Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day. Volume 2

The Tribunal de Simple Police is provided with apartments on the ground-floor, almost in the basement, of the Palais de Justice, under the stone arches that date from Saint-Louis, and where the atmosphere is always damp, chilly, and sombre. The Juges de Paix, in addition to their civil functions, are charged with sitting in judgment upon these petty misdemeanors, and they take their places in the Tribunal alternately, a week at a time. In addition to the Juges de Paix, the court is composed of three Commissaires de Police, delegated by the Procureur général, who fulfil the functions of the Ministère Public, one as Chef de Service, the two others as Substituts, and of a Greffier en chef and of four commis-Greffiers.

A grade higher in the judiciary scale is the Tribunal Correctionnel, which sits in the wing of the Palais on the south side of the court of the Sainte-Chapelle, and which occupies itself with what may be called the bourgeois of crime and poverty. The sittings of this court draw so many spectators that the visitor is frequently stopped at the entrance by the Garde Municipal, who says: "C'est complet!" like an omnibus conductor when his vehicle is full. Four Chambers are devoted to the sittings of this court, two on the first floor, and two on the second; on each of these stories is a Salle des Pas-Perdu. All these halls of justice are thronged by such a compact and democratic crowd that one of the attributes of the magistrates is a little flask of vinegar or smelling-salts placed on the bench, by the side of the Code, before each of the three judges of the Tribunal and before the Substitut. The avocats do not enjoy this privilege, nor the Greffiers unless they have been very long in the service of the court. Here, also, the pressure of affairs is so great that the judges leave the bench, saying to their consciences: "Well! those who are innocent can appeal!" The terror and ennui of the law are, however, so great that but very few of those condemned do thus appeal. One of the characteristics of this tribunal of the Police Correctionnelle is the number of avocats raccrocheurs who infest it in the search for clients of any degree, and who seem to bear a close resemblance to that unsavory class known in New York as "Tombs lawyers," or "shysters."

In the rear of the Palais, looking out on the Place Dauphine, is the Chambre des Appels de Police Correctionelle. The Salle d'Audience is a vast, chilly, and cheerless hall in which the appellant follows anxiously the retrial of his case in the formal and dispassionate résumé of the magistrates. The president begins by interrogating him courteously on his age, profession, etc.; then he says, with equal civility, turning toward one of his colleagues: "We will now hear Monsieur le Conseiller-rapporteur." One of the group of seven counsellors thereupon proceeds to read a strictly legal and impartial summing-up of the whole case, quite devoid of literary ornament or of personal observation; when he has finished, the president, turning again to the appellant, directs him to arise and interrogates him summarily on the principal points of his affair. During this examination, the counsellors, for the first time, turn their attention upon the appellant, but very briefly, and then, like magistrates whose judgment is quickly enlightened, resume the various occupations in which they have been engaged. Then the president calls upon the counsel for the defence; to him replies M. l'Avocat général. After these two orations, pro and con, the president announces that "the court will now deliberate;" all the counsellors rise, and, after some moments of consultation in a circle behind the arm-chair of the president, retire in procession into the Chambre du Conseil. This journey indicates that there is a question of law to be considered. Otherwise, the decision would have been rendered immediately, upon the spot.

The poor prévenu draws favorable auguries from this solemn deliberation. But his hopes are generally dashed; the court, usually, retires into the Chambre du Conseil only to correct the law, while affirming the decree, of the lower court. The president re-enters, the dossier of the case under his arm, and followed by his six counsellors; he proceeds to read the decision of the court, setting forth that, while the reasonings of the lower court are entirely erroneous, its conclusions are, nevertheless, irrefutable. Sometimes, however, this court, called the "Chamber of Bishops" by Henri Rochefort, demonstrates its judicial independence by overturning the decisions brought before it, even though they may be sustained by the popular verdict,—as it did in the case of M. Wilson.

