On the 25th of January 1862, the jury of the Seine delivered nine separate verdicts in an affair where common nights of misrule had brought nine individuals before the Court of Assizes. Three walked forth acquitted; six were pronounced guilty. The chronicle published the following day in the Gazette des tribunaux delineates a confederacy that offered its aid to drunken men only to strip them of their possessions, and which, when the thoroughfares grew hazardous, conveyed their quarry away in hired carriages. It further connects these larcenies to borrowed names, inscribed into the registers of the municipal pawnshop, the Mont-de-Piété.
A Method Masked Behind “Protection”
The chronicle opens upon an underworld colloquialism: the vol aux poivriers—the rolling of drunkards, or “pepper-pots.” The accused, the journal observes, kept watch for inebriated men under the pious pretext of safeguarding them.
The reporter also depicts the stratagem employed whenever the public street afforded insufficient security. The accused would coax the man marked for plunder into a tavern, plying him with liquor until he was “ripe for the taking.” The phrasing belongs to the chronicler, who summarized the judicial arguments rather than transcribing the direct testimony of a victim.
Yet another variation of the scheme made allowance for the perils of the pavement. If a public quarter seemed too perilous for the theft, the confederates advanced the fare for a hackney carriage, helped their victim within, and robbed him behind closed curtains. Thereupon they would abandon him in some remote quarter, where the police would find him the following morning, sobered and stripped of all his goods.
The Gazette records not a single name among those thus despoiled. It speaks of twenty robberies laid to the charge of the band, observing that the particulars of these misdeeds rested, according to the indictment, upon the confessions of certain prisoners or the depositions of witnesses. We remain ignorant of what specific articles were taken in each instance, where each victim was ultimately discovered, or what precise share fell to each accomplice. This hiatus forbids turning the general method into twenty fully authenticated vignettes. The journal furnishes the architecture of the prosecution, not a ledger of victims. The reader receives the public distillation of a preliminary inquiry and subsequent hearings, yet is denied access to the unvarnished depositions upon which the jurors reached their verdicts.
Nine Individuals, Unequal Stations
The nine prisoners in the dock appear by no means as a uniform company. The Gazette provides their names, callings, and known antecedents, sketching distinct roles: perpetrators of robbery, suspected receivers of stolen goods, a companion depicted as complicit, and one man set up as ringleader. These designations are those of the gazetteer and the Crown; they must not be extended beyond the individual verdict rendered for each soul.
Guillaume-Toussaint-Honoré Delaitre was presented as a self-styled husbandman, thrice previously convicted. He had yet to answer for another indictment before the Assizes, the paper notes. Marie-Eugène Depierre, a shopman aged forty-eight, had twice been convicted of public indecency. Michel-Ange Proment, a day-labourer of twenty-six, bore six previous convictions—three for battery, three for larceny. The chronicle assigns him the chief hand in the nocturnal assaults; yet the jury formally rejected the specific question regarding the acts of violence laid to him—a distinction between charge and verdict that remains vital.
Auguste-Isidore Boulogne, an itinerant hawker of twenty-four, had been apprehended nine times and convicted six, according to the column. In November 1860, he had received nine years of penal servitude; he appeared, writes the journalist, in the garb of a convict. It was his arrest that had unsealed the entire dossier. Alexandre Muguet, twenty-two, a dealer in knick-knacks, counted five convictions to his name. The most recent, in March 1860, had condemned him to six years’ solitary confinement, while a separate ruling had committed him to the Assizes on another matter.
François Deville, a coppersmith of twenty-five, is noted without antecedents in this brief report. Jean-Symphorien Collot, a second-hand dealer of thirty-seven, was prosecuted for receiving; the paper intimates that his trade accounted for his presence in the dock, though this is mere commentary from the press, not independent proof. Louis-Hippolyte Lacourrège, forty-two, formerly a gendarme of the Imperial Guard, was recorded as having possessed an honourable record in that corps, unmarred by prior offence. The Crown tied him to the enterprise through his connection with the final prisoner, his mistress for the past three years, and his alleged knowledge of the larcenies.
