On August 9, 1765, it was discovered that a wooden crucifix, erected upon the Pont-Neuf in Abbeville, had suffered mutilation. The earliest suspicions, according to Champagnac, fell upon drunken soldiers emerging from a tavern. At that juncture, no witness pointed an accusing finger at the Chevalier de La Barre. Yet, less than a year later, this young gentleman would be led to the scaffold at the close of proceedings in which the incident on the bridge, the failure to uncover before a passing procession, and reported songs were ultimately confounded into a single crime.
In 1764, the abbess of an Abbeville convent had summoned to her side her nephew, the Chevalier de La Barre, the grandson of a lieutenant-general. His father having squandered a considerable fortune, the aunt cared for the youth as her own son and endeavoured to procure for him a company of cavalry. He resided outside the cloister and frequently took supper with her in the company of a few companions. Among the abbess’s acquaintances was Duval de Saucourt, a man of some sixty years, lieutenant of the court of the *élection*, who was charged with certain temporal affairs of the convent. Champagnac relates that Duval became enamoured of her, and that his advances, initially repelled with gentleness, eventually inspired her aversion.
The quarrel assumed a sharper edge when La Barre rose to his aunt’s defense, addressing Duval with haughty disdain. The chronicle identifies this affront as the prime mover of the vengeance that ensued. Duval learned that La Barre and the young d’Étallonde, son of the president of the *élection*, had crossed a street while a religious procession was passing without removing their hats. He undertook to cast this breach of decorum as a premeditated insult to religion. The episode of the crucifix, occurring merely a few days later, would furnish him with the pretext to unite two occurrences that the archival record regards as entirely unrelated.
The Bishop of Amiens, who also exercised ecclesiastical jurisdiction over Abbeville, lent immense notoriety to the desecration of the crucifix. Monitory letters were issued from the pulpits, and an expiatory procession was marshalled. For months, tales of alleged sacrilege proliferated: there was talk of a clandestine sect that shattered crucifixes and profaned holy hosts, with certain individuals going so far as to aver that they had seen blood stream from them. Champagnac likens these fabrications to the ancient, mendacious charges leveled against the Jews across the cities of Europe. He does not present these accounts as established facts, but rather as the symptom of an atmosphere steeped in dread and calumny.
Duval caused the domestics, maidservants, and day-labourers who had known the young man to be interrogated. According to the chronicle, their initial replies held him to be wholly innocent of the degradation of the crucifix. No material trace bound La Barre to the deed; opinion inclined rather toward an accident, perhaps occasioned by a cart laden with timber. Duval refused to relent. Through menaces and insidious exhortations, he persuaded witnesses that their duty lay in denouncing the Chevalier for having passed at some distance from a procession without baring his head, and for having once sung libertine airs.
He lodged a formal deposition in his own person before the principal judge of the sénéchaussée and secured a hearing for his informers. The inquest soon broadened its reach: each witness reported what he claimed to have seen or heard, and at times what he merely imagined he remembered. The five individuals targeted were La Barre, Moinel, d’Étallonde, Douville de Maillefeu, and Duval’s own son. The dossier thus drew together those whom rumour linked to both occurrences, though the first—the damaged crucifix upon the bridge—was in no way interchangeable with the passage before the procession. The very witnesses suborned by Duval also named his own son among the presumed participants in these clandestine impieties. The chronicle affirms that Duval, initially overcome with dismay, contrived the young man’s flight, and thereupon pursued the prosecution with redoubled rancour.
The accusations were compounded of hearsay, words imputed to the youths, and private actions of long standing, amalgamated into a solitary indictment. La Barre and Moinel, a lad of some fifteen years, were subjected to examination. The judicial vocabulary of an assault against religion employed by the magistrate shattered the younger boy’s resolve: Moinel fell to his knees and made a general confession. La Barre, on the contrary, exonerated him entirely, persisting in this noble constancy unto the very end.
The fate visited upon d’Étallonde demonstrated the merciless rigour of the penalties contemplated. At eighteen years of age, he was condemned by the judges of Abbeville to have his tongue severed, his right hand cut off, and then to be bound to a stake and consumed over a slow fire; he fled the realm, thereby evading the execution of the sentence. La Barre, who remained in custody, was condemned to be beheaded before his remains were cast into the flames. The judges further decreed that he undergo both the ordinary and extraordinary question, to wrench from him the names of his accomplices. Thus, while both sentences partook of the same climate of severity, they did not prescribe the identical torture. The rack was to precede La Barre’s execution merely to extract names: it rested upon no proof that he had participated in the defacement of the crucifix, which the account scrupulously distinguishes from the other charges. Champagnac recalls that an ordinance of 1666 prescribed fines for blasphemies, doubled upon a second offense, and the pillory only after repeated relapses; he vehemently denounces the recourse to capital punishment in this affair. This royal ordinance, as summarized in the chronicle, did not abolish the severity of ancient penalties, yet it did not mandate death for the spoken words and gestures imputed to the Chevalier. The author thus contrasts the statutory penalties with those pronounced by the bench, discerning in this disparity the plain sign of judicial violence directed against the youth. The sentence of Abbeville was handed down on February 28, 1766.
As the sénéchaussée fell under the appellate jurisdiction of the Parlement of Paris, the condemned man was transferred thither. The magistrates of the capital confirmed the judgment, and La Barre was returned to Abbeville. His escort travelled by circuitous byways. He rode in a post-chaise between two officers of the maréchaussée, guarded by mounted archers disguised as couriers; it was feared, the chronicle notes, that his companions might attempt his rescue upon the road.
On July 1, 1766, he was put to the question in Abbeville. Having swooned beneath the agony, he revived only to declare that he possessed no accomplices. The Dominican friar who ministered to him, a friend of his aunt, could not stay his tears; the Chevalier consoled him. They took their dinner together, whereupon La Barre proposed that they take coffee, remarking with equanimity that it would not prevent him from sleeping. These details, preserved in Champagnac’s relation, lend to the scene a singular serenity amidst the dread apparatus of the law.
The mutilation of the tongue ordained by the decree was not carried to its completion: faced with his steadfast refusal, the executioners merely simulated the gesture, according to the chronicle. La Barre mounted the scaffold without lamentation or anger. To the religious, he murmured: “I had not thought that a young gentleman could be put to death for so trifling a matter!” He was executed that very day.
The execution plunged Abbeville into consternation; proceedings against the remaining accused were not pursued, Champagnac reports. Voltaire, who had championed the memory of Calas, published in his turn an account of La Barre’s death under the name of M. Casen, advocate. The chronicle borrows from this tract several of its salient features. Thus the affair of the crucifix remained upon the threshold of a trial that had ultimately judged together a defacement never proven against La Barre, a hat kept upon a head before a procession, and careless words attributed to youth.