No Spark of Malice - The Murder of Martin Begnaud (Hardcover, illustrated edition)

No Spark of Malice is the riveting tale of the impact Martin Begnaud's murder and the ensuing trial had on his large and prominent family, on the Acadians -- or "Cajuns" -- of southwest Louisiana, and on the village of Scott Station at the end of the nineteenth century.

On April 22, 1896, the forty-five-year-old Begnaud was brutally murdered in his general store in rural Scott Station, Louisiana. He was bound, gagged, blindfolded, stabbed more than fifty times, and robbed of several thousand dollars. Such sensational events were not supposed to occur in hamlets like Scott Station, and word of the gruesome crime circulated quickly through the largely Acadian parish and all of south Louisiana.

Two men were soon arrested for the killing. But the evidence against them was purely circumstantial, and as the suspects insisted on their innocence through months of harsh treatment, some observers began to believe the true murderers were still at large. Ten months after Begnaud's death, the initial widespread shock and hysteria reemerged when the teenage Blanc brothers, Ernest and Alexis, were arrested for the crime. Polite, educated, and popular, the Blancs were orphans from France who had worked on a local plantation.

To relate vividly the effects of this defining event, William Arceneaux sets the story against the backdrop of Acadian history from the 1604 establishment of a French colony in the Canadian maritime provinces to le Grand Derangement, the ruthless expulsion of the Acadians from Nova Scotia during the French and Indian War. He also examines the arrival of the Acadian diaspora in the then-Spanish colony of Louisiana and the eventual creation of a "New Acadia" among its swamps,marshes, river valleys, and prairies.

The aftermath of the murder of Martin Begnaud resulted in one of the most electrifying trials in the history of the American South. There was high courtroom drama, frontier-style, with a cast of unforgettable characters, and the fate of the Blanc brothers received international attention. By intertwining a suspenseful account of a murder and its repercussions with a thorough analysis of the history of the citizens the crime most affected, No Spark of Malice provides insight into a fascinating yet overlooked people, place, and era.