François-Jean de la Barre

Voltaire's two accounts of the story were polemic and not history, and contradict each other. The first, Relation de la mort du chevalier de la Barre, par M. Cassen, avocat au conseil du roi, à M. le marquis de Beccaria (1766), blames Belleval, a neighbor of la Barre's "aunt" (this account was almost immediately criticized by a local Abbeville printer for numerous inaccuracies). Le Cri du sang innocent (1775) omits all mention of Belleval and shifts the blame to Duval de Soicourt, the judge in the case (this version largely follows Simon-Nicholas Henri Linguet's memoir ''Pour les sieurs Moisnel, Dumesniel de Saveuse et Douville de Maillefeu injustement impliqués dans l'affaire de la mutilation d'un crucifix, arrivée à Abbeville le 9 Août 1765'' (Paris, 1766).). Voltaire notably emphasizes the role of the Church, although the prosecution was entirely secular (albeit based on Old Regime law, which assumed Catholicism as the state religion and so defined a number of offenses based on religion, such as sacrilege and blasphemy). The only specific efforts by the Church hierarchy were in favor of commuting the planned execution into life imprisonment, as requested by the Bishop of Amiens. ==Events==

On 9 August 1765, the wooden crucifix on a bridge in Abbeville was vandalized. Catholicism was then the state religion of France and the religion of the vast majority of the French public, especially in the devout town of Abbeville, where this act caused widespread shock and anger. Voltaire says that , the bishop of Amiens, roused the furor of the faithful and asked churchgoers to reveal all they could about the case to the civilian judges, under pain of excommunication; however, Chassaigne says that he came (at the town fathers' request) to calm emotions but that the ceremony had the opposite effect. The church was obliged under secular law to make the proclamations looking for witnesses (Voltaire mentions these proclamations, without clarifying that fact). Nobody actually revealed anything about the vandalism itself, but Du Maisniel de Belleval, a local judge who had quarreled with young la Barre, gathered damaging evidence against a group of friends (possibly not realizing his own son was part of the group). Among other things, it came out that three young men, Gaillard d'Etallonde, Jean-François de la Barre, and Moisnel had not removed their hats when a Corpus Christi procession went by. This incident is often cited as the main basis for the charges. But numerous other blasphemies were alleged as well, including defecation on another crucifix, singing impious songs and spitting on religious images. Soon, Douville de Maillefeu (son of a former mayor) and Belleval's own son Saveuse were also implicated. But these two along with d'Etallonde – also the son of a former mayor – managed to flee, and ultimately only d'Etallonde was named (in absentia) along with la Barre in the sentence. (Though no culprit was identified in the specific attack, Moisnel testified that he had seen d'Etallonde strike the statue with his cane on previous occasions. D'Etallonde appears in much of the testimony as the leader and instigator of the group of friends.) The only two who ended up in custody – Moisnel and la Barre – were both orphans and from outside Abbeville. During the inquiry, la Barre's bedroom was searched and among his mainly pornographic prohibited books, Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary was found - providing a pretext to blame the Philosophes for the young men's misbehavior. On 20 February 1766, Duval de Soicourt and two other local judges handed down the sentence: at AbbevilleRegarding Jean-Francois Lefebvre, chevalier de La Barre, we declare him convicted of having taught to sing and sung impious, execrable and blasphemous songs against God; of having profaned the sign of the cross in making blessings accompanied by foul words which modesty does not permit repeating; of having knowingly refused the signs of respect to the Holy Sacrament carried in procession by the priory of Saint-Pierre; of having shown these signs of adoration to foul and abominable books that he had in his room; of having profaned the mystery of the consecration of wine, having mocked it, in pronouncing the impure terms mentioned in the trial record over a glass of wine which he held in his hand and then drunken the wine; of having finally proposed to Petignat, who was serving mass with him, to bless the cruets while pronouncing the impure words mentioned in the trial record. Note that this sentence does not mention the mutilation of a cross which had provoked the original inquiry. Despite Voltaire's later claim that the court had applied an old obscure sentence for witchcraft, this sentence conformed to the statutory penalty for blasphemy and sacrilege. It is less certain however that this penalty was usually applied in practice, and Linguet later highlighted a number of defects in the legal forms of the case. On 4 June, the Paris Parlement (more a judicial than a legislative body) confirmed the sentence on appeal. It is sometimes claimed that it added the relatively standard stipulation that la Barre be tortured just before being executed. Typically this was done to oblige the accused to reveal any accomplices. However, the Abbeville sentence already included this stipulation and the note that the Dictionary should be burned as well. The key significance of the Parlement's confirmation was to give judicial legitimacy to a sentence that Voltaire and Linguet, among others, would later portray as the result of petty local quarrels. Chassaigne notes however that the Parlement itself might have had its own political reasons for its decision. On 1 July, la Barre was tortured early in the morning. Though he appears to have been with others when he committed some of the lesser acts named in the sentence, he refused to name any even under torture. Later the same day, he was beheaded; his body was burned with his ashes thrown in the Somme River. Voltaire's work was burned along with la Barre's body. == Later views of the case ==

Linguet Voltaire, at first horrified by the attention the affair drew to him, ended up defending la Barre's memory and helping d'Etallonde, whom he even received as a houseguest at Ferney. His first paper probably played a large part in the charges against the younger Belleval and Douville being dropped. His second was an attempt (unsuccessful) to obtain a pardon for d'Etallonde. In 1778, Linguet, la Barre's own defender, criticized him harshly, though largely as a way of attacking the influence of the Philosophes with whom Linguet was quarreling by then: …this dirty wretch of Chevalier de la Barre. They have tried to pass him off as a budding great man, sacrificed by a religious barbarism, as a martyr of Philosophy; he was only so by very profane perversity, armed with his own indiscretion. He goes on to say that la Barre's youth might have earned him some consideration had it not been for the need to make an example, and explicitly blames the Philosophes for having set la Barre's mind on fire. (Note that the trial record itself says little or nothing about such influence; the idea that the actions of la Barre and his friends were inspired by larger ideas, rather than adolescent discontent, is based almost wholly on the presence of a few books in his library.) The sentence was reversed by the National Convention during the French Revolution in 1794. In 1895, Jean Cruppi wrote an overview of Linguet's role in the case (which also includes a detailed and documented look at the case itself, including quotes from la Barre's interrogation under torture). He ends with this observation: Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities on the butte Montmartre A later reference to the torture and execution of la Barre can be found in the first pages of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities (1859): Other works Marc Chassaigne's Le procès du Chevalier de la Barre (Paris, 1920) and Max Gallo's Que passe la justice du Roi (Paris, 1987); both books (in French) are extensive studies of this affair. ==Posthumous tributes==

Paris – Montemartre The Freemasons of the Grand Orient of France and other organized freethinkers obtained the elevation of the first Chevalier de la Barre statue in Paris as "the antidote in front of poison" to the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus of Paris (Sacré-Cœur) on Montmartre during 1897. The Municipal Council of Paris during 1904 recovered 5000 m2 of land wrongfully retained by the archdiocese and decided to award a 5,000-franc grant toward the completion of the statue at this location in line with the great portal of the Sacré-Cœur, Paris. A full-size mock-up of the statue and base, as sculpted by freethinker Armand Bloch, was inaugurated on 3 September 1905 at the Congress of Freethinkers. The following year, 1906, the statue was cast in bronze and was placed 'provisionally' by the Paris City Council at the gate of the Sacré-Cœur basilica during a ceremony which was attended by approximately 25,000 spectators. Street names There are French streets or impasses named in memory of Chevalier de la Barre in the following common places: ==References==