A common theme in the June Rebellion trials is that almost everyone tries to pretend that they were somewhere else during the insurrection, they never saw a barricade, they wouldn’t recognize a barricade if they did see one, they’re not sure which end of a gun the bullets come out of, they have no idea how their mouth became covered in gunpowder, they have no designs against the government and they love the king. In the face of long prison sentences and the looming threat of the guillotine, very few had the courage to stand by their beliefs.
Jules-Stanislas Forthom is one of the rare exceptions. He claims his place among the Lesser-Known Badasses not so much for what he did during the rebellion itself as for what he said afterwards.
On the morning of the 6th, a barricade was erected at the corner of the Rue Beaubourg and the Rue Petits-Champs-Saint-Martin so that insurgents could fire on troops passing along the Rue Saint-Martin, at the time a major thoroughfare through the city. Forthom, a twenty-two-year-old fruit vendor who lived in the neighborhood, went to the houses of the local National Guardsmen and demanded they give up their weapons. They all said ‘Lol no,” but he did manage to get a gun from somewhere, and he succeeded in forcing a nearby house and a wineshop to keep their doors open. “If you don’t hold the door open I’ll fuck you in the stomach with my rifle,” he told the porter of the house.
Everyone in the neighborhood saw him casting bullets, loading his rifle and going over to the barricade to shoot at the troops, and he was captured still armed and with his face blackened with gunpowder. He claimed he’d been drunk and the other insurgents forced him to do it, but the jury was not impressed. They convicted him of attempted murder with premeditation and without extenuating circumstances, and he was sentenced to death.
In a strange way Forthom dodged a bullet with his death sentence, because he had a previous criminal conviction for theft. If he’d been sentenced to the lesser penalty of forced labor he would probably have been sent to the bagne as a common criminal without being granted the usual commutation to imprisonment that was offered for political crimes. But because it was a death sentence, it was commuted to life imprisonment like all the other June Rebellion death sentences, and he ended up at Mont-Saint-Michel with the other political prisoners.
In October of 1834 there was a terrible fire at Mont-Saint-Michel, and the political prisoners showed “the most commendable zeal and courage” in helping to put it out, thereby saving many of the prison buildings and the private homes on the island. The Minister of the Interior (Adolphe Thiers, ironically) and the Minister of Justice wrote to the king and asked him to pardon the prisoners as a reward for their bravery. Twenty-five of the prisoners who helped to fight the fire were immediately released.
Forthom and a guy named Pierre-Nicolas Vallot who’d been imprisoned for trying to bust political prisoners out of Sainte-Pélagie back in April 1832 could not be released because “the exaltation of their opinions does not allow us to ask for a full pardon”. Instead Forthom’s life sentence was commuted to four years of imprisonment. He was only released in October of 1836 after a second round of pardon applications, and he was placed under continuing police surveillance.
There’s no record of exactly what opinion he “exalted” to condemn himself to another two years in prison, but I’m assuming the conversation went something like this:
Monsieur le Directeur: “You’ve been locked up in this hellish island prison for over a year now, and thanks to the horrible fire in which we all nearly died you may finally have a chance to get out. Do you think you can be civil about the king for like five minutes so that we can get you a pardon?”
Forthom: “Fuck that guy in the stomach with a rifle.”
