Француз ақсұйықтығы үшін өлімге кесілді

Frenchman executed for blasphemy and sacrilege

François Jean Lefebvre de la Barre (12 September 17451 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 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 Catholic religious intolerance, along with Jean Calas and Pierre Paul Sirven, all championed by Voltaire. A 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 Antoine Lefèbvre 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). 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.

Marc Chassaigne's Le Proces 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.