Studies of French Criminals of the Nineteenth Century
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This is a reproduction of a library book that was digitized by Google as part of an ongoing effort to preserve the information in books and make it universally accessible. https://books.google.com ^M ^™ : : I >A I STANFORD LAW LIBRARY ► IN MEMORY OF HENRY VROOMAN BY THE SAME AUTHOR Uniform with this Volume Demy 8vo, cloth, 1n. 6d. net THE LIFE OF JUDGE JEFFREYS WITH THREE PORTRAITS AND A FACSIMILE LONDON : WILLIAM HEINEMANN STUDIES OF FRENCH CRIMINALS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY STUDIES OF FRENCH CRIMINALS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY BY H. B. IRVING AUTHOR OF "THI -rffi or JUDGE jirntrs LONDON WILLIAM HEINEMANN 1901 All rights reserved PREFACE " The annals of criminal jurisprudence," wrote Edmund Burke, " exhibit human nature in a variety of positions, at once the most striking, interesting, and affecting. They present tragedies of real life, often heightened in their effect by the grossness of the injustice, and the malignity of the prejudices which accompanied them. At the same time, real culprits, as original characters, stand forward on the canvas of humanity as prominent objects for our special study." The last sentence in this passage applies directly to the cases set out in this volume, which have been selected from the French criminal records of the nineteenth century. They are studies of real culprits, whose guilt is, in all but one instance, beyond the suspicion of a doubt. As studies of character, and as examples of the adminis tration of criminal justice in France, they may be of some interest or value to those who look to the human docu ment for specimens of human character as it actually is, or for suggestions on which to build some work of fiction. The study of the criminal on the Continent has in recent years attained to some dimensions, under the style viii PREFACE of Criminal Anthropology. But the results of this par ticular science have been disappointing in the extreme. The attempt to connect, by a process of atavism, the criminal with the savage, has broken down for want of any sufficient evidence to establish a real similarity between the two. As Mr. Goldwin Smith has pointed out,1 the persistent criminal has his status in nature and society, as an organism to whom " altruistic pleasure " simply does not appeal ; who, for his own satisfaction, pursues " a con genial, though conventionally reprobated, walk of life " ; and whom, it may be added, society has a perfect right to destroy by its own superior strength and for its own particular convenience. However great may be the diminution of crime by means of social reform, there will always be amongst us persons of the kind instanced in this book, of whom Lacenaire is the supreme type, who can only be dealt with in a destructive fashion, their pleasures not being those which, by the process of evolution, have been elevated into a sixth sense. These non-altruistic pleasures, though they may be gratified in absolute security from legal punishment by a Borgia or a Dubois, or the living prototypes of the Marquis of Steyne, in less exalted walks of life are bound, from a necessarily more crude and violent form of expression, to lead to the prison or the scaffold. The careers of real culprits such as these must always be, in Burke's words, striking, interesting and affecting, either in the pages of history or of the Causes Celebres. But, as they are narrated in the reports of a French 1 Guesses at the Riddle of Existence, pp. 218 — 220. PREFACE ix criminal trial, such stories are given with a completeness and wealth of detail, unequalled by any other form of history. If men like Caesar Borgia or King John had appeared before a Cour d' Assises, how complete would be biographies that must ever remain tantalizing and unsatisfactory for lack of materials. Whatever its faults — and they are fully recognized by more than one French critic l — the French system of criminal procedure pos sesses one supreme merit from the point of view of the student of character. At the cost of much that is to our notions trivial and irrelevant, it tells in every trial not only the bare details of the actual crime that is the object of inquiry, but the story of the life of the ac cused person. By inquisitorial methods, often startling to us, that story is dragged into the light of day, and the criminal confronted in the most poignant fashion, with the whole record of his past. The struggle that ensues in the Assize Court is almost invariably an exciting one, the national character responding with unfailing spirit to the stimulus of what must always be a dramatic situation. Some of these strange stories are told in this book. The