The Aisne Court of Assizes was in session on May 9, 1873, when Jules-Édouard-Hilarion Alliot appeared to answer for several fires that had broken out upon the farm he worked at Étaves-Bocquiaux. A first disaster had consumed a haystack in December; in January, the bill of indictment described three distinct seats of fire across two barns and an adjoining outbuilding. At the bar, the presiding judge questioned the accused on the hour of the outbreaks, his presence in the courtyard, and the sum of his insurance. The contemporary account concludes with a single, spare line: the jury returned a negative verdict, and Alliot was acquitted.
The affair had begun with a difficult lease. In September 1871, the wine merchant Léonard Lefranc had leased his farm—a holding of some twenty-two hectares—to Alliot. The annual rent amounted to 2,223 francs, payable in equal moieties in June and December. Alliot did not discharge the first term until September 1872, after repeated demands. When the next term fell due, he declared himself without funds and drew two promissory notes of five hundred francs each, maturing at the end of February. The judicial chronicle thus places these financial embarrassments at the very inception of the sequence of fires.
The insurance on the estate had not originally been contracted by him. The previous tenants, the Lefiots, father and son, had insured their implements, crops, and tenant’s risk for 16,000 francs; this sum was raised to 17,250 francs in 1870. Alliot assumed the benefit of this policy by an endorsement dated December 5, 1872, having his agricultural stock appraised at 22,500 francs. The bill of indictment deemed this valuation wholly divorced from real worth. It imputed to him, moreover, the design of turning the insurance to account in order to extricate himself from his straits. Such was the theory of the public prosecutor; it did not yet constitute the judgment of the jury.
On December 17, at midday, Alliot repaired to Fieulaine to sign the endorsement and the policy concerning four haystacks. He returned to Étaves towards three o'clock bearing duplicates of the instruments. An hour later, one of the insured stacks took fire. The indictment stated that the conflagration could not be ascribed to any stranger, nor to children who might have been seen in the vicinity; it added that their presence would have been signaled by the farm dog, which was wont to bark at the approach of an unknown face. It records no testimony of children having actually been observed. On the morrow, Alliot returned to the agent to declare the loss; the journal observes that he offered no explanation as to its cause.
The indemnity awarded after this first fire amounted to 755 francs. Alliot had promised to remit 200 francs thereof to Lefranc as an installment upon his arrears of rent, but failed to do so. In the prosecution’s reasoning, this anticipated payment and the overdue notes already bound together the lease, the insurance coverage, and the fire. One could trace the dates and the sums; of themselves, they did not establish who had fired the stack.
The policy cited in the indictment covered implements, crops, and tenant’s risk; the endorsement likewise applied to four haystacks. Yet the first casualty had destroyed but one, and the reported indemnity was 755 francs. The newspaper provides neither the apportionment of the contract nor the value of this single stack prior to the blaze. The 22,500 francs of agricultural stock do not, therefore, represent the reimbursement claimed for this isolated fire. The distinction does not dispel the suspicion cast upon Alliot; it merely prevents the insured valuation from being confounded with the sum actually disbursed after the first loss.
During the night of January 26 to 27, between two and three in the morning, another fire broke out within the buildings. Sauvez, a neighbor of the farm, caught sight of a glow, rose in all haste, and discovered the outbreak. The fire had taken in two distant quarters of the barns, the one running parallel to the street and the other perpendicular to it. The villagers came running. When the roof of the rear barn collapsed, the flames died away for lack of fuel; beneath the rubble, the witnesses found no ashes of harvested crops. According to the indictment, there had been nothing in that barn save a single cart.
The declared contents of the buildings became a cornerstone of the prosecution’s argument. Alliot was reproached for having stated that the rear barn held eight hundred bundles of fodder. As for the other barn, wherein he claimed to have stored seven thousand bundles of straw, the witnesses estimated that it could hold no more than five thousand sheaves and stood three-quarters empty. The expert appraisal, weighed alongside the deposition of Camus the straw-trusser, reckoned the straw harvest at roughly 6,250 bundles, from which had to be deducted the feed consumed by the livestock since autumn. The record frames these discrepancies as falsehoods on the part of the accused. It affords no particulars of the contradictory depositions, nor the full reckoning of the expert survey.
The material clues marshaled by the prosecution were manifold. The dog had not barked on this second night either. The walls of the two barns, solidly built, displayed neither hole nor chink through which an incendiary substance might have been introduced. The courtyard was enclosed; to enter it, one must have scaled the gates and risked arousing the household. Finally, Hallez extinguished a third seat of fire in a small outbuilding serving as a cow-shed, near the stable. The flames had begun to consume a shelf used as a hens’ nest and some fodder piled against the wall. The prosecution discerned in the arrangement of these materials a methodical preparation designed to spread the blaze to the remaining structures.
In the course of his examination, Alliot could not account for the first outbreak. He declared that he had been in his barn with his farmhand when it occurred. The presiding judge reproached him for having shown little haste in salvaging the spared crops or safeguarding the neighboring buildings; Alliot replied that he had done what he could and had only withdrawn when the danger was past.
Touching the January fire, he maintained that he was abed when the alarm was raised. He disputed the simultaneity of the two seats of fire in the barns and offered no clear explanation regarding that in the adjoining outhouse. The judge’s questioning bore upon the three points of origin observed within so narrow an interval: from this, the indictment deduced that the incendiary must have been familiar with the premises. Alliot answered: “It was neither I,” said he, “nor my servant who set the fire.” Questioned as to the increase in his insurance, he stated that he had requested it because he intended to enlarge his husbandry.
Deputy Prosecutor Desjardins maintained the accusation; Maître de Grilleau appeared for the defense. The chronicle mentions that the witnesses were heard, but preserves neither their names nor the substance of their words. The reader is thus denied the totality of the dossier that lay before the jurors. The page displays the collision of rival narratives, then resolves the sole point vouchsafed to us: the jury answered in the negative, and Alliot was acquitted.
An acquittal does not permit us to transmute into certainty every suspicion accumulated by the indictment. The dates of the policies, the unpaid notes of hand, the three seats of fire, and the silence of the watchdog formed a troubling sequence for the magistrates reporting the cause; the verdict of the jurors serves as a reminder that a powerful hypothesis is not yet guilt established. After the flames, the trial has left the reader not with a convicted culprit, but with the measure of what the chronicle chose to relate—and of the judicial decree that brought its narrative to a close.
Documentary Note: Gazette des Tribunaux, June 8, 1873, printed page 544, report of the proceedings of May 9 before the Aisne Court of Assizes. Most of the facts and clues are reproduced from the bill of indictment; Alliot’s statements and the verdict are recorded separately. The jury acquitted him.