In the autumn of 1869 a family from Roubaix, in northern France, was destroyed in two places and in three separate events. Jean Kinck died in Alsace in August. His eldest son, Gustave, died at Pantin, just outside Paris, a few days before his mother and four of his brothers and a sister, who were killed at Pantin on the night of September 19 to 20. Eight people in all were dead, six of them children. The man charged with all eight killings was Jean-Baptiste Troppmann, a young mechanic from Alsace who had known the father for only a few weeks.
The case unfolded in public over four months. Troppmann was arrested at Le Havre on September 23, gave accounts that changed several times, confessed on November 13 and later retracted the idea that he had acted alone, and was tried before the Cour d'assises de la Seine in Paris at the end of December. He was sentenced to death on December 30, 1869, and executed on January 19, 1870. The affair is also remembered for what it did to the French press: Le Petit Journal ran it on its front page almost every day and recorded the largest sales in its history.
Troppmann was born on October 5, 1849. The indictment read at his trial gave his birthplace as Cernay, in the Haut-Rhin department of Alsace. He was the youngest child of a mechanic who ran a workshop with a partner. He attended primary school until about the age of 14 and was then apprenticed in his father's workshop.
The indictment drew a harsh portrait of him as withdrawn, violent and set on getting rich, and cited a quarrel with an older brother that turned violent. Tom Pernodet, in a 2021 study of how the press told the story, records relatives describing him as sullen and envious and always looking for easy money. Both are descriptions offered by the prosecution and by people speaking after the killings, and they should be read as such. At his trial the defense stressed instead his poverty and his attachment to his mother.
In December 1868 his father sent him to Paris to install machines. He lodged at Pantin until May 1869, though he told the court that he had stayed there only about three weeks. In late May he was sent north to Roubaix on the same kind of work. He had no salary of his own and drew money from his father when he needed it.
Jean Kinck was an Alsatian by origin, living in Roubaix, and by the account of his neighbors he had risen from nothing by his own efforts. The indictment put his property at three houses in Roubaix and estimated his fortune at between 90,000 and 100,000 francs. A neighbor told the court that he was regarded as a brave and respected man. For several years he had planned to return and settle in Alsace, his native region.
His wife, Hortense, born Roussel, could not read; a sister-in-law or a neighbor read her letters to her. Witnesses described her as brave and honest, anxious about her children's health and reluctant to leave Roubaix. Her own sister, who kept a wine shop at Tourcoing, came to the Paris court in deep mourning and told the jury that Hortense had found her husband's sudden departure strange.
The six children, as the indictment named and aged them, were Gustave, 16; Émile-Louis, 13; Henry-Joseph, 10; Achille-Louis, 8 and a half; Alfred-Louis, nearly 7; and Marie-Hortense, 2 and a half. Witnesses described the children as respectful toward their parents. Gustave, the eldest, sometimes went with his father on his business errands. Newspapers in the first days of the inquiry gave the ages differently, and the Gazette des Tribunaux noted on September 25 that the Paris press had exaggerated them and that the eldest son was 16 or 17.
Kinck was introduced to Troppmann by a fellow Alsatian at a cabaret in Roubaix. The prosecution's case was that Troppmann meant to take the older man's money. The indictment dated his first steps to August 1869: he left Roubaix on August 18 and reached Cernay, in Alsace, around August 20.
The indictment placed Jean Kinck's death in the Haut-Rhin in August 1869, near Wattwiller. What followed is set out in the indictment's account of the money. A receipt for 5,500 francs bearing Kinck's forged signature and dated Guebwiller, August 25, was meant to be cashed through a Roubaix bank. On August 31 Troppmann went to the post office at Guebwiller and tried to collect the money by presenting himself as Kinck's son; the receiver refused. Two further documents were forged and later charged: a receipt for 500 francs dated September 4 and a power of attorney dated September 3 at Paris. A hotel keeper in Paris later testified that a man calling himself Jean Kinck took a room at the hotel on September 4.
Gustave Kinck reached Paris on September 17, according to the indictment. He died at Pantin in the days that followed. The medical evidence put his death some days before that of his mother and the younger children: testimony at the trial spoke of two or three days, and a later account of the autopsy findings gives three or four.
Hortense Kinck arrived in Paris with her five younger children on September 19. A hotel keeper and a wine merchant confirmed the date at the trial. She and the five children were killed at Pantin that night, the night of September 19 to 20. The prosecution's case was that they died within a short space of time. Pantin was then a commune on the northeastern edge of Paris.
By the morning of September 21 the news had caused what the Gazette des Tribunaux called an "immense impression" in Paris. The victims had been identified the day before, the paper reported. The investigation was led in Paris by Antoine Claude, head of the Sûreté. A hotel keeper in the capital helped establish who the family were, and a telegram from Roubaix confirmed the identification.
