Trials of Passion

by Lisa Appignanesi

  Finally Marie asked: ‘Since you didn’t get what you wanted of me, did you not then tell me to undergo the birth in Montmartre with a midwife and abandon my child there?’ ‘I only said,’ Robert replied, ‘that to avoid problems with your mother, it would be easier.’

  When Marie was brought into the interview room for the read- through and signing of the deposition notes, she was extremely pale. She fixed her eyes on Robert without speaking. This strange judicial scene, translated into contemporary terms, has something of the feel of a professional mediation between divorcees who can’t be brought to agree either on the facts or on a mutual language of negotiation, so opposed are their views on the etiquette and practices of love. After Robert’s answers to her questions were read out to her, Marie simply stated: ‘I maintain the truth of everything I said. If Monsieur contests it, that surprises me not at all.’

  Robert ‘absolutely’ denied her imputation that he was lying. There was nothing he wanted to add to his deposition. ‘Nor I,’ Marie stated, then burst out: ‘You’re base, odious [infame!]! You’re the cause of my daughter’s death. If you’d left her at my side, she’d still be alive, and I wouldn’t have tried to kill you.’

  ‘I protest emphatically,’ Robert retorted. T didn’t stop you from keeping your daughter and I’m not responsible in any way for her death.’

  The complex slippage between truths and lies inevitable to passion rarely translates easily into the harder certainties of the courts. That Marie was guilty of attempting to murder Robert Gentien was clear to everyone, let alone herself Whether she was an ‘honest’ woman – a virtuous innocent from the provinces, despite her appearances on the stage – or had wanted money or marriage from Robert, from the first; whether the wish for an abortion was his or hers, or in the early days both of theirs; whether Robert’s whole attitude to love and parenting was deeply reprehensible, or hers naive and unrealistic, or alternatively mercenary – these were not easily resolvable questions at any time, and particularly not at a historical moment when values were clearly in flux. Needless to say, when the juge d’instruction s rendition of these interviews was read out in court, sensation ensued.

  17. Passion, Madness and Medics

  Love relations, understandings of passion and sexual etiquette, were under strain in belle époque France. Old habits and ways were colliding with the new with increasing speed, like the railway that now cut through the nation. High migration from the traditionally Catholic and conservative provinces to the increasingly secular capital, where a largely progressive Republican and scientifically oriented government was in power from 1879, resulted in a vertiginous clash of mores. Moving from provincial Bordeaux to Paris, as Marie Bière had, constituted a leap not only across kilometres but into a different modernity. According to the mind doctors, such migration, like the speed of the trains themselves, could also cause psychological shock. Vagabondage, alcoholism and prostitution were some of the consequences, alongside the growth in the asylum population.

  Prostitution (together with the vice squads who battled against it) increased significantly in the course of the Third Republic as women, out of financial need, were forced or fell into or resorted to the oldest profession. In a world of double standards that separated them out, sometimes by class, into ‘honest’ and marriageable or fair game, punters were plentiful. A proportion of these were also single migrants from the country. Understanding of what behaviour was appropriately masculine, what respectably feminine, varied enormously from country to small town to capital city as well as, between the generations and the classes. The differences might be compared to some of our own confusions when old and young clash over the morality and appropriate etiquette for online and social networking sites; or when immigrant parents and their teenage children fall out over dating and sexual habits.

  Against this kind of background, the trial of Marie Bière which began on 6 April 1880 seemed to be far less about the crime of attempted murder than about the vagaries of passion, changing sexual relations and the nature of the human mind. What roles, what behaviour in men and women, would the new Republic value? Were seduction and abandonment – a gentlemanly Don Juanism – to continue to be permissible? Did men owe a debt of paternity to their ‘natural’ children as well as official recognition to their mothers? Was marriage ‘for ever’? Crucially, what could passion – sexual and maternal – do to the mind?

