In his Adultery and Divorce in Calvin’s Geneva,
Robert Kingdon discusses a number of individuals who were executed for
committing adultery (usually drowning for women; decapitation for men),
including the following:
Anne Le
Moine and Antoine Cossonex
The first case of an adultery charge that led
to a death penalty that we shall examine is that of Anne Le Moine, wife of
Pierre Bernard, and her lover, Antoine Cossonex. Anne and Antoine were first
jailed for cross-examination by Geneva’s Lieutenant on August 7, 1560. The case
moved with horrifying speed. A little more than a week later they were both put
to death.
Pierre Bernard and Antoine Cossonex were both
members of Geneva’s flourishing community of French refugees, then so large that
it constituted about half of the total population. Pierre was a merchant who
had originally come from Chinon, not far from Tours in the Touraine. Antoine
had come from a village in the south of France, not far from Toulouse. Pierre
and Anne had been married for twenty-six years and had a number of children,
several of whom were already married. Antoine had been in their service for
three and a half years.
The case began with interrogations of four
people: the two accused—Anne Le Moine and Antoine Cossonex; the aggrieved
husband, Pierre Bernard, and Bernard’s teen-age daughter, Esther. Anne and
Antoine were charged with repeated adultery and blasphemy. Antoine in addition
was charged with the attempted rape of Esther and with domestic larceny. Anne’s
initial response to the charges was that her husband treated her very badly and
had often beaten her. Esther insisted that she had not led Antoine on, that she
had no interest in marrying him. In the course of the investigation, the
Lieutenant discovered evidence that Anne had also committed adultery with
another man in the community, about two years earlier. Pierre was clearly
appalled by all these revelations.
After about a week of intensive questioning,
it was decided that torture would probably be needed, and Germain Colladon was
consulted. He found ample grounds for the use of torture and it was promptly
applied, in increasingly severe doses of the estrapade. In this case the torture worked. Antoine fell to pieces
immediately and completely. The details of his recorded confessions are much
more graphic than in most Geneavan proceedings of this type. He admitted
committing adultery with Anne repeatedly over the previous eight months, “even
in the bed of the master,” most recently only about a week earlier and twice
within the same day, very likely the incidents that led to this trial. Only a
few days before that, he reported, Anne had given him as a present a lock of
her pubic hair wrapped up in paper. He also fully admitted the attempted rape
of her lover’s daughter, reporting that he kissed her, fondled her breasts and
genitals, and rubbed his penis against her body, but that she had stopped him
from going any further.
Anne Le Moine also cracked under the pressure
of torture, but with somewhat different results. Rather than confessing her
crimes in graphic detail, she erupted in anger, insulting her husband, the
court, and everyone else involved in the process, saying things that led her
judges to add blasphemy to the list of charges against her. She said that she
wanted to be damned with all the devils to the deepest depths of hell, that she
hoped to spend eternity with them at the bottom of the abysmal lake, and other
things that the record summarizes as “detestable and abominable.”
Faced with this fresh evidence, Colladon
immediately issued an opinion recommending the penalty of death for both. He
rehearsed the evidence drawn from their confessions with evident horror. He
backed up his recommendation with uncommon precision, citing relevant
commandments from the Bible, specifically Leviticus 20, and relevant passages from
“imperial” (Roman) law against both adultery and blasphemy. He found Antoine
guilty of adultery, domestic larceny, and incest—since he had tried to seduce
his own lover’s daughter. Antoine thus deserved the death penalty several times
over. As for Anne, her crimes were so atrocious that she deserved to be
exterminated completely, at the very least to be put to death by drowning.
A full bill of charges was then drawn up
accusing both Anne and Antoine of multiple crimes, listing not only all the
crimes that they had been charged with up to this point but stuffing in some
additional ones. They had committed adultery several times in several places,
even on the bed of her own husband. In so doing Anne “had polluted and soiled,
and broken the faith of the holy state of marriage.” Antoine was also guilty of
incest, for having attempted to rape the daughter of his master and mistress.
And Anne was guilty of a whole series of additional crimes. She had
contemplated killing her husband so that she could marry her lover. She had
stolen pieces of cloth from her husband so that her lover could be dressed
better. She had kissed a number of other men. She had a duplicate key made to
the family cupboard, and then used it several times to steal silverware. She
had replied to her husband’s attempts to correct her with “insults and outrages.”
She had in the end committed blasphemy in the presence of both her husband and
the court.
In this case the Small Council had no
hesitation about levying the death penalty. Indeed its members insisted on
executions the very next day. The municipal executioner happened to be ill on
the day upon which the trial ended, and it was decided to borrow an executioner
from another community if necessary, rather than considering any delay
(Archives d’Etat de Genève, Jur. Pen. A 2, fol. 106v., 15 August 1560). The
formal sentence of condemnation notified the parties that Anne would be “bound
and led out of the city down the Corraterie Street and there to be drowned and
submerged in the water of the Rhone River,” and that Antoine would be “bound
and led to the lace of Champel [the public execution ground] and there to have
the head cut from above the shoulders in the usual way, and your head attached
to the gallows and your body hung from it, so that your souls be separated from
your bodies.” The sentences were executed immediately.
It became a fixed part of Genevan law that
these two rather different forms of execution be used in cases of notorious
adultery. There is no clear explanation in the law as to why men should be
decapitated and women drowned, but that became the rule. There is also no
evidence that Geneva ever considered adopting the method of executing by public
stoning recommended by the Bible. It may be that Geneva wished to confine the
process of execution to professionals, and not to encourage the intervention of
the public. The biblical method of putting adulterers to death was clearly a
public process, involving even casual bystanders. Any attempt to use this
method of execution may well have been thought likely to encourage riots and
other forms of disorderly conduct by crowds that could easily escape official
control. (Robert M. Kingdon, Adultery and
Divorce in Calvin’s Geneva [Harvard Historical Studies 118; Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995, 1997], 119-23; the other examples of
those executed that Kingdon discusses are that of Jacques Lenepveux [pp 123-26],
Bernardine Neyrod [pp. 126-28], Marie Binot [pp. 129-35], and Loise Maistre [pp
135-39])
