Pierre-Paul Sirven

Pierre-Paul Sirven (1709–1777) is one of Voltaire's causes célèbres in his campaign to écraser l'infame (crush infamy).

Sirven became an archivist and notary in Castres, southern France, in 1736. He was a Protestant with three daughters; the middle one, Elizabeth, was mentally handicapped.

Protestants suffered serious disabilities in France at the time and were frequently persecuted by the authorities, often on flimsy excuses. The case of Jean Calas, the subject of another of Voltaire’s campaigns, had shown that legal authorities were fully prepared to ignore basic principles of law and justice in acting against members of the minority religion. The Toulouse parlement (high court) which took the decision in the Calas case also had jurisdiction over the authorities that would eventually try Sirven.

Elizabeth disappeared on 6 March 1760, aged 21. After having searched for her without success, Sirven learned that she had been taken into the convent of the Dames Noires (the ‘black ladies’, a convent founded in 1686 to keep daughters of Protestants sent to them under a lettre de cachet, the infamous means by which certain persons in authority could lock away those against whom they had a grudge, without trial or appeal). On 9 October 1760, Elizabeth suffered such a mental breakdown as a result of the ill treatment she received from the Dames Noires that they released her.

Sirven was so angry over the state of his daughter that he publicly denounced her treatment by the Dames Noires. They retaliated with a lawsuit accusing him of mistreating his daughter in order to prevent her conversion to Catholicism. They obtained an order against Sirven to allow Elizabeth free access to the convent and to accompany her himself to the services.

At the end of August 1761, the Sirven family moved to Saint Alby, near Mazamet, to avoid further persecution. On 16 December, Elizabeth disappeared again. Two weeks of searching yielded no results but on 3 January 1762 three children found her body down a well.

Initially medical examinations found that she had suffered no violence but, under pressure from the public prosecutor Trinquier of Mazamet, they changed their evidence to say that Elizabeth had not died by drowning. A warrant for Sirven’s arrest was issued on 20 January 1762, but the family was able to escape in time. A sentence passed on them in absentia on 29 March 1764 condemned the father to be broken on the wheel, the mother to be hanged and the two surviving daughters to be banished. Their effigies were burned in Mazamet on 11 September 1764.

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