Twenty-two witnesses waited in the courtyard of the Palais de Justice on behalf of Napoléon Gaillard; none had received an official summons. The presiding judge considered it impossible to hear them all at the instance of a single defendant, and directed him to choose several among them. Gaillard replied that he had not seen them and did not know what they might come to say. The courtroom doors opened nonetheless to as many as the hearing could accommodate. It was 22 October 1869, before the Sixth Correctional Chamber of Paris, and the matter of the Belleville gathering was to turn first upon a single question: who, within the hall on the Rue de Paris, had heard the order to disperse?
Seven men stood in the dock. Lissagaray, Lombard, Oudet, and Amouroux, members of the assembly's presiding bureau, were prosecuted for having refused dissolution and incited, by words or shouts, misdemeanours and disobedience to the laws. Havrez, Noiret, and Gaillard answered further to charges of insulting language, resistance, and acts of violence against public officers. Two defendants, Havrez and Noiret, remained in preventive custody. This apportionment of charges already divided the gestures attributed to each; what the tumult had confounded, the court was obliged to disentangle name by name.
The meeting had taken place on 10 October, at No. 8, Rue de Paris, in Belleville. The discussion had concerned bailiffs and their relations with the courts of justice. Police Commissioner Briand, tasked with supervising the assembly, affirmed that he had cautioned the speakers Ducasse and Nathan repeatedly. Lissagaray, who had presided, maintained that he had heard no warning whatever. The first contested remarks had touched upon investigating magistrates, warrants of arrest, and the demolition of prisons. Nathan was then said to have denounced as an "infamous act" the failure to find a bailiff willing to serve a summons upon the Prefect of Police, whereas workingmen had been condemned by the prud'hommes tribunal to fifteen days’ labour. According to Briand, it was following these words, drowned in applause, that he declared the meeting dissolved.
Lissagaray recounted that moment otherwise. The commissioner, he stated, had leaned toward the bureau; the assessors believed he was about to deliver a caution. He had uttered a few words which they could not hear, and had then put on his hat. Thereupon the president had rung his bell and announced that the session continued, since no warning had reached the ears of the bureau. Amouroux, seated beside him, confirmed that he had perceived no cautions. The secretary, Perinet, on the contrary, asserted that he had heard them and reported the dissolution. He acknowledged, however, that he had drawn up the official minutes upon returning to the station-house under Briand’s dictation, both men piecing together their recollections.
From that juncture, the question of the order became entangled with that of the doors. Briand stated that he wished to withdraw after a few minutes, while the hall refused to disperse. The door, he said, was barred by an iron rod; individuals surrounded him, shouting that he should not leave. It was at last forced open from without. When he returned with five or six town sergeants, a bench flung from within grazed him and shattered upon the paving-stones. Other benches and chairs followed. The officers used them to ward off the missiles, affirmed the commissioner, who declared he had seen none of them draw his sword.
Within the hall, the accounts of blows did not accord. Briand had seen a man with a bloodied face; the injury appeared to him blunt, not inflicted by a pointed weapon. He had also noticed several sergeants bruised, their garments torn, and a sword wound upon the hand of one of them. Another man, carried through the street as though wounded, was not in fact injured, he added. Perinet, for his part, had seen an attendee bleeding from the nose without being able to say who had struck him; he believed a sergeant had been brought down and disarmed.
The sergeants called thereafter supplied further particulars, without identifying every hand. Brungalia said he had been thrown down and beaten; he feared he might be murdered with his own sword, which had been wrenched from his grasp. He thought Lissagaray was ringing the bell and shouting to remain, though he could not affirm it with certainty. He recovered his sword and used it, according to his deposition, to keep his assailants at bay with the flat of the blade. Gaillard called out that the sergeant had delivered at least twenty sword blows; the public prosecutor demanded of him where the twenty wounded might be. Pairault declared he had received a sword cut; Juneker stated he had drawn none, and did not know whether Noiret, whom he had seen grappling with an officer, had struck any blows.
To Noiret, Sergeant Blanchard attributed a chair hurled at the officers after the young man had branded them cowards and rabble. Gaillard was said to have been seen struggling with a sergeant from whom he tore four buttons. Clauser related that Gaillard, when urged to calm himself, had seized him round the body and shaken him. These testimonies lent recognizable gestures to the melee; yet they did not distribute every blow among all the accused. Garland, a civil engineer present at the assembly, had seen drawn swords but could not say whose arms wielded them. He had also heard, as the commissioner withdrew, voices urging that he be allowed to pass.
At the bar, the dispute returned to the police reports. Lissagaray maintained that Briand had drawn up two sets of minutes initially, and had subsequently added three more at the behest of the prefect. He claimed that no warning had been given and that the entire bureau testified to the same effect. The imperial advocate handed him the dossier, inviting him to verify the assertion. Lissagaray examined the documents, searched for a moment, and then desisted: "I cannot find it, but I saw what I saw." The journal does not resolve this dispute; it merely reveals the prosecution put to the test before the very instruments upon which it relies.
The tumult followed the accused into the courtroom itself. A voice rose from the public benches accusing the commissioner of conferring with the officers; the presiding judge ordered the expulsion of the interrupter, whom several recognized as Rigaut, a man already convicted of political offences. Brigadier Arnoult then recounted what had transpired in the street: he had heard cries directed against the sergeants and seen Havrez pointing to the man being carried as a victim, shouting that they had murdered him. Arnoult offered him the opportunity to come and make a statement at the station-house. Havrez refused; the brigadier took him by the collar. A man then threw himself to the ground before them, according to the witness, to obstruct their progress. Havrez answered that all of this was false. The presiding judge inquired as to the identity of the wounded man; Arnoult did not know him, nor did he even know whether he was the individual seen at the apothecary’s shop.
Eight days later, on 30 October, the defence advocates addressed the court once more before the same chamber. Jules Favre defended the freedom of assembly, maintaining that excesses are more surely corrected when a right is neither humiliated nor abandoned to arbitrary power. Laferrière pleaded for Amouroux; Paul Lax for Havrez. All the defendants, save Noiret, who persisted in his silence, offered their own explanations. Following the reply of the imperial prosecutor and a lengthy deliberation, the court rendered its judgment: it dismissed the prosecution against all seven men regarding the seditious cries, but convicted them upon the remaining counts. Lissagaray, Lombard, Oudet, and Amouroux were each fined 500 francs; Havrez and Gaillard were sentenced to four months’ imprisonment; Noiret, to three months.
The account closed upon a precise division: the seditious cries were not upheld, but the other counts brought either fines or imprisonment. Four defendants received identical fines; three others were committed to prison. Gaillard had arrived at the hearing unable to confer with his twenty-two witnesses; the Gazette does not record how many among them were ultimately heard. It announced that the full text of the judgment would appear at a later date. In the two reports preserved here, the hurled benches, the wrenched sword, and the wounds remain divided among voices that do not always point to the same hands.