When the last ladder was raised against the old company offices at Decazeville, Watrin was already wounded inside, alongside two engineers who had endeavoured to protect him. Upstairs, a small room had served as their refuge; outside, the crowd besieged the building. The Gazette des Tribunaux reports, in an account that initially rehearses the indictment, that the assailants then climbed through the windows, seized Watrin, and cast him into the void below. The mob then fell upon his body. Carried to the hospice, he expired at midnight. The gazette records the locations and reports the alleged acts; by June, what remained to be established before the jury was precisely the measure of each man's part.
It had all begun on the morning of 26 January 1886, across the mining concessions of the Aveyron. Hewers at Palayret refused to resume their labours following a dispute over their wages. The movement spread to Combes, Lavaysse, and Bourran; towards noon, according to the indictment cited by the Gazette, the strike was general. The contention was not confined to a mere figure. The grievances subsequently brought before the town hall demanded five francs for the daily shift of hewers and timbermen, three francs seventy-five for stowers and putters, a reduction in hours, the reinstatement of workmen discharged after the strike of 1878, immunity from reprisal for the delegates, and fortnightly payment. They also demanded the immediate resignation of Watrin, the company’s sub-director.
The Gazette depicts Watrin as having become, over the years, the visible face of decisions handed down by a remote corporate board. His management had sponsored a company provision-store that local tradesmen perceived as hostile competition. In the preceding months, the sub-director’s name had been scrawled upon a wall alongside a threat. These elements belong to the judicial narrative published by the journal; they illuminate the atmosphere of the strike, without proving that any concerted design to murder Watrin already existed.
Towards one o'clock, a band of workmen led by Louis Bedel repaired to the sub-director's office. The indictment ascribes to him words intended to urge the others inside; Bedel's counsel would later contest that such conduct sufficed to prove his participation in the murder. Watrin proceeded to the town hall, where Mayor Cayrade had delegates appointed. He declared himself willing to accept fortnightly payment, but stated that he could not resolve the remaining demands upon his own authority. As for his resignation, he replied that only the company could demand it of him. The conference was adjourned until the morrow.
That afternoon, an inspection of the mines was scheduled to ascertain the condition of the workings. Watrin asked to accompany the engineer Laur. The mayor, according to the prosecution’s account, urged Laur not to leave his side. On the road to Bourran, the crowd trailed the party, hurling stones and shouting that the sub-director must be taken “to the basin.” At the entrance to the Plateau des Bois, a gate gave way beneath the press; another group skirted the enclosure. Watrin, Laur, and the engineers Chabaud and Verzat fell back into the company’s old offices, barring themselves upon the upper floor.
The journal relates a first assault: a ladder was propped against a window, panes were shattered, and doors forced. In the chamber where Watrin had taken refuge, Henri Lescure dealt him, according to the indictment, a blow to the head with an iron crowbar. The wound laid open his brow; Chabaud was likewise struck. Auguste Blanc was alleged to have hurled a door panel at the engineers. These names and deeds were not yet the findings of the court: they were the accusations committed to print prior to the proceedings. Even the preliminary report noted that the turmoil, the miners’ uniform attire, and the terror of the witnesses rendered the exact identification of each individual singularly difficult.
The mayor endeavoured to obtain from Watrin a resignation capable of appeasing the crowd. He yielded at last. The tidings were cried from a window, but the clamour redoubled: it was not his resignation they demanded, but his person. The second incursion swept away the last defences. The public prosecutor's account attributes to three men—Souquières, Granier, and Chapsal—the act of hurling Watrin from the window; it credits Caussanel with a description of their part. The Gazette further reports that women set upon the wounded man and that several individuals trampled his body. These were averments of the indictment and judicial summaries, not facts that the verdict would attach to all the accused.
Several months elapsed before the Court of Assizes of the Aveyron heard the ten defendants. The initial report, published following the sitting of 15 June, rehearses the bill of indictment and the examinations. Lescure admitted having struck Watrin once, but disputed further blows. Caussanel, presented as a prosecution witness against several men, retracted portions of his depositions from the preliminary inquiry and did not maintain all his early claims. Granier and Chapsal advanced alibis; others denied all participation. The confusion of that tragic evening thus lingered within the courtroom: the jurors were left to disentangle presence, assistance, violence, identification, and intent.
