Le Chevalier de La Barre was
tortured and
burnt when he was 19, for not having saluted a procession. During his trial, collusion between the bishop and the prosecution was clear.
Jean-Francois de La Barre was born in 1745 in Férolles-en-Brie. As poor orphans, the brothers La Barre were adopted by their aunt in her
abbey in Willancourt. She held a
salon. The kids were noisy, and
anticlerical.
On august 9, 1765, the wooden cross on the Pont-Neuf was knifed. The emotion of the people of
Abbeville was canalized by Monseigneur de la Motte,
bishop of
Amiens, who ordered them to reveal everything they might know about the affair to secular judges, under pain of
excommunication.
Every sunday, pastors harrassed the churchgoers, and pressure rose. Nobody had seen anything, but several persons remembered young hippies who didn't take off their hats when a procession passed. Three names were cited : Gaillard d'Etallonde, Jean-François de La Barre and Moisnel.
Facing menaces, Gaillard d'Etallonde fled to Holland. La Barre stayed, where could he have gone without money ? Besides, he had an alibi for the 9th. But when they searched his room in his aunt's abbey, they found three
forbidden books, amongst them
Voltaire's
Dictionnaire Philosophique. The had the ideal suspect.
His aunt used her relationships, the chevalier filed for appeal in Paris, but nothing helped. On June 4,1766, the parliament of
Paris, ruled on the case. Moisnel, aged 15, was fined, d'Etallonde was still away, they only have the Chevalier left.
On July 1, 1766, after being questionned (tortured) once again - they cut his tongue for singing
lewd songs, they cut his head off and threw him in the flames with Voltaire's book.
Voltaire tried to have him
rehabilitated but he didn't succeed. He was rehabilitated by the
Convention on Brumaire 25, II (November 15, 1794).
Years later, the catholics (the bastards) built the cathedral of the
sacre-coeur on the
Butte Montmartre to "expiate the crimes of
the Paris Commune". Then in
1905, a statue of the Chevalier was built in front of it. It was to be removed afterwards in
1941, when the
vichy government was gathering metal for the German
war effort. Statues of saints, kings and queens were spared.