The Courtesan and the Gigolo: The Murders in the Rue Montaigne and the Dark Side of Empire in Nineteenth-Century Paris

by Aaron Freundschuh

Overview

The intrigue began with a triple homicide in a luxury apartment building just steps from the Champs-Elyseés, in March 1887. A high-class prostitute and two others, one of them a child, had been stabbed to death—the latest in a string of unsolved murders targeting women of the Parisian demimonde. Newspapers eagerly reported the lurid details, and when the police arrested Enrico Pranzini, a charismatic and handsome Egyptian migrant, the story became an international sensation. As the case descended into scandal and papers fanned the flames of anti-immigrant politics, the investigation became thoroughly enmeshed with the crisis-driven political climate of the French Third Republic and the rise of xenophobic right-wing movements.

Aaron Freundschuh's account of the "Pranzini Affair" recreates not just the intricacies of the investigation and the raucous courtroom trial, but also the jockeying for status among rival players—reporters, police detectives, doctors, and magistrates—who all stood to gain professional advantage and prestige. Freundschuh deftly weaves together the sensational details of the case with the social and political undercurrents of the time, arguing that the racially charged portrayal of Pranzini reflects a mounting anxiety about the colonial "Other" within France's own borders. Pranzini's case provides a window into a transformational decade for the history of immigration, nationalism, and empire in France.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781503600157
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	01/11/2017
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Aaron Freundschuh is Assistant Professor of History at Queens College, City University of New York.

Table of Contents

Contents and Abstracts

1Elite Cosmopolitanism and Gentrification in Western Paris
chapter abstract

This chapter traces the historical geography of western and west-central Paris in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with particular attention to the neighborhood near the lower Champs-Elysées and the Rue Montaigne, site of the horrific triple homicide that is the book's main focus. The chapter introduces themes pertaining to spatial divisions of modern Paris, highlighting the process of gentrification and the embedding of cosmopolitan and bourgeois social elements in the area. The Paris of Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann reinforced the very fantasies of social-spatial purity that the Pranzini arrest would upend.

2The Crime Scene
chapter abstract

This chapter tightens the narrative focus around the March 1887 date of the murders and visits the crime scene. The chapter introduces important early investigative findings, as well as the central investigators in the case: the crime reporter Georges Grison, Chief of Security Taylor, Deputy-Chief Goron, the magistrate Adolphe Guillot, and Dr. Paul Brouardel, the renowned forensics doctor and anatomist. The investigative rivalries among these men constitute a narrative arc running through the book. The Pranzini case was considered vital to attempts on the part of the police to fix its tattered reputation as it attempted to "professionalize" in the 1880s and 1890s.

3A Reporter's Ambition: Georges Grison and the Rise of Investigative Crime Reporting in Paris
chapter abstract

This chapter constitutes the first historical treatment of an important figure in the rise of investigative reporting in Paris: Georges Grison. For decades a fixture at Parisian crime scenes, Grison toiled as a lowly crime reporter of the fait-divers newspaper genre. The argument is that Grison—a deft professional networker, scandal-monger and controversial press advocate who published under the pen name Jean de Paris—pioneered new journalistic techniques as part of an ethos of investigation that appealed to readers of the mass press. Working under the protection of press freedoms guaranteed by the Third Republic and seeing in this case a unique opportunity, Grison used this case to challenge the limits of printable news and the role of the press in investigating crime.

4The Courtesan's Objects: Sexual Danger and the High Life of the Demimonde
chapter abstract

This chapter retraces the public fascination with, and the police investigation of, Marie Regnault's early life, as well as her rise in the demimonde. How was the life of a courtesan measured by Regnault's contemporaries? Did her murder constitute a mournful public tragedy? Regnault's murder is situated alongside other unsolved cases involving demimondaines going back to 1879. A novel angle on the strategies of the demimonde is in evidence in the so-called "secret archives" of the Vice Squad—a powerful investigative division overseen by Taylor and Goron—as well as in the material history of sex work that unfolded in Paris's most prestigious auction house, the Hôtel Drouot, where Regnault's own belongings were sold one year after her murder.

