It is better to risk saving a guilty man than…

The sentence occurs in the chapter of Zadig entitled “The Minister”, when the hero, having become prime minister to the king of Babylon, governs according to his conscience. When he judged, “it was not he who judged, it was the law”, and he tempered it when it was too severe. “It is from him that nations have received this great principle”, Voltaire writes before stating the maxim; Zadig believed “that laws were made to help citizens as much as to intimidate them”. A first lawsuit between two heirs follows at once.

The tale appeared in 1747 under the title Memnon, then in 1748 under that of Zadig, or Destiny. Behind the oriental setting, Voltaire sketches a justice that prefers doubt to error.

Fifteen years later, the affair of Calas, the Protestant wrongly executed in Toulouse, would make Voltaire the defender of the victims of judicial error. Zadig’s maxim has become one of the French formulations of the principle “when in doubt, in favour of the accused”.

Zadig, or Destiny, chapter “The Minister”, 1747

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