He had come forward to declare himself guilty, and his advocate was about to entreat the bench not to take him at his word. François Pascoët had found simple enough terms in which to surrender. At Brest, the public prosecutor attached to them a consequence far less simple: death. Between the convict’s declaration and the demanded punishment, Maître Clérec intended to interpose all that the haste to chastise threatened to obliterate—a murky hall, a throng of men, a wounded victim, and that elementary question from which the confession seemed to dispense the magistrates: who had seen?
The cause was tried on February 24, 1831. Three days prior, within a hall of the penal hulks, two blows had been reported. The gazette recounting the assize bestowed upon it an unhesitating title: a double attempt at murder. Yet the article’s conclusion would sustain neither this double charge nor that grave qualification. The defense plea had first to be traversed before arriving at that verdict.
After the Morning Gun
Clérec began with the hall itself. In the narrative he laid before the judges, the morning gun had only just resounded, and a streetlamp’s flame was dying out. The light remained too dim to distinguish with certainty any single movement amidst the prisoners. Sub-Adjutant Allamagny had received a blow to the groin. A truss was said to have preserved him; according to the advocate, he had not even perceived the blow and had continued on his round. Almost at that very moment, or shortly thereafter, Déarcourt, a fellow convict, had collapsed upon his bench, struck in the chest.
The second man was wounded. The first had marched onward. To the defender’s mind, this contrast alone forbade recounting the two events as a singular scene whose every detail had been witnessed. Two alleged victims did not constitute two testimonies of identification. The proximity of the blows was insufficient to render their author visible.
Clérec thereupon interrogated those who sat in judgment. Who had recognized the assailant in that gloom? Who had apprehended him? Who had wrested the weapon from his hand? To each of these questions, he returned the identical answer: no one. Such was his interpretation of the proceedings and the preliminary examination, maintained before the tribunal; the chronicle does not afford us, by way of comparison, all the depositions upon which the prosecution rested. Yet it preserves the objection, framed with sufficient force to prevent the prisoner from being condemned before his confession had even been scrutinized.
For Pascoët had come forward of his own accord. Clérec attributed to him these words: “Seek no further; behold the guilty man.” The person designated by this utterance was precisely the one who spoke it. There had been no need to tear him from the crowd, to hunt him down, or to wring a name from his lips. He presented himself. At first glance, such a step might have brought all inquiries to a close; the advocate contended, on the contrary, that it rendered them all the more imperative.
The Burden of a Declaration
Pascoët was serving a determinate term. He had attempted an escape and, as his counsel reminded the court, had recently been sentenced to three additional years. The endeavor to regain his liberty had thus postponed the hour when he might have expected it through the expiration of his sentence. This reversal formed part of his known history at the trial. What he felt within, no words from his own hand have survived to tell us.
Counsel offered an explanation. He portrayed a man for whom existence had grown unendurable, and who sought through the apparatus of justice the means to die. He employed the term “monomania,” ascribed to his client a restless mind and an overheated imagination, and linked his condition to the sickening horrors of captivity. These words belonged to a legal defense in 1831. They constitute neither a medical report preserved in the article nor a diagnosis that might be adopted today as an established fact.
This hypothesis inverted the meaning of the confession. If Pascoët harbored a desire to die, Clérec asserted, his eagerness to incriminate himself served that very longing. To credit his word without further inquiry would amount to permitting the accused to dictate his own sentence. The defender was not merely pleading for clemency. He warned the judges of the role they might unwittingly be made to play: that of executioners carrying out a will they believed they were chastising.
He denounced, furthermore, the bastinado and the humiliations attendant upon corporal punishments. The chronicle records his indignation; it does not detail any specific penalty that Pascoët had personally endured. Clérec broadened his plea to encompass the general condition of the hulks, and what such an existence might engender in the men subjected to it. The gloomy morning hall remained in the background. It had now become necessary to consider what could drive an inmate to designate himself as the assailant, as much as what eyes had actually managed to discern therein.
Two Reigns in a Single Hearing
Yet the prosecution possessed a text. An ordinance of December 16, 1686, as cited by the journal, provided particular penalties against convicts who wounded their fellows. Another article visited with death anyone who struck an officer of the galleys or an overseer with an iron instrument. The public prosecutor demanded the capital sentence for Pascoët; he invoked decrees, jurisprudence, and the customary usage of the tribunal to maintain that the ancient ordinance retained its full force.
Clérec could therefore not content himself with merely opposing a few recent months to an ancient statute. The magistrates before him were well acquainted with their established customs; the prosecution had just invoked them. To wrest his client from this unbroken chain, he shifted the debate to the ground of a changed regime. They stood now under Louis-Philippe, in the wake of the July Days of 1830. The Charter of August 7, he insisted, could not abide side by side with the edicts of an absolute monarchy.
He read aloud what the ordinance reserved for certain convicts sentenced for life: the slitting of nose and ears. The phrase required no embellishment. By introducing it into the courtroom, he compelled the judges to hear to its very conclusion the statute whose authority they were urged to maintain. Mutilation was not the punishment sought against Pascoët; in the mouth of his advocate, it became the touchstone of a body of laws deemed wholly incompatible with their century.
The advocate then asserted that these ordinances were no longer to be found in the printed criminal compendiums, subsisting only in manuscript form within the maritime registry rolls. This was an argument advanced in his plea, not an archival inventory verified by the chronicler. He cited likewise an ordinance of 1748. The dates succeeded one another, yet his petition remained concrete: that the judges cease to search within these musty texts for a pretext to put to death the man standing before them.
Finally, he had prepared for the possibility of defeat. Should the court deem itself bound to convict, Clérec solicited its intervention to obtain a royal pardon or a commutation. He invoked the humane inclinations of the new sovereign, imputing to him the desire to see the death penalty abolished. Such an aspiration did not constitute abolition. It offered merely a final avenue of appeal for a defense that abandoned no path so long as one remained to avert the scaffold.
Life, Without End
The tribunal ultimately dismissed the first count of the indictment, that concerning Allamagny. Pascoët was thus not declared guilty of that initial assault. Regarding Déarcourt, the judges found him guilty of assault and battery, absent any homicidal intent. They applied the ordinary Penal Code, and not the ordinance of 1686. The gazette’s title preserved the original indictment; the decree, however, had transformed its very nature.
The sentence pronounced was hard labor for life. Pascoët escaped the demanded death. He attained neither an acquittal nor a return to a sentence whose remaining years he might have counted down. His defender had preserved his life; the judgment stripped that life of the legal term it had still possessed before the affair began.
Déarcourt was not to be forgotten behind this partial victory. The tribunal acknowledged the wounds inflicted upon him. The article relates nothing of his convalescence and affords no ground to gauge its duration. Nor does it lead us back to Pascoët’s side once the hearing concluded. It leaves two men within the penal hulks: one wounded, the other condemned for those injuries, and an advocate who prevented a double accusation from ripening into an execution. For once, the final words did not belong to the man who had offered himself as guilty. They belonged to the judgment, and they were not those the prosecution had demanded.