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Though Paris grew and prospered, the national government was perennially unstable. Unsure of how long the Third Republic would last, Parisians believed, in the words of one, that they were “dancing on a volcano.” 39
The execution of President Sadi Carnot’s assassin was soon followed by the most severe internal crisis France faced during the Third Republic. The false accusation of a Jewish military officer for treason, known as the Dreyfus affair, divided the nation into bitterly opposed camps for years. It began in September 1894, when Major Hubert-Joseph Henry of the French intelligence service came into possession of a document that had been taken from a wastebasket at the German embassy. It was a note, afterward referred to as the bordereau, which indicated that someone in the French army apparently had provided the Germans with important information about French military plans. The type of information described in the bordereau implied that the traitorous informant had to be an artillery officer on the general staff of the army.
That brought Captain Alfred Dreyfus under suspicion, on no grounds other than the fact that he fit that general description and that his handwriting was said to have resembled that on the bordereau. More important, Dreyfus was a Jew — a rarity at such an elevated rank — and his colleagues did not like him. France was experiencing an upsurge in anti-Semitism around this time. Despite the fact that there were only about 85,000 Jews in a French population of 39 million, 40 anti-Semites blamed them for many of the country’s problems. The accusation against Dreyfus played directly into this metastasizing intolerance.
Military officials seeking to build a case against Dreyfus had asked Alfred Gobert, the handwriting expert of the Bank of France, to compare the handwriting on the incriminating bordereau with samples of Captain Dreyfus’s writing. Gobert reported that although the two writing samples were “of the same graphic type,” they “presented numerous and important disparities which had to be taken into account.” 41 He concluded that the bordereau had been written by someone other than Dreyfus. This did not satisfy the military, which began to look for a second opinion. Prefect of Police Louis Lépine recommended Alphonse Bertillon, France’s best-known expert on crime. Since he had identified and helped convict the anarchist Ravachol two years earlier, Bertillon’s reputation had only increased. Police forces throughout Europe, the United States, and Latin America were keeping records of criminals and suspects according to Bertillon’s identification system.
Unfortunately, Bertillon had no expertise as a handwriting expert, but at the urging of his chief, he acted as if he did — thus stepping into a morass from which his reputation never recovered. He pronounced his own judgment after a single day of examining the handwriting on the bordereau: “If the hypothesis of a document forged with the utmost care is eliminated, it appears clear to us that it was the same person who wrote the various items submitted and the incriminating document.” 42
In court, during Dreyfus’s initial court-martial, Bertillon’s testimony was far from compelling, for he tended to speak in a convoluted manner, complete with charts and diagrams that seemed dauntingly confusing. Moreover, the defense produced experts who contradicted his conclusion. By now, openly anti-Semitic publications, notably La Parole Libre, edited by the notorious bigot Édouard Drumont, had inflamed the public with their declarations that Dreyfus was a traitor. It was clear that if he were not convicted, the heads of those who accused him would roll. Desperate, Major Henry and others forged documents that added to the weight of “evidence” against the defendant. These were presented secretly to the judges, with the caution that “national security” would be compromised if they became public. Bertillon had no role in the forgery, but because he was the chief prop of the prosecution’s case, he would eventually be tarred by the dishonorable conduct of those who sought to pillory Dreyfus.
The court, influenced by the forgeries, sentenced Dreyfus to a life term in the French penal colony at Devil’s Island. But that was only the beginning of the Dreyfus affair. His brother and wife never ceased their efforts to clear his name, even while he sat in an isolated hut inside a walled compound off the coast of South America. In July 1895, Major Marie-Georges Picquart became chief of the Intelligence Bureau of the army and found that Germany was still receiving secret information, apparently from a French officer, Major Ferdinand Esterhazy. When Picquart reported this discovery to his superiors, he was reassigned to Africa to get him out of the way. Relentlessly, he continued to press the case against Esterhazy, who demanded a court-martial to prove himself innocent. He was, indeed, acquitted by the military judges, prompting the novelist and journalist Émile Zola to write “J’accuse,” an open letter to the president of France, denouncing those who had conspired against Dreyfus. The minister of war successfully sued Zola, forcing him to leave the country.
By now, Esterhazy’s handwriting had been compared to that on the bordereau, and the resemblance seemed compelling. France was divided into two warring camps: pro- and anti-Dreyfusard. Anti-Semitic mobs in the streets, urged on by demagogues, chanted “Death to the Jews!” Even some of those who doubted Dreyfus’s guilt worried that the French army’s prestige would suffer an irreparable blow should his conviction be reversed. Some asked whether reviewing the conviction of one innocent man was worth weakening the nation’s security at a time when many feared that a new war with Germany was imminent.
But Dreyfus’s defenders were encouraged when Henry (by then promoted to lieutenant colonel) committed suicide after his forgeries were discovered; Esterhazy then fled the country. At last, in August 1899, the government yielded to public pressure and brought Dreyfus back from Devil’s Island for another court-martial.
