At Bourg, on October 5, 1754, the merchant arriving to deliver his tobacco took the precaution of securing the city gates. His lads carried muskets; his mules choked the courtyard of the Director of the Farms; and the price he demanded admitted of little debate. Forty-four bales, twenty thousand livres. The director had vanished. His wife remained, saddled with a cargo she did not want and surrounded by men who fully intended to be paid.
Louis Mandrin had hit upon an admirable commerce: compelling those who hunted smugglers to purchase their contraband. The enterprise contained all of his future renown, and all of his present violence. The common people might well laugh at the humiliation of the Farm. Madame de La Roche, who was hurried out of her house before she could even dress in a manner befitting her station, found the experience rather less diverting.
The intendant, Joly de Fleury, happened to be in Bourg at that very moment. Toward his residence this singular ambassadress was conducted, under the escort of armed men. Two officers entered into negotiations. Mandrin professed the utmost reverence for the King’s authorities; his quarrel, he insisted, lay solely with the financiers. This reverence was priced at twenty thousand livres, advanced by the collector of the tailles. The captain delivered a receipt, then restored the director’s wife to her liberty. The legal forms were observed to perfection. Only the buyer’s consent was wanting to the contract.
A few hours later, while the intendant and his company sought refuge among the Capuchin friars, a second delivery called for a second settlement: an additional three thousand livres. Mandrin also visited the prisons, demanded the registers, and carried off those detained for smuggling, as well as a deserter. He selected his recruits from among the prisoners; he chose his clientele from among his adversaries. In the space of a single day, he had subverted the order of an entire city.
To understand how a man arrives at treating public treasuries like recalcitrant debtors, one must return to the Alpine trails. In 1748, Mandrin was not yet transporting contraband tobacco. He was driving a brigade of ninety-seven mules and baggage beasts to provision the army. He had committed his own funds and those of two partners. He hoped to restore his family’s fortunes through arduous, yet legitimate, toil.
Beasts plunged into ravines; others succumbed to distemper. Then the reduction of military troop numbers abruptly halted an enterprise that had scarcely begun. It became necessary to return home, to sell off part of the livestock under disastrous conditions, to endure the losses, and to plead for payment. The guarantees of the contract did not cover the casualties incurred. A dispute over accounts with an associate compounded the ruin. The records assembled by Funck-Brentano depict this young contractor struggling under obligations from which he could find no release.
In later days, he would lay his misfortune at the door of the Farms and demand vengeance against them. This tale of ruin provided him with a justification; it does not, however, suffice to explain, nor to excuse, all that followed. Before the beloved folk hero, there was already a man condemned for a bloody affray.
In the spring of 1753, Pierre Brissaud sought to evade the militia ballot. A youth chosen by lot could purchase his own freedom by delivering up a draft evader: this regulation turned neighbors into man-hunters. The Roux brothers pursued Brissaud; Mandrin joined those resolved to defend him. The encounter took place near Saint-Étienne-de-Saint-Geoirs. Weapons spoke; bystanders were kept at bay. Joseph Roux fell dead upon the field; François, grievously wounded, dragged himself home only to expire in his turn.
Mandrin fled. In July, the Parlement of Grenoble condemned him in absentia to be broken upon the wheel as the principal author of the assassination. His effigy suffered the punishment in his stead. The living man, however, took another road. The frontier offered him retreats, and the illicit trade provided him with comrades: he entered a world where a bale of goods was deemed well worth defending with musket in hand.
The General Farm collected taxes on the King’s behalf and exploited monopolies that rendered such fraud immensely lucrative. To whomever sold tobacco at a cheaper rate, doors were opened wide that the taxmen had shut behind them. In 1754, Mandrin conducted six campaigns. His men rode hard, provisioned themselves, fought, and scattered as occasion demanded; these expeditions bore enough resemblance to small military operations to lend their leader the bearing of an uncommissioned officer.
Yet the forced sale at Bourg was by no means a charming exception within a harmless excursion. To impose their bargains, these horsemen held towns at gunpoint. In December, at Beaune, gunfire left dead men in the street. Every encounter added to the receipts a debt that appeared on no ledger: that of families struck down by the violence of the foray. Mandrin’s popularity grew at the expense of the financiers; it erased neither the weapons nor their victims.
The final campaign foundered in the Velay. On the morning of December 26, the smugglers arrived at La Sauvetat, spent with fatigue, believing they had found a refuge. Captain Diturbide and his horsemen had preceded them. In the gloom, a sentry scented danger, a shot rang out, and the soldiers rushed to their mounts and muskets. The factions fired upon one another among the houses. Mandrin saved a handful of his companions; his troop was scattered to the winds. He made his way back to Savoy, there to prepare fresh incursions.
It was then that the hunt changed in character. The authorities no longer rested content with barring the French roads: they sought his lodgings beyond the border. Savoy belonged to the King of Sardinia. To cross into it to seize a man was to violate foreign territory. The commanders of the expedition knew this so well that they stripped away the identifying marks of their soldiers’ uniforms.
On the night of May 10 to 11, 1755, a troop crossed the Guiers. Uniforms had been abandoned upon the bank; faces were blackened and concealed. The march led to the Château de Rochefort, where Mandrin lay asleep beside his lieutenant, Saint-Pierre. Toward three in the morning, the men battered down the door, abused the servants, and extracted the location of the chamber. The captain of the smugglers had neither a town to hold nor a road to choose. He was bound fast and carried away.
The capture was accompanied by pillage, the particulars of which were set forth in the declarations of the castle’s inhabitants: personal effects, coin, linen, and stores. The victors had not merely taken an enemy. They left behind them wounded men and formal complaints, enough to elevate the matter to a diplomatic incident. Charles Emmanuel III demanded the return of the prisoners abducted from his soil. In Valence, however, the apparatus of justice moved far more swiftly than negotiations.
Mandrin appeared before an extraordinary commission established to try smuggling offenses. Contemporary critics denounced its financial dependence upon the Farm and its disregard for the safeguards of the ordinary courts. Levet de Malaval presided over the bench. According to contemporary accounts, Mandrin admitted to armed smuggling, denied his personal involvement in the murders committed during the raids, and exerted himself not to betray his companions. The complete trial record was lost to fire; the surviving narratives cannot restore to these proceedings the public scrutiny that was denied them at the time.
Sentence was pronounced on May 24. Two days later, the condemned man was led to the Place des Clercs. The authorities had taken every precaution: troops under arms, gates closed, the crowd kept in check. Mandrin suffered the wheel, followed by strangulation to shorten his agony. Witnesses cited by Funck-Brentano dwell upon his fortitude; death bestowed upon his renown what his victories had merely begun.
The Sardinian protest did not save him. The receipts remain, and so do the dead. Soon, popular broadsides and songs would fashion the armed merchant into a champion against the mighty, readily pardoned for the very excesses that men condemned in the powerful. For Madame de La Roche, for the families of the Roux brothers, for the victims of the skirmishes, the tale had an altogether different ring. It is between these divergent voices that Mandrin must still be understood: daring enough to make his enemies pay, and renowned enough that his own violent deeds were long stripped of their names.