The exchange also exemplifies another feature of the modern trial: the way in which it attempts to reconcile those being judged with those doing the judging, and the extent to which that attempt is so often doomed. No matter how much a criminal may want to explain, a court long to understand, and a grieving relative hope for resolution, the gap in most serious cases is all but unbridgeable. The most obvious reason is that no crime can be undone, but another is that no explanation can ever adequately pin down why one person breaks the rules and another does not. The excuses most commonly heard today – whether social deprivation, mental retardation, or pre-menstrual tension – are inherently no more plausible than Gilles’s claim that his murders were the fault of Satan, a wild childhood, and a predilection for mulled wine. Making the leap of imagination to empathize with a criminal is of course easy if one sympathizes with the crime concerned, but the mentality of someone who, say, dedicated a chapel to martyred children while slaughtering real ones is, for most people, about as unreachable as another mind can be. In such cases, the assessment that resonates truest to modern ears is one that Gilles gave long before his trial. He told a servant that he had been born under a star such that ‘nobody could know or understand the anomalies or illicit acts of which [I am] guilty’. And it explains nothing at all.
The concern to hear confessions was not the only feature of the Church’s battle against heresy that found permanent expression in the secular legal system of France. The country’s courts also became increasingly secret, just as the tribunals of the papal inquisitors had in the early thirteenth century. Inquisitorial judges opened their doors only when they were ready to present to the public the spectacle of a confessing defendant or, as happened rather more rarely, the mercy of the sovereign. By the close of the fifteenth century, they were interviewing witnesses in the absence of everyone but their clerks. Defendants meanwhile languished in custody except when it became necessary to confront them with their accusers or torture them; and defence lawyers, always rare, were formally excluded in 1539 from most stages of a trial, and absolutely barred in all capital cases after 1670.
Excluding the unlettered and the unwashed undoubtedly appealed to many lawyers then for the same reasons that secrecy still does to many people with power; but there was one notable critic. A judge from Angers called Pierre Ayrault, whose writings would influence generations of French lawyers, wrote a long work specifically on the topic in 1588, in which he complained that French justice had become like ‘a sacred mystery that is communicated only to the priest’. Its secrecy, which had been adopted out of ‘fear of the uproar, shouting and cheering that people ordinarily indulge in’, was a recipe for incompetence and error. Statements obtained during closed interrogations reflected the preconceptions of the legal official taking them rather than the meaning of the person being interviewed. Public trials, on the other hand, would serve to display the law at its most majestic. They would also make it more likely that a judge’s rulings were honest and reasoned.
The critique, developed at a time when political concepts like freedom of information and checks and balances still lay some distance in the future, was a perceptive one. The inquisitorial process, by concealing its officials from scrutiny, was inherently prone to corruption. The pernicious nature of the secrecy was, however, greater than Ayrault himself knew, for it could cloud the vision of even its greatest critic.
In August 1598, he was called upon to try a dishevelled and longhaired beggar in his mid-thirties called Jacques Roulet. Roulet had been handed into custody by one Symphorien Damon, whose statement set out how he had come to be arrested. Damon’s suspicions had been aroused when he saw the man lying on his stomach in a field for, upon being challenged, Roulet had stared at him malevolently and run away. He had seen him again shortly thereafter, alongside the mutilated body of a young boy and in the custody of four villagers. Everything else that Damon reported came from those four men; and if they ever testified, their evidence has been lost. He recounted how the peasants (one of whom was the dead child’s father) claimed to have chanced upon the body as it was being eaten by two wolves, and then to have spotted Roulet as they were chasing the beasts away. The coincidence had struck them as sinister, and their hunch was soon confirmed. Asked what he was doing, the beggar had said, ‘Not much’, but when they demanded that he reveal who had eaten the child, he had apparently confessed that he, his father, and his cousin had all been responsible. They had been wolves at the time. According to Damon, Roulet had even had long nails and bloody hands when arrested.
Attitudes towards lycanthropy in the late 1590s were in a state of flux. Although Christian scholars had insisted for centuries that werewolves were no more than an optical illusion – essentially because only God could turn humans into ravenous beasts and He had better things to do – the orthodoxy was under pressure. Lawyers, as usual, were at the forefront of the debate. The most eminent jurist in all France, Jean Bodin, had just written a witchcraft manual in which he argued that Satan did in fact enjoy the power to transform people into wolves. There is little reason to think that Ayrault subscribed to Bodin’s views, which were controversial even among his fellow demonologists, but the judge from Angers had a belief in the value of self-condemnation that was profound. In words that would be cited by French lawyers for the next two centuries, he wrote – in the same work that attacked his country’s legal secrecy – that the ultimate goal of criminal law was to ‘instil and engrave its fundamental principles on people’s hearts’. It was ‘not enough that wrongdoers be justly punished’ he insisted. ‘They must if possible judge and condemn themselves.’ And although he elsewhere warned that confessions could be false, he now put that credo into practice.
Ayrault began by asking Roulet to tell him what he had been accused of – a traditional if sneaky opening gambit among inquisitors – and Roulet replied that people thought him to be a villain. Ayrault specified that he wanted to know what he had been accused of at the time of his arrest, whereupon the beggar told him that he had committed an offence against God and that his parents had given him an ointment. When Ayrault hopefully asked if the potion turned him into a wolf Roulet denied it, but further prodding inspired him to admit that he had killed and eaten a child. He then confessed that he had, after all, been a wolf. Questioned in detail about his appearance at the time, he stated that his face and hands had been bloody, that he had had a wolf’s paws but a human head, and that he had attacked the boy with his teeth. Ayrault had heard enough. Whatever his attitude towards lycanthropy might have been, he certainly believed in murder. And having heard Roulet’s admissions, he now condemned him to death.
Records of the case give no indication why the sentence was not immediately carried out, but they show that the Paris court of appeal quashed the sentence of death three months later. Roulet was more foolish than evil, declared the parlement, and the best way to deal with him was to give him compulsory religious instruction in an asylum for two years. The basis for its decision is not set down, but any sixteenth-century court would have been even less likely than its modern counterpart to reprieve a self-confessed murderous cannibal unless absolutely sure of his innocence. Whether the beggar had been framed or simply fell victim to superstition, Ayrault had evidently got it wrong. He saw the risks of secrecy and untested evidence more clearly than anyone else in early modern France, but alone in his court, away