On June 19, 1828, at around two o’clock in the afternoon, Jean Fort stepped into his neighbour’s garden armed with a spade and a wooden shovel. He traced the outline of a trench. When Blanchier, the neighbour, asked him what he was doing, Fort replied that he was preparing his mother’s grave, and declared that he had killed her. The following morning, the mayor discovered him fast asleep at the bottom of this pit; inside the cottage, the widow lay dead. Taking up his spade once more, Fort informed the magistrate that he was now digging his own grave. A few weeks later, the assize jury returned a verdict of not guilty, finding him to have been in a state of insanity at the time of the deed.
Jean lived with his mother at Les Cossardières, in the canton of La Rochefoucauld. The chronicler Champagnac relates that from early childhood, a severe illness had disfigured his features, leaving him with a sullen, taciturn disposition. Following a stay at the La Rochefoucauld hospice—from which he was expelled on account of his misconduct—Jean returned beneath his mother’s roof. She lavished care upon him; he, according to the chronicle, showed himself quarrelsome and violently abusive toward her.
In the early days of June 1828, several villagers saw Jean seize his mother by the throat and strike her repeatedly with a staff. When neighbours intervened, he reportedly vowed to murder her another day if he did not dispatch her then and there. Around the same time, a child overheard him utter similar threats. Such accounts gave the villagers ample cause for alarm. Yet they revealed nothing of what had transpired when the Widow Fort suddenly vanished from sight.
On June 18, the mother disappeared from her dwelling. Jean set out across the neighbouring countryside to beg for alms, as was his custom. He encountered a woman named Touchet, who gave him a crust of bread and inquired after his health. According to Champagnac, he replied that he would soon be cured, for he intended to slaughter the folk of a neighbouring village as well as those of another household. When she pressed him for a reason, he allegedly explained that some were too numerous and others too honest, before announcing that he had killed his mother. He added that he wished to lay her upon dry heather, place her in a coffin, and bury her. The chronicle provides no exact date of death, but her disappearance, coupled with these reported utterances, made it plain to the neighbourhood that a crime had in all likelihood been committed.
On June 19, around two in the afternoon, the woman Blanchier saw Jean enter her garden bearing a spade and a wooden shovel. He marked out a pit and set to digging. She asked what he was about. He answered that he was digging a grave for his mother, professing that he had murdered her. The neighbour did not immediately credit his words; she presumed the widow was labouring elsewhere. That evening, however, she recounted the scene to her husband. Unable to dispel their dread, they ultimately sounded the alarm among the other villagers.
Around midnight, Blanchier called out from afar, urging Jean to go to bed. Fort retorted that he was not toiling upon the neighbour’s land. The villagers kept vigil through the night. At daybreak, the mayor arrived and discovered Fort stretched out in the pit, sunk in deep slumber. Proceeding into the house, a foul stench drew him toward the bedchamber, where the widow sat propped upon a chair, dead. An official report was drawn up. As the news swept through the hamlet, Jean had already returned to the garden, diligently turning the earth.
The mayor questioned him concerning the pit. Fort replied that he was digging a grave for the mayor himself, who had raised him as a child and whom he wished to repay. The magistrate asked where his mother was, and who had taken her life. Jean answered that she was dead, and that he had killed her. Champagnac recounts that he then brandished the tool he still held, before resuming the preparation of the corpse for burial. The gendarmes had arrived and cordoned off the house. One of them found him dressing his mother, busily stitching a linen shroud about her body. When asked what he was doing, Jean answered simply that he was laying her out.
Placed under arrest, he was conveyed before the magistrates in Angoulême. In the early examinations, he denied that the deceased was his mother; later, he admitted her identity, but maintained that the neighbours had murdered her. He also claimed to have departed from home on June 16, returning only on the 19th. In a subsequent interrogation, his answers grew incoherent; the chronicler notes that he openly defied the judge. The case against him thus assembled his utterances in the garden, his contradictions, and his prior threats; yet the true meaning of these words was to become the central battleground of the trial.
The surgeon examined the body, noting severe blows to the head as well as two wounds to the chest. According to the medical report cited by Champagnac, the head injuries had been inflicted with an edged weapon, whereas the chest wounds had been delivered after death. In the chamber where the widow had been found, the bloodstained tool, the corpse, and the shroud her son was stitching together constituted the material evidence. Before the Court of Assizes, the recounting of these acts would confront an agonizing question: did Fort’s conduct stem from cold premeditation, or from the state of dementia pleaded by his counsel?
The inhabitants of Les Cossardières had never previously observed symptoms they recognized as alienation of mind. Some described him as inherently wicked rather than mad. The mayor, who had employed him between the ages of twelve and thirteen, attested to a rare intelligence in the execution of his errands. A physician from the hospice recalled a vacant, bewildered air, which he ascribed to the severity of Fort's physical ailments rather than a derangement of the intellect. Thus the recollections of the neighbours, the magistrate, and the physician were sharply divided at the very moment justice was called upon to weigh his sanity.
Jean stood trial before the Charente Court of Assizes during the first fortnight of August. The presiding judge asked him whether he had killed his mother; he began by denying it. Confronted with his previous admissions before witnesses, he acknowledged having uttered them, but challenged the prosecution to prove the deed. Pressed regarding his motives, he attributed the act to fury, declaring in a sudden outburst that he would do it again. These words, as recorded in the chronicle, struck terror into the courtroom; yet they were insufficient to determine whether the prisoner understood the nature of his acts when he committed them.
The public prosecutor pressed for conviction, vehemently dismissing the plea of insanity. He urged the jury to make a stern example for the province, arguing that the populace would tremble were Fort released, and insisting that no mitigating circumstance could temper his punishment. Defence counsel Aubin Durand contended, on the contrary, that Fort was entirely bereft of reason at the time of the homicide; his plea drew murmurs of sympathy from the benches. Following a half-hour deliberation, the jury returned its verdict: not guilty, by reason of his state of dementia at the moment of the crime.
At the instance of the prosecution, Fort was remanded to prison while civil interdiction was sought against him. The verdict had pronounced him not guilty because he was in a state of insanity when he struck down his mother; yet it did not restore him to her side, whose death had brought the entire village running to the garden. Champagnac’s account concludes upon this return to the cells. It records neither a subsequent decree of interdiction, nor the asylum to which Fort was later consigned, nor the years he spent behind locked doors.