Lucien Jean Baptiste Bersot (June 7, 1881 - February 13, 1915) was a French soldier executed for refusing to wear trousers that had belonged to a dead person.

However, the general staff judging this regiment not very active had just entrusted its command, on January 22, 1915, to Lieutenant-Colonel François Maurice Auroux, a former member of the African troops, responsible for whipping the unit into shape.

Shivering from the cold in the trenches, he asked on February 11, 1915, the quartermaster, for red woollen trousers (le pantalon rouge) identical to those worn by his comrades.

[1] Two companions of the condemned man (Elie Cottet-Dumoulin and Mohn André) then intervened with the lieutenant-colonel to try to soften the sentence, but were not heard and saw themselves punished in turn with forced labour in North Africa.

Colonel Auroux was implicated for having acted completely illegally, being both the accuser and the president of the court-martial, and causing the imposition of a sentence disproportionate to the fault (violation of article 24 of the Code of military justice ascertained by the Court of Appeal of Besançon, the April 10, 1922.

A stele located near the church of Fontenoy (Aisne), inaugurated in November 1994, pays homage to Lucien Bersot and to another shot for the example: the soldier Léonard Leymarie of the 305th infantry regiment, executed on December 12, 1914, under the pretext of giving himself a self-inflicted wound (according to the data of a medical report), an act for which he had always protested his innocence (he had been injured in the hand in his post as a lookout; however, many cases of voluntary mutilation consisted of holding a lit cigarette in the hollow of the hand-stretched over the parapet of the trench).

This plaque, inaugurated on November 11, 2009, honours the memory of Lucien Bersot and that of another soldier, Elie Cottet-Dumoulin, a tinsmith worker from Battant, condemned to ten years in prison for having protested against the sanction which struck his comrade in the regiment.