of a sentence, and allow the convicted | nizance of the dossiers. The avocat may man to walk freely out of court. Political not always be of much use to a prisoner, offenders, journalists, and duellists, who but there he is, and he seldom fails to get sentenced to a few months' imprison- exercise his privilege of challenging some ment only, are seldom detained imme- of the names called for the jury. This is diately after their conviction. Except in done by merely lifting up his toque or very serious cases, or in cases where the headdress when the name is called. The government harbors a special animosity public prosecutor may also challenge, and against the culprit, the latter leaves the challenges coming from either side are court free, and does not surrender to un- always allowed without question. dergo his punishment until he receives a summons to do so from the public prosecutor. And sometimes, as for instance when a sudden change of ministry brings the friends of a political offender to power, the summons is never sent at all. It may be remembered that during the last days of the Duke de Broglie's administration in 1877, M. Gambetta was sentenced to four months' imprisonment for an attack on Marshal MacMahon, but the order to surrender was never communicated to him. The administration of justice in France is never rendered undignified by sordid surroundings, such as small, frowsy courts. All the courts of assize are spacious and handsome; there is plenty of room for all who have business there, and it is always possible to accommodate a good many sight-seers. The public prosecutor sits in a rostrum to right or left of the bench according to the position of the windows, the dock being always opposite the light so that the prosecutor may enjoy a full view of the prisoner's The first business of the assizes is to face. The three judges in their robes of draw the juries. A panel of forty jury-scarlet and ermine sit in armchairs at a men is summoned, and the prisoners are long table on a dais. Behind them hangs all brought up one by one into the presi- a life-size painting of the Saviour on the dent's room to see the drawing done. For each trial fourteen names are drawn by lot, that is, twelve to form the jury and two others to act as suppléants in case one of the jury should fall ill. These suppléants are sworn like the rest, and they sit in the jury box, but take no part in finding the verdict unless they are required to fill up vacancies. This system of having a couple of extra men on a jury is evidently more sensible than the English plan of empaneling just the number needed. How absurd this system would have seemed if one of the jury in the Tichborne case had died on the one hundred and fiftieth day of the trial, thereby rendering it necessary that the whole trial should be recommenced! In France, if a trial bade fair to last a hundred days, it is probable that the bench would order six suppléants to be empaneled in order to guard against all chance of a miscarriage of justice. Every prisoner is attended at the draw ing by his counsel, and it is a merciful provision of French law that no prisoner shall be arraigned at the assizes without having a barrister to defend him. A few days before the assizes a notice is sent to the house of detention requesting that all prisoners unable to pay for counsel shall forward their applications to be defended at the expense of the State; and the judges appoint a counsel for each prisoner as soon as they have taken cog cross, and there is a crucifix on the table fronting the president's chair. These emblems of mercy and redemption form part of the furniture of all assize courts. No freethinking judge has yet ordered their removal, though judges must be pretty well tired by this time of hearing young avocats adjure them by the crucifix not to slay the innocent. This is a piece of rhetorical flourish which may have been effective sometimes, but it has been sadly overdone and misused. III. "BRING in the accused," says the president, as soon as the judges have taken their seats; and the prisoner is introduced into the dock between a couple of gendarmes heavily armed, who sit on either side of him and keep their cocked hats on throughout the proceedings. From this time and until the end of the trial it may occur to the prisoner to wonder why three judges have been put to the trouble of trying him, seeing that it is the president who does all the work. It is said that the two assessors have a voice in the infliction of the sentence, but they take no ostensible part in the trial, and sit all the while as dumb as fish. The president, on the contrary, has a great deal both to say and to do. The procedure of the French assize court differs totally from the English. The proceedings commence with the read ing of the indictment in a sing-song voice while the charge against them is being investigated by examining magistrates; but as it is the juge d'instruction's busi ness to frame a perfect indictment, and not merely to establish a prima facie case, he will end by discharging a prisoner if not fully satisfied of his guilt, sooner than risk a snub from the chambre des mises en accusation by sending up an incomplete case. Nevertheless innocent men do get committed and convicted sometimes in France; and rare as such occurrences may be, they ought, one would think, to render presidents of assize more dispassionate. When the prisoner has been questioned and harried till he is faint and despairing, he is allowed to sit down again. The president has done his duty, according to his lights, in endeavor. ing to wring a confession from the man, and, having failed, he is content to let by the clerk of the court, and this usually lasts more than an hour, for the indictment is of portentous length, touching upon almost every incident in the accused's life. The prisoner, who remains seated during this reading, is then told to stand up, and the