The jury system of France resembles, in a general way, in its alleged safeguarding of the public liberties, and in its injustices, inequalities, and obstinate bringing to the service of Themis the uncertain aid of Chance and of Prejudice, that of the United States. Each year, in each canton of France, these generally unwilling aids in the administration of justice are selected among the respectable citizens by a council composed of Maires, Juges de Paix, and Conseillers généraux. Their names, forwarded to the central judicial authority, are subjected to a second revision, by a commission sitting in the chief town or the capital. In this manner is obtained the "general list of the jury;" from this is drawn by lot, every three months, and in Paris every fortnight, the jury of each criminal session, composed of thirty-six titular jurors and four supplementary. All citizens, having the required qualifications, between the ages of thirty and seventy, are obliged to serve, under a penalty of five hundred francs. The juror receives a very small sum for travelling expenses if the court is at a distance from his residence, but nothing at all if it be in his neighborhood. Consequently, these arbitrary summonses in the name of Justice are viewed, generally, with as much disfavor by the recipients thereof as in other countries, with the exception of the members of some such leisure class as retired officers on half-pay. The tendencies of certain classes of jurors are well recognized, the law and the evidence being as they may;—thus, before a jury of peasants and farmers, the young girls guilty of infanticide are nearly always acquitted, the rural economy entertaining a natural aversion to illegitimate children, reared at the public cost to become vagabonds at the age of fifteen. On the contrary, incendiaries, counterfeiters, and those accused of assaults upon young children in the fields, receive no mercy at the hands of these honest countrymen. The severity of the juries of Versailles is well known. Composed of market-gardeners, ex-officers, and retired shopkeepers and employés, living in small cottages in the suburbs, and exposed night and day to the incursions of the Parisian marauders, they give always to the prosecution the verdict which it demands, and sometimes even more. There was a case, a few years ago, of three young rascals who set out from Paris to assassinate an old innkeeper of Argenteuil; the Ministère Public claimed one of them for the guillotine, but the Versailles jury gave him all three.

As to the Parisian jury, its composition is naturally more complex, but its results are said to be equally unreliable. Its deliberations are not affected by any spirit of caste or class, since these distinctions are not sharply enough defined; "but it is at the mercy of a fine talker. This will not be the avocat, rarely listened to, nor even the Avocat général, offensive in the eyes of the Parisian frondeur as the representative of authority. No; it is among its own members that the jury will select this veritable chief, some reasoner with abundant and facile speech, discovering in everything concealed meanings, hidden allusions, and all the more dangerous for the good sense of his colleagues that he has an elegant talent for paradoxes."

The Parisian jury is also, it appears, peculiarly under the influence of the fashions and customs of the day, no matter what they may be. For several years it was almost impossible to secure a verdict of conviction in the so-called "passionate dramas;" the heroines of vitriol and the revolver passed with impunity before these complaisant juries. The Parquet was obliged to withdraw most of these cases from trial by jury and send them to one of the Chambres of the Tribunal Correctionnel, which did not fail to do them justice. The notoriety, the celebrity, of a case have also a great effect upon these citizen jurors. If a crime has been committed on some fête-day, or in the midst of a ministerial crisis, the twelve jurors take into favorable consideration all the extenuating circumstances and render a verdict of acquittal. If, on the contrary, the crime has attracted much popular attention, been exploited in the daily papers, with portraits of the accused, of his victim, etc., then is the condemnation to death inevitable. "The Parisian jury is nothing but a great child whom it is necessary to keep in leading-strings and to watch very closely."

One of the most picturesque and characteristic features in the train of justice, one in which the French themselves have always taken a lively, though a professedly disparaging, interest,—as befits a military nation,—is the black-robed multitude of avocats, the attorneys, the lawyers. The nature of their profession, their professional costumes, certain peculiarities of whisker and absence of moustache, all those qualities which, in all countries, offer cheap handles to easy wit at the expense of the members of this judicial order, all these unite to lend them an interest, of various kinds, as a class somewhat apart. Their intelligent, shrewd, generally unimaginative heads, under their cylindrical black caps, offer endless studies to the physiognomists and the caricaturists. Their services are indispensable for all those who seek the aid of the law. At Paris, the avocats alone have the right to plead for litigants, before all the Cours d'Appel and the Tribunaux Civils. They can also plead before the military, commercial, and administrative tribunals and the Conseils de Prud'hommes. The only exceptions are the Conseil d'État and the Cour de Cassation.