Six days later, the Gazette resumed its coverage of the sittings of 18, 19, and 20 June. On the 18th, Maître Aubin spoke for the civil party, applying himself to the vindication of Watrin’s memory. He evoked his modest parentage, his training, his years in industry, and his arrival at Decazeville in 1880. To buttress this portrait, he read a letter in which Watrin accepted a reduction in his gratuity. It was counsel who construed this letter as the mark of a disciplined and benevolent gentleman; it was by no means a neutral portrait drawn by the journal.
Maître Léon Renault, another advocate for the civil party, subsequently placed the affair within the context of the labour crisis, censuring those discourses that sought to justify murder in the name of social struggle. His speech also defended the company against the reproaches levelled against it. By way of counterpoint, the Gazette reports the address of Maître Laguerre: to his mind, the miners' grievances and the history of strife at Decazeville could not be effaced by violence, yet they explained how Watrin had become the lightning rod for their fury. He stressed that the man placed at the centre of this wrath was not the whole company. This collision of narratives serves as a reminder that while the court sat in judgment of penal liability, the pleadings were also contending for the memory of the strike.
On 19 June, Procureur Général Baradat set forth his case. He held that the prior threats and the day's occurrences revealed premeditation, and apportioned responsibilities accordingly: he cast Lescure, Souquières, Granier, and Chapsal as the principal authors, and the others as accomplices. He appealed to the depositions, the weapons, the ladders, and the reported presence and conduct of each. His words remained those of the prosecution. On the following day, Maître Laguerre responded on behalf of Bedel. Bedel, he maintained, had conducted Watrin to the town hall, but had borne no part in the fatal deed; he recalled also that Bedel had been thrust back from a ladder and that witnesses placed him at a distance when Watrin was thrown down. The defence disputed the evidence and pleaded for an acquittal.
Other counsel delivered their closing arguments for Chapsal, Granier, Puech, Phalip, and Souquières. The jury then returned its findings. According to the record of the verdict, their answers were negative upon all questions concerning Souquières, Chapsal, Granier, Puech, the woman Pendariès, and Eulalie Phalip. In the case of the remaining accused—Lescure, Bedel, Blanc, and Caussanel—they affirmed the homicide, dismissed premeditation, and accorded extenuating circumstances. The court acquitted the former six. It sentenced Bedel to eight years of hard labour, Lescure to seven years of solitary confinement, Blanc to six years of solitary confinement, and Caussanel to five years of solitary confinement. The report adds that, upon the petition of the civil party, the court condemned “all the accused” to one franc in damages and to costs; the Gazette does not elucidate how this formula was reconciled with the acquittals and the sentences handed down.
The Gazette does not relate the subsequent fate of these men, nor that of the working families whose claims had filled the streets. Yet behind the verdict, it leaves bare the rupture that the trial failed to heal: a crowd had made of a sub-director the emblem of a contested industrial order; the tribunal was tasked with discerning, amidst the chaos of a frantic day, those specific acts that entailed penal guilt. The prosecution had designated four principal culprits. The jury acquitted three of them, convicted four men of homicide without premeditation, and pronounced six complete acquittals. Between the tumult of the plateau and these few lines of judicial record, the chasm remains that of proof.
Archival Note
This narrative draws upon two accounts from the Gazette des Tribunaux preserved in digital form by the ENAP: the issue of 16 June 1886, recording the hearing of 15 June, and that of 21–22 June 1886, which reviews the proceedings of 18–20 June through to the verdict. It does not encompass all intermediate hearings nor the entirety of the testimonies. Statements ascribed to witnesses when reported within the indictment, the prosecution's closing speech, or the defence pleas are retained under that attribution. The critical columns were verified against the original scans; the raw OCR is preserved separately, and a missing clause of the verdict was transcribed from the scan and annotated in the case file. Observed printed pagination: p. 568 for the issue of 16 June; p. 590, followed by p. 589 in the physical PDF sequence for the issue of 21–22 June, with the trial text accompanied by non-sequential printed numbering. The file contains no record of examination of the original court minutes.