A friend of Rousseau brought the case to the notice of Voltaire and as soon as the Calas affair came to an end, he turned his attention to the Sirvens. The wife meanwhile had died. Remained the duty of vindicating the husband. It took exactly seven years to do this. Once again the tribunal of Toulouse refused to give any information or to surrender any documents. Once more Voltaire had to beat the tom-tom of publicity and beg money from Frederick of Prussia and Catherine of Russia and Poniatowski of Poland before he could force the crown to take an interest. But finally, in the seventy-eighth year of his own life and in the eighth year of this interminable lawsuit, the Sirvens were exonerated and the survivors were allowed to go back to their homes.
So ended the second case.
The third one followed immediately.
In the month of August of the year 1765 in the town of Abbeville, not far from Amiens, two crucifixes that stood by the side of the road were found broken to pieces by an unknown hand. Three young boys were suspected of this sacrilege and orders were given for their arrest. One of them escaped and went to Prussia. The others were caught. Of these, the older one, a certain Chevalier de la Barre, was suspected of being an atheist. A copy of the Philosophical Dictionary, that famous work to which all the great leaders of liberal thought had contributed, was found among his books. This looked very suspicious and the judges decided to look into the young man’s past. It was true they could not connect him with the Abbeville case but had he not upon a previous occasion refused to kneel down and uncover while a religious procession went by?
De la Barre said yes, but he had been in a hurry to catch a stage-coach and had meant no offense.
Thereupon he was tortured, and being young and bearing the pain less easily than old Calas, he readily confessed that he had mutilated one of the two crucifixes and was condemned to death for “impiously and deliberately walking before the Host without kneeling or uncovering, singing blasphemous songs, tendering marks of adoration to profane books,” and other crimes of a similar nature which were supposed to have indicated a lack of respect for the Church.
The sentence was so barbarous (his tongue was to be torn out with hot irons, his right hand was to be cut off, and he was to be slowly burned to death, and all that only a century and a half ago!) that the public was stirred into several expressions of disapproval. Even if he were guilty of all the things enumerated in the bill of particulars, one could not butcher a boy for a drunken prank! Petitions were sent to the King, ministers were besieged with requests for a respite. But the country was full of unrest and there must be an example, and de la Barre, having undergone the same tortures as Calas, was taken to the scaffold, was decapitated (as a sign of great and particular favor) and his corpse, together with his Philosophical Dictionary and some volumes by our old friend Bayle, were publicly burned by the hangman.
It was a day of rejoicing for those who dreaded the ever-growing influence of the Sozzinis and the Spinozas and the Descartes. It showed what invariably happened to those ill-guided young men who left the narrow path between the right and the wrong and followed the leadership of a group of radical philosophers.
Voltaire heard this and accepted the challenge. He was fast approaching his eightieth birthday, but he plunged into the case with all his old zeal and with a brain that burned with a clear white flame of outraged decency.