Counsel was still addressing the court when fear slipped into the hall, clad on this occasion in the garb of positive intelligence: confederates were about to hurl bombs, deliver the prisoners, and set fire to the courthouse. No man had laid eyes upon these confederates, nor upon their bombs. Yet this proved no impediment to their occupying every conversation. In December 1867, at Aix, justice was examining a string of highway robberies that had rendered travel perilous; the public, already predisposed to believe the worst, now endowed the brigands with designs they had perhaps never conceived. The Gazette des tribunaux took care to contradict the rumor. The circumstance deserves its place in the record: amidst deeds of very real violence, terror continued to fabricate its own evidence.
Twelve men stood in the dock. The prosecution gathered them under the convenient heading of a criminal association; the hearings were soon to show how vast a variety of disparate roles, dubious loyalties, and irreconcilable narratives such an association might contain. Coda-Zabetta, Quaranta, and Nardi commanded the forefront of public attention. Yet an absent figure weighed heavily upon the deliberations: Posapiano, the veteran companion whom several advocates depicted as the true contriver of the plots. For the prosecution, Coda had directed the enterprises; for his counsel, the authorities were merely heaping guilt upon the chief they held in custody for want of the one who had slipped their grasp. The dispute was no mere contest of titles. Upon this alleged command rested the weight of premeditation and legal answerability for the acts of the rest.
The depredations spanned a vast swath of the Midi. Marseilles served as their pivot and place of return; the highways led toward Aix, Nice, and L’Escarène, then drew the men back to common lodging-houses where aliases changed far more readily than habits. The band did not remain constantly assembled. Some arrived while others drifted away; an aborted foray might yield to a fresh design settled upon only hours later. Such flux sorely taxed the investigators. A plundered wayfarer had caught sight of a face, heard a command, felt a hand rifle his pocket; of the colloquies that had preceded his misfortune, he knew nothing.
Isolated dwellings offered the first lure of plunder. In the spring of 1867, an attempt upon a residence in the Belle-de-Mai came to grief when the ringing of a bell startled the intruders. In another expedition, toward Allauch, the sheer number of occupants compelled them to abandon their initial scheme. The men fell back upon the Bérenger house, hard by the road from Marseilles to Aubagne. This improvised diversion ended in bloodshed. The inhabitants offered resistance, Polycarpe Bérenger interposed, blows were dealt, and a firearm was discharged. Before the Assizes, the attribution of each movement became a battleground: Nardi admitted to a blow with a bludgeon, while his counsel denied he had fired; the depositions of his companions cast the burden back and forth from one shoulder to the next.
It was necessary, therefore, to return to the threshold, to the door, to the exact vantage from which the shot might have been loosed. Here lies the singular perplexity of these collective trials: the broad narrative seems plain enough—armed men enter to rob—yet the condemnation of an individual requires something more than a general prospect. Counsel fastened upon physical positions, weapons, and the utterances of the victims. The public prosecutor labored to reconstruct the continuous thread of the enterprise. Between these two endeavors lay the question that repeated violences had rendered almost inaudible: who had done what?
In the night of June 13 to 14, upon the road from La Garde to L’Escarène, the ambuscade assumed a darker magnitude. The men had concealed their arms before lying in wait. Convoys were halted, carters ransacked, their hard-won savings stripped away. Éloi Arnaud lost his life in the ensuing struggle; Ribero likewise stood at the heart of the arguments over the exchange of fire. Quaranta’s defense contested the trajectory of a ball extracted from a wheel, as well as the identity of the marksman. Mulateri’s counsel underscored the discrepancies in the testimonies. As for Arnaud’s death, the shadow of Posapiano arose once more in the depositions cited. The dead man could no longer decide between those who disputed how he had fallen.
The highway to Aix presently yielded a fresh sequence of assaults. A design upon an estate at Le Tholonet had entailed travel, reconnaissances, and bitter dissension. Several participants withdrew. The remainder gathered near the Pont de l’Arc and fell upon passing carriages. What had been conceived as a concerted raid degenerated into a succession of violent encounters forced upon casual passers-by. Stagecoaches were fired upon. Maurin was slain. At the trial, Quaranta’s counsel asked whether the fatal discharge could be laid to his client solely upon the word of fellow prisoners, whose own interest lay in deflecting the capital charge. The court was bound to weigh this objection without losing sight of the fact that a traveler had perished merely for having journeyed along a public road.
The arrests finally reduced these roving movements to fixed addresses. Coda and Quaranta were run to earth in a lodging-house in the Rue Thubaneau, in Marseilles, sheltered beneath assumed names. The fortitude of a private citizen named Turrel received public commendation at the trial for his part in their capture. Then came the confrontations, the confessions of some, the protestations of others. Mulateri brought forth revelations; yet their utility did not dispense with the necessity of testing their truth. An accomplice who speaks may unseal an inquiry while simultaneously bargaining for his own neck. The magistrates were well aware of the snare, and the defense took care they should not forget it.
The Italian nationality of the accused occupied an unfortunate place in the prosecutor’s address. The chronicler of our day must preserve the record of such language without endorsing its reasoning. These men answered for specific deeds; their origin explained neither murder nor innocence. The biographical sketches presented by the defense revealed, moreover, paths far less uniform than the specter of a foreign horde bent upon rapine. Mulateri had labored upon the Verdon canal and produced favorable testimonials; Trivero was a youthful workman whose advocate traced his gradual seduction into crime; Nardi pleaded his youth and the secondary nature of his part. Such pleas could not efface the bloodshed. They merely demanded that the penalty remain individual.
Coda, Quaranta, and Nardi were condemned to death. In January 1868, all petitions to avert their execution came to naught. The Marseilles press found them once more at dawn on January 27, following their transfer from Aix. The journals recorded their demeanor, Coda’s exhortations to his companions, their final words, and the ministrations of the clergy. They imputed to them also a contrition whose true depth no onlooker can fathom. We may chronicle gestures; we do not hold the key to human consciences.
Three men went to the scaffold that morning. The roads received once more their carriages, their teams, and wayfarers peering anxiously toward the next turn of the way. Yet the trial bequeaths an image more enduring than that of a gang abruptly suppressed: a courtroom wherein each prisoner strains to disengage his own hand from that of his neighbor, while the families of the slain wait for justice to reconstitute, at long last, what truly transpired upon the highway. Between the clamor of public dread, which demanded a single sweeping answer, and the stubborn facts, which required reckoning one by one, the debates had revealed an affair vastly more intricate than its legend.