The trial of Abbe Jean-Yves Cottard, a fundamentalist Catholic priest charged with manslaughter and negligence in the 1998 drowning of four boy scouts and a yachtsman was to end last night in Guingamp, Brittany.
Three judges will hand down their verdict before the end of the year. If found guilty, the 52-year-old priest could be sentenced to five years in prison and a Ffr 500,000 (£60,024) fine.
The case is known as "the drama of Perros-Guirec", after the strip of rocky Breton coast where a sailing boat carrying seven boys between the ages of 12 and 16 capsized on July 22nd, 1998.
All were enrolled at a summer camp run with military-like discipline by Abbe Cottard. During his two-day trial, it emerged that the seaside camp had no qualified sailing instructors, that Abbe Cottard ignored storm warnings and filled boats that were supposed to carry a maximum of six people with seven to eight boys - without an adult supervisor.
He waited until 10 p.m. to notify local authorities that the boat was missing, by which time the boys had been lost at sea for nine hours.
The presiding magistrate read aloud the deposition of Benoit d'Andre, one of the survivors. "We were all hanging on to the overturned keel, and the current was carrying us out to sea," the boy recounted.
"Jean-Baptiste Pruvost was the first to let go. I held on to his hand for about an hour. He didn't have the strength to grip the boat. A wave swept him away from me."
Holding a Latin prayer book, Abbe Cottard seemed remorseless on the first day of his trial. Yesterday he changed tone slightly, admitting that he "was not sufficiently conscious of my incompetence".
On Monday evening, he had thanked two Paris magistrates whose yacht rescued the shipwrecked boys in the dark, saving three of them.
A third yachtsman, Guillaume Castanet (30), lost his balance and drowned in the operation. Neither the priest nor the boys' families had previously thanked the rescuers.
Mr Castanet's mother brought the case to court by suing the priest for manslaughter and negligence. The mother of one of the dead boys has joined in the lawsuit.
But the other parents sided with Abbe Cottard. When he was briefly jailed after the boating accident, they petitioned for his freedom, saying "to be deprived of our abbot in these painful hours is a grief perhaps even greater than the loss of our children."
At a memorial service in July, the abbe blamed the press for his trial and warned the parents against going to court against him.
Abbe Cottard is a member of the Saint Pius X fraternity, part of the French Lefebvrist movement which broke away from the mainstream Catholic Church in the 1970s. The Lefebvrists rejected the reforms of Vatican II and celebrate Mass in Latin.
Abbe Cottard's youth group several times staged joint rallies with the extreme right-wing National Front.
In a 1992 booklet - which also contained a "message from the National Front" - the priest said he told parents who entrusted their boys to him: "Don't worry. I have two extraordinary insurance policies. The first one is `Saint Joseph insurance' and it works very well. The second is a `24-hour guardian angel' and that works well also. For the only recourse is to have faith in God."