General Custine re-entered the courtroom following the jurors’ vote and found his advocates no longer by his side. The president communicated the verdict to him, then informed him that he might submit observations regarding the application of the law. The soldier declared that his conscience reproached him with nothing, and that he died with composure. Champagnac’s narrative presents this scene as the first trial in a succession wherein the charge of treason passed from father to son.
Adam-Philippe Custine had been born in Metz into a noble house. He had embraced the profession of arms, sat in the Constituent Assembly as a deputy for the nobility, and later obtained the command of an army. After Dumouriez abandoned the French cause, Custine succeeded him at the head of the Army of the North. Champagnac praises his military conduct and loyalty, yet his chapter is composed against the Revolutionary government: his judgments upon the factions and the motives of the prosecution must be read as those of a partisan author.
On July 29, 1793, while the Convention decreed the impeachment of several fugitive Girondin deputies, Custine was himself implicated. The surrender of Mainz to the Prussians served as the pretext for the measure, according to the chronicler. The general was then in Paris by order of the Executive Council. He did not take flight following the decree, continuing instead to accuse the Minister of War of having deprived him of reinforcements and spread mistrust among his troops. Champagnac interprets this posture as an excess of frankness; the act of accusation discerned within it an attempt to provoke an insurrection in the capital.
Custine was arrested, conducted first to the Abbaye, and subsequently transferred to the Conciergerie on July 31. A fortnight later, he appeared before the Revolutionary Tribunal. The indictment, drawn up by Fouquier-Tinville, linked him to the defection of Dumouriez and reproached him in particular with having disapproved of the king’s death. It further imputed to him the summary execution by firing squad of officers and soldiers for trifling offences. The source counters this charge with another account of the executions: soldiers were allegedly punished after having plundered watchmakers’ shops, churches, and religious houses in Speyer.
A document dated April 9 played a singular part. It bore a signature attributed to Custine and was employed to substantiate the grievances lodged against him. The general denied having written, dictated, or signed it. The handwriting experts declared that the signature had been traced from another of the general’s signatures and bore the marks of a forgery. In Champagnac’s chronicle, this examination directly contradicted the use made of the note by the prosecution; the chapter does not, however, reproduce the experts’ report nor the complete record of the hearing.
Witnesses for the prosecution brought forward further accusations, which the author attributes to malice or ambition. Witnesses for the defence also took the floor, among them General Miranda. Following their examination, the public prosecutor drew a parallel between Custine and Dumouriez and summarized the charges. The general spoke in his own defence concerning his military operations; his counsel, Tronson-Ducoudray, was subsequently to plead upon the remaining matters of fact. The narrative portrays both addresses as a resolute defence, before remarking that neither the advocate’s eloquence nor the general’s explanations altered the verdict.
On the evening of August 27, the jury pronounced in favour of the accusation upon three counts, by majorities respectively of ten votes out of eleven, nine, and eight. The president exhorted the public to give no sign of approval or disapproval, reminding them that the accused now belonged to the law. Custine re-entered the hall under escort. His advocates, whom the chronicler describes as overcome with emotion, had withdrawn from the proceedings. Upon hearing the sentence, the general affirmed that he died without reproach upon his conscience.
At the close of the hearing, he prayed on his knees in the clerk’s office for two hours and requested his confessor to pass the night by his side. He wrote to his son, exhorting him to seek at a later day the rehabilitation of his memory. On the following day, he was led to the place of execution and died at fifty-three years of age. The year was 1793. The son to whom he had entrusted his memory was soon to defend his own life.
The general’s condemnation did not bring an end to the family’s ordeal. His son was arrested and arraigned in turn before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Champagnac attributes these proceedings to the fear that he might seek to avenge his father; he adduces no document establishing any such design. A single witness, Vincent, accused him of having shunned the patriots, consorted with counter-revolutionaries, and participated in his father’s designs. Interrogated as to his proofs, he admitted that he had merely repeated rumours he had heard and what, in his view, was common knowledge.
The court examined chiefly intercepted letters. The son had entrusted to the general’s courier a letter addressed to his father. Therein he expressed his solicitude in the face of military reverses; when questioned, he explained that the fall of Condé and the threat looming over Valenciennes risked furnishing new weapons to the general’s adversaries. He had likewise informed the general of the composition of the new Committee of Public Safety. He explained that such intelligence directly concerned an army commander and proved no manner of conspiracy. He affirmed that he had known the Girondin deputies only in the committees he visited on his father’s business, without knowledge of their intentions.
The young man had also been dispatched to the Duke of Brunswick at the outbreak of the war. He explained that he had been instructed to offer that foreign general the command of the French armies. He declared that he believed he was serving his country in undertaking this mission, unaware of any covert aims. He argued that he was then twenty-three years of age, and that it was scarcely credible that secret objectives would have been confided to him. When the president read his correspondence in an incomplete manner, according to the chronicle, the son demanded that the letters be produced in their entirety. He maintained that they were being truncated in order to crush him.
The final question concerned his complicity with the general. The son answered that he had known no other purpose in his father than that of serving the Republic, and that he had remained beside him with the army for but a brief season. President Dumas held, on the contrary, that a son in constant correspondence with his father could not be innocent of his designs. Counsel protested that a man could not be condemned upon such a presumption, even had he known his father’s intentions. Champagnac reports that a portion of the audience anticipated an acquittal; the sentence, nevertheless, was death.
In his cell, the son wrote to his wife, Delphine. He confided to her his anguish regarding her future and that of their child, besought her to rear the infant far from vice, and declared that he felt no remorse for errors he did not believe he had committed by design. He added that he had forgiven those who had rejoiced at his condemnation. He was executed on January 4, 1794.
The two trials were not identical. In the case of the father, the accusation rested upon military command, the surrender of Mainz, and a note contested by experts; for the son, it rested primarily upon correspondences construed as proofs of complicity and upon a witness who admitted to retailing hearsay. Between the two hearings, a letter had changed its character: the father had seen in it the link that would allow his memory to be vindicated; before the son’s judges, family correspondence became one of the instruments of complicity.