The Courtesan and the Gigolo: The Murders in the Rue Montaigne and the Dark Side of Empire in Nineteenth-Century Paris
272
The Courtesan and the Gigolo: The Murders in the Rue Montaigne and the Dark Side of Empire in Nineteenth-Century Paris
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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: | 9781503600973 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/11/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Sales rank: | 837,429 |
| File size: | 12 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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Read an Excerpt
The Courtesan and the Gigolo
The Murders in the Rue Montaigne and the Dark Side of Empire in Nineteenth-Century Paris
By Aaron Freundschuh
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2017 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5036-0097-3
CHAPTER 1
Elite Cosmopolitanism and Gentrification in Western Paris
The murders in the rue Montaigne delivered a collective shock that was, at the outset at least, primarily due to the address of the crime scene. The area around the lower Champs-Elysées was a Milky Way of gorgeous limestone-fronted construction and high living. The newspaper reporter Georges Grison described the neighborhood's social character as "semi-bourgeois, semi-aristocratic," for it stood at the crossroads of modern cosmopolitan, aristocratic, and republican cultures. As Grison knew better than anyone, these factors would inform the authorities' investigation just as they colored the newspaper coverage of the murders in fundamental ways. The city's last sensational multiple homicide, the Troppmann murders of 1869, were every bit as gruesome and involved even more victims. Yet the rue Montaigne case was categorically different, Grison concluded. Whereas the Troppmann tragedy had taken place in the middle of a "deserted field" on the industrial fringe to the city's northeast, the 1887 murders upended an "elegant quarter."
THE NEIGHBORHOOD had not always been so pristine, to say the least. Just four decades earlier, a coalition of local businessmen and residents had banded together in a petition to brush up the neighborhood's image. At that time, and for as long as anyone could remember, the tree-lined path that intersected the lower roundabout of the Champs-Elysées had been known as Allée des Veuves (Widows' Alley). Despite the whiff of the macabre, the name's origins lie in an odd sort of euphemism, one that by the late 1840s had begun to seem coarse to the new waves of people settling there.
That was because the path's reputation was that of a notorious axis of the Parisian night, until recently embedded in an otherwise pastoral area. Back in the eighteenth century the lower Champs-Elysées was, by day, a pleasurable promenade, where fashionable members of high society removed themselves from the stench and gargoyles of central Paris. But at sundown a different crowd set upon the place to engage in unsavory commerce and revelry.
Yes, the petitioners conceded, the lower Champs-Elysées had long served as a "discreet haven for sex of a more or less delicate nature." In fact, the area was neither delicate nor terribly discreet, the absence of lights notwithstanding. Generations of Parisian whores — the aforementioned "widows" — gathered along the path at night, alongside "libertines" and scofflaws who took advantage of its rustic character.
In earlier times the area had been a marshy green with a higgledy-piggledy collection of plots, plantations dotted with farmers' huts, and, farther out, a few hamlets; tree nurseries and thatched houses provided cover for the denizens' adventures in congress. At night they sneaked past the city limit just beyond the Tuileries and the place de la Concorde, where the name Champs-Elysées was bestowed upon a muddy slope with an unguessed destiny. The heterosexual and homosexual prostitution that persisted in the brothels around the Champs-Elysées well into the nineteenth century were an open secret, as the petitioners pointed out. Out alone for a walk one evening in the early 1830s, the young Victor Hugo chanced upon Widows' Alley. Hugo was reciting his own poetry aloud when a lookout man, stationed on Widows' Alley to protect the homosexuals gathering, warded off the unwanted visitor.
Our petitioners were adept in the jargon of development and progress, and their demand was straightforward. They wanted the prefect to scratch "Widows' Alley" from the map. In those days, Parisians thought of their city as a work in progress much more than as a historic jewel to be preserved. Like every nascent political regime, developers and neighborhood groups saw the renaming of streets as a potent and inexpensive means of reconstituting the city and eliminating untoward echoes of the past, naughty or otherwise.
