Minotaur: French Military Justice and the Aernoult-Rousset Affair

NINE—The Rousset Murder Case

NINE The Rousset Murder Case In 1902 General Jules Bourelly had countered the argument that military officers were unqualified to perform judicial functions with the claim that those officers, however unschooled in the fine points of juridical argumentation, were nonetheless far more attuned than any civilian jurist to the specific subculture that military courts were designed to regulate, as well as to the requirements of discipline within it.1 They knew their men, Bourelly insisted, and they knew what it took to make soldiers of them. The entire system of military justice was geared to those realities, which military men understood far better than any civilian lawyer, judge, or even warden possibly could. Yet politicians simply couldn’t resist inserting themselves and their civilian agendas into the operations of the jurisdiction. Politicians simply didn’t understand the truth on the ground. Like-minded conservatives especially lamented legislation of 1889, when the politicians in their wisdom had decided that the army must incorporate even the nation’s criminals and moral degenerates—its apaches. Politicians hoped these men could be either redeemed or safely stored for a few years. But the military professionals to whom those tasks had been consigned generally 162 M I N O T A U R saw things very differently. By their lights, these were men whose chronic hostility toward authority was more often exacerbated than attenuated in the barracks—only a few were redeemable, and the incorrigible majority would corrupt the healthy body of the army if carelessly dispersed through it. The army had struggled for years to build units where the salvageable few could be identified and helped, while the irredeemable many were kept safely segregated. Hence, the Bats d’Af. Yet even those units were insufficiently punitive for much of the detritus the politicians had decided to honor with a soldier’s uniform. Hence, Biribi. Then, complained the guardians of military justice, the same politicians who had created the conditions calling forth those penal institutions in the first place proceeded to meddle in their operations. In the wake of the Dreyfus Affair, with its supposed revelations of the arbitrariness of military parquets, reformers with scant understanding of military realities had decided to press for more lenient treatment of the criminal element the jurisdiction was struggling to contain. In 1905 the politicians decided that those with relatively modest criminal records were to be spared the rigors of the Bats d’Af and assigned to regular units in France, at least for their reserve duty.2 But civilians soon learned what military professionals had known for some time: wherever these men went, thievery and violence followed. In 1910 the politicians changed course again and reasserted the exclusion of incorrigibles from regular units, even while (with characteristic inconstancy) bending to the demands of humanitarians for repatriation of the disciplinary companies to metropolitan France.3 The interventions of reformers in other areas of military justice made it difficult for the military jurisdiction to do this penal work well. The reforms of 1897 (extending access to legal counsel), 1901 (granting defendants the right to claim extenuating circumstances), and 1904 (expanding the incidence of suspended sentences) had, according to even knowledgeable critics of the system, “softened discipline without bringing true justice.”4 Enlisted men were losingthatfearofaconseildeguerre,whichhadonceservedasthebeginningof soldierly wisdom. Nowhere were the consequences more difficult than in the special sections, the public works units, the various compagnies de discipline. Politicians, of course, showed little interest in the dangers and difficulties faced by the officers and enlisted men attempting to maintain order in those institutions, or in the endless problems they presented to the war ministry. Above all, there was the expensive, time-consuming stream of conseil de guerre cases the camps generated. That concern was grave enough at 163 By Bernard Naudin, from L’Assiette au Beurre, August 5, 1905. © 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. 164 M I N O T A U R 164 one point to spur discussion of whether to simply remove all serving corporals from them on the grounds that those corporals were usually ex-prisoners themselves, tied to their old comrades by complex, often adversarial, relationships that generated hosts of accusations and counteraccusations .5 That particular idea hadn’t been adopted, nor was any other measure found to thin the flow of court actions. The war ministry was essentially compelled to accept this as a fact of military life under...