At four o’clock in the morning on 24 February 1822, General Berton presented himself in full dress uniform at the house of Pombas, in Thouars. Men had assembled within. He announced to them that the King’s government had fallen and that a provisional authority had been established. The gendarmerie barracks, he declared, had to be taken. The intelligence was false; yet the actions that followed were immediate.
At the barracks, a gendarme heard the bell and opened the door. Armed men seized him and ordered him to keep silence. Others traversed the quarters, brought the gendarmes downstairs, and held them prisoner. The tocsin rang out; the drums beat the general assembly. Men styling themselves “soldiers of liberty” arrested the parish priest in his bed. A magistrate was taken in the street, a municipal councillor at the town hall. There, the insurgents replaced the white flag with the tricolour. They requisitioned horses and carriages, then seized weapons from the gunsmith Gaspy. Sentinels were posted at the town gates.
The path that brought Berton to that house had begun several weeks prior. He had departed Paris in early January, stating he was going to visit his son, a sub-lieutenant of dragoons at Pontivy. He passed through Brest and Rennes. Colonel Alix, who was suspected of preparing military support, left Brest on 8 January, reappeared in Rennes on the 9th, and returned to Brest on the 11th; Borrow records that he met Berton there. Berton set out from Brest for Rennes on the 15th. At Rennes, he later acknowledged having yielded to the entreaties of several men who wished to place him at the head of a movement in favour of the Charter. Those conspiring around Saumur urged him to join them; according to Borrow, he arrived in the region on 18 or 19 February and held conferences at Thouars.
Following the arrests at the barracks, Berton proceeded to a public square where a man named Heureux, who presented himself as a deputy from Nantes, read two proclamations aloud. The first declared the government overthrown, promised to protect the purchasers of national property, and pledged the abolition of indirect taxes. The second was addressed to the soldiers, promising them victory, honour, and advancement. The crowd did not answer with a single voice: shouts arose of “Long live the Charter,” “Long live Napoleon II,” and “Long live the Republic.” A provisional government was proclaimed, and Lafayette was appointed generalissimo. To this Parisian authority were attached the names of Foy, Kératry, Voyer d’Argenson, and Benjamin Constant. These names were cast before a town where the gendarmes had just been captured and weapons seized: they lent to deeds already accomplished the semblance of an order descended from higher spheres. The proclamation intended for the soldiers affirmed that all France had risen. Yet it remained to march upon Saumur and obtain from those who held its gates something more than a promise. But this authority held sway only within the ranks of the column; Saumur had not acknowledged the new power.
The insurgents took the road to Saumur. At Montreuil, the brigadier of the gendarmerie dispatched a man to warn the town. The mayor advanced toward seven o’clock in the evening, accompanied by a single national guardsman. Berton told him that he had seen him in Paris and that he came in the name of liberty. The mayor denounced him as a rebel and ordered him to withdraw. Berton, disconcerted, ordered his men back beyond the bridge.
The National Guard formed in battle array. The insurgents barricaded the road with wagons and posted men to avoid surprise. Berton maintained his position until midnight, then commanded a retreat. The town was shut fast; the movement had not won over the garrison of Saumur. The leaders dispersed. Berton wandered through the Deux-Sèvres and Charente-Inférieure until his capture toward the middle of June.
Thirty-seven other defendants were arrested in the affair; eighteen others had eluded capture. Their trial was held at Poitiers, opening on 26 August and continuing until mid-September, according to Borrow. The record distinguishes several fates. Berton, Caffé, Sauge, Fradin, Sénéchault, and Jaglin were condemned to death. Caffé died in prison following a self-inflicted wound; the sentences of Fradin and Sénéchault were commuted. Alix was found guilty on the capital charge by seven jurors against five, but a majority of the bench aligned with the minority and acquitted him of that count; he was nonetheless convicted of misprision of treason for having failed to reveal the plot. The others received various terms of imprisonment and fines.
The trial soon overstepped the bounds of the abortive march on Saumur. Berton claimed to have acted in concert with liberal deputies, among them Lafayette, Foy, Constant, and Voyer d’Argenson. Grandmenil, one of the conspirators, had named them in a deposition, but he had fled and could not appear in court. The public prosecutor nonetheless retained that declaration in the bill of indictment. He admitted before the court that the connections attributed to the deputies rested upon “moral proof” and that material evidence was wanting. Thus, the affirmation of an absent conspirator found a place in the proceedings without ever being tested under cross-examination. The prosecutor elaborated his reasoning with respect to Lafayette: an alleged connection with a second enterprise ought, in his view, to illuminate the first, since both Berton and Grandmenil figured in both. He conceded that this deduction provided no material evidence. Yet he explained this absence by the prudence of the instigators, who, he contended, preferred spoken words to written letters. What was missing from the case file thus became, in his address to the court, the very effect of the dissimulation imputed to the suspects. The implicated deputies had demanded an inquiry into the conduct of the public prosecutor; their petition came to nothing.
Benjamin Constant replied with a published letter defending his name and attacking his accusers. The copies were seized. Prosecuted for defaming the public prosecutor Mangin and the presiding judge of the court, he was acquitted on the second count. On the first, he was sentenced to one month’s imprisonment and a fine of five hundred francs. The proceedings against Berton thus unfolded upon two stages: at Thouars, an armed column claimed to speak in the name of a government that did not exist; at Poitiers, a political accusation rested upon a declaration that its author was no longer present to sustain at the bar.
Berton and Caffé, members of the Legion of Honour, were stripped of their rank. The sentence distributed the executions between Poitiers and Thouars: the judgment appointed for each condemned man the town where his punishment was to be carried out. Yet not all the condemned mounted the scaffold. Caffé had died in prison; the sentences of Fradin and Sénéchault had been commuted to twenty and fifteen years’ detention. Beneath identical names aligned in a judicial decree, destinies had already parted.
Berton was guillotined on 5 October 1822, on the Place du Pilori in Poitiers—the date preserved by the municipal heritage records of the city. Borrow’s account attributes to him an unfaltering self-possession to the very end. Eight years later, his son Adolphe obtained permission from the municipality for a stone to mark the site of his burial. The provisional government announced in the early dawn had survived no longer than the reading of its proclamations; the grave, at least, was granted a lasting place in the city that had witnessed his end.