president begins to interrogate him. Now the bias of French judges against accused persons is always so strong as to have become proverbial, and any Englishman hearing a judicial interrogatory is shocked by perceiving that the president speaks as if the prisoner's guilt had already been made manifest. He says to him, "Now don't deny your guilt. Don't equivocate. You know very well that you are telling lies. You seem to have been a bad character from your youth up;" and so on. This kind of thing quite unsettles a nervous person, or makes a bold one saucy, and it pro-him alone thenceforth. Now comes the duces a bad effect on juries. It is a marvel that judges should not yet have discovered how bad an effect it produces. Many of the scandalously lenient verdicts which have disgraced French courts of justice of late years may be ascribed entirely to the irritation caused in the minds of jurymen by the bullying tone adopted by judges towards prisoners. A wretched man driven to exasperation one day exclaimed: "You are not judging my cause; you have made up your mind about it without hearing me. What is the use of my answering you?" and he was acquitted for this speech, though in truth he was guilty. A judge who believes in a prisoner's guilt and wants to see him punished cannot do better than speak to him in the most moderate tone, as the jury will probably do their duty if their vanity is not ruffled by the feeling that After the witnesses for the prosecution they are being cowed. By an act passed have been heard, those for the defence in 1880 the summing up of judges was come forward without any interposition abolished. This act may be said to have in the shape of a speech from the prisonbeen a very severe vote of censure passed er's counsel. This is another point of by the Parliament upon the judicature, difference from English procedure. The and it ought to have had a sobering and speeches are all delivered at the close of somewhat humiliating effect upon presi- the evidence. The public prosecutor dents of assize. But it has apparently leads off with his requisitoire; if there had none. The truth is, judges come be a claim for damages, the avocat of the into court with their minds utterly saturated with the facts accumulated in most cleverly drawn indictments, and it should be added that the preliminary investigations conducted before the examining magistrates are generally so long, so minute, and painstaking that it is very seldom indeed that an innocent man is committed for trial. Innocent men frequently remain for months and months in gaol time for the witnesses to be heard. They are not sworn upon a Testament, but are enjoined to lift up their right hand and swear to tell "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." A rather needless question is asked them to start with, "How old are you?" After this they have to say whether they stand in any degree of relationship towards the accused. There is no cross-examination by the counsel for the defence as in England. It is the president who does all the interrogating. The prosecution and the defence may from time to time interpolate a question, but this is not done on any systematic plan, and the questions are always put through the presi dent with his leave. In the newest-built assize courts the witnesses sit while giving their evidence. civil parties to the suit follows, and then the counsel for the defence makes his harangue. One must call it a harangue, for whether the orator be one of the foremost men at the bar, or a mere forensic tyro, he is sure to indulge in a set declamation with a great deal of what is on this side of the Channel contemptuously termed "gush." As there are no juries. in civil causes or in correctional courts, of France who may be seen going about the streets on the first and fifteenth of every month to collect payment of bills. These messengers are very conspicuons from wearing a grey uniform and carrying their satchels full of notes and gold slung by a chain to their sides. Martin decoyed one of these poor fellows into his shop under pretence of wanting change for a avocats gladly avail themselves of the senger was stooping over his counter to spread out the gold, he clove his head open with a hatchet. The murder had been craftily planned, and might well have gone undetected, for Martin was alone in his shop; he had littered the floor thickly with sawdust, and he had made all his arrangements for dragging his victim down to the cellar and there burying him. Unfortunately for him the messenger was not killed outright. He had just strength enough left to wrench open the shop door and stagger into the street, where he died on the pavement. Let us not make too light of assize court oratory. It is of an infinitely higher quality than that so met with at the Old Bailey. To begin with, the French are born talkers; they are, moreover, warmhearted, quick-willed, and aesthetic. You can appeal to the feelings of the least cultured among them by lofty theories upon humanity, and you may captivate the minds of the most intelligent and highly educated by ingenious paradoxes. Jury- How promptly an English judge and men are for the most part plain men of jury would have sent Martin to the galsquare sense; but one or two "thinkers" lows need not be insisted upon; but M. among the twelve will leaven the whole Lachaud, who defended the ruffian before lump. The others will undergo the influ- a Parisian jury, did it with such skill that ence of their superior minds, and while he moved them to tears. He drew a not comprehending their theories perhaps will feel secretly ashamed of their own dulness, and will be anxious to prove that they, too, comprehend a grande idée. The grande idée may happen to be this, that a man is justified in slaying his mother-in-law if she interferes too perseveringly with his domestic arrangements; but what matter, if the verdict which consecrates this doctrine be received by the public with loud cheers? 