On March 20, 1753, the Grand Conseil discharged Father Risch of the accusation that had stripped him of his worldly goods, his sacred ministry, and his liberty. By the same decree, Louys—the former curate who had turned into his accuser—was banished in perpetuity, his property was declared forfeit, and the parish priest was awarded ten thousand livres in damages. This adjudication was arrived at only after more than four hundred witnesses had been examined across several years of relentless litigation. It redressed a sentence pronounced upon a preliminary inquiry that Champagnac characterizes as having been compiled exclusively to Risch’s detriment; in the intervening years, the aged priest had endured the dungeon, sickness, and exile, while his accuser had walked the streets in absolute freedom.
Towards the end of March 1744, the Sieur Louys had been appointed curate of the parish of Saint-Simplice in Metz, where Risch served as parish priest. The latter, whom the chronicler portrays as an unpretentious man of excessive benevolence, was favourably impressed by the youth, the carriage, and the pulpit eloquence of his new assistant. He entrusted the curate’s duties to him without reserve. Before long, however, if the chronicle is to be credited, word spread regarding his relations with Barbe Marchand, a young parishioner of twenty years who supported herself, alongside her mother and aunt, by the labour of her hands.
Rumours reached the parish priest: Louys was said to maintain a scandalous liaison with the girl, among other illicit intimacies. Risch initially refused to lend credence to these reports. When ocular proof made it impossible to look away, he addressed his curate like a father, exhorted him to return to the duties of his calling, and sought to cloak his missteps so as to shield him from the rigours of ecclesiastical authority. Champagnac accounts this forbearance a grievous lack of discernment, though he takes care to distinguish the priest’s motives from the conduct he imputes to Louys. While the chronicle does not afford the reader access to the preliminary inquest, it maintains that the curate’s misconduct was eventually established, whereupon legal proceedings were instituted.
These criminal proceedings were subsequently stayed following powerful solicitations. Risch made yet another intercession on behalf of his curate, who had pledged to retire to a religious house. In the chronicler’s telling, this act of protection was destined to recoil upon him. Louys, bolstered by certain churchmen hostile to the discipline enforced within the diocese and supported by a cabal described by Champagnac as formidable, charged Risch with calumnious defamation. The accusation fastened upon the very words and representations by which the parish priest had endeavoured to report and reform the curate’s misconduct.
Risch was first served with a decree of personal summons. Strong in the consciousness of his innocence, he appeared before the magistrates, but soon gathered from the manner of his interrogation—according to Champagnac—that his destruction was premeditated. When a bodily arrest warrant was issued against him, he withdrew to the Abbey of Wadgassen, in the County of Nassau, beyond the frontier of the realm. His enemies discovered his retreat, and, in contempt of the law of nations as the chronicler maintains, had him seized and abducted to the prisons of Metz. He was thrown into solitary confinement. For two whole months, he was not once brought up for examination.
The ecclesiastical court finally handed down its ruling on April 29, 1749, upon an inquiry that the chronicle insists was conducted entirely against Risch. It pronounced him guilty of having, through incautious utterances and imprudent steps, occasioned the defamatory and scandalous reports stirred up by Barbe Marchand’s accusations against Louys. It condemned him to retire into a seminary and suspended him from his priestly ministry for three months. Following this sentence, Risch was transferred to the Conciergerie; his octogenarian father was denied the liberty of comforting him.
Meanwhile, the affair had become the sole topic of public talk. A rumour gained ground that this alleged “spiritual incest” would be visited with death, and that Risch would be consigned to the flames. His family laid their grievances before the King and the Chancellor. The latter replied that no afflictive penalty was to be visited upon the accused without prior notification. Nevertheless, the final submissions of the Procureur Général demanded an amende honorable and a sentence to the galleys for life against Risch as a slanderer; they likewise condemned Barbe Marchand to the gallows. These were, to be sure, merely the prosecutor’s submissions, and not yet the definitive judgment of the court.
Risch petitioned to be permitted to produce evidence in justification. This request was granted, though entirely at his own expense. On the day appointed for the examination of the witnesses, those whom he regarded as vital to his defence vanished, according to the narrative; the bailiffs were alleged to have exhorted the remaining deponents to swear they had neither seen nor heard anything, while threatening with the penalties of perjury any who should alter their previous statements. Champagnac denounces these contrivances as deliberate impediments to the defence. Such assertions, however, cannot be received as facts corroborated by a neutral source: the text is an openly partisan chronicle, composed entirely in advocacy of the parish priest.
The definitive decree of December 23, 1749, sentenced Barbe Marchand to be whipped, branded, and banished in perpetuity. Risch was likewise condemned to perpetual banishment; his property was confiscated, and he was mulcted in a fine of six thousand livres for the benefit of Louys. Barbe’s punishment was duly executed. Risch, for his part, remained incarcerated: Louys was to have him committed to prison after Christmas should the six thousand livres remain unpaid. The chronicle contests the legitimacy of this debt, arguing that the sum ought to have been levied upon the confiscated estate, but records that the underlying intent was to bar the priest from prosecuting an appeal to the King.
The forfeiture swallowed up his lands and personal effects; the chronicle asserts that he was despoiled of his very raiment and necessities. He was likewise deprived of his living. In the dampness, stench, and gloom of the subterranean cells, his health was broken. This was no longer the mere three-month suspension decreed by the officiality: the judgment of December banished him from the kingdom, stripped him of his inheritance, and kept him bound in iron. According to Champagnac, those years of captivity left him paralyzed and infirm.
Risch sued for a writ of error. A first decree of the Council quashed the original proceedings; a second remitted the cause to the Grand Conseil. His liberation from prison took place upon the conclusion of the hearings, at the appointed hour, under the eyes of an assembled populace. He was transferred to Paris. The new jurisdiction ordered a fresh inquiry and issued fresh canonical monitors. More than four hundred witnesses were examined under oath. Louys, who had dogging the steps of the man he had brought to ruin and presented himself before the bench, was in turn made the subject of a bodily arrest warrant and committed to the very prison where Risch had lain.
This time, the depositions collected led the Grand Conseil to find, as the text relates, that Louys had abused his sacred ministry and the sacraments to corrupt Barbe Marchand, and had thereafter pursued Risch with a calumnious accusation that had stripped the elder priest of his fortune and shattered his health. By its decree of March 20, 1753, the court fully discharged the parish priest. It condemned Louys to perpetual banishment from the realm, to the total confiscation of his estate, and to the payment of ten thousand livres in damages to Risch.
This judicial review could restore neither the lost years of liberty to Risch, nor the substance of an estate already dissipated by confiscation; the chronicle remains silent on whether the damages were ever recovered. It establishes, however, the ultimate legal outcome: the priest was cleared, whilst his accuser stood convicted in his stead. Barbe Marchand, for her part, had undergone the physical punishment meted out in 1749; the decree of 1753, as reported by Champagnac, makes no mention of her rehabilitation. The two destinies, though entwined by the chronicle in its condemnation of Louys, must be evaluated separately.
Risch’s ordeal was not that of a man merely acquitted upon the heels of an investigation. He passed from a three-month ecclesiastical suspension to a sentence of perpetual exile, the confiscation of his goods, and prolonged confinement, before a reversal of the judgment permitted a new investigation to proceed. The contrast between the two trials lies in the testimony admitted: at first, the defence was thwarted in producing the witnesses upon whom its survival depended; later, over four hundred depositions were placed upon the record. It is this reversal of fortune that the chronicler places at the core of his narrative, though his grave charges against individual magistrates and officers must remain attributed solely to the partisan voice that records them.