  The eighteenth-century philosophes had vested all that was good in the ‘triumph of reason’. Perhaps it was this absolutist emphasis that made passion and the irrational take on a competitive dynamic in the French thinking of the nineteenth century. In England, the Romantic movement had largely affected the arts and aspects of sentimental behaviour. In France, after the excesses of the Revolution, passion had also become an explanatory category, one used by the early alienists hand in hand with the diagnosis of monomania. They took it into the courtrooms as a mitigating factor. It was a category every citizen could understand. The mind, the mental faculties, could be overturned by an impulsive force that left rational will out of control, ‘alienated’ reason and diminished responsibility.

  French mind doctors had made their way into the criminal courts as expert witnesses early in the century. They had done so noisily in the landmark case of the child murderer Henriette Cornier in 1825. The great alienist Esquirol’s follower Étienne-Jean Georget had even argued for a classification of monomanie instinctive, or instinctive monomania, for five brutal criminals whose reason and moral sense were palpably intact. They could tell right from wrong, yet they were driven to monstrous crime. Homicidal monomania, Georget claimed, was a subspecies of Esquirol’s classification of monomania. It was a lesion of the will, rather than of the intellect, a perversion of the affective passions and sentiments which propelled the individual to sudden violent acts.

  In his pamphlets, Georget championed two roles for alienists: conducting a pre-examination of offenders; providing expert witnesses in court. Esquirol and other specialists testified in the case of Henriette Cornier, a young servant woman who had brutally killed a neighbour’s toddler. They brought definitions of partial and not readily visible madness into the legal arena. Through them a diagnosis of monomania came to act as an extenuating factor in sentencing. Hidden madness, not readily visible to the lay observer, was now dissected by specialists in the criminal courtroom. Passion, love gone wrong, distorted or malignant love which bred violence rather than tenderness, perversion – all gradually became subjects both of forensic and of public discussion. Though, in the course of the century, a diagnosis of monomania went out of fashion and hereditarian explanations took on greater moment, French alienists continued to be interested in conditions that led to crime. In mid-century, the great clinician Charles Lasègue wrote detailed and evocative analyses of violence caused by persecutory delirium as well as studies of kleptomania and exhibitionism.

  With the birth of the Third Republic after France’s shaming defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the violent uprising of the Paris Commune, there was increased scientific and wholly secular interest in ‘unreason’. Whether it took the form of individual crime or mass explosion, it was clear that extreme emotion could overturn the rational mind. Emotion worked on the nerves. So could external hypnotic suggestions. The nervous impulses, it was thought, could set up their own autonomous activity and propel actions of which the conscious mind was not aware. Automatisms, automatons, alters (or alternating personalities), doubles, increasingly pervaded the fin de siècle, together with the accompanying medical theorizing. Such passionate or sleepwalking states engendered what English law, too, calls an ‘alienation of reason’; and since the ‘voluntary’ acts that constitute the basis of crime can not be said to have taken place during such states, the individual perpetrator can not be held responsible.

  By 1910, a doctoral dissertation by Hélie Courtis could assert that the passionate criminal suffered from ‘psychic troubles that suppress all control by the intellectual faculties
over the muscular reflex that constitutes the murderous deed’. The criminal acted under the influence of ‘a succession of muscular jolts originating in a pure motor impulse’. Passions – frustrated love, jealousy, rage – ‘distorted the functioning of the nervous system’, and in that état passionnel, a transitory state in which the sane could be subject to insanity, ‘a momentary modification of the cerebral circulation’ took place.

  As in other aspects of medicine, more needed to be learned here by the doctors so that preventive scientific measures could be taken by a state that had its citizens’ best interests at heart – the interests of both those who suffered from ‘disease’ or disorder and those whose wellbeing needed to be safeguarded if they were endangered by the ill. The mind doctors could help to explain crime, and prevent it, by being put in charge of those who in their worst manic moments could imperil others as well as themselves. Thus, the medico-legal specialization grew in the Third Republic not only in such obvious areas as toxicology but also in psychiatry. It gradually acquired its own professorships and teaching sites; these were far more centralized than in the UK and readily became part of the state apparatus.

