ABSTRACT
The Philosophes and the Enlightenment Critique of Inquisition-Process The 18th century campaign against the Code Louis was championed by the French literary elites. Montesquieu, for example, having spent three formative years in England (1729-31) and having absorbed the work of John Locke (Dedieu 1971), produced a trenchant, if somewhat coded, critique of existing forms of French justice in his L’Esprit des Lois of 1748. He called for increased formality in procedure1 and rejected torture with the words ‘I hear the voice of nature crying out against me.’2 In this he was echoing a growing sentiment which had been expressed from within the judicial community by influential figures such as Lamoignon and Augustin Nicolas, the president of the Parlement of Dijon (Esmein 1914, pp.357). The real crisis for the Code Louis, however, was not to occur until the 1760s, when the criminal courts became deeply embroiled in the controversies surrounding the repression of Protestant dissent. Against a background of the declining use of torture for ordinary crime, the brutal repression of the Huguenots demonstrated once again the potential of inquisition-process for mobilising official secrecy and terror as a weapon against minorities. In Toulouse in 1762, the Huguenot father of a probable suicide victim, Jean Calas was arrested for his son’s murder on the grounds that the crime had been committed to prevent the young man’s conversion to Catholicism. Backed by violent anti-Protestant feelings in the city, the murder enquiry was conducted with a mixture of cynicism and incompetency by the capitoules (local judges) who arranged for an elaborate requiem mass for the son (Maugham 1928; Bien 1960; Nixon 1961; Bontems 1964; Royer 2001, pp.204-6). The Parlement compounded matters by condemning Calas (on flimsy and circumstantial evidence provided by repeated monitoires) to be broken on the wheel, after suffering the question préalable (torture to identify accomplices). Calas endured the torture and subsequent execution with great dignity, insisting on his innocence throughout. As the priests remarked to one another on the scaffold, ‘(O)ur own martyrs died in this way’ (Nixon 1961, p.109). The chilling bureaucratic efficiency with which the torments of Calas were
recorded in the procès verbale, recalls the experimental techniques and records of the scientists Lavoisier or Laplace, intermixed, in this case, with large amounts of religious bigotry. As Calas was repeatedly racked and the water torture was administered, the greffier noted the times and quantities with scientific accuracy:
INTERROGATED … AFTER which we have put the said Calas into the hands of the Reverend Fathers Bourges, Doctor of the University and Caldaigues, Professor in Theology … to exhort him. AND then, after half an hour, we have bound the said Calas to the bench for the application of the Question extraordinary. AND the said Calas having been questioned by us if he has committed this crime because of Religion … if he did it before or after supper, and if he strangled or hanged Marc-Antoine Calas. REPLIES and denies the Interrogatory and says that he had no accomplices. AND after that five pitcherfuls of water were poured down (his throat) and having uncovered the face of the said Calas, INTERROGATED if he persists in his replies to the last Interrogatory made to him (ibid., p.105).