5Colonial Picaresque: The Trans-Mediterranean Investigation of a Migrant
chapter abstract

This chapter pieces together the Rue Montaigne investigation's eastward movements through diplomatic, military, and political sources. The French diplomatic corps's pursuit of Pranzini's past—ostensibly undertaken to determine his prior criminal activity and his whereabouts going back to 1879—produced a wealth of data relative to Pranzini's family history, which is here contextualized within the broader historical trend of European colonial migration and settlement in the East during the nineteenth century. In Alexandria, a magnet for southern European colonial settlers, social hierarchies and racial tensions helped transform the exonym "Levantine" into a pejorative—a category that Pranzini, a product of the French empire in important respects, was coming simultaneously to embody in Paris.

6Criminal Detection as Colonial War by other Means: Investigative Claims on the Latin-American Rastaquouère
chapter abstract

This chapter proceeds along two parallel tracks while carrying the case narrative forward to the interrogation phase. In order to understand how the Pranzini case impacted the investigative imagination in Paris, the chapter picks up Chapter One's discussion of the stakes of the investigation for Security, arguing that this case was an important moment in the agency's history. This was because Deputy Chief, a veteran of colonial settlement and war, saw in the investigation's colonial dimension an opportunity to valorize the colonial experience and culture that were a source of pride within Security's ranks. Pranzini, meanwhile, was held up as an example of a "rastaquouère," a racialized colonial category that evoked European settlement in South America, unwanted social backwash, and forms of criminality such as sex trafficking.

7The Trial of a Gigolo: Intimacy, Foreignness, and the Boulangist Crisis
chapter abstract

The Pranzini was an extraordinarily rowdy event, replete with outbursts of laughter that are the subject of this chapter's inquiry. Linking the trial to the rise of General Georges Boulanger and the early coalescence of right-wing factions into a movement known to historians as the "New Right," the chapter argues that Pranzini—as a foreigner coded as an infiltrator and sexual threat—became a convenient target for modern French political xenophobia. As a gigolo, Pranzini was typed as risible, effeminate, and recognizable on the butte of Montmartre; at the same time, he infused that social type with hints of the exotic that could appeal to independent-minded Parisian women.

8The Skin Affair: Punishment and the Colonial Body
chapter abstract

Chapter Eight recounts the grotesque aftermath of Pranzini's guilty verdict. Georges Grison's revelation that Taylor, Goron, and one of their underlings were each in possession of souvenirs fashioned from the post-cranial cadaver of Enrico Pranzini set off a chain of events that led to the stunning fall of Jules Grévy. More than a sensational anecdote, the so-called "Skin Affair" nourished debates about the procedures surrounding the death penalty, the punishment of the colonial body, and the right of death-row convicts to exempt their cadavers from posthumous medical research.

Conclusion: On Imperial Insecurity
chapter abstract

The Conclusion revisits the notion that for Parisians in the 1880s, the political themes of criminality and colonial empire were intimately tied. The Pranzini case took social theorists like Gabriel Tarde aback. At the same time, other unwanted reverberations from overseas dealt fatal blows to the careers of pro-colonial politicians like Ferry. Empire's promise of security and stability was left most wanting as it pertained to discourses on crime. In the months following the Pranzini Affair, Enrico Pranzini's name officially entered the French parliamentary record. Xenophobic politicians cited his example in their re-framing of immigration as an imperial question; they cited his example, and the press coverage of the case, as justifications for a stricter regime of immigrant control—one that would endure for generations.

