Eighty “fortunate” numbers, one hundred and sixty-four “ill-starred”: thus did the gazette reduce two hundred and forty-four policies to a ledger of bare figures. Yet behind every drawing lay a precise promise: to finance the exemption of whichever youth fate summoned to arms. At Tours, five defendants stood before the correctional tribunal to answer for these transactions. The principal accused, designated by the Gazette des Tribunaux solely by the surname Person, had offered insurance against military conscription; four others were indicted at his side. While the front page dates the issue 4 January 1861, the running header of the page on which the article begins reads 1860. This discrepancy remains unresolved.
The journal distinguishes the traffic in military surrogacy, already familiar in several cities, from insurance against the draft. Under the former system, a man drawn by lot could pay a substitute to take his place in the ranks. Insurance, as delineated by the public prosecutor, rested upon a different engagement: the subscriber paid a premium and, should his number compel him to serve, received the funds requisite for his official exemption. At Châlons-sur-Marne, Person is said to have presented himself as a replacement agent beginning in 1856. The Gazette asserts that, when this trade was suppressed by fresh legislation, he pursued it under another guise. This transition and its construction were advanced by the prosecution; the administrative records themselves are not reproduced.
The account portrays a man who, having quitted Châlons, settled in Tours without great fortune, yet possessed of the art to gather capital and procurators. He is said first to have sought partners. One associate reportedly promised him three thousand francs, of which only a portion was ever advanced. The journal then describes an effort to endow the enterprise with an outward semblance of solidity: circulars, canvassers, policies, and overtures to a notary. Person is alleged to have submitted to this officer of the law an instrument already drawn. The notary reportedly found it so singular that he drafted an alternate form with his own hand to shield his professional liability. This circumvention does not, of itself, establish fraud; the chronicle marshals it among the circumstances which, in the eyes of the prosecution, lent credit to a venture whose guarantees were open to dispute.
The drawing of the lots provided the ordeal through which the contract had to pass. The public prosecutor contended that, on average, one number in three favored the insured, the other two obliging him to procure a substitute. The price fixed by the Imperial Government for exemption stood at two thousand three hundred francs. Person, however, demanded but one thousand two hundred francs per contract. At such a rate, the prosecution calculated, the premiums gathered from the fortunate numbers had to absorb the liabilities engendered by the unlucky ones. The journal estimates that an average premium of some one thousand five hundred and thirty-three francs would have been required merely to break even, before yielding the slightest profit.
The figures cited at the hearing lend concrete shape to this dilemma. Out of two hundred and forty-four policies ascribed to Person, eighty lots were fortunate and one hundred and sixty-four unfavorable. Each subscriber had furnished the initial premium of one thousand two hundred francs. For an unlucky draw, this first sum was, according to the terms reported, to be supplemented by one thousand one hundred francs to attain the two thousand three hundred francs required for the promised exemption. The one hundred and sixty-four supplements thus represented one hundred and eighty thousand four hundred francs. Against this, the prosecution set apart the ninety-six thousand francs received upon the eighty fortunate numbers: this alone constituted available funds, the premiums of the others being already committed to their own discharge. The deficit to be bridged amounted to eighty-four thousand four hundred francs. These remain the figures of the indictment, not accounts published in company with the contracts.
According to the prosecution, Person chose not to bridge this chasm. He instructed his agents to seek out those policyholders whose numbers had fallen ill and negotiate with them. The sum tendered to settle their claims reportedly ranged between two hundred and three hundred francs, in place of the one thousand one hundred francs pledged as a supplement. The premiums already disbursed by these subscribers—one thousand two hundred francs apiece—explain why the indictment counts only this supplementary indemnity: at the maximum rate of three hundred francs, the cost of composition for one hundred and sixty-four men fell to forty-nine thousand two hundred francs. Set against the ninety-six thousand francs remaining from the premiums of the fortunate lots, the calculation left forty-six thousand eight hundred francs before expenses. The prosecution estimated outlays for advertising and recruitment at twenty-five thousand francs. At the foot of its balance-sheet, the printed report records a net profit of twenty-one thousand francs; the paragraph immediately following mentions twenty thousand francs. Yet the arithmetic of the figures just recited—forty-six thousand eight hundred francs before charges, minus twenty-five thousand—yields twenty-one thousand eight hundred francs. These three values must remain distinct: two figures printed by the journal and attributed to the prosecution, and a reconstructed sum that does not, for all that, become a finding of the court.
This profit was the financial model imputed to the enterprise by the prosecution, not a conclusion drawn by the tribunal from an examination of the ledgers. It laid bare the alleged design: to maintain the premium at one thousand two hundred francs, then reduce by private compromise the balance owed to those men whom the draft compelled to seek a substitute. The Gazette relates that certain policyholders accepted these arrangements, while others protested or demanded the full measure of what had been promised. The individuals concerned remain nameless in these columns. It is the letters of complaint, the tallies, and the overtures of the agents that lend them an ephemeral presence in the courtroom.
The affair reached far beyond the policyholders of Tours. The Gazette credits Person’s circulars with circulating through thirty-nine departments, recording that two hundred and forty-four policies were subscribed. It describes, moreover, a network of intermediaries: the initials of several co-defendants alone appear in the opening statement of the charge, whereas a few names of recruitment brokers surface further on in the report. The journal does not permit an exact determination of each man’s liability. It indicates that they stood together in the prisoners’ dock, yet presents them under legal designations that were not identical throughout.
Insolvency brought the dispute to a head. Subscribers from whom one thousand one hundred francs were withheld to complete their exemption brought Person before the commercial tribunal. That bench declared him bankrupt. The public prosecutor maintained that he had thereafter omitted certain creditors from his declaration and sought to recruit partners or conclude private compositions to stall their proceedings. Here again, the thesis of the prosecution must be severed from the final disposition: the text of the commercial judgment is not reproduced in the article, and the absence of a name upon a schedule is recounted as a piece of circumstantial evidence advanced by the Crown, not as an exhibit the reader may inspect.
The defense was heard after the requisition. The Gazette condenses the speeches of counsel into a few lines, transcribing none of their arguments; its columns accord far greater space to the tallies and accusations of the prosecution. Counsel for the remaining defendants moved for their full acquittal. This disparity of attention belongs to the record as much as the figures themselves: a faithful chronicle must allow the indictment to be heard without mistaking it for the grounds of the judgment.
The correctional tribunal reserved its decision, delivering judgment at a later session, termed in the report an adjournment of eight days. The Gazette records that the agents were cleared of all charges and discharged, while Person was found guilty of swindling and simple bankruptcy. He was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for these two offenses. The account does not record the particulars of the judicial interrogatories nor the comprehensive reasoning of the bench; nor does it allow one to trace any subsequent appeal or the execution of the sentence.
The fortunate numbers and the ill-starred were, at the outset, mere categories in a contract; the trial invested them with another gravity. For one hundred and sixty-four men, the promise hung upon a payment that the agents sought to diminish to a pittance. The court sustained the charges of swindling and simple bankruptcy against Person, while declining to follow the prosecution toward the conviction of the other agents. Yet the page bears the inherent limits of this verdict: it provides neither the judicial points of law nor the commercial ledgers that would permit the verification of every sum. It suffices to record what the judges decreed, and to discern how a promise calculated upon the vagaries of chance ultimately turned upon the man who had sold it.