66 touching picture of the honest tradesman, the good husband and father, driven to despair by seeing himself on the point of ruin. He implored the jury to have mercy. on a man who wanted to save his "commercial honor." No doubt it was wrong. to try and save one's honor by murder and robbery, but such a wild design only. proved the extent of mental aberration to which poor Martin had been brought by the prospect of seeing his credit broken. In England we have by our sneers at The jury, taking this kindly view of the found "gush," "humbug," "clap-trap," "senti- matter, extenuating circummentalism," etc., made our barristers stances" in favor of Martin, who was ashamed to talk nobly. Very few of them, consequently saved from the guillotine, indeed, would care to risk that reputation and sentenced to transportation for life. for good sense which is so valued amongst As he has now undergone five years of his us by launching hazardous theories in jus- time, he is probably living as a free colotification of great crimes. In cases of nist in New Caledonia. murder especially the plea of provocation can only be urged with the extremest caution. Neither judges nor juries will stand much of it, and some of the theories occasionally advanced in French courts of justice to save the necks of desperate Scoundrels would be received in England not only with indignation, but with contemptuous laughter. Some time ago a Parisian tradesman named Martin, being on the verge of bankruptcy, was moved to right his affairs by murdering and robbing one of those messengers of the Bank 1984 LIVING AGE. VOL. XXXIX. Such miscarriages of justice may seem to us monstrous, but they may be matched by plenty of others from recent judicial annals. M. Lachaud, who exercises a magical influence over juries, was three years ago called upon to defend a girl named Marie Bière, who had shot at her paramour with a revolver and wounded him so dangerously that for weeks he lay at the point of death. Marie Bière was not an artless girl wreaking frantic vengeance on a man who had seduced her, but a person of worthless antecedents, who, having formed a cases M. Georges Lachaud, nephew of the great Lachaud, had to meet the remonstrances of the public prosecutor, who plainly pointed out that the constant acquittal of adventuresses who had no object but to bring themselves into notoriety by committing murder was really a public scandal and a danger to society. 66 liaison with a young gentleman of property, wished to induce him to marry her, and shot him because he was going to marry somebody else. It ought to have been regarded as an aggravating circumstance in her crime that her paramour had not sought to cast her off penniless, but had liberally settled an income of 144%. a year on her for life; and yet it was pre-"I contend, on the contrary, that such cisely on this fact that M. Lachaud based acquittals are tending unmistakably to his most masterly defence of the girl and moralize society," answered M. Georges obtained her acquittal. He fully admitted Lachaud. By proving that you have no how bad Mlle. Bière's antecedents had sympathy with young men of loose morals been; "but," he asked, with his fiery elo- you are making them cautious. All laws quence, "what has that to do with it? If have failed to make them virtuous, but this poor creature conceived a true and one such verdict as you may render can tender feeling of love for this man, if she frighten them into becoming so." had cherished the dream of becoming his wife and leading a life of purity thenceforth, was it not a most pitiable thing that her hopes of redemption should have been destroyed? You saw how she spurned his money her love had purified her he had won her heart and his desertion made her desperate. Are you going now by your verdict to affirm that women who have once fallen shall never be allowed to love, shall never blot out the past, shall be subject all their lives to the degradation of offers such as this by which Marie Bière's lover sought, as he cynically said, to compensate her? Compensation at the rate of three hundred francs a month for a broken heart! Compensation by insult for a wrong most cruel, most worthy of good men's compassion?" There were numbers of fine ladies, actresses, authors the author of the "Dame aux Camélias" among them who wept in court during this stirring address; and the bewildered jury brought in a verdict of not guilty, which was hailed with tremendous applause, waving of handkerchiefs and hats. Marie Bière, in leaving the court, received an enthu siastic ovation from the crowd in the Salle des Pas Perdus, and for several days afterwards the girl's lodgings were beset by warm-hearted people, who brought her bouquets, cards, and more substantial gifts. But her acquittal produced most disastrous consequences. It led in fact to a very epidemic of shooting and vitriol-throwing. In the course of the last two years, at least twenty girls have been arraigned at the assizes for seeking reparation for their blighted hopes vi et armis, and M. Lachaud's famous speech, repeated with every kind of variation suitable to particular circumstances, by barristers great and small, has always led to acquittals. In one of these Such appeals to juries to judge a case on higher grounds than those of mere law seldom miss their effect; and it has gradually come to be accepted as a doctrine in France that the jurymen need not feel themselves tethered by the letter of the oath which they swear. They are representatives of the people rendering popular justice, not according to the hard, unelastic texts of the law, but according to the highest dictates of abstract equity, common sense, and mercy. M. Lachaud, who is a truly great orator, and has done more than any man alive to educate juries into the notion that they must judge with their hearts and not with their heads, is ably seconded in his theories by