  Public health and hygiene, prevention of disease and sanitation, had been important to the French state and its citizens since the 1789 Revolution. A decree of 18 June 1811 had instituted a role for the medico-legist in the criminal code, as well. Poisoning, infanticide, sudden death, would now mean the instant intervention of medical experts, who from 1829 also had their own journal, the Annales d’hygiène puhlique et de médecine légale. The law of 1838 made alienists – at least in part – servants of the state and administrators of a nationwide asylum system.

  A related decree of 1845 demanded that a doctor countersign any police certificate committing a person to an asylum. As a result, the Paris police acquired a new and permanent medical post. This was first held by Ulysse Trélat, one of EsquiroPs disciples. The Paris police prefecture now also had an infirmary attached. Here the wide range of offenders picked up by the police were examined and some then moved on to the famous Asile Sainte-Anne, where Clérambault and Jacques Lacan eventually worked. At the admissions department at Sainte-Anne, the resident alienist would determine whether the ‘criminals’ were to be held or moved on once more to the appropriate long-term or short-stay facility. Offenders might well be considered too devoid of mental faculties or too delirious to be tried: administrative justice rather than court hearings would then prevail.

  It is worth noting that not only psychiatry but the medical profession as a whole reached new heights of status and influence during the Third Republic, and took on a wholly recognizable modern authority. Between 1871 and 1914,358 medical doctors gained election as senators or deputies in the Assembly, the second-largest group after lawyers. Mostly left-wing and progressive, they had a shaping interest in both public health and family matters. They spoke out about the rising toll of alcoholism, which in their eyes had taken on epidemic proportions and was linked to suicide, crime, divorce, the declining birthrate and insanity. They also largely considered it to be a breach of the Hippocratic oath to pass on information about abortion – a crime in the eyes not only of a Catholic hierarchy but of the state as a whole, which until well into the twentieth century was strongly pro-natalist and ever worried about its population being smaller than that of neighbouring Germany. The doctors’ presence in the courtrooms, as pathologists, as alienists, and as expert witnesses, took on a wholly modern configuration.

  By the third quarter of the century, the médecin légal des aliénés was a figure who was often called by the juge d’instruction to assess the mental state of an accused. He also regularly appeared in court to give an impartial opinion on a defendant’s mental state. Under a penal code which like the English was founded on a conception of the individual possessing a free and rational will as well as moral responsibility, the expert psychiatric determination of whether a person was in full possession of his mental powers, and could be deemed responsible for a crime, was a crucial issue. Passion of the morbid long-lasting kind or a sudden overwhelming impulse could topple such powers and induce madness. In women, whose hold on reason alienists and public largely agreed was weaker because of her biological make-up, her susceptibility to menstrual and other pressures, the rational will could more easily succumb either to passion or to suggestion.

  18. The Trial of Marie Bière

  One of the ways in which passion, madness and the understandings of the mind doctors moved into the public sphere was through the increased reporting of court cases in an ever growing number of newspapers, high- and low-brow, as well as in professional journals. Censorship died with the change of government in 1879. Between then and 1887, when the threat of a take-over by the populist hero General Georges Boulanger seemed imminent, almost every step the French government took worked to increase the sphere of democratic liberties, while curbing the power of the clerics. As in the United States, France had no law against pre-trial disclosure. In the press and the more specialist Gazette des tribunaux, crime columns now featured more prominently than ever, some providing near-verbatim records of trials. Newspapers popularized not only the ‘exceptional’ status of criminals, but also debates surrounding the psychology of crime and interrogations of madness.

