Voltaire: Treatise on Tolerance (Cambridge Texts in the ... (ISBN 0521640172)

Book Description:
The works presented in this volume, in a new English translation, are among the most important and characteristic texts of the Enlightenment, and bring together all three aspects of Voltaire: the writer, the doer and the philosophe. Originating in Voltaire's campaign to exonerate Jean Calas, they are works of polemical brilliance, informed by his deism and humanism and by Enlightenment values and ideals more generally. The issues which they raise, concerning questions of tolerance and human dignity, are still highly relevant to our own times.

Great Writings on Freedom of religion and against tyranny:
Voltaire's Treatiste on Tolerance is a brilliant account of the judicial murder of French Protestant Jean Calas who was accused of murdering his son who had converted to Roman Catholism. Voltaire details the case : the lack of counsel, the breaking on the wheel, burning at the stake and strangulation. Calas suffered this and continued to maintain his innocence. Through Voltaire's effort Calas was rehibilitated in 1766 and his innocence vindicated. Interspersed in the text are Voltaire's historical observations of the tolerance of the Roman Empire, the Thirty Years War, the massacre of St. Bartholmew's day were thousands perished due to religious fanaticism. Also chronicled is the case of a young nobleman accused of not taking his hat off as a religious procession passed. He was further accused of mutilating a cruxifix that was placed on a bridge. This young man, and his friend were convicted of blasphamy and heresy and sentenced to be broken on the wheel, have his tongue torn out with pincers, and then burned at the stake. The account Voltaire provides is both enlightening and frightful. If you are interested in freedom of religion, tolerance, and freethought this is a must buy!