WorkVoltaire

Treatise on Tolerance

Written in defence of a Protestant father broken on the wheel in Toulouse, it asks France's rulers to stop persecuting over belief.

by Voltaire129 passages held

English, a translation held here, and your language

Original title: Traité sur la tolérance
First published: 1763(aged 69)
Original language: French

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Overview

Marc-Antoine Calas was found dead in his family's house in Toulouse in October 1761. His father Jean, a Protestant merchant, was accused of killing him to stop him becoming a Catholic, and on 10 March 1762, by order of the Parlement of Toulouse, the regional high court, he was broken on the wheel, still declaring his innocence. At Ferney, Voltaire heard of the case from a merchant, Dominique Audibert, and at first believed the verdict; Jean's son Pierre, whom he met in Geneva, convinced him otherwise. The treatise was one weapon in the campaign that followed. Voltaire finished it at the start of 1763, and the Cramer brothers printed it in Geneva that April. Its readers were meant to be the men who governed France, where Protestant worship had been banned since 1685, when Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, the old guarantee of that worship. Persecution, Voltaire argues, is neither commanded by Christ nor useful to the state. England, Holland and the German states had shed as much blood over religion as France, and now let their sects live side by side without trouble; the Huguenots of his day are not their warring grandfathers. He does not ask that Protestants hold public office, and he allows a government to punish belief only when it turns into fanaticism that disturbs public order. Then he widens the case to every people on a small planet, the Turk, the Chinese and the Jew included. The book was banned soon after it began to circulate in France. On 9 March 1765 a royal tribunal declared Calas innocent, and the king granted his family 36,000 livres. After the attack on the Paris offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, the treatise became a bestseller in France again.

Key concepts

When does the Treatise allow a government to punish religious error?

Only when error becomes crime, which it does only by disturbing society, and it disturbs society only when it breeds fanaticism. Jesuits who burn down a Jansenist house, or a sect that kills newly baptised infants to send them to heaven, may be punished; Protestants who pray to God in bad French may not. Toleration is owed to everyone who does not turn fanatic.

What is the natural-law argument against intolerance?

Human law must rest on natural law, and the great principle of both, everywhere on earth, is not to do to others what one would not have done to oneself. By that principle no one can say to another: believe what I believe and what you cannot believe, or perish. Intolerance therefore has no footing in nature or in any just human law.

Why is superstition called the mad daughter of a wise mother?

Because it is related to religion as astrology is to astronomy: born of it, resembling it, and dangerous precisely because it is mistaken for it. Relics, invented miracles and legends crowd in beside true worship and borrow its authority. The treatise's point is that the danger lies in the resemblance, and that the worst superstition of all is the belief that hating a neighbour for his opinions pleases God.

Why does the Treatise say that less dogma means less misery?

Because disputes multiply with doctrines, and disputes end in persecution. Religion exists to make people happy in this world and the next: for the next, be just; for this one, be indulgent. Metaphysics can never win the assent geometry wins, since its claims do not follow from an axiom everyone grants, so making every mind in a city think alike is harder than conquering the world by arms.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Why Persecution Must End

Can a state ever be right to punish what its subjects believe? The treatise argues from one broken body in Toulouse to a rule for the whole planet: belief becomes the magistrate's business only when it turns into fanaticism.

The argument is practical before it is principled. England, Holland and the German states shed as much blood over religion as France, and now let many sects live in peace; the Huguenots of today are not their warring grandfathers, and it is bad reasoning to say that men who rebelled when treated ill will rebel when treated well. Intolerance, the treatise finds, is commanded neither by natural law nor by Christ. Error becomes a crime only when it disturbs society, and it does so only when it breeds fanaticism. Then the case widens to every people on a small globe.

religious toleration
religious tolerance
religious persecution
persecution
religious violence
fanaticism
sectarianism
religious pluralism
political authority
morality
reason
violence

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Superstition and the Letter of Scripture

Does scripture itself command the persecutor's fire? The treatise reads the two Testaments, the martyrs and the saints' legends to show that intolerance was grafted on later, and grew in superstition's soil.

Superstition, the treatise says, is to religion what astrology is to astronomy, the mad daughter of a wise mother. Where nothing purer is known, a crude religion is better than none, since it restrains secret crime; once a pure religion is offered, superstition turns dangerous, and the most dangerous kind is hating a neighbour for his opinions. The chapters on Judaism, on Christ and on the martyrs argue that neither scripture nor Rome, which tolerated every cult, taught persecution, and that false legends of martyrdom have fed it. The chapters on the Testaments read Genesis as God speaking to a crude people in terms it could grasp.

biblical criticism
scriptural interpretation
biblical interpretation
historical criticism
miracles
superstition
religious authority
early christianity
prophecy
theology
allegory
idolatry
scripture
evidence
justice

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Within this work

passages held: 129
distinct concepts: 244
by passages held, corpus-wide: #453

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “religious pluralism” and “religious toleration”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 17 pairings. 85 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
religious pluralism	religious toleration	9
religious tolerance	scriptural interpretation	8
religious persecution	religious violence	4
religious pluralism	religious tolerance	4
biblical interpretation	religious tolerance	3
fanaticism	religious tolerance	3
fanaticism	religious violence	3
religious persecution	scriptural interpretation	2
religious pluralism	scriptural interpretation	2
religious tolerance	religious violence	2
religious violence	scriptural interpretation	2
biblical interpretation	religious persecution	1
fanaticism	religious persecution	1
fanaticism	religious toleration	1
fanaticism	scriptural interpretation	1
religious persecution	religious tolerance	1
religious toleration	religious violence	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1734 Philosophical Letters (Lettres philosophiques)
Written out of the English stay that began in 1726 and published a quarter-century before Candide; it cost Voltaire his place in Paris and set out the programme that his later campaigns pursued.
EN
1759 Candide (Candide, ou l'Optimisme)
The most widely read of Voltaire's philosophical tales, a short novel published in the year he bought Ferney; its quarrel with optimism began in his poem on the Lisbon earthquake three years earlier.
EN
1762 The Sermon of the Fifty (Sermon des cinquante)
Among Voltaire's anti-Christian pamphlets, the one his posthumous editors counted the first to attack the religion directly; the arguments it set down came back in many of the tracts he wrote over the following decades.
EN
1763 Treatise on Tolerance (Traité sur la tolérance) you are here EN
1764 Philosophical Dictionary (Dictionnaire philosophique portatif)
An alphabet that kept growing: begun as a single pocket volume, it was enlarged through the 1760s and swollen after Voltaire's death into the combined dictionary his editors assembled.
EN
1772 We Must Take Sides (Il faut prendre un parti, ou le principe d'action)
Written at seventy-seven, it turns Voltaire's arguments away from the Church he had attacked in The Sermon of the Fifty and against the atheists of d'Holbach's circle.
EN

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