L'Auberge rouge

The Red Inn
L'auberge rouge
Old postcard of L'Auberge de Peyrebeille, commonly called L'Auberge Rouge (The Red Inn)
Former names	L'Auberge de Peyrebeille
General information
Location	Lanarce, Ardèche
Country	France
Coordinates	44° 45′ 18″ N 3° 58′ 23″ E

L'auberge rouge (The Red Inn) is an inn, originally named L'Auberge de Peyrebeille ("the Inn of Peyrebeille"), in the commune of Lanarce in Ardèche, bordering Issanlas and Lavillatte. In the 19th century, it was the site of a notorious French criminal scandal known as "the Red Inn affair". The owners of the inn, Pierre and Marie Martin, and their employee Jean Rochette were arrested in 1831 after a customer, Jean-Antoine Enjolras, was found dead by a nearby river, his skull smashed in. They were later charged with his murder. During the subsequent trial, numerous witnesses testified to other crimes committed by the accused, including up to fifty murders at the inn, and to aggravating circumstances of rape and cannibalism. There were rumors that the owners used to serve their intended victims meals containing cooked body parts of previous victims. The accused were only convicted of the murder of Enjolras, and were sentenced to death. They were executed by guillotine in front of the inn, with a crowd of 30,000 on-lookers.

Subsequent scholars have raised doubts about the integrity of the trial. Today, the inn is a tourist attraction.

For about 23 years (approximately 1805-1830), Pierre and Marie Martin (née Breysee), kept the inn. Originally poor farmers, they were said to have accumulated a fortune of 30,000 gold Francs (approximately 600,000 Euros in today's currency) by the time of their death. Pierre Martin was feared by his neighbours as he was a grasping, paid henchman of the local nobility, and had a forceful personality. The Martins were ultra-royalists; he had assisted nobles returning from exile to recover their land from the farmers on the cheap, and she had hidden a refractory priest. The political climate in France changed in 1830 with the overthrow of the ultra-royalist Charles X and his replacement by Louis Philippe: the Martins were no longer useful supporters of the regime but rather of its opponents.
The peasantry of the Ardèche were accustomed to collecting wood in the royal forests, but this had been curbed to protect the interests of sawmills. Sawmills began to be set on fire at night by bands of men who knew the terrain and had no difficulty in putting the gendarmerie to flight. Worried by this, the prefect had ordered that the rule of law must be restored
In October 1831, a local horse-dealer, Antoine (Jean-Antoine) Enjolras (or Anjolras), went missing; a justice de paix (local magistrate), Étienne Filiat-Duclaux, determined that Enjolas had visited the inn on October 12, 1831, whilst looking for a lost heifer and had not been seen since. On October 25, the magistrate arrived at the Martins' to investigate the disappearance of Enjolas, whose body was found next day on the banks of the Allier River a few kilometres from the inn, his skull smashed and his knee crushed. Pierre Martin and his nephew André Martin were arrested on November 1, 1831. The Martins' servant, Jean Rochette (nicknamed "Fetiche") - incorrectly described in romantic literature as a South American mulatto, but actually a (well-tanned) native of the Ardèche) - was arrested the next day. Marie Martin was not arrested until later because the authorities did not believe at first that a woman could be a murderer.