At Roubaix neighbors confirmed who the victims were. In those first days much about the case was uncertain. Nobody yet treated the father as a possible accomplice. The Journal du Havre thought the man arrested at Le Havre was the eldest son, while the Courrier du Havre said there was no positive identification yet. The Gazette recorded that letters addressed to a man named Traupmann had reportedly been taken from the prisoner, which suggested to some that others were involved.
On September 23, 1869, Troppmann was arrested at Le Havre. The papers he carried were in the name of Jean Kinck of Roubaix, and Kinck's money and belongings were on him, the indictment later recorded. The Gazette des Tribunaux wrote on September 25 that the public and the first judicial information alike pointed to him as the only one of the Pantin assassins, although at that stage he refused to answer questions. An acting investigating judge and a deputy prosecutor questioned him at Le Havre, and the head of the Sûreté was to bring him back to Paris.
Crowds gathered at the station and along the route to the prison, and some tried to reach him, according to Pernodet's study.
For nearly two months the inquiry rested on what Troppmann told the magistrates, and that changed. His first account cast Jean Kinck and Gustave as the main perpetrators and himself as an accomplice. He then said that he had acted alone. On November 13 he confessed to the killings as the sole perpetrator, a date given by the indictment; Pernodet's study gives November 12 or 13.
The Gazette des Tribunaux reported on November 14 that Troppmann had given very precise indications about his crime and that he maintained that he alone had done it. The paper wondered whether he was telling the truth or hoping to be moved to Alsace. Jean Kinck's death in the Haut-Rhin was established in the last week of November: the Gazette of November 26 carried a first, unconfirmed report from the previous day that the father's death had been established, and the indictment dates this to November 24.
On November 28 Troppmann changed his account again and said that three accomplices had acted with him. The indictment described these later statements as fabricated. The investigating magistrate was M. Drouet d'Arcq. When the case was sent for trial, the indictment ran to thirteen counts: the murders of Jean Kinck, of Gustave, of Hortense Kinck and of each of the five younger children, with theft; the forgery of commercial documents; and the use of the forged documents.
Historians of the French press treat the affair as a turning point in how crime was reported. Le Petit Journal, founded in 1863 by Moïse Polydore Millaud and sold for five centimes when its rivals charged fifteen, ran the affair on its front page almost daily from September 22, 1869 until the execution. Its issue of September 23 gave most of the front page to a story headed with the word "horrible" and the promise of new details. Le Figaro, Le Gaulois and Le Temps also followed the case, and on September 24 the Petit Moniteur universel put the six victims on its front page.
The effect on sales was large, though the figures vary. Pernodet's study puts Le Petit Journal at about 250,000 copies before the affair and about 500,000 as it began, with a record of 594,000 on January 20, 1870. The historian Anne-Claude Ambroise-Rendu, citing earlier work, gives a rise from 30,000 or 40,000 copies at the end of 1869 to 300,000 within a few days, and the same record of 594,000 on the day of the execution. Both agree on the record figure and on its cause. RetroNews, the press archive of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, describes the case as a media story of four months, in which newspapers competed over details to sell copies.
Interest was not limited to readers. Crowds traveled to Pantin, where sellers of souvenirs set up and singers performed songs about the case. A ballad printed at Limoges in 1870 ran to 26 verses; others appeared in regional dialects. At the trial, seats were sold, and in November the Gazette des Tribunaux had already remarked that requests for places were numerous and that the small courtroom, with its many witnesses, would hold few spectators.
The indictment was read at the opening of the trial and took more than an hour. It described Troppmann as the sole author of eight killings. It set out the Alsace events of August, the September events at Pantin, the forged documents and the money. It recorded that the Kinck family had been almost entirely destroyed. It also recorded that Mme Kinck had sent the 5,500 francs and that a police commissioner had retrieved it on September 30 under a judge's authority; 2,500 francs were later returned to the heirs.
The trial opened on December 28, 1869, before the Cour d'assises de la Seine in Paris. The presiding judge was M. Thévenin. The procureur général, Grandperret, led the prosecution with the avocat général Merveilleux-Duvignaux. Troppmann was defended by Charles Lachaud, one of the leading advocates of the day, who told the jury that Troppmann had asked him to take the case and that he had not thought he should refuse. The jury was drawn by lot, with two substitutes added.
Troppmann, aged 20 by then, entered the court pale, with his head high and his eyes slightly lowered, and greeted the jurors with a quiet "Bonjour, messieurs." The Gazette des Tribunaux described him as mostly motionless and silent, with sudden bursts of animation. He contested the witnesses who implicated him and sometimes altered his version as he went. He told the court that Jean Kinck had wished to make counterfeit money with accomplices, and the president accused him of slandering the dead and pointed out his contradictions. On the gravest charges he said: "It was not I who killed them." He added that he had to defend himself.
