At the Fort du Hâ, the deputy prosecutor asked the prisoner if his true name was indeed Liard. The man answered that it was. When asked whether he might not rather be Auguste Courtois, he burst into laughter, deeming the question “most comical.” Joseph Reinach recounts this exchange in his report, later reproduced by Courtois: a name is assumed, taken up in turn by the authorities, and justice is left to determine the precise moment at which such a borrowing turns into criminal forgery.
In his chapter entitled “Hope of Returning to France” (1903), Courtois relates that while in French Guiana in July 1899, he received a pamphlet by Joseph Reinach, who devoted a section to his case among those of five convicts on the Îles du Salut. Courtois reprinted these pages “by way of documentary evidence.” The narrative thus rests upon two intertwined voices: that of the convict and that of his advocate, who considered the sentence grossly disproportionate. Reinach claims to have based his account upon the indictment, the prosecutor’s closing address, La Petite Gironde, a stenographic record, and the original drafts of the judgments; we do not possess these documents independently.
According to these pages, the affair did not arise from an imposture unmasked all at once. On December 20, 1893, the central police commissioner of Bordeaux sent a report to the prosecutor’s office concerning an inmate at the Fort du Hâ, prosecuted in connection with a strike of house painters. The man, he wrote, was due to be discharged the following morning after serving four months for infringement of the freedom of labor. He went by the name of Liard; the commissioner asserted that he was in reality one Courtois, born in or around Poitiers.
This report contained an additional accusation: the individual was alleged to have deserted from the army and to be wanted by a court-martial. Reinach maintains that this detail was erroneous. The Courtois held at the Fort du Hâ had been sentenced to a single month’s imprisonment for having attended an electoral meeting in military uniform; the man wanted for desertion was another Courtois altogether. This confusion alone does not prove that the police sought to manufacture an identity. It reveals, however, the perilous nature of a dossier in which several men bearing the same name could be conflated under a vague physical description, while a pseudonym ultimately came to stand in for a civil status.
On the very day the commissioner dispatched his report, a deputy prosecutor interrogated the prisoner. He asked him whether he was indeed Louis Liard. Courtois held to his assertion. To the direct question—was he not Auguste Courtois?—he answered with laughter. Reinach quotes the phrasing of the indictment: “that was all that could be drawn from him.” The four months’ imprisonment were then concluded, and the man was set at liberty. This release in December 1893 must not be confused with the outcome of the forthcoming trial: the prosecutor’s office pursued its inquiries, and on January 27, 1894, Courtois was arrested anew, this time after investigators had established his identity and his use of the name Liard.
The crux of the matter lay in the fact that the name was not a pure invention, or at least not merely that. Louis Liard, an anarchist from Le Havre, had died on June 21, 1891, according to Reinach; he was already deceased when the acts alleged against Courtois took place. Courtois had also appeared under that name in prior proceedings. The defense contended that in Bordeaux as in Marseille, the magistrates had prosecuted and convicted him under the name of Liard, going so far as to tell him he was not whom he claimed to be when he had protested that his name was Courtois. Reinach reports this line of argument, but we lack the Marseille court records to verify it independently.
At the trial in November 1894, Courtois reiterated this explanation. The presiding judge, Riffaud, congratulated him on having finally consented to resume his real name. The accused replied that he had not created Liard: the authorities, by prosecuting him under that identity, had “concocted an entire civil status for him out of whole cloth,” which he had thought fit to adopt. But the prosecution countered by producing calling cards printed in Marseille under the name of Louis Liard, bearing the title of naval contractor. Courtois admitted having ordered them. He explained that the name had pleased him, that he had chosen it at random, and that he had every right to be called whatever he pleased. His turn of phrase played upon the monetary connotations of the name: a *louis*, he remarked, was worth twenty francs, while a *liard* was not worth a farthing.
The prosecution contended, on the contrary, that this was no harmless nom de plume chosen without consequence. Courtois had taken the name of a citizen of Le Havre, and the state maintained that he had caused prejudice to that man and to his family. The accused rejoined that Liard had died before the events in question, that he too had been an anarchist, and that he had left no direct heirs. The advocate general, Labroquère, retorted that maternal uncles still survived, and that Courtois had soiled their family name. The dispute fundamentally shifted the question from the realm of paper to that of the person: can one injure a dead man by borrowing his identity, and who holds the right to speak on his behalf?
