2023-12-29 19:57:21
Stories for the long winter evenings – Extraordinary criminal cases – No. 1: Chuck.
After the “Summer Chronicles” to distract your summer vacation, France-Soir invites you to entertain yourself by the fire, during this winter period, by discovering or rediscovering some extraordinary criminal cases, whose actors have often gone down in history for their audacity, their ingenuity, their impertinence or… their popularity! Mandrin, self-proclaimed “captain general of smugglers”, brings together all these qualities, or faults if we look at it from the point of view of the victims.
Mandrin’s main victims were the King’s Treasury and the tax collectors or their families. And, during this 18th century which ended with the French Revolution, the common people were burdened with various taxes, from which the nobility and the Clergy were largely exempt. Thus, the taille, the main income tax of the Ancien Régime, was only owed by commoners. But above all, taxes, these indirect taxes which hit the taxpayer regardless of their income, are flourishing. The gabelle is part of this taxation and it is particularly unpopular because it makes a basic necessity product more expensive: salt. Taxing essential products, and thus recovering tax revenue even from the most deprived, is not new. Indeed, under Louis XV, salt was essential for preserving food.
The collection of these indirect taxes is entrusted to the Farm. How does it work? Individuals, called general farmers, acquire a lease which allows them to collect a tax for a given period. Most often, the latter then grant this right of collection, for an amount much higher than that which they paid, to sub-farmers who, in order to enrich themselves, are ruthless in the application of tariffs when they don’t overvalue them. Many farmers thus accumulate indecent fortunes and are cordially hated by the people crushed by taxes. However, it is precisely farmers and taxes that Mandrin will attack.
An unjust sentence
These are unfortunate combinations of circumstances that will lead Louis Mandrin onto the path of crime. This son of a prosperous peasant, born in Savoy in 1725, would probably have been content to operate the family business after the death of his father, if a batch of horses that had been entrusted to him to be sold in Italy had not been decimated by an epidemic. Of the few hundred animals, only 17 survive and Mandrin is condemned in a completely disproportionate manner in view of his responsibility in the tragedy. He finds himself ruined and inhabited by a strong feeling of injustice.
Five years later, another twist of fate. He takes the side of a peasant friend who they want to forcibly enlist in the French bourgeois militia. A fight ensues during which he kills a soldier. He fled, was sentenced to death in absentia and forced to go on the run. It was then that he began to assemble his “army of smugglers” which would quickly grow.
At the time, a large part of the States of Savoy were lands of the King of Sardinia, and Rochefort-en-Novalaise, where Mandrin established his headquarters, therefore did not belong to the Kingdom of France. With his two to three hundred men, the fugitive organized real campaigns across the French provinces, where he sold contraband products brought back from Savoy at low prices: salt, tobacco or gunpowder. The people adore him, especially since the “captain general of smugglers” works on his popularity with careful staging. He plunders the houses of the rich and distributes the spoils to the poor. He frees smugglers and deserters from prisons, while making sure to leave other criminals, from whom he wants to differentiate himself, locked up. Obviously, he and his troop rob the tax revenue. In 1754, smugglers killed employees of the Farm and forced the daughter of the tobacco warehouseman to pay them a “tax” of 8,000 pounds! Mandrin also took prisoner those responsible for the Farm or the king’s intendants, and organized popular tribunals to judge and condemn them. At the end of 1754, shortly before Christmas, he stormed the town of Beaune and forced the tax collector to pay him 20,000 pounds.
“Arms, thighs, legs and kidneys broken alive”
Mandrin is considered public enemy number 1 by the French monarchy and a true hero by the people. Itinerant singers celebrate him, picture artists recount his exploits. The king and his ministers can’t take it anymore. When we learned that he had forced general farmers to buy contraband products from him, the French state decided that it was necessary to arrest the insolent delinquent, whatever the cost and even if it meant violating international law. The royal troops took Mandrin by surprise in his Savoyard headquarters, on the lands of the King of Sardinia, and kidnapped him during a commando operation led by Colonel de la Morlière. The smuggler is promptly brought back to France. The vehement protests of the representatives of Sardinia did nothing: Mandrin was condemned by the Valencia court to have “his arms, thighs, legs and kidneys broken alive”, in other words to die on the wheel. The popular emotion and discontent, aroused by the illegal arrest of the man who is a hero to the common people and his conviction, are immense. So much so that Mandrin is hastily executed to prevent the crowd from rising up and freeing him.
His execution only partially resolved the problem that Mandrin posed to the monarchy. The people found in the figure of the smuggler a martyr whom they celebrate and his legend remains. The attacks against the Farm are virulent and those in power are worried. From 1787, even before the revolution, notables condemned the tax tax which was definitively abolished in 1790.
Mandrin’s notoriety has survived time and his lament, the most famous of the songs narrating his exploits, has entered popular folklore, and has also been taken up by French singing stars like Yves Montand or Renaud.
Mandrin’s lament – Popular version.
There were twenty or thirty of us
Robbers in a band,
All dressed in white
In the fashion of, you hear me,
All dressed in white
In the fashion of merchants.
The first flight
What I did in my life,
It is to have pinned
The purse of one, you hear me,
It is to have pinned
A priest’s purse.
I entered his room,
My God, how big she was,
I found a thousand crowns there,
I put my hand out, you hear me,
I found a thousand crowns there,
I put my hand on it.
I entered another
My God, how high she was,
Of dresses and coats
I loaded three, you hear me,
Of dresses and coats
I loaded three carts with it.
I wore them to sell
At the Dutch fair
I sold them cheap
They had nothing to me, you hear me,
I sold them cheap
They didn’t cost me anything.
These gentlemen from Grenoble
With their long dresses
And their square caps
They had me soon, you hear me,
And their square caps
They soon judged me.
They judged me to hang,
How hard it is to hear
To hang and strangle
On the square, you hear me,
to hang and strangle
On the market square.
Mounted on the gallows
I looked at France
I saw my companions
In the shadow of one, you hear me,
I saw my companions
In the shade of a bush.
Companions in misery
Go tell my mother
That she won’t see me again
I’m a child, you hear me,
That she won’t see me again
I’m a lost child.
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