The military judges were determined to uphold the honor of the army; unfortunately, they saw honor only in clinging to what had clearly been discredited. Most onlookers were astonished by the verdict: once again, Dreyfus was found guilty, but this time with “extenuating circumstances,” as if there could be extenuating circumstances for treason. The president of France offered him a full pardon, which Dreyfus accepted, while continuing the legal efforts to prove his innocence. A civilian court cleared Dreyfus of all charges in 1906, and by an act of the French Parliament, he was reinstated to the army and decorated with the Légion d’honneur.
The wounds of the Dreyfus affair were far from healed, however, and Bertillon in particular felt anguish, with good reason, that his own reputation had been damaged. He saw the theft of the Mona Lisa as a chance to show that he was still, as many believed, France’s premier criminal investigator.
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Parisians were both fascinated and terrified by crime and criminals, le prestige du mal. Sensational accounts of the most lurid crimes thrilled readers of the mass-circulation newspapers. Supposedly true crime stories, called faits divers, and serialized novels, the feuilletons, were popular features of any newspaper wanting to attract readers. The historian Ann-Louise Shapiro has commented, “The culture seemed saturated with accounts of sensational crimes and infamous criminals. Mass-circulation newspapers entertained a wide popular audience with criminal stories, even as crime became the focus of scientific inquiry and the subject of articles that moved… out of professional journals into more popular formats and general social criticism. Medical and legal experts as well as professionalizing social scientists began to think of crime as a mirror held up to society, exposing the tendencies of the day writ large.” 43 During the years 1906–8, the death penalty had been suspended for the first time in more than a hundred years, but the ban created such anxiety among the populace that it had to be reversed. Guillotinings, traditionally held in public, were so popular that even when officials held them at inconvenient times and without publicity, mobs of spectators still showed up.
The courtrooms were packed with spectators when the juicy trials of famous criminals were on the docket. People went to the morgue to look at corpses, sometimes to guess the identity of unknown victims. An underground railway carried groups of t
ourists through the city sewer system, which had been made famous by Victor Hugo in Les misérables and was in real life often used as a hiding place for criminals. Wealthy residents of Paris’s fashionable Right Bank headed up the slope of Montmartre for a frisson, or thrill, as they rubbed shoulders with the dangerous criminal and lower classes. Cabaret singers sang of characters such as pimps, streetwalkers, and tramps. Sprinkled among the audience were real crooks, prostitutes, and pimps.
The French loved gossip and scandal, and Paris’s numerous daily newspapers catered to their needs, though some tales were too hot even for the scandal sheets to repeat. Meg Japy, a twenty-one-year-old from the provinces, had married Adolphe Steinheil, an artist who was twenty years older. Steinheil was not an avant-garde artist like Picasso; each year he managed to have one of his canvases accepted for display in the Salon, the government-sponsored exhibition of art that had acquired a stamp of approval marking it as culturally stifling. Nor was Adolphe exciting in bed, but Meg, beautiful and vivacious, found it easy to attract other lovers. Her husband consoled himself with the fact that his wife’s paramours were generally men of wealth and power, who graciously purchased some of Adolphe’s works, enabling the Steinheils to maintain a well-to-do lifestyle in Paris.
Meg eventually reached the pinnacle of her particular form of art: she became the mistress of Félix Faure, the president of France. At fifty-eight, Faure was twice her age, but as a connoisseur of feminine beauty, he remained a devotee of the cinq à sept — the traditional late afternoon tryst. And Meg, according to Maurice Paléologue, an official in the foreign office, “was expert at shaking men’s loins.” 44
Late in the afternoon of February 16, 1899, Meg slipped through a side door of the Élysée Palace for a rendezvous with Faure in a room known as the Blue Salon. Sometime later, the president’s male secretary heard cries that sounded more like signals of distress than of passion. He investigated to find Meg naked and Faure dead, with his fingers gripping her hair so tightly that she could not get free. Paris gossips later supplied the detail that she had been administering oral sex when the strain proved too much for Faure’s heart. Servants were able to release Meg by cutting her hair and quickly spirited her away as a priest was brought in to belatedly administer the last rites.
Because Faure had been a determined anti-Dreyfusard, resolutely refusing all demands for a retrial of the imprisoned officer, his death was rumored to have been part of a conspiracy. By one account, he had been killed in a far more sinister and deliberate fashion; by another, his mistress had stolen some papers relating to the Dreyfus case from the president’s office.
To those who knew the truth, none of this did anything to hurt Meg’s reputation. She continued hosting her weekly salon at the four-story house on a cul-de-sac called the impasse Ronsin, where she and her husband lived. She might thus have continued for the rest of her life, taking occasional lovers and living off her reputation. But Meg was destined to burst into the headlines soon in her own right, as the defendant in a double murder trial that fully satisfied the public’s appetite for scandal and intrigue.
