Contested causes and blame for the condemnation

Cassen, avocat au conseil du roi, in his 1766 letter to Beccaria blamed Belleval, a neighbor of la Barre's aunt, though a local Abbeville printer almost immediately criticized this account for numerous inaccuracies. Le Cri du sang innocent (1775) omitted all mention of Belleval and shifted blame to Duval de Soicourt, the judge in the case, largely following Simon-Nicholas Henri Linguet's 1766 memoir. Another contemporary assessment held that the condemnation resulted from a quarrel between two men of law and particular resentments, while conceding la Barre was not entirely innocent. A later commentator feared that even a criminal jury in 1766 would not have treated the Abbeville defendants with more justice.