M. ERNEST JUDET WILL APPEAR NEXT WEDNESDAY BEFORE THE COURT OF ASSISE

‘The former director of “L’Éclair” is accused of culpable dealings with Germany.

Mr. Ernest Judet condemned, in absentia, to perpetual deportation on February 4, for intelligence with the enemy, will be judged contradictorily in court of assizes. Wednesday, June 27 and the following days. We remember that the former director of L'Éclair spontaneously came to give himself up to French justice, after the judgments of the indictment chamber exonerating Mr. Paul Meunier and Mrs. Bernain de Havisi, charged at the same time than him, and Hans Bossard.

The additional investigation ordered by President Gilbert, and which was entrusted to Mr. Cluzel, did not yield significant results, Mr. Judet having confined himself to taking cognizance of the file and refusing to explain himself before the public hearing on the charges against him.

We do not yet know what will be the defense system of Mr. Judet and his lawyer, Me Léouzon Le Duc. It is not known whether he will only endeavor to dispute the seriousness of the facts with which he is accused or whether - rather - he will not mention documents hitherto unknown and likely to exculpate him. In the latter case, the debates would necessarily be interrupted, verifications would be ordered, rogatory commissions launched. experts appointed, reports produced before the debates can resume their course.

The accusation

The prosecution is up. as charges against Mr. Judet. in the first place the encrypted correspondence exchanged in 1914 between the German Under-Secretary of Foreign Affairs, M. von Jagow, and Baron de Lancken, former adviser to the German Embassy in Paris. A first despatch from M. von Jagow, addressed on December 15, to M. von Lancken, then head of the political department in occupied Belgium, reads as follows:

Following Swiss news. the state of mind would now be less favorable for us than four weeks ago. A reversal would only be possible after a significant German success and preparatory propaganda. I would like to win Judet for this propaganda. At first he refused to act as an intermediary, but finally he consented under the following conditions: since he must give up the management of his newspaper, worth a million and a half, and that he risks a half -million of private fortune, he asks for two million, in exchange for which he would put all his power at our disposal. The sum seems immense to me. Please give notice, I'm staying here until Monday.

Mr. von Lancken replied: "Judet is certainly not devoid of talent as a journalist, however, he seems to me absolutely unfit for the mission that we want to assign to him. One cannot in any way trust him and he is not taken seriously from a political point of view, and unfortunately he conducted the newspapers he directed very badly. first the Petit Journal, later the Éclair. L'Éclair was considered ruined, Judet's personal financial situation had been considered for some time very disturbed. His wife, an Englishwoman, has relations with General French, if I am not mistaken, of a family nature, which Judet has always cultivated, in spite of his Anglophobic articles.

In spite of these reservations of the baron, the market was. concluded. The prosecution maintains that the deal was concluded and relies on two other dispatches from the same correspondents, on the testimony of Mee Hans Bossard and on Judet's relations with Hans Bossard.

Indeed, on February 10, 1915, Mr. von Jagow wrote to Baron Lancken that during talks between Mr. Judet and Ambassador Romberg, Judet claimed to have won the Pope over to his Bonapartist plans and that the Pope had delivered to him, Judet, instructions for the French clergy, with a view to putting this clergy on guard against cooperation with the government of the Republic. And Mr. von Jagow wondered if Mr. Judet was not boasting and exaggerating.

The role of Mrs. Bossard

The accusation, on the other hand, is based on the testimonies of Mrs. Bossard, who declares having received confidences from her husband about Judet's actions. But it was on behalf of the Swiss government, Bossard said, that he wanted to see Romberg.

In 1915, Judet made several visits to Switzerland. He corresponded with Bossard on agreed terms which the latter sometimes dictated to his wife, and of which she did not have the key until later. Bossard sent reports on what Judet wrote to him, to M. von Romberg. Madame Bossard was commissioned to type a certain number of them. In September 1915, Bossard left Lucerne to settle in Bern, in the Zerleder villa, communicating by a small path under the woods with the nearby German embassy. One night in November, returning from the embassy, Bossard woke his wife to show her a packet of notes, representing 990,000 francs, which Mr. von Romberg had just given him, while waiting for the rest, 4 million and 10,000 francs which he would touch soon after. Madame Bossard, a few days later, also counted the million and the 10,000 francs. Bossard deposited everything at the Swiss Commercial Bank, explaining that this money came from a friend who wanted to protect his fortune from the French tax authorities.

This testimony of Mrs. Bossard was confirmed by a whole set of findings, in particular by the authorized representative of the Commercial Bank of Basel, Mr. Tschudy.

On October 24, 1915, interesting documents were discovered in Mrs. Bossard's luggage at the Pontarlier customs. They came from Judet. Bossard, informed, sent his servant, the wife Irénée, to Paris to warn Judet. On the intervention of the latter, the restitution of the compromising papers was decided. But it could not take place. And the accusing documents were later found in the files of the archives of the general security.

Finally, at the beginning of 1918, Mrs. Bossard, having broken with her husband and asking for a divorce against him, denounced her husband's relations with Judet and Romberg. And citing testimonies, restoring from memory the text of important documents, Ms. Bossard provides the prosecution with a whole set of extremely damning data for the accused who will appear on Wednesday before the jurors of the Seine.