Jean-Nicolas Leroy, who took the name Jean-Nicolas Moulin during the French Revolution ( 1734, Urville-Hague; died 23 March 1794, Paris), was a French postal official and revolutionary officeholder from the Manche. Commander of the National Guard at Cherbourg and, from October 1792, director of the town's letter post, he was, according to the local historiography, the only resident of Cherbourg executed during the Reign of Terror.
In 1793 Leroy sold part of a large accumulation of official bulletins, laws and reports that the National Convention had sent through his post office to the travelling representatives on mission. He maintained that Jean-Baptiste Carrier, a representative on mission passing through the town, had dismissed the papers as worthless and authorised their disposal. The surveillance committee of Cherbourg, prompted by its secretary, the printer Marc-Antoine Giguet, accused him instead of selling public documents for personal profit, and denounced him by printed circular to committees across the Republic.
Jean-Baptiste Le Carpentier, the representative on mission for the Manche, read his printed defence and ordered him reinstated. The order was overtaken by a decree of the Convention, passed the previous day, referring the case to the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris. Leroy was re-arrested, held at the Conciergerie for more than three months, and tried on 23 March 1794. His chosen counsel having been denounced to the Committee of Public Safety by the Cherbourg committee and having withdrawn, his defence was taken up at the last moment by Claude François Chauveau-Lagarde. He was convicted of conspiracy and guillotined the same evening on the Place de la Révolution, leaving a widow of twenty-three and a son of seventeen months.
After the Thermidorian Reaction the société populaire of Cherbourg twice recorded in its minutes that Giguet had been the cause of Leroy's death and was guilty of a false accusation against him, and 184 notables of the town addressed a collective protest to the Convention in defence of his memory. His widow was restored to the directorship of the post. Drouet, whose 1912 study reconstructed the case from the registers of the Cherbourg revolutionary committee, argued that the bulletins affair had been a pretext, and that Leroy had in fact been destroyed because his office was coveted and because he had refused to assist the committee in intercepting private correspondence. Local historians have since treated the case as a miscarriage of revolutionary justice.
Early life and family
Leroy was born at Urville-Hague, in La Hague, and the Manche biographical tradition gives his year of birth as 1734. His 1791 marriage record names his parents as Michel Le Roy and Jeanne Le Boisselier and describes him as a native of the parish of Urville-Hague, then living at Cherbourg. The family wrote the surname "Le Roy"; the revolutionary administration and the later literature write it "Leroy", the form used in this article. The list of the condemned drawn up by the Revolutionary Tribunal gives his age at death as fifty-seven, which would place his birth in about 1736.
On 8 November 1791 Leroy married, at Surtainville, Marie-Anne Moulin (1770–1812), of the parish of Saint-Malo de Valognes, daughter of Thomas Moulin and Marie Villot and thirty-four years younger than himself; the witnesses included the bride's father, her brother Auguste Moulin, the groom's sister Jeanne-Barbe Le Roy and his nephew François-Antoine Dupont. According to Drouet, the bride's brother Irénée-Auguste Moulin later served in Italy as inspector general under General Le Marois, and was mayor and conseiller général of Bricquebec when he died in 1845. The couple's son, Frédéric-Auguste Leroy, was born at Cherbourg on 24 October 1792.
Revolutionary career
Leroy commanded the Cherbourg National Guard from 1 May 1792 to 1 May 1793. On 30 Frimaire Year II his officers, sergeants, corporals and fusiliers signed a declaration that he had always carried out his duties with zeal and exactness. On 14 October 1792, offices being elective at the time, the district electoral assembly chose him director of the Cherbourg letter post by 44 votes out of 67. Besides the director, the office employed a controller, a postman and two clerks.
Drouet described him as a man who gave every public proof of patriotism, and who had no personal reason to resent a regime which had, within six months, made him commander of the guard and then director of the post, a position both comfortable and much sought after. He gave to the collections for the volunteers, twelve livres on one occasion and twenty on another, and donated a sabre and shoulder belt which he valued at forty livres. At the sale of national lands in the canton of Beaumont he bought a lot at Omonville-la-Rogue: a twelve-perch piece of arable, opened at 100 livres and adjudged to him at 510 livres on 2 August 1793.
In September 1793 Lecarpentier told the société populaire that he would not attend its meetings until it had purged its membership. Leroy submitted to the examination and was retained. The certificate he was given survives in his criminal dossier, because his wife produced it in his defence four months later. It records that at the purification of the society in September, "slave style", the citizen Moulin was kept on the list of members.
Change of name
On 28 October 1793 (7 Brumaire Year II) Leroy appeared before the general council of the commune and renounced the surname "Leroy", which recalled the word roi ("king"), adopting instead the name "Moulin", his wife's maiden name. Contemporary records accordingly name him variously as "Moulin", "Moulin dit Leroy" and "Moulin, ci-devant Leroy". The change was made four weeks before any accusation was brought against him. On the copy of his printed defence preserved in the Archives nationales the name "Leroy" was set in type at the head, then struck out and replaced in manuscript by "Moulin", with a note added at the foot of the page recording that on 7 Brumaire the director had abjured the name of Leroy to take that of his wife, and that the proof was attached.
