The life of Voltaire

by Evelyn Beatrice Hall

As Voltaire said, “it deserved Saint Lazare.”

On February 28, 1766, d’Étallonde and La Barre were condemned to have their tongues torn out with hot irons, their right hands to be cut off, and to be burnt to death by a slow fire. In the case of La Barre this sentence was so far graciously remitted that he was to be beheaded before he was burnt; but, on the other hand, he was further condemned to the torture Ordinary and Extraordinary, to extract from him the names of his accomplices. Even for that time the sentence was so brutal—“could they have done more if he had killed his father?”—that no one believed it would be carried out. Against absent d’Étallonde, of course, it could not be. A public appeal was made to the King. Ten of the best avocats of Paris declared the sentence illegal. La Barre was taken to the capital, and his case retried there, where “a majority of five voices condemned to the most horrible torments a young man only guilty of folly.” He was taken back to Abbeville. All through the trial he had borne himself with a high courage. It did not leave him now. He recognised many old acquaintances on the way, and saluted them gaily. On the last evening of his life he supped with his confessor—a priest whom he had often met at his aunt’s gay table. “Let us have some coffee,” he is reported to have said; “it will not prevent my sleeping.” Bravado, perhaps. But bravado and brave are of the same origin. The next day, July 1, 1766, began with the torture. On his way to the scaffold the poor boy recognised among the cruel crowd of spectators not only many men whom he had called friend, but, to their everlasting shame, women too. That “barbarism which would have made even drunken savages shudder,” the pulling out of the tongue, was so barbarous that the five executioners only pretended to do it. On his way up to the scaffold La Barre’s shoe dropped off. He turned and put it on again. He bound his own eyes, and talked calmly to the executioners, and then died with “the firmness of Socrates”—a harder death.

It is said that the executioner who cut off the head did it so cleverly that the spectators applauded. The body was thrown to the flames—with “The Philosophical Thoughts” of Diderot; the “Sopha” of the younger Crébillon; two little volumes of Bayle; and “The Philosophical Dictionary,” which was supposed to have inspired the indecent impiety of which the unhappy boy had been guilty, but which certainly does inspire a religion not so unlike the religion of Christ as the savage hatred which killed La Barre.

The event caused a fearful sensation, even in the eighteenth century. The victim was so young, and had so nobly played the man. To the last moment, popular opinion had believed in a reprieve. One of the people who so believed was Voltaire. Vague reports of the case had reached him at first. Some young fools had been profaning a church, and then declaring in cross-examination that they had been led to do so by the books of the “Encyclopædia”! But then wild boys who commit drunken frolics do not read books of philosophy!

And when the tidings of that 1st of July had come—“My dear brother, my heart is withered.” Grimm wrote boldly and significantly of the event that “humanity awaited an avenger.” But this time how could the avenger be Voltaire? On the lips of all the churchmen were the words—Philosophy hath done this thing. This is where your fine freethinking, your mental emancipation, lead men! Certainly, it might have been answered that La Barre was not the product of philosophy, but of the Church; educated by a curé, finished by my Lady Abbess; sheltered, after his sin, in the Abbey of Longvilliers; given for his last confessor a priestly boon companion of those wild suppers at the convent. If the philosophers mocked at religion, what of the licentious priests of that wicked day? Châteauneuf, Chaulieu, Desfontaines—the names of a score of others must have come to Voltaire’s lips. This boy had put the teaching of such men into action. The more fool he; but not the greater criminal. There were a thousand excuses for him; and “tears come easily for the youth which has committed sins which in ripe age it would have redeemed.”

But Voltaire, with a guilty conscience one may hope, seems to have remembered that he had written not only “The Philosophical Dictionary,” but the ribald “Pucelle.” He might thereby have had some hand in La Barre’s undoing; and when he saw that men flung the whole responsibility for that sin on him and his brothers, the Encyclopædists, he feared.

By July 14th he had gone to Rolle in Vaud. He had been there in the spring for his health; now he went for his safety.

But, safe or dangerous, he must write his view of the case. By the 22d of the same month his account of “The Death of the Chevalier de la Barre” was complete. Clear, masterly, succinct, it is perhaps one of the finest tracts in the cause of humanity ever written, even by Voltaire himself. On July 25th, he was asking clever young Élie de Beaumont if there was any law, date 1681, by which those guilty of indecent impieties could be sentenced to death. He had himself looked everywhere in vain; which was not wonderful. There was no such law. The ignorance and fanaticism of the judges had “supposed its existence.” “This barbarity occupies me day and night.” True, La Barre was past the reach of human help. But Voltaire could hope that his cries “might frighten the carnivorous beasts from others.” They did that. The popular fury to which he gave mighty voice saved feeble Moisnel. After La Barre’s death the judges did not dare to proceed with the suit.

In 1775, when d’Étallonde was staying with him at Ferney, Voltaire wrote a pamphlet called “The Cry of Innocent Blood,” which had as its object the restitution of his civil rights to that young officer, to whom Frederick had accorded a long leave of absence. If he never obtained that restitution or full justification for the memory of La Barre, at least he never ceased to try. He worked the case for twelve years, and his labours were only stopped by death.

Partly for his own safety; partly in horror of a country which could sanction a vengeance so awful; partly in longing for an Elysium where he and his brothers might live and speak as free men, in this July of 1766, at Rolle, this boy Voltaire conceived the mad and hot-headed scheme of retiring, with all the enlightened, to Cleves, and forming there a literary society, with a printing press.