The Ordre des Avocats, with its monopoly of this privilege, claims to date back to the year 518 A.D., and to have had for sponsor an uncle of the Emperor Justinian. It was restored by Charlemagne and continued under various names: Causidici, Avantparliers, Plaidoux, and Chevaliers de la loi, and was constituted the Ordre des Avocats in the time of Saint-Louis to distinguish it from the various confraternities of artisans which were then being organized. A decree of the Assemblée Constituante dated September 2, 1790, announced that "the men of the law, formerly called avocats, shall not form any order or corporation, nor shall they wear any peculiar costume in the exercise of their functions." This eclipse, however, was not of long duration. The former avocats had drawn up a list of the recognized members of their profession in good standing, this list became the official one, and the roll of the Ordre des Avocats was reconstituted by the law of the 22d Ventôse, year XII, reorganizing the law schools, the Écoles de Droit.

By the word avocat is designated those lawyers who, after having obtained the title of Licencié en Droit, have taken the professional oath before a Cour d'Appel. But, in order to be able to plead, they are required, in addition, to be admitted to the bar of the tribunal or the court. The Avocats-Consultants are those who, not having been admitted to the bar, cannot plead in the courts, but give legal consultations in their offices. The Avoués, attorneys, are appointed by the court or tribunal to represent the litigants before it. They cannot be avocats, and are obliged to be residents of Paris.

Among the multitude of attendants and habitués of the judicial tribunals are the necessary witnesses and experts, of all kinds in degree,—the témoin à charge, important witness, listened to with attention; the témoin à décharge, uncertain and ill at ease; the expert-comptable, very conscientious; the expert en écriture, in handwriting, very positive and authoritative and unreliable, after the manner of his kind; the experts in medicine, in mental ailments, in physics, etc. The various degrees of willingness and unwillingness on the part of those who receive these official assignations à témoin are much as in other climes.

After the summer vacation, the opening of the courts is preceded by an annual divine service, the messe rouge [the red mass], held in the Sainte-Chapelle and attended by all the magistrates in their robes of office, red, black, and ermine. In 1898, this ceremony took place on October 17th, and was presided over by Cardinal Richard, Archbishop of Paris. The mass was celebrated by Canon Pousset, of the cathedral of Notre-Dame. After the service, the magistrates return to their courts in hieratic procession, following each other strictly in the order of their rank, the walls of the passage-ways being hung, for the occasion, with Gobelins tapestry.

A similar ceremony has been introduced in London. For the second time, in this same month of October, 1898, the legal year was inaugurated by a religious service celebrated with great pomp at Westminster. The Lord Chancellor, the judges, the Queen's Counsel, and a great number of representatives of the bar were present at this messe rouge English and Anglican. The Catholic judges and lawyers have long been in the habit of attending a similar service on this occasion in one of their own churches.

By an excellent arrangement, the Palais de Justice is enabled to lodge its criminals in one of its dependencies, the prison of the Conciergerie, whence the guards conduct them directly, by private staircases, to the court-room where they are to be tried,—thus avoiding any unseemly exposure of these unfortunates to the populace. An ingenious supposition as to the origin of the name of this famous prison, a barracks under the old kings of France, is furnished by M. Pottet,—that it was inhabited by a certain captain who provided himself with the title of Comte des Cierges [Count of Candles], concierge, janitor, or house-porter. Those who are confined in the Conciergerie are the criminals who are to appear before the Cour d'Assises; those convicted by the police correctionnelle of the departments, waiting the result of their appeal to a higher court, and those condemned to death during the three days which the law allows them for their appearance en cassation.

In the Dépôt are deposited temporarily all the individuals arrested in the department of the Seine, for any crime whatever, and held for justice. This general depository receives on an average a hundred and fifty prisoners a day. Any one arrested by a police agent and conducted to the poste, if not delivered by some friend before the arrival of the panier à salade, is put into this cheerful vehicle, much like a closed-up omnibus, and carted off to the Dépôt. There, he is interrogated, searched, measured by the service anthropométrique of M. Bertillon, and held for three days. At the end of this period, he is transferred to some other prison,—to Mazas, before it was demolished, or to the Santé. The desperate criminals have the privilege of remaining in the Dépôt under the eye of the agents de la sûreté.