The accusations were not confined to calling cards. Courtois was charged with having signed the name of Liard to various procedural documents, notably a final interrogation at the Fort du Hâ. On this specific point, Deputy Prosecutor Massot stated that he had no recollection of having required the accused to sign that examination. While this testimony was not enough to erase the other uses of the name adduced at trial, it precluded presenting every alleged signature as having been equally demonstrated by the official who recorded it. Courtois did not dispute having employed the name, but maintained he had adopted it only after the magistrates had bestowed it upon him. He acknowledged, too, that he had failed to protest: “True enough,” he answered, “and that was my only fault.”
The trial was therefore to determine whether the use of Liard’s identity—which Courtois admitted—constituted a public forgery, with what intent it had been committed, and what penalty ought to follow. Reinach notes that the prosecution retained only the charge of forgery, and that no statute targeting anarchist agitation was invoked as the legal foundation of the indictment. Yet, in the trial account he cites, a substantial portion of the prosecutor’s address was purportedly devoted to Courtois’s propaganda across several departments. The contrast between the formal legal charge and the political portrait painted of the defendant remains a critique voiced by Reinach, rather than a judicial reasoning that the original judgment allows us here to establish.
On November 16, 1894, the jury returned an affirmative verdict on the charges and refused mitigating circumstances. The court sentenced Courtois, for forgery, to five years of hard labor and a fine of one hundred francs, without an order of banishment. The verdict was no acquittal, and nothing in the consulted sources permits this conviction to be erased. Yet Reinach observes that the court could have pronounced a far heavier penalty given the denial of mitigating circumstances; it adhered to the minimum prescribed by law. He also cites La Petite Gironde, which reported a prolonged murmur running through the room upon the announcement of the verdict, and the public’s astonishment at the refusal of mitigating circumstances.
Reinach pursues his comparison by citing the case tried immediately after that of Courtois: an unnamed contractor, prosecuted for several thousand francs’ worth of forged commercial instruments, was acquitted. Reinach discerns in this an unequal treatment of the anarchist, attributable, in his view, to the man’s political opinions. This parallel belongs to the author of the report; the details of the second trial are not elaborated in the records we have consulted. The argument must therefore be acknowledged without regarding it as conclusive proof of judicial bias.
In 1899, while Courtois was still in French Guiana, Reinach’s report petitioned for his pardon. The French League for the Defense of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen adopted the text unanimously at its session of May 23. Reinach did not issue a blanket denial of the facts: he conceded that an assumption of identity had occurred, but questioned whether it had caused any real injury to the deceased or his kin, and contested the proportionality of the punishment. In his eyes, the name of a dead man, already employed by the courts to designate the accused, had engendered a confusion that the convict had merely accepted and exploited thereafter. The report does not supersede the court’s judgment; it demonstrates that a public campaign transformed the affair into a debate over sentencing and the procedural safeguards owed even to an unpopular militant.
Courtois writes that his supporters began to intercede before his discharge from the penal colony. With his sentence nearly completed, he remained subject to mandatory residence in the colony. On January 2, 1900, the authorities resolved to recall him from exile; he states that he received notification only in March, roughly fourteen months after leaving the penitentiary. This subsequent chapter rests entirely upon his own narrative. The recall from exile remains distinct from the petition for pardon formulated by Reinach: the consulted passages establish neither that a pardon was granted, nor that the conviction of 1894 was overturned.
Thus the name of Liard led several lives: that of a dead man, that which Courtois adopted according to his own explanations, that which the courts inscribed upon procedural documents, and finally that under which the prosecution indicted him for forgery. The jury settled the question of guilt and refused mitigating circumstances; Reinach contested the justice of that response without seeking to deny the material fact of the borrowing. A clear limitation remains: we read here the convict and his defender, not the entirety of the judicial dossier. Throughout these pages, an identity changes hands each time it passes from one administrative form to another. It remains to be determined whether justice punished a fraudulent signature, or the individual whom the documents had already grown accustomed to calling by another name.