LARS TO/NDERintellectual curiosity in the history of political thought. It is to this revalorization that we
now turn; to understand the reason behind it is to gain insight into the tacit exclusions
that determine the reasonableness of toleration.
Voltaire arrives at the basic insight—that ‘‘tolerance... is the endowment of human-
ity [l’apanage de humanite ́]’’^17 —through his engagement with the Calas case. This is the
case in which Jean Calas, a Protestant father living in Toulouse, was executed on March
10, 1762, for having killed his son Marc-Antoine, who, the prosecutor alleged, was in the
process of converting to Catholicism. Convinced that Jean Calas was innocent and that
Marc-Antoine had committed suicide for personal reasons, Voltaire set out to protect
Mme Calas and her family from further harassment. His focus on how the deliberations
of the thirteen judges responsible for the case were shaped by the broader context chal-
lenges the image of reason that Locke promotes.
Voltaire begins his defense—published inTraite ́sur la tole ́rance—with the suggestion
that theToulousaineshave an innate disgust for other religious faiths.^18 He substantiates
this by reminding his audience of the tradition in Toulouse that celebrated the deaths of
more than three thousand Protestants killed in a massacre by their Catholic adversaries
on May 17, 1562. He also points out how one of the religious fraternities in Toulouse
influenced the opinion of the judges by honoring Marc-Antoine at a commemorative
mass, at which he was presented as a martyr who died for his struggle against evil (that
is, Calvinism). Both of these observations help Voltaire establish the claim that the people
of Toulouse, and not the Calas family, were responsible for the suggestion that Marc-
Antoine had been in the process of converting to Catholicism. They also help Voltaire to
understand that, if the virtues of tolerance and toleration are to flourish, they can do so
only if we place them in a climate of enlightened forbearance. This, stresses Voltaire, is
not something that happens in a disinterested manner. To the contrary, it depends on the
partisanship of those who are prepared to appreciate the embodied nature of reason.
Voltaire argues this in an often-quoted passage: the ‘‘great means to reduce the number
of fanatics... is to subject that disease of the mind to the regime of reason [re ́gime de la
raison], which slowly, but infallibly, enlightens men. Reason is mild and humane. It in-
spires forbearance and drowns discord; it strengthens virtue and makes obedience to the
laws agreeable rather than compulsory.’’^19
There is no doubt that this alternative image of reason had a great impact on the
political climate of France during the eighteenth century, epitomized in Condorcet’s com-
ment that Voltaire was theidole de la nation. Voltaire maintained this status in early-
twentieth-century commentaries by scholars such as Ernest Cassirer, who saw in theTraite ́
an attitude of sober engagement, which made it possible for Voltaire to focus ‘‘in one
point all the intellectual convictions and tendencies of the Enlightenment.’’^20 But Voltaire
no longer occupies the epicenter of the Enlightenment. In fact, we might describe the
more recent reception of Voltaire as a shift from seeing him as key to the discussion of
tolerance and toleration to viewing him as a curiosity in the history of these issues. Preston
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