Languedoc. He was a respectable tradesman in Toulouse, when one evening his eldest son was found dead. This son being a Roman Catholic, while Calas himself was a Protestant, a suspicion arose that the father had on that account murdered him. The father was in consequence tried and sentenced to torture and to be broken on the wheel. This barbarous sentence was carried out in 1762, and Calas's property confiscated. Public attention was drawn to the affair by Voltaire, who was the means of procuring a revision of the trial. This resulted in the parliament at Paris in 1765 declaring Calas and his family innocent. Louis XV. granted the sum of 30,000 livres to the injured family.