Within the walls of the Palais de Justice is included a third place of detention, the Souricière, in which are confined the accused brought from the various prisons of the city,—la Santé, Sainte-Pélagie, la Petite and la Grande-Roquette, Saint-Lazare,—to appear either for their trial or for their examination before the Juge d'Instruction. The Souricière [mouse-trap] is a gloomy and ill-smelling basement, almost without light and air, and frequently crowded to suffocation, situated under the chambers of the police correctionnelle. The prisoners are very often confined here from eleven o'clock in the morning to eight o'clock in the evening, without being given either food or drink. This abuse is of long standing, notwithstanding the many protestations that have been raised against it.

Before 1826, the entrance to the Conciergerie was from the grand court-yard, the Cour du Mai, to the right and at the foot of the grand stairway. This entrance, with its iron railings, still exists, it now gives access to the Tribunal de Simple Police, and through it the multitude of victims, illustrious and obscure, of the Revolution and the Terror, issued to take their places in the cart for the guillotine. This doorway was walled up in 1826, and the entrance to the prison is now on the Quai de l'Horloge, near the tower of Cæsar. It was at this latter date that the Conciergerie was transformed into a modern prison, with the régime cellulaire. In the course of this transformation, the ancient dungeons in which had been confined so many eminent historical personages disappeared; to-day there can be seen only the cell of Marie-Antoinette, which now communicates with that of Robespierre, and the latter with the Salle des Girondins. The apartment of the unhappy queen was transformed into a chapel in 1816. Of the original furniture of her cell, there now remains, it is said, the little lamp hanging from the ceiling, and the ivory crucifix which she kissed before mounting the scaffold. As to the arm-chair in which she sat, it was prudently removed some years ago to his office by one of the directors of the Conciergerie, to protect it from the ravages of the tourists of all nations who were gradually carrying it away piecemeal. This apartment of the prison can be visited on Thursdays by securing a permit from the Préfecture de Police. The grande salle which was the prison of the priests and royalists during the Terror, and in which the Girondins passed their last night, is now the chapel of the Conciergerie. Through the little door at the left the latter passed on their way to the scaffold, and in this court-yard took place the massacres of September.

Before its demolition in the summer of 1898, the immense Mazas prison (Maison d'Arrêt et de Correction Cellulaire), on the Boulevard Diderot, received the prisoners from the Dépôt. This gloomy institution contained twelve hundred cells, of which eleven hundred and fifteen were occupied, the others being used for the service of the hospital and of the baths. Among the more illustrious prisoners who have been within these walls was Victor Hugo, confined here on the morrow of the Coup d'État, and who has left this description of his cell: "Walls whitened with lime and soiled here and there by various emanations; in a corner, a round hole, furnished with iron bars and emitting an infectious odor; in another corner, a shelf hinged to the wall like the strapontin, or folding-stool, of the city folks, and which might serve for a table; no bed, a chair stuffed with straw. Under the feet, a brick floor; the first impression was of darkness, the second, of cold." In addition to the hammock and the bedding, the furniture consisted of a table with a drawer, an earthenware vessel, a porringer, a cup in wrought-iron, tinned over, a wooden spoon, a spittoon, called génieux, two brooms, three shelves in whitewood, a wardrobe set in the wall. The round hole, to which M. Hugo objected, was used by the prisoners as a means of speech with each other; by conquering their scruples—if they had any—and inserting their heads in this hole, they were able to make their words carry from one cell to another and even the entire length of the gallery, as through a speaking-tube. The authorities were not unaware of this arrangement, and by placing an agent in the basement they could have surprised these confidential communications.

