LITMIR.BIZ

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efforts not merely to accommodate a growing popular interest in courtrooms, but to promote it. ‘Palaces of Justice’ were built across the country during the nineteenth century: newfangled monuments to open justice, packed to their triforia with crucifixes, statuary, and all the trappings of tradition that its absence could demand. As congregants flocked in, it became increasingly common to issue tickets in order that the classes and sexes could be properly segregated – a development simultaneously seen in England – and the trials of lowlifes were soon pulling in the haut monde. The December 1869 prosecution of Jean-Baptiste Troppmann for multiple murder inspired particular interest. His case had been intriguing Parisians from the moment that the six victims had been laid out behind plate glass at the city morgue three months before, and more than twenty thousand applications were made for admission passes. Only several hundred were lucky enough to make it into the trial chamber, a magnificent judicial temple inaugurated just a year before, but few who did so would have been disappointed. For three days they trained opera glasses on the dock, perhaps picking up clues from Troppmann’s physiognomy, and pondered the table that dominated the room – spread with bloody garments, blades, and a jar swimming with the stomach contents of one of the deceased. Aristocrats, socialites and workers attended in force, and so many women were present that Le Petit journal marvelled how ‘strange’ it was that ladies ‘raised in velvets, lace, and silk’ should display such ‘mad unbridled passion…for the coarse details and repugnant debates’ of the case.

      That particular concern was widely shared. When Adelaide Bartlett stood trial at the Old Bailey in 1886 for chloroforming her husband – in a case involving a love triangle and liberal condom use – the judge publicly condemned the relish of women in the public gallery for evidence that he and the jurors could hear only with shame. By 1896 one French doctor was expressing not only distaste, but fear. The libertines of fin-desiècle France had developed something of a vogue for throwing acid into their lovers’ faces, and Paul Aubry proposed that even reading about a vitrioleuse might be enough to launch the female reader (who was ‘often not very intelligent’) on some passionate mischief of her own. ‘What else does she need to excite [her] imagination?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘It is easy to throw vitriol at someone [and] one is sure to be acquitted and to be the subject of gossip for forty-eight hours.’

      But whatever the other moral consequences of the intensifying courtroom drama, the Troppmann trial suggested that the weaker sex was made of rather sterner stuff than their would-be protectors realized. Following the defendant’s conviction, several distinguished Parisiennes wrote to Le Figaro to complain that the newspaper’s correspondent had not acknowledged their presence at court. René de Pont-Just, though as suspicious of female spectators as the next man, was at least capable of irony. He drily explained that the courtroom audience had included ‘both ladies and women’ and that he had held his tongue for fear of confusing the danses with the femmes.

      Jury trial had come a long way since a desperate murderer called Alice had squealed on five of her co-accused at Westminster in 1220. Just how far was marked, in ways both geographic and historical, by the 1880 publication of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Juries had been introduced to Russia fourteen years before and the novel concludes with the prosecution of Dmitri Karamazov for the murder of his father, in a courtroom that would have been familiar to readers from Paris to San Francisco. Tickets have been snapped up by luminaries from miles around, lorgnettes twinkle in the audience, and counsel joust across a table stacked with a bloodied silk dressing gown, a blood-stiffened handkerchief, a pistol, a pestle, and a slender pink ribbon. The spectacle, as compelling as it is mysterious, somehow implicates everyone present – and the shared shame is spelled out when Dmitri’s brother, Ivan, deliriously characterizes the spectators’ lust for bread and circuses as equal to any act of parricide.

      Ivan Karamazov had very personal reasons for his distress, but it was shared by right-thinking folk everywhere. French commentators and English hacks rarely reported a trial without tut-tutting at the onlookers. If it was not the fact of their femininity, it might be their eagerness to applaud, their willingness to bring food to court, or their morbid curiosity – attacked, of course, in articles that went on to describe every twitch and tremor of the defendant.

      The concerns all echoed those that had been expressed not so long before about public executions. But the bread and circuses of the courtroom constituted a very different diversion from the gallows spectacle. Sobs, applause, and whispers had replaced the howls of hatred. Packed lunches had taken the place of Tyburn’s gin-soaked procession. And although the verdict in a high-profile case could still bring traffic to a halt – gridlocking the entire West End of London in the case of one murder acquittal in 1907 – crowds now preferred queueing to rioting. A decision not to issue tickets might cause the lines to form long before sunrise, and the crown might over-flow far beyond the court itself, but spectators always knew their place. When Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen was arraigned for his wife’s murder in 1910 – at a trial which saw a shred of her skin passed around on a dish – a multitude of the ticketless swarmed outside the Old Bailey until police steered them into an empty court. Only after several hours of picnicking and chattering did they realize that they had been duped – at which point they drifted home.

      The jury trial had further to travel, but by the turn of the twentieth century it had come of age. Born from magical rituals and only tempered by reason, it had always enacted the difference between right and wrong as much as it had decided it. And with the end of public executions, it had become the only judicial show in town: a touch of evil for an era that no longer thought it seemly for crowds to jump at the legs of a dying man.

       4 The Witch Trial

      I have to fight against countless subtleties in which the Court is likely to lose itself. And in the end, out of nothing at all, an enormous fabric of guilt will be conjured up.

      

      FRANZ KAFKA, The Trial

      By the fifteenth century, two very different models of criminal justice had established themselves in Europe. On the continent, judges asserted the wisdom of the Romans and the authority of canonical law – and the right to investigate any crime they detected. In England, on the other hand, kings had already delegated considerable responsibility to ordinary men, whose role was only to assess the complaints and defences of people who came before them. The jurists of Europe were honing their inquiries to logical perfection; the jurors of England were entirely unversed in legal theory and so unlikely to be literate that evidence was invariably spoken or shown to them. The history of the witch trials, a saga that lasted two centuries and claimed the lives of between sixty and a hundred thousand people, would encapsulate the differences between the systems. It would begin in the hushed monasteries and torture chambers of central Europe, and would end amidst the high drama of Salem. Subtle doctrines of theology would transform superstitions into denunciations, and the secrecy of the inquisitorial process would generate a vicious cycle of confession and execution. But the publicity of jury trial would produce the most spectacular prosecutions of all.

      Medieval Christianity had an instinctive distrust of anyone who dabbled with the supernatural. The Book of Exodus warned against ‘suffer[ing] a witch to live’, while Leviticus recommended the stoning to death of anyone with ‘a familiar spirit’, and Christian rulers everywhere were paying lip service to the rules by the end of the first millennium. But anxious though the Church was to kill sorcerers in theory, the practical shortcomings of Dark Age logic always made it hard to define them. Without firm theories of cause and effect, it was impossible to pin down the relationship between a curse and a consequence. The significance of healing was no easier to understand; just as a potion that worked might be magic, a failed doctor might as well be a magician. To confuse matters further, orthodoxy insisted for centuries that no one but God could bend or suspend the laws of the cosmos. Ever since St Augustine had explained in the fifth century AD, that only He was capable of turning men into beasts and birds, Catholic theologians had taught that sorcery was either ineffective or blessed. The idea that people could actually fly and work evil magic was therefore, in the words of a tenth-century canon, an ‘error of

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