Editorial Reviews

★ 01/23/2017
Freundschuh, a history professor at CUNY, expertly integrates broader geopolitical themes into a compelling true crime story about a series of now-obscure murders that at the time were the talk of Paris. The narrative begins in 1887 with the bloody slaughter of Madame de Montille, a high-class prostitute, and two members of her household, presumed to be the latest in a string of murders targeting “women of the Parisian demimonde.” The arrest a few days later of an Egyptian immigrant named Enrico Pranzini garnered international media attention. The story of the investigation, Pranzini’s apprehension, his eventual trial, and its dramatic resolution are enthralling, and the context for those events gives this work contemporary relevance. The political fallout from the Pranzini case included a push for tighter immigration controls and increased insecurity in the French homeland, even as the Third Republic’s imperial ambitions thrived. This well-reasoned analysis is eminently readable and accessible for those with absolutely no background in the period. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"The Courtesan and the Gigolo presents a fascinating history of late nineteenth-century Paris as it was becoming a cosmopolitan seat of a transnational empire. Aaron Freundschuh explores questions of criminality, sexual deviance, and national identity as they gripped a society both fearful and desirous of exotic masculinity, and all that colonialism introduced. Its parallels with our own time are chilling."

Santa Cruz - Tyler Stovall

"The arguably seminal role of the Panzini affair in the consolidation of the fin-de-siècle New Right is only one example of Freundschuh's deft contextualization of a minor incident in French history. This book is the rare contribution to French history that is gripping and readable enough for the general reader, or for an undergraduate course, but which is detailed and nuanced enough for research or use in a graduate course."

The French Review - Melanie Conroy

"An intriguing tale, told with insight...a good read about the great city in a time of transition."—John Merriman, Yale University, author of Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune


"Aaron Freundschuh's investigation of the Pranzini case stretches the limits of the genre, illuminating the urban landscape, social life, and political context of 1880s Paris and the role of the so-called 'demi-monde' in the French imaginary. His concept of 'imperial insecurity' is a major insight that brightly renews our understanding of fin-de-siècle societies."—Dominique Kalifa, Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne


"The Courtesan and the Gigolo presents a fascinating history of late nineteenth-century Paris as it was becoming a cosmopolitan seat of a transnational empire. Aaron Freundschuh explores questions of criminality, sexual deviance, and national identity as they gripped a society both fearful and desirous of exotic masculinity, and all that colonialism introduced. Its parallels with our own time are chilling."—Tyler Stovall, University of California, Santa Cruz


"This well-reasoned analysis is eminently readable and accessible for those with absolutely no background in the period."—Starred Review Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

"[Pranzini's] case caused cultural currents and careers to intersect in ways that both reflected and reinforced the political turmoil and social tensions of the time. Freundschuh's adept use of microhistory succeeds in exposing the decade's complexities through one galvanizing cause célèbre...Freundschuh's careful reconstruction of the Pranzini affair both achieves and justifies its rescue from historical oblivion."

H-France review - Susan A. Ashley

"Aaron Freundschuh's investigation of the Pranzini case stretches the limits of the genre, illuminating the urban landscape, social life, and political context of 1880s Paris and the role of the so-called 'demi-monde' in the French imaginary. His concept of 'imperial insecurity' is a major insight that brightly renews our understanding of fin-de-siècle societies."

Universityé Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne - Dominique Kalifa

"An intriguing tale, told with insight...a good read about the great city in a time of transition."

Yale University, author of Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune - John Merriman

"In The Courtesan and the Gigolo, Aaron Freundschuh explores the brutal murders of Marie Regnault (forty years old), Annette Gremeret (early forties), and Marie Gremeret (twelve years old), as well as the execution of the man convicted of killing them, Enrico Pranzini, who may have been innocent. Freundschuh convincingly argues that the entire affair serves as an entrée into the broader forces that shaped the history of the early Third Republic, including late-nineteenth-century migration patterns, powerful gender norms, colonial expansion, the rise of the mass press, and shifts in policing and medical practices. The murders and ensuing trial made huge news in 1887, and the compelling story that Freundschuh tells at once humanizes the people involved and reconstructs the world in which they lived."

American Historical Review - Caroline Campbell