On the night of 7 November 1884, in the hamlet of Les Allouettes, a man approached the home of the tallyman Etienney carrying a dynamite contraption. Forewarned by an anonymous letter, the gendarmerie had laid an ambush. According to the account of the proceedings later published in the Gazette, the man had just deposited the device upon the threshold and was drawing a flame to the fuse when he was discovered. He took to flight. A first discharge from a revolver wounded Staff Sergeant Belgy and Gendarme Chofflé; a second struck Gendarme Pépin in the chest. The man, Jean Gueslaff, was himself wounded and taken into custody. These gunshots put an end to the police vigil; they also opened a judicial inquiry that would trace a broken door back to the clandestine conduits of a cache of dynamite.
Since 1882, the mining basin had suffered outbreaks of violence that the court chronicle sets in the background of the trial. The report does not confound these earlier disturbances with the facts examined in 1885: it depicts a region where several unsolved explosions had kept terror alive, before turning to the outrages of 1884 and the theft that furnished part of their material means. The Gazette assigns the collective name of the “Bande Noire” to the whole affair, yet the thirty-two men remanded to the assizes were not all implicated by the same acts, nor were their answers indistinguishable.
The first material element of the narrative is a powder magazine at Perrecy-les-Forges. During the night of 14 to 15 July, its door was forced open; approximately forty-five and a half kilograms of dynamite, twenty-one bundles of gutta-percha fuse, and perhaps some compressed powder vanished. The indictment attributed the theft to Jean Jacob, known as Grandjean, and Philibert Serprix. It described a crowbar, two wooden crates, a potato patch, and the subsequent conveyance of the bundles to the Champ-Sauvage woods. Five other men were said to have been summoned to move the cargo. Certain among them admitted their assistance; Alexandre Deschamps and Pierre Calandron disputed the statements implicating them.
The cartridges did not follow a single path. The chronicle traces them through woods, quarries, hedgerows, and the hands of several defendants. A portion of the stock was allegedly employed in the explosion of 13 August at the residence of the engineer Chevallier, in Perrecy. The charge, placed upon the threshold, shattered windowpanes and partition walls; Monsieur and Madame Chevallier, abed on the ground floor, were struck by flying debris, while a younger brother of the engineer escaped the fall of a wardrobe thanks to a support beam. The Gazette then reports Jacob’s confession: he had prepared the engine with Serprix, then carried it alone to the house. The journal attributes to him this explanation offered during the preliminary examination: he knew that Chevallier was inside. This declaration, if faithfully transcribed, strips the explosion of any pretense of being a mere warning to a superior.
Other contrivances were directed against places of worship. In September, the door of the chapel of Le Magny was shattered by a blast, sending fragments hurtling as far as the altar. The indictment named René Laugrand, known as Pillot, and Gilbert Serprix as the ones who lit the fuse, while placing Jean Chaillet at a distance to keep watch. At the hearing, Laugrand recanted this latter charge, admitting he had wrongfully implicated Chaillet during the investigation. Chaillet likewise denied having acted as a sentinel. The roles of the other men were constructed around meetings, the transfer of dynamite, or lengths of fuse. A few days later, Lauvernier and Dessolin were alleged to have laid a charge at the base of the roadside cross at Le Magny. The blast did not bring down the cross: it shattered one step of its pedestal and loosened several others. In October, an iron tube stuffed with dynamite, gunpowder, and iron scrap was discovered before the chapel; the sacristan had initially mistaken it for a piece of firewood. For each of these episodes, the Gazette meticulously distinguishes confessions, denials, and alleged complicities, even when the indictment itself did not maintain such prudence.
As the hearings progressed, this material shifted in meaning. Jacob and Serprix, who had accused one another during the preliminary examination, produced a new tale in open court: two strangers, they claimed, had promised them two hundred francs to steal the dynamite. The presiding judge confronted them with their prior statements. They replied that they had not spoken the truth to the examining magistrate. Rauvet, who admitted having transported the crates, initially denied belonging to the Bande Noire and maintained that the magistrate had dictated his confession; the judge ordered the reading of a letter addressed to his mother wherein he expressed remorse for having been affiliated. Deschamps and Calandron rejected the accusations levelled against them. Elsewhere, a defendant conceded having carried or concealed cartridges while denying any knowledge of the purpose they were to serve. Thus the trial advanced by piecemeal admissions, retractions, and incompatible narratives, rather than by any single confession capable of illuminating the whole.
