On this date in 1766, a 20-year-old French chevalier’s freethinking proclivities got him beheaded and burned for impiety in one of Bourbon France’s most notorious episodes of religious chauvanism.
Check that date again. This is 69 years after the British Isles’ last execution for blasphemy; Voltaire was alive, and already in his dotage — and the fact that young Chevalier de la Barre was reading him was proclaimed as evidence. Such a benighted proceeding with the French Revolution on the horizon calls Dickens to mind:
it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness
The luckless youth and a couple of friends had pissed off a local judge, which got ugly for them when the unexplained vandalism of a town crucifix availed the opportunity for the magistrate to wield a sledgehammer against a fly.
De la Barre’s volume of Voltaire was tossed onto the pyre with him. That Enlightenment colossus made a measured posthumous effort at having the boy rehabilitated* — primarily for the benefit of his more judicious friend, who had fled the country and required his death sentence in absentia be lifted in order to inherit the family estate — but the verdict was not set aside until the French Revolution, a few months after the end of the Terror.
France’s overall secular trajectory since has rendered this date a sort of national freethinkers’ holiday, Chevalier de la Barre Day. A statue of its namesake stands in Paris’ Montmarte:
* Voltaire’s writings on the case in the original French are collected by the Association Le Chevalier de la Barre here.
On this day..
- 1523: Jan van Essen and Hendrik Vos, the first Lutheran martyrs
- 1896: The Rufus Buck Gang, heaven-dream't
- 1681: Archbishop Oliver Plunkett, the last Catholic martyr in Great Britain
- 1941: Francisco Escribano, for supplying the Spanish Maquis
- 1555: John Bradford, in the grace of God
- 1819: Neyonibe and Naugechek
- 1413: Pierre des Essarts
- 1943: Willem Arondeus, gay resistance fighter
- 2010: Michael Perry, Herzog subject
- 1569: Three Huguenot Parisians
- 1346: Simon Pouillet
- 1947: The avatar of Doctor Wonder
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Thank you for your utube video. All of my life, we have had an oral history detailing my paternal grandmothers fathers’s father etc. coming to america. i am born in hawaii, so tales of a great uncle being beheaded and burned in paris seemed very remote and could not really be verifyed( not easily) unitl the internet came along. Now I have traveled to paris and have seen the statue of my unfortunate great- ( how many greats?) uncle.