his son, and his nephew, and by MM. Allon, Nicolet, Demange, Carraby and others. All these avocats are arch blarneyers. Their fantastic arguments and hysteric declamations make judges to moan, but they cause juries to weep, and all the gain is for the prisoners. A curious result of this state of things is this, that if a man have a quarrel with his enemy he had far better for his own sake kill him outright than maim him. For an aggravated assault he will be tried before three judges without a jury in the correctional court, and stands a good chance of getting five years' imprisonment; but if he kills his man, he will be tried before a jury, and if it be proved that he acted in hot blood without premeditation, an acquittal will very likely follow. It will certainly follow if the murder in hot blood have been the upshot of a quarrel between husband and wife in consequence of some infidelity on one side or the other. Juries never will punish the betrayed husband or wife who takes the law into his or her own hands. Lately a husband who had an unfaithful wife gave her a tremendous thrashing and broke her arm, for which he was sentenced to a year's imprisonment by a correctional should be no mercy at all. It shocks court. As he left the dock he exclaimed ruefully, "Mon Dieu, voilà ce qu'on gagne à se montrer trop doux!" IV. WHEN the counsel for the defence has finished his speech, the public prosecutor replies; but this privilege will probably be taken from him before long, on the same principle as that which made the legislature suppress the summing up of the judge. Humanitarians think that the last word in a trial should be spoken by the defence, so that the jury may retire with cries for mercy still ringing in their ears. French jurymen are not detained, as in England, throughout the whole duration of a trial for felony. They may return to their homes in the evening, and go where they please, and speak with whom they please during the adjournments for lunch. Once they have retired to consider their verdict, however, they are locked up until they have come to a decision. The only person with whom they may communicate is the president of the court; and if they desire to see him he is summoned to their room. Their verdict has to be given under the form of answers by "Yes" or "No" to a number of questions stated for them in writing by the president. These questions sometimes exceed a hundred, and cover several pages of foolscap in the clerk of arraign's handwriting. Unanimity is not required for the finding of a verdict, but there must be a majority of eight to four to carry a full conviction. If the votes are equally divided the prisoner is acquitted; if five pronounce for an acquittal and seven for a conviction, the prisoner gets the benefit of what is called minorité de faveur, and the bench by adding their three votes to the five given in his favor may acquit him if they think fit. A verdict delivered without any finding of "extenuating circumstances" carries with it the maximum penalty; but the maximum can never be inflicted when "extenuating circumstances" are allowed. Thus murderers tried for their lives always escape the guillotine when the judges find circonstances atténuantes. Verdicts of this description are often delivered simply because the majority of a jury may object to capital punishment. They none the less produce a painful and startling effect upon the minds of right-thinking persons, when the recipient of clemency happens to be a villanous scoundrel for whose crime, humanly speaking, there people to hear a jury find extenuating circumstances in favor of a brute who has murdered his aged parents to rob them of their savings; or of a monster, like that man in the Ain, who last year blew up a house, and killed three people, be cause he wanted to destroy at one stroke five relations who stood between him and some property. The inmates of the house were nine in number, and the murderer had coldly planned to kill them all. It was by a sheer miracle that six of them escaped death. Nevertheless, the jury found "extenuating circumstances," and the judges were so indignant at this scandalous verdict that they marked their sense of it in a rather odd fashion by sentencing the prisoner to twenty years' transportation only, instead of to transportation for life. The effect of this would be that the convict might in ten years obtain a pardon and return to France; whereas, if sentenced for life, he would have to spend the remainder of his days in New Caledonia, even if discharged from the penal colony there on ticket-of-leave. The judges practically said to the jury: "Since you take an interest in this malefactor, you shall have the pleasure of seeing him among you again in a few years." It must be remarked that juries who are so compassionate towards the perpetrators' of violent murders are seldom tender towards forgers, burglars, and other offenders against property; they are not lenient towards poisoners either. Murder with a knife, revolver, or bludgeon is all very well, but treacherous poisoning strikes even the most opaqueminded juryman as a thing to be discouraged. Even M. Lachaud has often expended his eloquence quite vainly in the attempt to enlist pity for wives who put lucifer matches into their husband's soup, or sons who drugged their father's coffee with laudanum. Since M. Grévy's accession to the presidency of the republic, however, capital punishment has been suffered to fall into disuse, so that mur. derers of the most unpopular categories, though sentenced to death, are no longer executed. When the jury have found their verdict they return into court, and the foreman delivers the finding in an impressive manner. He lays his hand upon his heart and says, "On my honor and conscience, before God and men, the verdict of the jury is unanimously (or by a majority as the case may be) on the first question "Yes; " on the second question "Yes;" and so |