The figure of Brenin occupied a still more troubling place. The indictment portrayed him as a police informant, tasked with observing the designs of the group without taking part. In court, he testified that Police Commissioner Thevenin had approached him and promised a reward; the written testimony read after the commissioner’s death maintained, on the contrary, that Brenin had volunteered his services and had been expressly warned against turning agent provocateur. The sums of money also varied according to the depositions: five or ten francs on idle workdays, two hundred francs delivered in October, one or three thousand promised for uncovering an attack, and two hundred and fifty francs on the very evening he alerted the police. The article does not resolve these contradictions. It conveys their concrete consequence: Brenin maintained ties with Hériot, with Gueslaff, and with the police, at the very moment a revolver was passing from hand to hand prior to the expedition to Les Allouettes.
Gueslaff did not deny all the preparations, but he contested their interpretation. He admitted having resolved upon the design of 31 October with Hériot, but asserted that Brenin had delivered the revolver to him by order of the police commissioner. He acknowledged that Brenin had provided him with tinder, matches, and a cigarette; he challenged, however, certain remarks attributed to him by Hériot and dismissed the allegation of an explosive device placed above Etienney’s bed. Concerning the gunfire of 7 November, he claimed to have returned fire after hearing a discharge, subsequently admitting to firing twice without knowing, according to his testimony, that he was aiming at gendarmes. The presiding judge recalled the severity of the wounds and the order of the shots as established by the depositions; Gueslaff claimed the gendarmes had struck him. Then the judge evoked a gesture that occurred after the arrest: in prison, Gueslaff had asked for water, and Belgy, himself wounded, had brought him a glass of sweetened water. Gueslaff acknowledged that this gendarme had behaved better toward him than anyone else. Amidst the gunfire, this brief acknowledgment leaves room in the chronicle for something other than violence. These words remain strictly those reported by the newspaper, free of invented dialogue.
The informant himself could not be reduced to a detached bystander. Gueslaff accused him of having directed the conspiracy; Brenin admitted transmitting information, receiving money, and supplying the means of ignition, while maintaining he had acted to save society and had taken no part in the assembly of the device. Hériot contradicted several of his claims, notably regarding who had solicited the revolver. The Gazette lays these discrepancies before the reader: it does not record the detail of the jury’s answers to each specific question, and thus precludes transmuting every accusation raised during the trial into established judicial truth.
The proceedings concluded, the journal reports, on a Sunday at eleven o’clock at night. The verdict acquitted twenty-two of the thirty-two defendants; ten others were convicted. Gueslaff was sentenced to ten years of penal servitude, Brenin to five, Jacob to twelve, and Hériot to twenty; Lauvernier, Claude Martin, Laugerette, Gilbert Serprix, Philibert Serprix, and Laugrand received prison sentences ranging from two to eight years. The chronicle does not name the twenty-two acquitted men in this summary of the verdict, nor does it provide the itemized answers of the jury that might explain each divergence in fate. One must abide by what the record yields: a theft of dynamite pursued through several alleged outrages, statements repeatedly retracted, a covert agent turned actor in the events, and a court that parted the convicted from the acquitted without bequeathing to the reader the inner reasoning of the jurors.
The fuse, in this affair, does not lead to a singular explanation. It tethers together successive caches, charges compounded in copses and quarries, dwellings and sanctuaries struck or spared, and men whose testimonies wavered with the passing of each session. At the end of the line lies a question more enduring than the sobriquet of the secret society: how far may a man go who professes to monitor a crime, when he is privy to its preparations, remains entangled with the conspirators, and accepts remuneration from the authorities he assists? The Gazette furnishes the elements of this query; the reader must keep distinct the accusing voice, the defendant’s answer, and the sole final certainty the journal records: twenty-two acquittals and ten convictions.