At the hearing of August 28, the taxpayers called to testify held receipts whose figures failed to accord with the counterfoils preserved in the official ledgers. Chailley, the chief expert witness, set before the Court the two stratagems revealed by an examination of the entries: at times the sums remained accurate, yet the correspondence between the counterfoils and the receipts was thoroughly disarranged; at other times, the counterfoil recorded a sum inferior to that of the receipt itself. To grasp the prosecution’s case, one had to trace the path of a single payment through three distinct records. The collector was required to enter it into the nominal roll, promptly deliver a receipt torn from a counterfoil book, and then total the revenues in the cashbook. Dates, amounts, and serial numbers had to balance to the letter. It was upon these exact collations, the expert explained, that the entire audit reposed.
The accused, Michel-Marie Franzini, was forty-one years of age and claimed residence in London. Formerly the tax collector at Guerchy, he stood before the Assize Court of the Yonne on August 28, 1874. The Gazette des Tribunaux presented him as having been born in Naples to a Corsican family, having passed through the ranks of the army before securing several tax-collection posts. The journal recalled that he had commanded the mobilized guards of the Haute-Savoie in 1870. The reputation of general which he was wont to cultivate was contested during the proceedings; the indictment, however, turned strictly upon his public accounts. On December 11, 1870, the Moniteur of the Tours delegation had published his appointment as superior commander of the Haute-Savoie mobilized forces. The decree noted that he had presented himself as a former staff officer; at trial, the presiding judge reminded him that the uniform he claimed could at most correspond to the rank of colonel, and that the rank of general had never been conferred upon him. This divergence between advertised title, gazetted appointment, and the uniform worn resurfaced in the testimony of Colonel Lambert.
The bill of indictment placed a draft for 3,400 francs at the origin of the affair. In November 1860, according to this initial narrative, Franzini had presented it to the special receiver of Montreuil-sur-Mer as reimbursement for works undertaken at the school in Senlis. The receiver demanded the supporting vouchers. Franzini produced his summary ledger, wherein the expenditure stood entered under the date of November 27. Payment was refused. A few days later, according to the document cited by the Gazette, he acknowledged that the entry in the register was untruthful and that the expenditure had not occurred. He gained no pecuniary benefit from the transaction.
At the trial, the presiding judge revisited this same episode, dating it to November 1868. Franzini did not deny that the expense had not yet been incurred, but maintained that the warrant was formally in order and that the entry was intended merely to draw in funds to satisfy an outstanding debt. He asserted that he had thus paid civil servants and disbursed more than 100,000 francs to contractors, in conformity with the instructions of the Receiver General. To this explanation, the judge opposed the formal report made to the ministry and the disgrace that was said to have followed. Franzini replied that his patrons could never have secured him a new tax collection had he been guilty of the misconduct alleged.
The source also places his appointment to Guerchy on March 28, 1859, prior to the draft which it first dated to 1860. Yet it recounts his dismissal to Lieury, followed by his elevation to a superior post, as a consequence of that very incident. The cross-examination reverts once more to the year 1868. These discordances stand printed in the trial record; they preclude the establishment of an incontrovertible chronology. They leave intact, however, the very core of the accusation: the comparison of receipt, counterfoil, and cashbook to ascertain whether the monies collected truly appeared in the public ledger.
At Guerchy, the prosecution reproached Franzini for residing in Joigny, far from his rural collection office, for neglecting his duties, and for delaying his remittances. The grievances of local mayors and the correspondence of the special receiver’s office were entered into evidence against him. The journal then described the manner in which, according to the experts, the receipts had been diverted. Blank counterfoil receipts had allegedly been procured in advance; elsewhere, a lower sum was entered in the daily journal than that stated on the receipt delivered to the taxpayer. Erasures and scratchings-out had further altered the tens or the hundreds. The gap between the amount collected and that preserved in the registers constituted the alleged embezzlement.
This mechanism depended upon the ongoing cash flow. According to the indictment, fresh receipts enabled Franzini to cover part of the deficits whenever the strictures of his superior grew pressing. Chailley, and subsequently Massy, laid bare the alterations in the ledgers. The report computed the number of falsifications or forgeries at upwards of one hundred in less than eighteen months; the first was said to have been uncovered shortly after his installation in the post. The experts did not fix upon a single figure for the total deficit: at the time of his flight, at least 4,108 francs and 24 centimes were missing; their report of December 13, 1871, estimated the deficit at 5,364 francs and 87 centimes. These distinct calculations cannot be reconciled into a single sum.
The accounts vanished in part along with the collector himself. On December 6, 1870, the receiver called upon Madame Franzini to surrender the ledgers abandoned by her husband. She promised to deliver them on the morrow, but departed in the night. The justice of the peace seized what remained; a portion of the books was missing. A search conducted at Franzini’s Parisian domicile brought to light the accounts for 1870, with the sole exception of the fifth counterfoil volume. This absence took on paramount significance in a prosecution grounded precisely upon the discrepancy between counterfoil and receipt.
The cross-examinations did not confine themselves to accounting books. Chevau, a former special receiver, was called to testify regarding the 3,400-franc draft and declared that he regarded Franzini as a violent and dangerous man. The accused retorted with heat: “It is because I once refused to dine with you that you bear me a grudge. You went so far as to claim that I belonged to the secret police. You had the right to audit my accounts, sir, but not to insult me!” The witness admitted that public rumor had associated Franzini with the secret police, but denied ever having uttered such words himself or having invited him to his table. The report illustrates how a mere examination of public accounts could degenerate into a bitter feud over the honor of those who had conducted it.
A letter from Colonel Berge, read before the court, brought the debate back to the fighting in Paris. On May 27, as the Versailles troops were entering the city, a man in civilian dress, umbrella in hand, had asked to pass through the lines to reach No. 49, Rue Saint-Antoine. He presented himself as Franzini, general. Berge asked him of what brigade, of what corps; he did not know him. Franzini answered that he was going to see a friend. The colonel, suspecting rather that he meant friends of another stripe, moved to have him arrested. But a naval officer momentarily diverted his attention; when he turned back, Franzini had vanished. Such was the account set down in the letter. At the bar, the accused declared he had never spoken to Berge.
Colonel Lambert reported having seen him in Bordeaux in the uniform of a general and having ordered him to take it off; he stated that Franzini was arrested, then released two days later upon the intervention of the Minister of War. He further recounted that an aide-de-camp, d’Antioche, limped without any visible wound, attributing his discomfort to tight boots. Finally, Lambert recalled the suspicions harbored by Versailles officers regarding Franzini’s relations with the families of Communard prisoners. The newspaper notes elsewhere that the judicial inquiry into his alleged participation in the acts of the Commune ended in a dismissal of charges, no positive fact having been established against him.
Following the testimony of the witnesses, the public prosecutor, Charpentier, delivered the closing argument for the State; Maître Remacle presented the defense. The presiding judge summarized the proceedings, and the jurors deliberated upon no fewer than fifty questions. They returned a verdict of guilty on forty-seven counts, while according Franzini the benefit of mitigating circumstances. The Court sentenced him to five years of solitary confinement.