In October 1996 a visiting carpenter saw Johnny, then aged four, in a farmhouse in the Vosges, eastern France. The child wore dirty, torn pyjamas. His face was so bruised and swollen that he could not open his right eye.
In front of the carpenter, Mrs Marie-France Coq, the owner of the farm, slapped the boy for no apparent reason. He was in the habit of wetting his bed, his mother, Mrs Sandra Grenglet, explained. Mr Rene Grenglet, who adopted the illegitimate boy when he married Sandra, boasted to the craftsman that he would beat Johnny "until his eyes popped out". The carpenter alerted the gendarmes, who arrested all of the adults on the farm.
Johnny's case ended at the weekend with the conviction of seven French adults for "acts of torture and barbarity committed in a habitual manner on a minor under the age of 15", "failure to care for and feed [the child]" and "failure to denounce a crime".
A chilling tale of incest and cruelty, passed on from generation to generation in a family marginalised by alcoholism and unemployment, of the sick dynamic that took hold of the group, turning Johnny into their shared scapegoat and laughing-stock, emerged from the crowded courtroom in Epinal.
"It was like a game", Mrs Coq's daughter-in-law, Muriel, told the gendarmes who liberated Johnny. "It made a good atmosphere in the house . . . It made us laugh." The French public was fascinated by the backward, matriarchal tribe which lived on Mrs Coq's farm; "little Johnny" came to symbolise all the battered children in the country.
For four months after the birth of his half-sister, Cindy, in 1996, Johnny spent his days standing in the kitchen corner. Each time he moved he was slapped, kicked or hit with a strap, casserole dish or broomstick. When the adults ate and watched television in the dining room in the evening, they slapped him each time they walked through the kitchen.
The boy was barely fed, was not washed and had no toys, bed, sheets or blankets, only a piece of foam rubber to sleep on. At various times he was tied to a chair or a pole in the barn, or shut inside cupboards, the chicken coop or the pig-sty. As a joke, the adults once forced Johnny to swallow an entire jar of jam. Another time, Mrs Coq made him drink undiluted Ricard pastis.
Sandra Grenglet, now 25, sobbed in the dock when her mother, an illiterate woman named Jocelyne, told the court how her own half-brother and longtime lover, Mr Claude Virot, repeatedly beat and raped their daughter at knifepoint when she was a child.
Mr Virot served two prison sentences for molesting Sandra Grenglet, yet she still calls him "Papa" and he shared a bedroom with the Grenglet couple and their two infant children. At the trial, psychiatrists testified that Mrs Grenglet merely repeated the violence done to her by her own uncle/father. Like Johnny Mr Virot, now 57, was called a "bastard" and forced to eat from a dog dish as a child.
Psychiatric experts engaged in a public debate over whether Johnny, who is almost seven and lives in a foster home now, should attend his parents' trial. Some said it would help the boy shed his status as a victim and his own feelings of guilt, a phenomenon with battered children.
Opponents argued that a confrontation with his tormentors could further damage the child, possibly making him feel responsible for their conviction and imprisonment.
The boy came to the trial once, on September 30th. He sat in the front row, snuggled up against a social worker, his face buried in his teddy bear. Johnny shot several quick glances at his mother; witnesses were struck by the strong resemblance between the blonde, blue-eyed woman and the boy. Mrs Grenglet stared at him and began crying. After five minutes, Johnny asked to leave the courtroom.
Late on Friday night the jury exceeded the prosecutor's recommendations by handing down a total of 50 years in prison sentences for Johnny's four chief tormentors, including 15 years for Mrs Grenglet. Mr Virot received a two-year suspended sentence for failing to go to the authorities. Children's defence groups say there are 20,000 ill-treated minors in France.
A French court will hear a request by convicted Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon today that he be spared the required night in jail before his appeal.
Papon was convicted in 1998 of ordering the arrest for deportation of 1,560 Jews between 1942 and 1944.