Jean-François de la Barre

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Jean-François Lefevre, knight de la Barre (September 12, 1745 - July 1, 1766), was a French nobleman, famous for having been tortured and beheaded before his body was burnt on a pyre along with Voltaire's "Philosophical Dictionary" (a touch added by the Paris Parlement when they confirmed the original sentence from the Abbeville court). In France, he is a symbol of Christian religious intolerance, along with Jean Calas and Pierre-Paul Sirven, all championed by Voltaire. A statue to him stands in the Montmartre district of Paris and a street nearby is also named for him.

This story is best known through Voltaire's two accounts, which, however, were polemic and not history, and in fact 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 ^[1]). Le Cri du sang innocent (1775) omits all mention of Belleval and shifts the blame to Duval de Soicourt, the judge in the case. 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).

On August 9, 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. 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; although 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). Three young men, Gaillard d'Etallonde, Jean-François de La Barre, and Moisnel were accused of not having removed their hats when a procession had passed, but numerous other blasphemies were revealed was well. 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 Philosophers for the young men's misbehavior.

Voltaire, at first horrified by the attention the affair drew to him, ended up defending La Barre's memory and helping d'Etallonde. The sentence was reversed by the National Convention during the French Revolution in 1794.

[edit] References

1. ^ A. Deverité, Recueil intéressant sur l’affaire de la mutilation du crucifix d’Abbeville, arrivée le 9 août 1765, et sur la mort du chevalier de La Barre

Marc Chassaigne's "Le Proces du Chevalier de la Barre" and Max Gallo's "Que Passe La Justice Du Roi", both dedicated to this affair.