The petitioners were probably aware that the terrain situated roughly midway between the place de la Concorde and the Étoile was a perennial target of revamping schemes, both substantial and cosmetic, that aimed at the creation of a suburban zone of upper-crust entertainments. These attempts often ended in comic failure, which is a little puzzling given the desirable location. The most grandiose flop of all was Le Colisée de Paris, a massive open-air venue designed by the famed architect Le Camus de Mézières and wedged between Widows' Alley and the Champs-Elysées in the 1770s. Envisioned as an answer to London's successful Vauxhall Gardens, the rotunda structure housed dance halls and shops. It attracted the likes of Marie-Antoinette, but then languished and went bankrupt after just a decade.
Then arrived another developer with a grand vision, Marie-Antoinette's brother-in-law, the swashbuckling, debt-ridden Count d'Artois, brother of future King Louis XVI. He called his plan for the land Nouvelle Amérique. At its center would be the place Benjamin Franklin, with surrounding streets named in honor of other American revolutionary heroes. Before it could be developed, the French Revolution of 1789 intervened: The count's property was seized, along with a large parcel of land belonging to the Catholic Church and situated due west of Widows' Alley.
Predictably the count soured on revolutionaries of all stripes during his long exile. Decades later, as the ultraconservative Restoration King Charles X, he ordered the erection of a statue of Louis XV on horseback in the middle of the Rond Point des Champs-Elysées (this time the 1830 revolution forced him to abdicate, and the statue was not completed). In the meantime, France's first roller coasters (montagnes russes, as they were known: "Russian mountains") had been constructed as part of an amusement park on an adjacent property first developed by Nicolas Beaujon, a provincial financier who had gotten rich under the ancien régime. There were safety issues at the park, however, and after a war commissary fractured his skull in an accident, the police outlawed risky thrill seeking for a time. It hardly mattered. Paris's growth made speculation and further residential settlement in the area a foregone conclusion. The city's population, which doubled twice between 1789 and 1914, began to burst through the fortification walls. More developers swooped in, and a cosmopolitan neighborhood grew up where Beaujon's park had entertained an international crowd (Russian soldiers had briefly camped on the Champs-Elysées after Napoleon I's defeat).
The foul reputation of Widows' Alley survived nonetheless, thanks to Eugène Sue's novel about the urban underworld, Les mystères de Paris (1842–1843), an international sensation that is still read today. Sue used the path, almost from the first page, as the setting for underhanded conspiracies, thereby cementing Widows' Alley in popular lore.
It was then that the petitioners moved to control the damage.
To hear them tell it, the cleanup around the Rond-Point des Champs-Elysées had already been so thorough that Widows' Alley was no longer consonant with the quarter's social milieu, a gentry who, it was implied, kept their prostitutes indoors, and who were more used to reading about criminality in the press than acknowledging it in their midst. They assured the prefect in their petition that the spread of "law-abiding lifestyles has erased the memory of another age's loose morals. With the Champs-Elysées having now become, as was its mythological destiny, a retreat for pure spirits, we believe that the infamy of Widows' Alley has been buried beneath the ruins of the little houses that formerly lined it."
The petitioners proposed avenue Montaigne to replace Widows' Alley, a choice that requires some explaining, given that a small portion of Widows' Alley that shot directly off the other side of the Rond-Point des Champs-Elysées had been spruced up lately and had been renamed avenue Matignon. Logically, then, the petitioners could have requested that their portion of the old path be treated as a continuation of it. Instead, they expressed a wish to be attached, if only symbolically, to the rue Montaigne, a tiny spoke that rose in a northerly direction rather at odds with Widows' Alley.
