The case involves neither murder nor poison, nor even a culprit in the ordinary sense. Yet it merits its place here, for it raises a question commonly held to be modern.
A journeyman glazier from the town of Comines, one de Buigne by name, was seized in the dead of night by a mounted trooper of the Maréchaussée and cast into prison in Lille. He had committed no crime, nor any known misdemeanor. There he languished for over a month.
He first applied to the Gouvernance of Lille, seeking an order compelling the trooper to declare under what authority he had arrested him. The Gouvernance deemed itself without jurisdiction and declined to answer. The glazier then appealed to the Parlement of Flanders on grounds of denial of justice, obtaining leave to subpoena the trooper. Thereupon, the Provost General of the Maréchaussée appeared alongside his man, declared that the trooper had acted solely upon his command, and maintained that he himself could be called to account only before the Connétablie—the jurisdiction reserved exclusively for men-at-arms.
It was on this very point that arguments were heard at Douai. The glazier’s advocate, Maître Merlin, drafted a legal opinion of admirable lucidity. The Maréchaussée, he wrote, was established to watch over public safety, not to disturb with impunity the peace of private citizens. Its force is not an instrument whose exercise is left to its own discretion; save in cases of flagrante delicto, it may act solely upon the express warrants of sovereign or judicial authority. He cited the ordinance of 1778, the declaration of 1714 forbidding officers of the Maréchaussée from arresting any settled inhabitant without prior inquest and decree under pain of damages, and a regulatory ruling of 1705.
The Gazette records no outcome. We know only that a glazier of Comines, destitute of fortune and patron, dared to challenge a Provost General, and that an advocate who would one day become one of the great jurists of the Revolution lent him his pen. Spirited away in the night without cause, he asked merely to be told why.
Gazette des tribunaux, circa 1783, Parlement of Flanders: the cause of the man named de Buigne against a trooper of the Maréchaussée and the Provost General (legal opinion of Me Merlin).