Introduction

In 1936, in a world which was collapsing around him, the Viennese humanist Stefan Zweig published an essay, The Right to Heresy: Castellio against Calvin. The memory of religious intolerance loomed ominously over a present troubled by the rise of Nazism. Zweig stressed the need to remember the victims of intolerance:

History has no time to be just. It is her business, as impartial chronicler, to record successes, but she rarely appraises their moral worth. She keeps her eyes fixed on the victorious, and leaves the vanquished in the shadows. Carelessly these ‘unknown soldiers’ are shoveled into the common ditch of forgetfulness. Nulla crux, nulla corona – neither cross nor garland – records their fruitless sacrifice. […] Hence, we must never cease to remind a world which has eyes only for monuments to conquerors that the true heroes of our race are not those who reach their transitory realms across hecatombs of corpses, but those who, lacking power to resist, succumb to superior force – as Castellio was overpowered by Calvin in his struggle for the freedom of the spirit and for the ultimate establishment of the kingdom of humaneness upon earth. ¹

Unfortunately, pleas like Stefan Zweig’s were not that frequent. In the nineteenth century, the memory of religious violence did not necessarily become a statement in favour of tolerance or freedom of conscience. Indeed, it often became an argument for religious hatred. It is true that there were those who, like Zweig, resorted to the past to defend the creation of a framework for coexistence. These readings were the heirs of Enlightenment and revolutionary traditions, which drew from the theological reflections of John Locke in the face of the tensions between Anglicans and Catholics, the more philosophical reflections of Pierre Bayle after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and the historico-philosophical reflections of Voltaire after the execution of Jean Callas. This idea of remembering and overcoming a past of intolerance was also nourished by more positive experiences nearby, such as the patents of tolerance granted to various confessions in the second half of the eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth centuries, as well as the first two experiences of religious freedom in 1791 with the first amendment of the Constitution of the United States and the French Constitution. However, the search for referents in the past would be limited by hate speech, as well as by the affirmation of confessional nationalism first and the culture wars later.