From the rear of the courtroom, the stains of blood were indistinguishable. One saw, however, the seals of red wax affixed to the waistcoat. Upon the order of the court, Édouard Brierre had put back on the garments he wore on the night his five children were murdered. Dr. Dieudefoy had him turn slowly before the jurors; the presiding judge had stepped down from the bench, the advocates from their bar. In the midst of this attentive circle, a man displayed his back, his chest, his flanks, while the red tags of the court seals offered the public the only redness it could recognize with certainty.
This scene, recorded by Edmond Frank in his report of December 1901, encapsulates the profound disquiet of the affair. The experts scrutinized physical traces. The onlookers gazed upon a man. For eight months, the court had sought to ascertain whether Brierre had also been a victim of the assault he denounced, or the perpetrator of the massacre. Yet, in the cramped assize hall of Chartres, the manner in which he held his cap, answered the presiding judge, or regarded his neighbours seemed at times to weigh as heavily as the items held under seal.
On the morning of Monday, April 22, the children were discovered dead within the home of this husbandman, near Chartres. A widower for three years, Brierre lived with five of his six children. He himself lay bleeding upon his threshold. He recounted that after an evening spent at the tavern, marauders had set upon him as he returned home. In the opening hours, help and compassion flowed toward the father; authorities sought the unknown assailants whose attack he described. A single dwelling appeared to contain the victims, and its threshold to have yielded the only survivor capable of speech.
Then the narrative veered. According to Frank, by the day after next, rumor singled out Brierre. It was said he had slaughtered the children, feigned the assault, and inflicted his own wounds. Searches within the house yielded indices the prosecution deemed damning. Arrested and interrogated, the cultivator made no admission of guilt. The preliminary instruction dragged on for months without obtaining the longed-for confession. When the trial opened, the court was obliged to examine a charge that its primary subject continued to repudiate, rather than merely confirm an admission already known to all.
The courtroom accommodated roughly three hundred spectators; some fifty places were set aside for the press. Judge Belat presided; Prosecutor Voisin carried the charge. Comby, a Parisian advocate, led the defense alongside Guitter and Duparc. Flanked by gendarmes, Brierre wore a black frock coat and held a brand-new cap. He was forty-two years of age. This mourning attire, in which he was made to hear the recitation of his children’s slaughter, stood in stark contrast to the work clothes he was later ordered to put on for the expert’s demonstration.
Frank devoted a long passage to the portrait of the accused and the gaze cast upon him. An angular countenance, the brow, the jaws, the eyes: everything became an accusation in the eyes of those who professed to detect the crime upon the criminal’s face. Frank mocked this accommodating science, which began by decreeing a man guilty only to discover subsequently, upon his nose or mouth, the justification for the verdict. The witnesses summoned to testify against Brierre, he observed, often bore the very same marks of manual toil and open-air exposure. The physiognomy of a tiller of the soil could scarcely serve as proof against a single peasant.
To this reading of the face was joined an appraisal of his character. Brierre was said to be harsh, taciturn, headstrong, and unloved. The presiding judge confronted him with the findings of the inquiry and the opinions of his neighbors; the accused replied without expatiating. That people might say what they wished of him did not mean, in his defense, that any of it was true. He rejected the theory of a staged attack and disputed the assertions of the forensic physician. "One can always say that," he muttered to characterizations of his temper; faced with the claim of feigned wounds, his retort was more curt: "It is ridiculous!" Frank declined, however, to discern here any sure distinction between innocence and guilt: both might defend themselves with equal composure.
There remained the wounds and the physical exhibits. Those of the five children, those of the father, and those of the dog Ravachol were submitted for scrutiny. A knife, a plow coulter, and stains of blood entered the debate. To enlighten the jurors, the court demanded more than written reports and oral testimony: it ordered this parade of the blood-stained clothes, transforming the hearing into an empirical demonstration. After a brief absence, Brierre returned in his work smock and submitted to the required postures. Frank deemed the spectacle theatrical. He did not dispute the necessity of examining the material evidence; he conveyed the unease engendered by a prisoner exhibited like a piece of evidence himself.
Forty-nine witnesses for the prosecution filed past, according to his account. Among them stood Martin, the mayor, who reproached Brierre for his pride. Lubin, a well-to-do farmer and former friend, had turned hostile since the tragedy. Hubert, the schoolmaster, and Bordier, the rural constable, reported having seen him watchful and alert in his cowshed when he was believed to be on his deathbed. Other villagers gave an unfavourable account of him. These depositions did not speak with one voice: some recounted observed conduct, others offered mere judgments upon a neighbour. Their accumulation nonetheless presented to the jurors a village singularly merciless toward one of its own.
Véronique Lubin introduced the question of remarriage into the affair. Frank reported a liaison, followed by the refusal she reportedly dealt to the proposals of this widower burdened with offspring. Here, the prosecution argued, lay a plausible motive: to rid oneself of a family in order to begin life anew. Yet the existence of an intrigue and a refusal did not, by itself, account for the night of the slaughter. The journalist remained troubled by the transition from a conceivable explanation to the certainty of guilt. Did the monstrosity of the deed demand a foundation all the more unassailable, or did it merely make the first plausible motive all the more alluring?
The forty-three witnesses for the defense presented a different man. Friends and relatives spoke of a devoted husband, an affectionate father. Thus it was not enough to ask the village what it thought of Brierre to receive a single, uniform answer. The examining magistrate, Cornu, summoned by the defense, also took the stand, affirming that he had done no more than his duty. Between fond memories, village enmities, physical findings, and conjecture, the jury was compelled to rule on the guilt of an accused man who had never confessed.
Germaine, fourteen years old, was the sole survivor among the six children. Dressed in deep mourning, she knelt at the foot of the bar, weeping and begging the judges to acquit her father, whom she protested was innocent. Frank notes the profound emotion of the jurors. Yet the girl’s supplication did not sway them. Following the summing-up and the closing defense speeches, they returned an affirmative verdict; Brierre was sentenced to death. At the end of more than eight days of deliberations, the judicial verdict had resolved the legal matter without dispelling the doubts of those who had followed the proceedings.
Subsequent events prevented this sentence from culminating at the scaffold. The archival notice from Criminocorpus confirms that Brierre was pardoned in 1902, transported to the penal colony in French Guiana, and died at Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni in 1910. The pardon was not an acquittal. It commuted the penalty while leaving the conviction intact. In the narrative of the trial, however, two irreconcilable images endure: a father clad in his bloodstained garments, turning before his judges, and his daughter upon her knees, pleading for his life.