Mingrat: anatomy of a restoration cause celebre

Abstract

This article explores the discursive afterlife of the 1822 murder of Marie Gérin by the Abbé Mingrat, who subsequently fled France and was never extradited. The crime, which the Restoration government attempted to conceal, is read here as a cause célèbre that acted throughout the Restoration as a watchword of anticlerical and otherwise oppositional opinion. The article examines pamphlets published by Marie's relatives and by Paul-Louis Courier, on the one hand; and on the other, official papers relating to the persecution of Marie's brother for his attempts to publicize the crime. It takes these texts as symptomatic of a broader early nineteenth-century dispute: a cultural and moral disagreement about the meaning of scandal, which might be imagined 'conservatively,' as a pathogenic spectacle that spreads corruption; or, as it was by the pamphleteers, 'progressively,' as a therapeutic revelation that brings that corruption to an end. It also contributes to our understanding of the modes of political participation available to those excluded from the Restoration political process. 2 Mingrat: Anatomy of a Restoration cause célèbre On 8 May 1822, in the Isère town of Saint-Quentin, a grisly crime was committed: the rape and murder of twenty-six year old Marie Charnalet, née Gérin, by the parish priest, Antoine Mingrat. Having lured the young woman into the rectory on the pretext of hearing her confession, Mingrat throttled her to death, evidently after sexually assaulting her. Dragging her body some distance through woodland, he then hacked it apart, first with a hunting knife, then with a meat cleaver, before scattering her remains in the river. Marie's absence was noticed almost immediately by her husband Étienne Charnalet, who began searching for her with the help of neighbours; patches of bloodstained grass were discovered hours later, at which point suspicion fell on Mingrat, whom locals believed to be sexually obsessed with the missing Marie. When on 16 May a woman's severed thigh was discovered by fishermen, Mingrat's servant finally revealed that she had heard sounds of struggle coming from the rectory on the night in question. Soon after, Mingrat took flight, escaping over the border to Piedmont, then in the Kingdom of Sardinia. There he was arrested and imprisoned by local authorities. Yet despite his having been convicted in absentia of rape and murder, and sentenced to death by the Cour Royale in Grenoble on 9 December 1822, Mingrat's extradition was never offered by the Sardinian government, nor was it ever requested by the French; 1 indeed, it is now clear that Foreign Ministry officials later advised Sardinian diplomats through back-channels that extradition would not be sought in this case, and the prisoner's maintenance costs were be met by the diocese of Grenoble for the duration of his detention. 2 Mingrat died in the Fenestrelle Fortress some time after the Restoration. This article addresses the discursive afterlife of this crime in Restoration politics: its persistence, that is, as an affaire or...