  The reported spectacle of crime, passion, potential lunacy and punishment was often echoed in the feuilletons, one-off fictions or serial novels, which filled the pages alongside court reports. Running into each other and occasionally penned by the same author, reportage and feuilleton thrived on each other’s sensation and tropes: fact fed fiction and fiction fed life, in a looping effect that gathered in legal and medical practice on the way. Ideas, terminology, ways of classifying emotions and mental states, percolated through society invoking new ways of understanding the self while moulding the self into the categories of understanding. Courtroom players – defendants, lawyers, magistrates and even doctors – became stars whose names might be as well known as those of today’s footballers. Like that of a match, the outcome of a case might not be uninfluenced by public will and the noise and heat with which it expressed itself.

  Albert Bataille, the Figaro columnist who reported court cases with such panache that they found their way into bestselling bound volumes, calls Marie Bière’s trial ‘one of the strangest of our times’. Her case ranks for him amongst the most dramatic and most Parisian of novels. ‘Criminal or victim, unworthy of indulgence or worthy of pity, Marie Bière isn’t one of those vulgar accused who move from sad vice to crime and from crime to the central prison,’ he writes, underlining that Marie doesn’t belong to the bas-fonds, the dregs, of Paris. Her youth is a ‘melancholy romance’, her love a ‘tragic novel’. Will the trial, Bataille asks rhetorically, prove her an ambitious woman in search of a lucrative marriage who played her passion to the hilt and couldn’t forgive her lover for escaping her clutches, or a poor trusting romantic soul whom disillusion and the ruin of all her hopes of happiness drove to crime?

  On the morning of 6 April 1880, the majestic Assizes courtroom in Paris’s grand, though still not altogether reconstructed, Palais de Justice is packed with well dressed women and a panoply of writers, Conservatoire professors and theatre people. Amongst the latter is Alexandre Dumas fils, whose many popular boulevard dramas seem to have been made for Marie to star in. Tragically abandoned heroines and illegitimate children were Dumas’s theme. He himself was one, and though his own father had recognized him, Dumas fils championed actual marriage between seducing men and the women who gave birth to their offspring, not merely the recognition of their children.

  Marie Bière, when she appears in the courtroom at ten-thirty, evokes gasps of pity from the public: fragile, pale, her brown eyes vast and her face skeletal against the black of her severe dress, she is, according to the press, a shadow of her former beautiful self. She has to be held up as she is led to the bench of the accused, and then all but falls into it. Her face, according to the press, is ravaged wit
h the marks of despair, her forehead white beneath the simple round hat poised on her auburn hair, which lets a few locks stray onto her brow – in the current style. She leans against the bar, her handkerchief to her eyes, and at eleven o’clock when the session is convened, listens to the clerk reading out the counts against her.

  When she answers to the charge, her voice is soft and contained, with none of the melodrama the public has been led to anticipate, particularly since she is a woman of the stage. The trial is to be Marie Bière’s most acclaimed performance and the one in which she has most at stake.

  French trial procedure allows for the president of the court to act as a kind of chair of judges, jury and proceedings: with due ceremony he leads the interrogation of the accused, the partie civile – in this case the victim of the crime – and all witnesses. This can, in large part, be an oral replication of the juge d’ instruction’s dossier, but the public stage and the presence of the jury often induce surprises. Le Président Bachelier, with his small well manicured hands and impeccable robes, was known as something of a pontiff amongst judges. He was a man with a soft-fluted voice who could make the most hideous crimes sing, and was a virtuoso of the summing-up statement that directed the jury.

  Bachelier takes Marie through the facts of the crime. He describes the four days of stalking leading up to the shooting, her journal entries which show premeditation, the shooting itself, to all of which Marie acquiesces. If she no longer insists that she wants to see Robert dead, she is still adamant about the justice of her act. Bachelier then takes her through her life – her musical talent, her studies at the Conservatoire, her failure to attain the highest rank in her profession, her meeting with Robert... The latter two seem to elide in his mind. Despite his stress on her impeccable reputation, he implies that she might well have been ready for an affair with a wealthy man. Marie is instantly alert to his intention: when he states that she was introduced to Monsieur Gentien by a friend, she interrupts to stress – ‘Yes, and he paid court to me straight away.’