La Barre Monument

The La Barre Monument (Monument La Barre) is a secular monument in Abbeville, (Somme), France. It lies near the railway station (Gare d'Abbeville), next to the canal aqueduct over the River Somme. It was erected in 1907, by public subscription, in commemoration of the ordeal of François-Jean de la Barre, known as the Chevalier (en|Knight) de La Barre. In 1766, at Abbeville, La Barre was tried, found guilty, and executed for failing to salute a religious procession. The monument is today an annual gathering point for defenders of secularism and freethinking. On 1 July 1766, at Abbeville, a young man of 18 years of age, François-Jean Lefebvre de La Barre was beheaded for having failed to show religious respect. In applying the law, the judge committed him to have his bones crushed until he confessed his crime and denounced his accomplices, his tongue torn out, his right hand and head cut off, and their ashes thrown to the wind. The three principals in the case said that they had expected the judgment, having "been tried and convicted of letting pass twenty-five steps of a procession without doffing the hat on his head, not genuflecting, singing an unholy song, and making reference to infamous books, among which can be found Mr. Voltaire's Dictionnaire Philosophique". After the French Revolution, the French National Convention of 15 November 1793 (in the French Republican Calendar, 25 Brumaire an II) pardoned La Barre posthumously as a "Victim of the Superstition". At the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries, with embattled public schools and the secularisation of institutions, which culminated in the 1905 French law on the Separation of the Churches and the State, La Barre became a symbol of the anticlerical battle. In 1904, the Paris City Council recovered that had been unlawfully obtained by the Archbishopric, and moved to build a statue of de La Barre there, in line with the Grand Portal of the Sacré-Coeur de Montmartre. This statue by Armand Bloch was inaugurated on 3 September 1905, witnessed by 25,000 people.