The calculation behind their choice to connect to the rue Montaigne was limpid enough to any observer. It was because the rue Montaigne anchored the modern, prosperous neighborhood then taking form in the lower Champs-Elysées. In its salons commingled old blood and new money, high culture and hints of the elite cosmopolitanism that enticed artists and financiers from all corners of the earth. Planned back in 1795 and cut into the ground where the Colisée de Paris had been, the street stood a mere 300 meters in length, straight as a pin and just wide enough to fit two large carriages side by side. During the course of the nineteenth century it gained a reputation as a quiet residential jewel, an enviable enclave of comfort and affluence for any neighborhood association to emulate. In its modest-sized buildings, poets with their mistresses frolicked, politicians conspired, and diplomats fraternized.
The prefect approved the proposal, and the avenue Montaigne was born.
Critics recognized the name change for what it was: a whitewashing by neighborhood actors who were bent on socially rebranding the place. The disappearance of Widows' Alley augured the extinction of the underground in this part of the city, and it left the writer Paul Féval with a bout of nostalgie de la boue that also afflicted some of his colleagues. Féval grumbled that "self-respecting people" would "still call it Widows' Alley." Before long, he embarked on a career as a successful crime novelist in the mold of Eugène Sue.
BY THE LATE 1840S, bankers, brokers, industrialists, lawyers, investors, and developers had amassed great wealth and were taking credit for Paris's transformation into the world's largest manufacturing city. Brimming with confidence, they changed the rules and set about building what soon would be known as the "new" Paris. It was they who had put Louis-Philippe on the throne back in 1830. As though in acknowledgment of his debt to them, the king became the only French monarch ever to don the three-piece suit, the bourgeois costume par excellence. It would not be enough to save him during the revolutionary upheaval of 1848, when he fled to Britain disguised as a peasant.
It was amid the bumpy and unforeseen regression from the so-called bourgeois monarchy to a Bonapartist regime that the Widows' Alley petition was published. The timing could not have been better.
Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon I's nephew, assumed the title Emperor Napoleon III when he revived the family name and founded the Second Empire (1852–1870). Like his uncle, Napoleon III had not spent a significant period of time in Paris before adulthood, so he was not burdened by a nostalgia that might have checked his controversial and thoroughgoing urbanism. He hired a seasoned prefect, Baron Haussmann, who liked to call himself a "demolition artist."
Scrambling to absorb what was still largely an internally French migration, the duo felled enormous tracts of the built environment, annexed the city's surrounding terrains, expanded to the twenty arrondissements of today — the Champs-Elysées is the linchpin of the 8th arrondissement. The winding alleyways of medieval Paris gave way to wide corridors and attractive apartment buildings whose ornate facades glowed and smiled when looked upon by the springtime sun.
Napoleon le petit, as Hugo called the usurping nephew, also tried his hand at foreign invasion, but he possessed none of his uncle's military genius. Both Bonapartes made indelible marks on western Paris: Napoleon I made the Champs-Elysées into an axis of military commemoration, with the Arc de Triomphe (completed in the 1830s) built on the raised roundabout on the avenue's western end; Napoleon III had a taste for monumental construction too, but he was just as interested in the more quotidian matters of dwelling space, traffic, and parks. His work around the lower Champs-Elysées made it welcoming to neighborhood children, who used it as a park for recreation. By the mid-1860s the staggering elegance of it all nearly palliated the experience of capitalist authoritarianism. Great artists, more than they had ever before, appreciated the Parisian landscape as a subject worthy of high art.
The Grands Boulevards, the regime's crowning achievement, offered sight lines to the first modernist painters, the Impressionists, who chronicled the rise of the bourgeoisie in the 2nd, 8th, and 9th arrondissements. The boulevards drew these parcels together, easing the commute between the stock exchange, banks, theaters, and nightlife. Understandably, elites fancied Haussmann's boulevards as their "fiefdom," as the journalist Gustave Claudin recalled. "By virtue of a selection that was contested by nobody, one was admitted only on the basis of a superiority or originality of one sort or another. It was as though there existed an invisible moral barrier that denied access to this stretch of land to the people of mediocrity, insignificance, and colorlessness."