The witnesses covered the whole span of the inquiry. A neighbor and the sister of Mme Kinck described the family and its plans. Hotel staff and shopkeepers described the visitors' arrival and Troppmann's movements. Witnesses from Le Havre testified to the arrest. Two doctors, Bernard and Bergeron, gave evidence on the medical findings. The question of whether one man could have committed all the killings was central. Troppmann said it was impossible; the prosecution said it was entirely possible, and Pernodet's study records that medical opinion held it to be so.
In his closing speech on the third day the procureur général asked the jury for justice. He counted eight victims, the mother and her five younger children, the eldest son and the father, and argued that Troppmann alone had killed all of them. Lachaud, in reply, argued that Troppmann's poverty and his love for his mother called for pity and tried to raise the possibility of accomplices.
The jury retired at 8:50 in the evening and returned about forty minutes later, according to Pernodet. Troppmann was sentenced to death on December 30, 1869. At about four o'clock the next afternoon he asked for Lachaud and signed an appeal to the Cour de cassation, the Gazette recorded, and was moved from the Conciergerie to the Roquette prison at about half past four.
By January 3 the case file had been deposited at the prosecutor's office for transmission to the Chancellery, and the Gazette expected the Cour de cassation to take it the following week. The court rejected the appeal; the date of the ruling is not on record. The request for clemency was refused as well, Emperor Napoleon III declining to intervene.
From the Friday before the execution, crowds gathered at the place de la Roquette. On four nights thousands came, and the police cleared the square around midnight. Some witnesses later estimated that more than 25,000 people were present. In his cell Troppmann was calm; he slept from about nine in the evening, read, and wrote. The prison chaplain, Abbé Croze, visited him daily, and so did the former vicar of Cernay who had given him his first communion. He received many letters, some sympathetic and some abusive. He continued to say that others had been involved and that he could not name them. On the morning of the execution he woke at ten past six, and at about half past six the head of the Sûreté and other officials came to his cell. He told the chaplain to tell Claude that he persisted in his account. Jean-Baptiste Troppmann was executed in Paris at seven o'clock on the morning of January 19, 1870.
Accomplices. Troppmann claimed at different times that Jean and Gustave Kinck had been the principal actors, that he had acted alone, and that three unnamed men had helped him. The prosecution rejected every claim of help, and the court sentenced him to death on the indictment that charged him with all eight killings. Pernodet's study records that a theory of complicity persisted for years afterward, although the medical evidence held that one man could have done it. No accomplice was ever charged.
Dates. The date of the confession is given as November 13 by the indictment and as November 12 or 13 by Pernodet. Jean Kinck's death was established on November 24 according to the indictment, while a witness at the trial gave November 25. The date of the execution is given by different sources as January 18, 19, 20 or 21; the Gazette des Tribunaux issue dated January 20 reports it as having taken place "today," which places it on January 19, the date also given by the Criminocorpus ballad catalog.
Other points. The indictment gives Troppmann's birthplace as Cernay, while the Criminocorpus ballad catalog gives Brunstatt, and the president of the court also mentioned a place called Burstats. The ages of the children differ between the first press reports and the indictment.
October 5, 1849: Jean-Baptiste Troppmann is born in Alsace.
December 1868: his father sends him to Paris to install machines.
Late May 1869: he is sent to Roubaix on the same work, where he meets Jean Kinck.
August 18, 1869: he leaves Roubaix; he reaches Cernay around August 20.
August 1869: Jean Kinck dies in Alsace, according to the indictment.
August 31, 1869: Troppmann tries to cash a forged 5,500-franc receipt at Guebwiller and is refused.
September 3 and 4, 1869: a forged power of attorney and a second forged receipt are dated; a man calling himself Jean Kinck takes a hotel room in Paris on September 4.
September 17, 1869: Gustave Kinck arrives in Paris; he dies at Pantin in the days that follow.
September 19, 1869: Hortense Kinck arrives in Paris with her five younger children.
Night of September 19 to 20, 1869: Hortense Kinck and the five younger children are killed at Pantin.
September 20 to 22, 1869: the victims are identified; Le Petit Journal begins its daily coverage on September 22.
September 23, 1869: Troppmann is arrested at Le Havre.
September 26, 1869: Gustave Kinck's death is established.
November 13, 1869: Troppmann confesses to acting alone.
November 24, 1869: Jean Kinck's death is established.
November 28, 1869: Troppmann names three alleged accomplices.
December 28, 1869: the trial opens before the Cour d'assises de la Seine.
December 30, 1869: sentenced to death.
December 31, 1869: signs an appeal to the Cour de cassation; moved to the Roquette prison.
January 1870: the appeal is rejected and clemency refused.
January 19, 1870: Troppmann is executed in Paris.
January 20, 1870: Le Petit Journal sells a record 594,000 copies, according to one study; another gives the day of the execution.