In France, Lefebvre de la Barre is widely regarded a symbol of the victims of Catholic religious intolerance, along with Jean Calas and Pierre-Paul Sirven, all championed by Voltaire.

The only specific efforts by the Church hierarchy were in favor of commuting the planned execution into life imprisonment, as requested by the Bishop of Amiens.

Voltaire says that Louis-François-Gabriel d'Orléans de La Motte [fr], the bishop of Amiens, roused the furor of the faithful and asked churchgoers to reveal all they could about the case to the civilian judges, under pain of excommunication; however, Chassaigne says that he came (at the town fathers' request) to calm emotions but that the ceremony had the opposite effect.

Among other things, it came out that three young men, Gaillard d'Etallonde, Jean-François de la Barre, and Moisnel had not removed their hats when a Corpus Christi procession went by.

On 20 February 1766, Duval de Soicourt and two other local judges handed down the sentence: Regarding Jean-Francois Lefebvre, chevalier de La Barre, we declare him convicted of having taught to sing and sung impious, execrable and blasphemous songs against God; of having profaned the sign of the cross in making blessings accompanied by foul words which modesty does not permit repeating; of having knowingly refused the signs of respect to the Holy Sacrament carried in procession by the priory of Saint-Pierre; of having shown these signs of adoration to foul and abominable books that he had in his room; of having profaned the mystery of the consecration of wine, having mocked it, in pronouncing the impure terms mentioned in the trial record over a glass of wine which he held in his hand and then drunken the wine; of having finally proposed to Petignat, who was serving mass with him, to bless the cruets while pronouncing the impure words mentioned in the trial record.

We order that before the execution of the said Lefebvre de La Barre the ordinary and the extraordinary question [that is, torture] will be applied to have from his mouth the truth of several facts of the trial and revelation about his accomplices… We order that the Philosophical Dictionary… be thrown by the executioner on the same pyre as the body of the said Lefebvre de La Barre.Note that this sentence does not mention the mutilation of a cross which had provoked the original inquiry.

The key significance of the Parlement's confirmation was to give judicial legitimacy to a sentence that Voltaire and Linguet, among others, would later portray as the result of petty local quarrels.

[citation needed] Voltaire, at first horrified by the attention the affair drew to him, ended up defending la Barre's memory and helping d'Etallonde, whom he even received as a houseguest at Ferney.

His condemnation… was the result of a quarrel between two men of law, of some particular resentments which directed the first judges, and of the skill with which, to influence the second, was emphasized the general alarm inspired in partisans of Religion by the redoubled attacks which he saw carried against it, by the sort of plot formed to destroy it; but one cannot say that he was entirely innocent, and I so warned M. de Voltaire himself by a special letter.

The habitual use of these fruits of philosophical madness had turned his head: he had drawn from them the passion for irreligion: he daily engaged in the type of excess that it is easy to pass off as crimes.

[6]A later reference to the torture and execution of la Barre can be found in the first pages of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities (1859): France, less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her sister of the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding smoothness down hill, making paper money and spending it.

Under the guidance of her Christian pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane achievements as sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards.

[7][9] The following year, 1906, the statue was cast in bronze and was placed 'provisionally' by the Paris City Council at the gate of the Sacré-Cœur basilica during a ceremony which was attended by approximately 25,000 spectators.

[7] In 1926 the statue of the Chevalier de la Barre on Montmartre was moved away from the approach of the basilica entrance to the nearby and lower elevation of Square Nadar.

Under this plate reads "In Commemoration of the Martyrdom of the Chevalier de La Barre tortured in Abbeville on 1 July 1766 at the age of 19 years for failing to salute a procession."

[citation needed] Three associations exist with the name of the Chevalier de la Barre in Paris, Abbeville, and the Masonic Lodge of the Grand Orient of France in Bergerac.