The night of St. Jean's Eve, June 23, is the occasion in France of fireworks, bonfires and merrymaking. In bustling Perpignan, a city of 70,000 near the Spanish border, the holiday was celebrated as usual last year. But not everyone was amused. Jean Amiel, 37, who taught English at the local lycée, rushed to quiet his five-year-old daughter when she awoke crying, after youngsters had slipped firecrackers through the letter slot in Amiel's door and they exploded in the hall. He went to the open window, glimpsed five boys and two girls running laughing down the street. Said Amiel later: "I saw only silhouettes. I didn't recognize any of the children. Suddenly I got the idea of surprising them or frightening them with a shot. I fired haphazardly. I never intended, not for a moment, to kill anyone."
But he did. The bullet from Amiel's revolver struck one of his pupils, Alain Rolland, 16, in the back of the head and killed him. Standing trial in Perpignan's sunlit Palais de Justice, Amiel was asked why he did not fire into the air. "It goes without saying," he answered, "that I regret not having fired in the air." Teacher Amiel refused to make excuses, would not plead overwork at the end of the term, nervous strain in trying to pay for his new house, harassment by the students. He said sternly: "A teacher can never have sufficient provocation to kill a child."
Courtroom Cry. More than a score of witnesses and court-appointed psychiatrists testified that Amiel showed no traces of mental unbalance, was regarded as a dedicated teacher and a man of serene disposition. The jury apparently took into consideration Amiel's wanly pretty wife, his small daughter, and the fact that his father had just died, grief-stricken at the collapse of Amiel's future, and that his mother was near death. Amiel was sentenced to two years in prison.
From the crowded courtroom came a cry: "Assassin!" Snapped the judge: "Remove that woman at once." A lawyer answered: "It is the mother of Alain Rolland," and no one moved. As Jean Amiel went back to his cell, where he had been reading Milton's Paradise Lost, his wife was escorted out of town by police to protect her from the townspeople. But this was not the end of the affair.
The father of the dead student, Eugène Rolland, 52, a bank official, could not be comforted by his wife or his remaining son, 14-year-old Michel. He considered the verdict an "affront," complained that some of the witnesses had hinted that Alain got only what he deserved, railed against the "bandit" Amiel, whose life was supposedly dedicated to children and who had betrayed his trust.