François-Jean de la Barre
| François-Jean Lefebvre de la Barre | |
|---|---|
First statue of the Chevalier de la Barre at the gates of the Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre
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| Born |
12 September 1745 Château de Férolles-en-Brie |
| Died | 1 July 1766 (aged 20) Abbeville, Somme, Picardy, France |
| Nationality | French |
| Other names | Jean-François Lefebvre de la Barre |
| Known for | French icon for the victims of religious intolerance |
| Title | Chevalier (Knight) |
| Criminal charge |
Blasphemy Sacrilege |
| Criminal penalty |
Torture Execution |
| Parent(s) | Jean Baptiste Alexandre Lefebvre Charlotte Claude Niepce |
François-Jean Lefebvre de la Barre (12 September 1745 – 1 July 1766) was a young French nobleman. He was tortured and beheaded before his body was burnt on a pyre along with Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary nailed to his torso. La Barre is often said to have been executed for not saluting a Roman Catholic religious procession, though other charges of a similar nature were laid against him.
In France, Lefebvre de la Barre is widely regarded a symbol of the victims of Christian religious intolerance, along with Jean Calas and Pierre-Paul Sirven, all championed by Voltaire. A second replacement statue to de la Barre stands near the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus of Paris at the summit of the butte Montmartre (itself named from the Temple of Mars), the highest point in Paris and an 18th arrondissement street nearby the Sacré-Cœur is also named after Lefebvre de la Barre.
Lefebvre de la Barre was a descendant of Joseph-Antoine de La Barre, a governor of the French Antilles and then New France.
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). Whatever the general influence of religion in the affair, the only specific efforts by the Church hierarchy were in favor of a pardon for la Barre (requested by the Bishop of Amiens, among others.)
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Wikipedia