At three o’clock in the morning on 8 July 1828, the guillotine stood assembled upon a public square in Metz. The block and the executioner’s axe had likewise been made ready. Michel Dalstein had been condemned for parricide; those who waited for his execution might thus discern, in these additional instruments, the exact penalty reserved for his crime. Yet the judgment had prescribed something altogether different: a military execution, without prior mutilation. Upon the square, they had erected the scaffold for a sentence that was not his.
A few hours later, it was taken down. The crowd watched the apparatus they had gathered to see in operation being carted away. At the prison, a chaplain had already prepared Dalstein for death. The countermand did not restore him to the life of other men; it merely remanded him to waiting. To understand how matters had come to such a pass, one must retrace the journey he had made with his father on a night in January.
The Father Who Came to Beg a Favour
Jacques Dalstein was a husbandman from Hubling. He had journeyed to Metz on business and found his son confined to the guardroom. Michel was serving in a line infantry regiment, having enlisted as a paid substitute. The father went to petition the colonel and obtained his release. Before becoming the corpse over which tribunals would contend, Jacques had thus been the man who solicited a favour for his child.
On 5 January, following a visit to an attorney concerning a creditor, they quitted the city together. They halted at the tavern of Michel Happ in Saint-Julien, where they ate and drank. Towards six o’clock, the innkeeper reminded the soldier that it was high time to return to his barracks. His father pressed him to do the same. Michel replied that he wished to see his mother in Hubling, and that he would rather suffer a few days’ imprisonment than forfeit such an opportunity.
They set out late. At Antilly, another tavern took them in around midnight. Wine was served to them; a second bottle, initially refused, was at last brought over. The trial report records that Michel silenced his father whenever the old man attempted to join the conversation. The money that paid the reckoning came from a small linen pouch; the son stowed it inside his greatcoat. The two men took to the road again towards half past one in the morning.
Between them lay an older pecuniary dispute. Michel had lent Jacques eight hundred and fifty francs, drawn from the bounty received for his military substitution. The property securing this debt had been sold with his consent. The father owed far more than he possessed, and the son, the last registered creditor, had scant hope of being repaid. This debt entered the dossier. Yet it does not warrant inventing the conversation that might have passed between the two inns or upon the road: the witnesses did not overhear it all.
Those Who Heard the Blows
Between three and four in the morning, Jean Germain, an oil-presser from Luttange, and his servant Louis Léonard drew near Champion farm on horseback. Groans reached their ears. They came upon a man lying in the road, with a young soldier standing beside him. Upon the ground lay a hat, a shako, and a knotted cudgel. Questioned in German, the soldier at first held his peace; at length, he recounted that men bursting from the woods had set upon them.
The wounded man cried out that he was dying. Michel called him his dear father, endeavoured to raise him up, and spoke of his mother, who would never see them return. Léonard advised him to seek assistance at the farm. The two horsemen then went their way. The snow bore impressions that led them to suspect the stumbles of drunken men rather than an assault by brigands. They had suggested an alternative explanation, but they had not carried the wounded man away with them.
Anne and Marguerite Duval, who were likewise on their way to Metz, had heard cries and repeated blows in that very vicinity. Seized with dread, they had concealed themselves, then reached the farm by crossing through the meadows. There they begged shelter until daybreak and raised the alarm with the farmer. When Michel appeared shortly thereafter to seek aid, the two sisters were already within.
This time, he spoke of a drunken man discovered by the wayside. Anne confronted him with what she had heard. Michel replied that it was he who had been shouting. The farmer roused four farmhands, who set forth with a lantern. Upon the road, they found Jacques grievously wounded; he kept repeating his son’s Christian name. Michel declared that the old man was asking for his money. A search was made, but none was found.
The conveyance to the farm did not put an end to the acts of violence reported by the witnesses. Jacques, unable to walk, was dragged along, dropped upon the stones, and subsequently carried head downwards. In the bakehouse, straw had been laid out. The farmer then offered a bed; Michel refused it repeatedly. He was now presenting the wounded man as his father-in-law. From one interlocutor to the next, the kinship shifted as readily as the account of the encounter.
Jacques died towards half past five. Gendarmes, noticing blood upon the road, followed the tracks to the farm and arrested Michel. The medical examiners attributed death to the repeated violence they observed upon the body. Before the magistrate, the son denied having struck the blows; he pleaded his father’s falls and the possibility that others had mistreated him during his absence. These explanations were destined to run headlong into the testimonies of the wayfarers and the people of the farm.
Who Was to Judge the Soldier?
The case was initially referred to the Moselle Assize Court. Michel demanded to be tried by a military tribunal. The Court of Cassation upheld his claim on the question of jurisdiction: he remained in active service, was not on leave, and had not been absent long enough to be deemed a deserter. To have overstepped the bounds of the garrison was not sufficient to place him within the remit of the ordinary courts.
Before the first council of war, Maitre Bauquel rested the defence upon the absence of homicidal intent. He could make neither the corpse nor the depositions disappear; he sought rather to distinguish wilful battery from the intent to take life. The account published in May announced a sentence of penal servitude for life, followed by its annulment upon the appeal of the reporting officer. A second council was summoned to try Dalstein.
This second council condemned him to death. It specified, however, that the execution would be military, devoid of the mutilation prescribed for parricide under the general criminal code. The condemned man petitioned for review, but his appeal was dismissed. By this stage, the debate over the competent tribunal had extended into the very manner of carrying out its decree. It was not merely a matter of transmitting an order; one had to transmit the correct one.
It was into this sequence of events that the scaffold of 8 July intruded. According to the cautious explanation offered by the chronicle, the public prosecutor called for the judgment to be laid before him, observed that it prescribed a military execution, and issued a counter-order. The journal adds that he referred the matter to the Keeper of the Seals. It depicts no condemned man already beneath the blade. The preparations had begun; the apparatus was removed before the torment could commence.
Eight Days More
The suspension was no pardon. On 25 July, a brief notice in the Gazette des tribunaux announced that Michel Dalstein had been shot on the 16th, in the presence of the entire garrison. Those few lines brought the waiting to its end. They recount neither a parting confidence nor a plea for forgiveness. It would be simple to furnish them with a dramatic scene; they contain none.
Between the witnesses of that January night and the troops drawn up for the execution, several decisions had been rendered, quashed, or affirmed. Jacques Dalstein had enjoyed none of these respites. He had secured his son’s liberty; the morning following their departure from Metz, his death was certified in a farmhouse. The record preserves these two opposing acts: a father obtaining a favour, and a son refusing the preparation of a bed for the dying man. The dismantled scaffold must not obscure them.