Small wonder, then, that around the same time Parisians began to speak of artistic modernism, they also coined the term embourgeoisement, which predates its English equivalent, gentrification, by roughly a century. Embourgeoisement (an overliteral translation of the term would be "bourgeoisification") referred to the perceptible segregation of the city by social class. Real estate speculation drove up prices, and rents soared. In policy terms, social homogenization was not an unintended consequence of Haussmannization but instead one of its goals; housing for the poor in the city's center came under the pickax with nothing proposed to replace it. The real estate market around the Champs-Elysées skyrocketed.
By the time Madame Régine de Montille moved there in the mid-1880s from an apartment near the Grands Boulevards, such a decampment would have demanded little adaption in social terms and no obstacles as it pertained to everyday movement about town. In the afternoon initiates of high society, le monde, congregated in gilded carriages around the Champs-Elysées and cruised together; in the evening they rolled up the rue des Martyrs and went slumming in Montmartre's bohemian taverns.
Society painters who were in search of quarters unmarked by social tension gravitated to the 8th arrondissement. One thinks of two paintings signed in the politically turbulent year of 1877, when the crisis of 16 May nearly brought the Third Republic to an end. Gustave Caillebotte's masterwork, Paris Street; Rainy Day, fixes the viewer's gaze on the sheen of prim streets, well-brushed shoes, and the small-bore dramas of the New Paris — a crush of oversize umbrellas passing on a narrow sidewalk. The second painting, Jean Béraud's Sunday at the Church of Saint-Philippe-du-Roule, Paris, lauds the city's incorporation and rapid development of the old farming hamlet of Roule. The sociability of the lower Champs-Elysées was a favorite subject of Béraud's, and in Sunday he conveys the church's well-turned-out parishioners, of whom Madame de Montille would soon became one. The parishioners are exiting the church after mass. A little girl stands closest to us in the foreground, clasping a woman's hand and preparing to cross the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, where, a short walk in the other direction, Émile Hermès would soon resettle his father's award-winning harness shop, thereby signaling the brand's — and the neighborhood's — pivot toward the global market in luxury design and fashion. Behind the little girl, men's top hats stretch against a dense and distinctly modern fabric: billboard advertisements, storefronts, and a packed omnibus hurtling where regal saplings had sprouted not long before.
WHAT THE RESIDENTS of the rue Montaigne thought of the old alley's rechristening is unknown. They were content not to call much attention to themselves. In sex as in politics, the outwardly sedate street was an exemplar of discretion and normalcy, with its horse stable, post office, wine seller, and small hotels. Tastefully understated, the rue Montaigne was rarely remarked on as anything other than a "peaceful" passage up from the Champs-Elysées.
For that reason it was an ideal site for sexual trysts in the modern style. When the Romantic poet Alfred de Vigny, a friend of Hugo's, fell in love with the acclaimed actress Marie Dorval, he rented a flat at number 18 for their lovemaking sessions; because both were married, they relied on the building's doorman as a go-between for their erotic correspondence and for news of each other during cholera outbreaks. The street was also home to child pensioners, salonnières, military brass, and well-heeled foreign families, including that of the German composer Giacomo Meyerbeer.
Henry James wistfully recalled his experience as a boy in that idyll where he discovered Flaubert's recently published novel, Madame Bovary: "the sunny little salon, the autumn day, the window ajar and the cheerful outside clatter of the Rue Montaigne are all now more or less in the story and the story more or less in them." But the James family discovered that the clean air and quietude came with exorbitant rent bills. After the stock market crash of 1857, the expense grew unbearable. James called it his "long term of thrifty exile" from the rue Montaigne.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Courtesan and the Gigolo by Aaron Freundschuh. Copyright © 2017 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents and Abstracts1Elite Cosmopolitanism and Gentrification in Western Paris chapter abstractThis 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 abstractThis 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 abstractThis 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 abstractThis 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 abstractThis 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 abstractThis 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 abstractThe 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 abstractChapter 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 abstractThe 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.