This last defendant was Marie-Louise Baudot, a cook of twenty-eight, possessing no judicial antecedents according to the report. She was, moreover, grievously ill. The chronicle notes that her heart affliction halted the proceedings on several occasions, and that she uttered, at intervals, cries she strove in vain to stifle. The reporter frames these interruptions neither as an artifice of defense nor as proof of an unsettled mind. What the text establishes is solely their disruption of the hearings and the gravity of her physical state as witnessed by the court.
From Arrest to the Assize Court
The chronicle retraces the matter to the close of March of the preceding year, 1861. Boulogne had been apprehended, making confessions and disclosures that brought his associates before the magistrate. Delaitre went at the time under the alias of Huzel; under that name, he had received a sentence of one year’s imprisonment for theft on 12 October 1859. Depierre and Proment were likewise familiar to the tribunals. The Gazette recounts several of their former sentences, not to claim that a tainted past established new guilt, but because these prior penalties formed the backdrop laid before readers and jurymen alike.
The journal further records that Delaitre and Depierre, following Boulogne’s example, entered upon the path of confession. The facts they disclosed, to their own prejudice as well as that of their fellows, were subsequently confirmed by the preliminary investigation, to borrow the journal’s phrase. It remains impossible, from this summary, to discern which revelations struck which defendant, what external proofs corroborated them, or what weight the jury attached to each statement. The press offers the broad narrative arc without reproducing the exhaustive interrogatories.
The indictment recited twenty acts of theft. It embraced, in addition, the forgery of public and authenticated documents. According to the Gazette, certain of the accused had pledged stolen articles under false names, affixing those signatures to the ledgers of the Mont-de-Piété; other false identities had been assumed in the course of criminal procedure. A fictitious name was thus employed to move the stolen wares while leaving an administrative paper trail that would not lead directly to the perpetrators.
This documentary dimension widened the scope of the trial. A victim stripped of his effects in a dark lane or a hired carriage might never recognize his assailants; a ledger of pawned pledges, however, held fast to an ink-and-paper signature.
The trial unfolded over the 23rd, 24th, and 25th of January, under the presidency of Councillor Portier. The Advocate-General maintained the indictment against all nine prisoners, yet announced that he sought mitigating circumstances only on behalf of Lacourrège and Baudot. The advocates addressed the court in succession for the defense.
Three Acquittals, Six Condemnations
The third day was devoted to the summing-up of the presiding judge and the deliberation of the jury. This began at noon and concluded two hours and a quarter later. The verdict was negative in the cases of Baudot, Lacourrège, and Collot. The president ordered their immediate discharge. Their acquittal detached individual fates from any tidy presumption of an indissoluble band: to stand indicted within the same indictment had not sufficed to secure a conviction.
The remaining six were declared guilty. Mitigating circumstances were accorded only to Muguet and Deville. The jury formally dismissed the fifty-second question, which had pertained to the acts of violence imputed to Proment.
The Court then passed sentence: nine years of penal servitude and a fine of 100 francs for Delaitre; nine years of solitary confinement for Depierre; eight years for Boulogne and Muguet; seven years of the same penalty for Proment and Deville. The newspaper does not explicitly reiterate the exact category of confinement for the latter two groups following the mention of Depierre; this account refrains from conjecture. The concluding sentence of the press article marks the boundary of the archival record: it relates neither an appeal, nor the execution of the sentence, nor the day of liberation.
An offer of “protection” that conducts a man from a tavern into a carriage, and thence to a lonely spot, emerges from the trial report as a stratagem to divert the prey’s suspicions at the very instant he believes himself succoured. Yet the judicial outcome does not conclude upon a sweeping moral precept. It releases three persons while condemning six, strikes down a charge of violence, grants mitigating circumstances to two prisoners, and leaves the victims nameless. It is this very fracture—rather than the portrait of a well-oiled gang—that the surviving archive allows us to chronicle.