“The monarchists are down on their luck.” On March 15, 1873, this sentence opened an article in Le Rappel devoted to the departure of Prussian troops and the bitter French squabbles over the liberation of the territory. Nine days later, those very words resurfaced before a court of assizes. The author, Édouard Lockroy, and the printer-manager, Adolphe Pelleport, were summoned to answer an accusation of inciting hatred or contempt among citizens one against the other.
The judicial drama unfolded on March 24, before the Seine Court of Assizes, presided over by M. Étignard de la Faulotte. The contemporary gazette recorded the roles of the two defendants with that scrupulous precision demanded of a prosecution aimed both at a text and at the men who brought it into the light. Pelleport, printer and business manager of the journal, resided at number 18, rue de Valois. Lockroy, a thirty-three-year-old man of letters, was the editor to whom the prose was attributed. One had set the issue into circulation; the other had composed the contentious piece. The accusation did not impute precisely the same act to each, but it bound them together around a single publication.
The piece bore the title “The Liberation of the Territory.” Its point of departure was the announced withdrawal of the Prussian forces, which the author contrasted sharply with the hopes of the royalists. According to the article, the monarchists had wished to prolong the foreign occupation, notably by retaining Belfort. It charged them with having harbored the hope that the presence of an alien army would pave their path to sovereign power and lucrative sinecures. The Republic, conversely, was exalted as the only regime that had delivered France from her chains.
The prose did not confine itself to the arena of parliamentary dispute. It addressed itself directly to the inhabitants of the occupied departments, to families whose farmsteads had been reduced to ashes, to soldiers fallen on the field, and to all who had endured the patrols, the brass fanfares, and the heavy presence of the invader. The article depicted their humiliation and their fury, then bid them remember those who, in the author’s estimation, had turned defeat to their own advantage. Such imagery belonged to the arsenal of partisan warfare; it constituted no judicial finding upon the conduct of any individual monarchist.
The article proceeded to trace the thread back to the calamity of 1870. It reproached the Empire for having steered the war to the catastrophe of Sedan and for having dispatched Mac-Mahon into the Ardennes, when he might have fallen back to defend Paris. It accused the constitutional monarchists and the champions of divine right of having combated the republican government with greater ferocity than they showed the foreign foe, of having disheartened the armies, and of having sued for peace. The journal cast them as Bismarck’s auxiliaries; this stood as Lockroy’s polemical thesis, not the legal question submitted to the jury’s conscience.
The closing cadence condensed this entire argument into two opposing propositions: the monarchy had ruined France; the Republic had delivered her. Between these lines, the text had deployed a vast address to the victims of the invasion, a political trial of the fallen Empire, and a fierce indictment of the monarchists. This architecture explains how an isolated phrase could take on an import far different from that which its author claimed to impart. It explains, too, why the prosecution fastened upon a printed, widely circulated text rather than a private colloquy.
The indictment carefully distinguished the act of Pelleport from that of Lockroy. The former was prosecuted for having, in Paris in 1873, disturbed the public peace by causing the article entitled “The Liberation of the Territory” to be inserted into the March 15 issue of Le Rappel, and for having subsequently sold and distributed that issue. The latter was pursued as an accomplice, for having drafted the article with a view to its publication and lent his aid to its dissemination. Several statutory provisions were cited. The gazette enumerates them, without transcribing the complete legal reasoning of the prosecution.
The charge retained did not concern an error of military reportage, nor an insult directed at a minister of state. It struck at the effect imputed to the printed word upon the citizenry itself: to arouse or inflame reciprocal hatred and contempt. It was this threshold that the trial questions required the jury to cross. The accused disputed any criminal intent; the text itself, however, named a specific class of Frenchmen as adversaries of the fatherland and held them responsible for wishing the occupation prolonged. The contention turned not merely upon the vehement tone of the piece, but upon the transition from political denunciation to indictable offense.
When the presiding judge interrogated the defendants, each declared that he had never entertained the unlawful intention laid to his charge. The gulf between the objective effect of a text and the subjective intention of those who produced it thus lay at the very heart of the proceedings. The article accused the royalists of wishing to retain the invader; the defendants, for their part, denied having ever intended to sow hatred among fellow citizens. It fell to the court to weigh the publication in its entirety, while the public prosecutor sustained the indictment.
Advocate General Chevrier took the floor for the prosecution. The court report does not dilate upon his address; it notes merely that he maintained the charges. Maître Lechevalier then presented the defense. Here again, the judicial reporter denies us the particulars of the plea, contenting himself with calling it eloquent. It would be tempting to supply this silence with the arguments one imagines regarding the freedom of the press or political intent. The chronicle does not record them; one must not put words into its mouth.
Lockroy added a few words of his own. He stated that he had nothing to add following his counsel’s speech, but protested against the method of detaching a single sentence from the article, which lent the mention of châteaux and presbyteries a meaning wholly alien to their context. He protested as well against the “appalling” intention the Advocate General had imputed to him. This brief intervention was no re-argument of the article: it brought the dispute back to the manner of reading it—severed piece by severed piece, or in the sweep of its general movement.
The presiding judge summarized the arguments. The jury retired to their chambers, returning after half an hour. Their answers were affirmative on both counts submitted to them: the facts charged were sustained against each of the defendants. Extenuating circumstances were granted to both. Interrogated as to the application of the penalty, Pelleport and Lockroy declared they had nothing to say.
The court sentenced each to one month’s imprisonment. It pronounced, in addition, a joint fine of five hundred francs, cast the costs upon them, and ordered the publication of the judgment in the manner prescribed by law. The report does not state that the two men were condemned to separate fines: the five hundred francs were owed jointly and severally. Nor does it recount the subsequent fortunes of this decree.
The affair thus resides in a printer’s paradox. The incriminated text denounced political phrases and postures it deemed complicit with the foreign occupation; before the assizes, its author protested that a handful of words had been severed from the rest to burden them with a meaning foreign to their context. The jury nevertheless answered affirmatively to both questions, and the bench fixed the penalties. The court likewise ordered the decree to be published, though the chronicle does not name the journal destined to receive it. To Lockroy’s flourish now answered another sentence, delivered from the bench: a month in prison, a common fine, and the public posting of the judgment.