A similar fate awaited the new bride of the man who was premier of France at the time the Mona Lisa was stolen. Henriette Rainouard Claretie had obtained a divorce from her first husband three years earlier, in 1908, after a fourteen-year marriage. After a decent interval, she expected to marry her lover, the rising politician Joseph Caillaux. Caillaux, however, found it difficult to obtain an amicable parting from the woman he was already married to (and who had also divorced a husband to marry him), and he did not press the issue until after he had attained the ultimate political prize, the post of premier of France, in June 1911. Four months later he made Henriette an honest woman — but unfortunately, not quite a respectable one.
It was unusual for French politicians to divorce and remarry. It was socially acceptable for them to take lovers, even long-term ones, but they were not supposed to elevate their mistresses’ status to wife. Moreover, Caillaux’s first wife, though agreeing to a divorce, had found and kept some incriminating letters that her husband and Henriette had exchanged during their illicit affair. When hints of these started to appear in a prominent newspaper, Henriette feared the correspondence itself would appear in print. She took drastic action and in so doing became the star of the era’s most spectacular murder trial, in which politics played a major role and the murder victim was even accused of causing his own death.
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Parisians had a particular love-hate obsession with the apaches, or young gangsters, who made their headquarters in Belleville, on the Right Bank. 45 From that neighborhood, the apaches emerged to terrorize citizens on the central boulevards of the city. They specialized in violent tactics, using sudden kicks, sucker punches, and head butts as a prelude to robbing victims. (A crime reporter, Arthur Dupin of Le Journal, had coined the term apache in 1902 because the gangs’ fierce tactics and violence resembled the French image of the Apache Indians in battle.) Soon the menace of apachism appeared to be the greatest threat to normal life in Paris.
A typical apache crime could start with a thug asking a potential victim for a light and tipping his hat. If the victim put his hand in his pocket, the apache would throw the hat in his face and head-butt him. Sometimes the attacker pulled the victim’s jacket over his face to blind him. Some worked with a pretty female, a gigolette, serving as a foil. While she engaged the victim in conversation, the male would come up behind with a scarf and loop it around the victim’s neck. Newspapers printed detailed accounts of the apaches’ methods, increasing the public’s fears of being accosted.
The apaches differed from ordinary street thugs by their lifestyle, which included distinctive clothing, argot, and even a dance. Similar to the tango and imitative of street fighting, the apache dance was sometimes dubbed the Dance of the Underworld. Because of its violent nature, in which the female partner is literally thrown around, it was popular as an exhibition dance. Upper-class Parisians enjoyed watching it performed in the cafés around Montparnasse and in dance halls called musettes. Adventurous tourists sometimes made a visit to a musette a part of their Paris experience. Bored upper-class women would pay an apache dance partner for a half hour’s whirl around the floor — usually a toned-down version of the real thing.
Off the dance floor, entertainers sentimentalized the apaches’ fatalism about life and love. Yvette Guilbert, the star of the Moulin Rouge, performed a popular song, “My Head,” in which an apache defiantly contemplates his future, which must end on the guillotine in a perverse kind of triumph:
I’ll have to wait, pale and dead beat,
For the supreme moment of the guillotine,
When one fine day they’ll say to me:
It’s going to be this morning, ready yourself;
I’ll go out and the crowd will cheer
My head! 46
Parisians’ appetite for entertainment that reflected their fascination with the underworld found its fullest satisfaction at the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol. Located at the end of Montmartre’s rue Chaptal, the tiny theater presented a series of short, gruesome plays each night, alternating comedy and horror. The fare was not for the squeamish, for the creators of the Grand-Guignol brought incredible realism to grotesque special effects, regaling audiences with stabbings, ax murders, gouged-out eyes, torture, acid throwing, amputations, mutilation, and rape. Indeed, there was no outrage that the Grand-Guignol shrank from attempting to depict. Because of the theater’s small size, the spectators were often sprayed with “blood” as well.
Oscar Méténier, a former secretary to the police commissioner of Paris, was the theater’s founder and the author of some of its skits. Oscar knew what he was writing about because he often walked through the city’s red-light areas and criminal dens searching for material. The other star was the playwright André de Lourde, called the Prince of Terror, whose works generally broke any boundaries of taste and decency. The son of a doctor, de Lourde had from an early age
listened to the sounds of suffering from his father’s patients. He had also developed a morbid fear of death, which his father tried unsuccessfully to cure by making him sit vigil over his dead grandmother’s body the night before she was buried.
De Lourde used these childhood experiences to good effect by frightening others with his plays. His goal was to create something like a dream of Edgar Allan Poe, a man he admired, “to write a play so terrifying and unbearable that several minutes after the curtain rises, the entire audience would flee from the theatre en masse.” De Lourde called his works “slices of death.” 47
The Grand-Guignol shared with the avant-garde artists a desire to break through barriers to express humankind’s deepest fears and emotions. The size of the theater broke down the separation between the performers and the audience. All the tricks of the trade were used to heighten the horror for its own sake and induce a reaction from the audience — to shock people out of their conventional thinking. Success was measured by the number of audience members who fainted or threw up. The advertising for the show noted that there was always a doctor in attendance. Increasing the opportunity for stimulation, the bar at the theater served a special drink called Mariani wine, which contained, among other things, cocaine.
The Crimes of Paris Page 4