The new arrival from the Dépôt, after being subjected to the usual formalities, after having lost his civil personality and changed his name for an official number, was at first disposed to rejoice in the solitude of his cell after the hideous promiscuousness of the Dépôt, but this solitary confinement would soon have become unendurable, had it not been for the daily labor with which they were all occupied. Their exercise was taken in the préaux cellulaires, oblong or converging cells under low sheds, through the iron grating of one side of which they could look out into the narrow space of the court-yard. All the prisons of the department of the Seine are furnished by a contractor, who supplies the provisions for the prisoners at a fixed price plus a percentage of their small earnings.

This prison was built between 1845 and 1850 by the architects Gilbert and Lecointe, on the general plans of the English prisons of the same nature, and was considered at the time a model institution. It succeeded the Prison de la Force, in the Rue Pavée-au-Marais, immortalized in a chapter of Les Misérables; the new prison was known officially as the Nouvelle-Force. Popular usage, however, gave it the name which it retained, from the Place Mazas, at the end of the Pont d'Austerlitz,—the name of the colonel of the Fourteenth Regiment of the line, killed at Austerlitz. His family protested strongly against this usage, and in 1858 the administration of prisons abandoned the popular term and recognized the institution only under the formula: Maison d'arrêt cellulaire. All in vain, even though, in 1879, the Boulevard Mazas became the Boulevard Diderot.

This prison was the first in France in which was adopted solitary confinement. In a single night, that of the 19-20th of May, 1850, the eight hundred and forty-one inmates of the Force were transferred to Mazas,—a much more expeditious operation than that of the transportation of the prisoners of Mazas to the Santé, in May, 1898, which took ten days, at the rate of eighty men a day. It appears that the prisoners from the Force objected strongly to this system of solitary confinement in their cells; they gave way to such excesses of fury and despair that the Académie de Médecine was moved in their behalf, and protested against the système cellulaire as conducive to suicide and insanity. The new prison—as any one might see from the top of the viaduct of the Vincennes railway—was built in the form of a great wheel, the spokes represented by six long galleries, eighty mètres in length and twelve and a half in height. The hub of this wheel was a two-story rotunda, the ground-floor of which was occupied by the central post of observation, and the upper story by the chapel, which could be seen from any point in any of the six galleries. At the hour of the celebration of the mass, on Sundays, the guards set the door of each cell partly open, so that the prisoner might receive spiritual comfort if he so pleased,—and if his distance were not too great. Each of the six galleries was two stories in height, lit by a glass roof. All the cells received light and air through a grated window, opening on one of the outside galleries or on one of the interior courts, but placed too high to afford the inmate any view outside. Each prisoner was entitled to an hour's exercise in one of the twenty préaux into which the interior courts were divided. This promenade was always a solitary one, under the eye of the guardians in the rotunda, and to be deprived of it was the lightest punishment inflicted. The most severe, in extreme cases, was imprisonment in the cachot, or dungeon.

Saint-Lazare (Maison d'Arrêt et de Correction), on the Faubourg Saint-Denis, is at once a hospital, a police station, and a prison for women, and its methods and regulation have long been the object of earnest denunciation. As a prison for women, it is divided into two sections, for those accused, and for those condemned to less than two months' imprisonment; among the latter are women of the town, who have a special hospital. The only condamnées who remain for any length of time within these walls are the sick, nursing women having a child less than four years of age, and those enceinte. There is a special crèche for the newly-born babies,—for there are no less than fifty or sixty births annually. The nursing mothers, whether convicted or only accused, have special dormitories, and there is a shady garden for the wet-nurses. The prostitutes are provided with a special section. These unfortunates have not passed before any court; they have been condemned without appeal by a Chef de Bureau of the Préfecture de Police to an imprisonment of from three days to two months. During the day, the inmates are assembled in a workroom under the surveillance of one of the Sisters of the Order of Marie-Joseph, to whom is confided a general oversight of the workrooms and the dormitories. These prisoners take their meals in common, take their exercise walking in a long file, and at night sleep in a great chilly and crowded dormitory. Those who have merited it by their conduct are given one of the cells of the ménagerie, a double story of grated cells, furnished each with a bed, a stool, a shelf, and an earthenware vessel. The menagerie was formerly devoted to the service of the correction maternelle.