author, in compiling them, has endeavoured to make them neither too short to interest, nor too long to hold the at tention of the reader, to keep throughout to the actual facts of the cases as given in the various reports, to select the careers of criminals who by their social circumstances or individual characters are removed from the category of ordinary malefactors, and to indicate in a general way by examples occurring in the course of the various cases the 1 See Jean Cruppi, La Cour a" Assises. Paris, 1898. x PREFACE chief points of difference between criminal procedure in France and England. In confining these studies to French crimes, some of them sufficiently atrocious in character, the author has no intention of thereby suggesting that French crime is in its general complexion any more atrocious than English, or than that of any other civilized nation. It is not ; it is only more interesting, both from the individuality of its perpetrators, and the methods of legal investigation that are applied to it by the French Criminal Code. CONTENTS PACI I. LACENAIRE 3 II. TROPPMANN 51 III. BARRE AND LEBIEZ 73 IV. THREE CRIMINOUS CLERKS — The Abbe Auriol 107 The Abbe Boudes 1 1 8 The Abbe Bruneau 125 V. THE ADVENTURERS — Campi 141 Pranzini 151 Prado 178 VI. Two ALGERIAN TRAGEDIES — The Affair at Sidi-Mabrouk 207 Madame Weiss 236 xii CONTENTS PAGE VII. The Strange Cases of Albert Pel 255 Euphrasie Mercier 283 VIII. The Anarchists — Ravachol 307 Vaillant 326 Emile Henry 333 I LACENAIRE I LACENAIRE " Every human society has what is called in theatres a third sub-stage. It is the grave of the depths. It is the cave of the blind. What crawls in the third sub-stage is no longer the stifled demand for the absolute. Man there becomes dragon. Hunger and thirst are the point of departure ; Satan is the point of arrival. From this cave comes Lacenaire." — Victor Hugo, Les Miserables, Bk. vii., chaps, i. and ii.1 In this passage from his tremendous description of the sub-stages in the human theatre, Hugo has immortalized the name of Lacenaire as the supreme type of human villainy. Theophile Gautier has devoted some elegant lines to a description of the assassin's thin, cruel hand, covered with a reddish down, which the poet saw lying on a cushion, after it had been severed from its lately executed owner. Gautier stigmatizes Lacenaire as a false poet, but a genuine murderer, and terminates his verses by conferring on him the not inglorious title of the " Manfred of the Gutter." "Whatever the justice of these literary appreciations of Lacenaire's attitude towards life, they are sufficient evidence of the fact that he powerfully, if unpleasantly, affected the 1 See also Les Cbdliments, Bk. v., " Le Sacre," in which Lacenaire, and other famous French criminals, are described as being raised to Imperial honours by the coronation as Emperor of the French of their co-mate in infamy, Napoleon III. 3 4 STUDIES OF FRENCH CRIMINALS minds of his contemporaries, and has left behind him a more distinct and original notoriety than generally falls to the lot of criminals. It may at once be said that his reputation is not based on his professional achievements. As an assassin of real executive ability he cannot compare with Troppmann or John Williams ; in sheer brutal atrocity he must yield the palm to many another. But as a cold and reasoned assassin, arriving at crime as the logical out come of his own attitude towards society, as a man of unfaltering insensibility, disliking his fellow-men with a dislike the more deadly for being free from any trace of passion, as a man of more than ordinary ability, well educated, sensible and rational, and above all, capable of fully recognizing the impossibility of his own proceedings from a general point of view, Lacenaire stands alone among criminals. No French criminal, except perhaps Cartouche, has left so distinct an impression on the minds of his countrymen. He embodies in its most mischievous form that cynical materialism, that deliberate philosophy of entire selfishness, which if it usually stops short of murder, does so from motives of convenience, and not from any respect or pity for human suffering. Lacenaire is the embodiment of reasoned cruelty ; the exercise of murder gratifies his feelings and opinions, without, however, dis turbing his equanimity ; revenge gives him pleasure, but it is a calm and temperate enjoyment that its gratification affords him. He is not without those inconsistencies that lie at the root of all character ; he looks for loyalty in his associates, and the candour of a Chef de la Surete finds its way to his heart ; he can be touchingly sentimental at times, as only really unfeeling people can ; but these are mere transient gleams in the almost impenetrable darkness of a black soul.