Minotaur: French Military Justice and the Aernoult-Rousset Affair

EIGHT—Triumph of the Political

EIGHT Triumph of the Political The sixteen signers of the offending poster were represented by three attorneys (Jacques Bonzon, Jean Robin, Joseph Hild), whose strategy was to openly politicize the case.1 Their clients were to be seen not as criminals but as activists who were unashamedly using the courtroom as a political rostrum: “To make ourselves accusers,” explained one signer, the sociologist Charles Albert, “we first had to get accused.”2 The signers themselves had committed no crime; no effective “provocation to desertion and violence” could be taken from a poster that actual denizens of Biribi had never even seen. Rather, the poster’s signers had reasserted the natural right of self-defense for the unfortunates of that hellish netherworld. For it was those hapless prisoners, not their officers, whose lives were truly threatened. To confirm that threat, the defense would present to jurors precisely what had happened at Djennan-ed-Dar— including its source, scale, and typicality. That is, these heirs of Zola intended not only to exonerate themselves but to put a great many other people on trial in their stead, starting with Djennan-ed-Dar’s officers. It was a high-risk strategy, but the potential payoff was considerable: an acquittal could be taken “only as the moral condemnation of Aernoult’s murderers.”3 Triumph of the Political 147 The most consequential phase of the trial may well have been the pretrial rulings on the defense’s witness list, which included three sets of witnesses. The first included actual participants in the events at Djennan-ed-Dar: Rousset, Debon, Allaire, Cott, Captain Finot, Lieutenant Sabatier, Sergeant Beignier, Sergeant Casanova, and Captain Alix. The defense also wanted testimony from longtime critics of military justice: Georges Lhermitte, Jacques Dhur, Urbain Gohier, René de Marmande, Gustave Rouannet, and others. Finally, it wanted representatives of the political world: War Minister Brun, former War Minister André, Adrien Veber, Jean Allemane, Pierre Renaudel, Francis de Pressensé, even Jean Jaurès. All this testimony was necessary, argued defense attorneys, to demonstrate that the defendants had spoken nothing but the truth. The first set of witnesses would establish the real circumstances surrounding Aernoult’s death and Rousset’s defiance. The second set would reveal broader truths about Biribi and military justice in general. The third set would reveal the government’s obfuscation of these truths and complicity in those crimes. The prosecution naturally fought to keep many of these witnesses out of court, with partial success. Most of the first set of witnesses were ruled out for the legally compelling reason that any crime committed at Djennan-ed-Dar must be adjudicated before the conseil de guerre of Oran rather than the cour d’assises of Paris. However, the court did not extend this invocation of the rationae personae principle to Allaire and Cott, who were by then civilians. The defense would use them not only to denounce Sabatier, Beignier, and Casanova but War Minister Brun as well, who, defense attorneys claimed, had submitted the most vapid sort of whitewash to the chamber. The jury also heard a parade of witnesses denounce Biribi in extremely graphic terms. Aernoult’s parents came forward to describe their son’s grief, followed by a parade of witnesses who enlarged on his case. An old Communard, Jean-Constant Breton, showed the scars he carried from his own time in an African prison. Jacques Dhur described conditions at Djennan-edDar in particular. Georges Lhermitte displayed thumbscrews he claimed were still in use. Deputy Allemane argued that Biribi “has made more antimilitarists than all the theories you can condemn,” then decried the hypocrisy of “patriots” who looked away while Arab auxiliaries, “insensitive to pity” and driven by “the bitterness of a vanquished race against its invaders,” satiated their “racial hate on French prisoners confined to their care.”4 Turning to the formally legalistic side of the defense’s case, attorney Robin submitted that Biribi in its entirety was a fundamentally illegal undertaking. Unlike the Bats d’Af, Robin argued, the compagnies de 148 Gustave Rouanet, at the “Down with Biribi!” trial. La Guerre Sociale, July 6–12, 1910. Triumph of the Political 149 discipline operated without explicit statutory authorization. What was criminal was the army’s maintenance of its own, autonomous prison system, not the defendants’ (entirely verbal) assault on it.5 The government itself, then, should be in the docket. It was attacked by Pressensé, who recalled...