The Convention bulletins affair
Accumulation of the papers
From June 1793 the Cherbourg post office began to fill up with newspapers, bulletins, laws and printed reports which the Convention was sending to the representatives on mission with the Army of the Coasts of Cherbourg. Those representatives were constantly on the move between the Manche and Calvados, and the federalist rising at Caen in June 1793 had cut communications. The material could not be forwarded, and it accumulated until it filled a room of its own.
Leroy set out the sequence in detail in his printed defence. At first he forwarded the packets to the representatives at Bayeux, and said the postmaster there could confirm it. After Caen rose on 9 June he stopped, believing the packets would fall into federalist hands. He asked the commissioners appointed to attend the opening of the post, Tasson and Leroy, what to do, and they told him to hold on to them. On 13 June he wrote to the deputies Lecointre and Prieur, then at Coutances, sending on their private letters and two packets and asking for instructions. He received no reply. He offered the whole accumulation to General Tilly, who refused it, and went back to Tasson, who told him it was a matter for the army of the coasts and not for the district.
In August 1793 Jean-Baptiste Carrier, deputy for the Cantal and later notorious for the drownings at Nantes, passed through Cherbourg and dismissed the papers as obsolete. Leroy afterwards maintained that Carrier had told him that packets arriving in future were to be delivered to General Tilly, which was done, and that the older material, having lost its interest, could be kept and disposed of as he saw fit. The address of the Cherbourg notables to the Convention in 1795 reports Carrier's reply in blunter terms, as an instruction to make "cabbages and turnips" of them.
Leroy sold part of the stock at six sols the pound to two grocers of the neighbourhood, Macé of the rue de la Vase and Le Buhotel of the rue de la Fontaine.
Denunciation
Marc-Antoine Giguet, a printer of the rue des Corderies, was a member of the general council of the commune and secretary of the committee of surveillance; his garden adjoined Leroy's in the rue Christine. Drouet records the deposition of Leroy's servant that Giguet, standing in his own garden, had on one occasion overheard part of a conversation between her master and several other persons.
When Giguet heard about the sale he bought some of the papers back from Le Buhotel, took them home, and called the committee to his own house to inspect the evidence there. He added that Le Buhotel had mentioned a further four hundred pounds weight of the same material elsewhere. The committee questioned Le Buhotel, his servant Rose Marvie, and a marine employee named Chapuy. Le Buhotel claimed he did not know where the papers had come from or who had brought them, although Leroy lived some fifty metres away. His servant's evidence was more damaging: the parcels had always come after dark, tied in bundles, and had been left not in the shop but in her master's bedroom.
A search of the post office turned up twenty-nine sealed packets in a loft, said to hold about four hundred bulletins each, still under the seal of the Convention and addressed to the representatives with the army of the coasts.
Leroy was questioned the same day. Asked whether he had sold papers to Le Buhotel, he said he had sold him none, but had given him what was left over and received some soap in exchange. Asked what he had intended to do with those found at his house, he said "nothing": he had told Carrier about them and been told to keep them, since the men they were addressed to were away, and most were no longer current, so he had seen no point in sending them on.
On 25 November 1793 (5 Frimaire Year II) the committee denounced Leroy to the Committee of Public Safety, to the representative on mission, and by printed circular to surveillance committees across the Republic. The letter to Paris called the discovery an infamy and the director a monster in the pay of the Brissotin faction, who by holding back the bulletins had deprived the citizens of instruction. The circular told committees elsewhere to descend on their own post offices without warning, seize any bulletins of the Convention they found, and establish whether the same thing was going on locally. The letter to the Committee of Public Safety called him "Monsieur le Roi (sic)", four weeks after he had renounced the name in front of the committee's own general council.
Leroy was confined to his house under guard and temporarily replaced at the post office by Victor Lefourdrey, a former surgeon of twenty, whom the committee described to the minister of the interior as a sans-culotte republican who had always been the terror of moderates and aristocrats.
Leroy's defence
Leroy had a memoir printed in the town, addressed to Lecarpentier, the committee of surveillance and his fellow citizens, and distributed it. Drouet described it, with the depositions, as the principal document of the file and reproduced it in full. In it Leroy set out the chronology of the accumulation and of his repeated requests for instructions, and concluded:
He denied the report that packets received as late as Brumaire had been found at his house, appealing to the members of the committee who had opened them, and ended:
He also wrote to Carrier on 7 Frimaire, reminding him of their conversation at General Tilly's and asking him to attest it, and closing: "You are just, you will not hesitate to answer me and attest the truth of these facts. Republicans owe one another aid and assistance; it is on that ground that I call upon you today." No reply is recorded.
Prosecution and execution