In the month of January 1784, Jean-Baptiste Lacqueman, an inhabitant of the village of Beuvry, within the jurisdiction of Marchiennes, murdered his father. The Parlement of Flanders condemned him to death, and the sentence was executed at Marchiennes on the thirty-first of January. So much for the crime; the Gazette relates no more of it, for it was not the parricide that provoked the scandal.
What caused the scandal was a letter. On the thirtieth of March, a sheet printed at Lille—a supplement to issue number seventy of the Feuilles de Flandres—published a missive dated the eleventh of February, addressed to Monsieur Des Essarts, author of the Journal des Causes célèbres, by an advocate from Douai who signed himself merely with three stars. In it, the advocate rendered an account of the parricide, seeking to fathom its underlying cause.
He traced it neither to climate, as Montesquieu might have done, nor to innate wickedness of soul. He found it in the flesh. It is to physical organization alone, to the bodily constitution of every creature, he wrote, that one must ascribe the cause of great vices no less than of great virtues; temperament is the primal generative source of all moral faculties. And he pursued his thesis to its absolute conclusion: had Jacques Clément, had Ravaillac, had Robert Damiens been bled but an hour before their heinous deeds, they would never have stained their hands with the blood of our kings; had Jean-Baptiste Lacqueman received that selfsame remedy, he would never have butchered his father.
The King’s Procurator-General at the Parlement of Flanders rose in fury against this broadsheet. He contested none of the details of the crime; he denounced a pernicious doctrine. If man, he argued, must perforce obey an irresistible motor impulse which neither virtue, nor will, nor education can arrest, then free will is no more, and the guilty man is no longer guilty. It was, in his eyes, materialism in its most unbridled form, directly descended from the authors of The System of Nature and De l'Esprit.
One may smile at the lancet and the bowl. One smiles rather less on observing that the question propounded by the advocate of Douai, in a provincial gazette in the wake of an execution, has never ceased to be asked: where does the body end, and where does moral guilt begin? In 1784, it was deemed sufficiently perilous to be arraigned before a sovereign court. As for Jean-Baptiste Lacqueman, he had already been dead two months, and no one had ever thought to offer him a bleeding.
Gazette des tribunaux, 1784, Parlement of Flanders, indictment against the Supplement to issue No. 70 of the Feuilles de Flandres (30 March 1784).