Trials of Passion

by Lisa Appignanesi

  p. 41 unacquainted: Memorial of Sydney Cornish Harrington to Secretary of State for the Home Department, January 1972, National Archives HO 45 9297/9472 C477970

  p. 43 sent there: From the petition sent by Ann Christiana Edmunds to the Home Secretary, January 1972, National Archives HO 45 9297/9472 C477970

  p. 43 affidavit: Ibid.

  p. 45 supervision: Report of the Metropolitan Commissioners on Lunacy, 1844 (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1844), pp. 44–5. Available at http://www.archive.Org/stream/reportofmetropol001ond#page/n3/mode/2up

  p. 46 to the head: The Times, 17 January 1872

  p. 46 sleep: National Archives HO 45 9297/9472 C477970

  p. 48 Sussex: Morning Post, 22 September 1856

  p. 49 apparatus: J. Crichton-Browne, MD, FRSE, ‘Clinical Lectures on Mental and Cerebral Diseases’, British Medical fournal, 29 July 1871, pp. 113–14

  p. 50 roused at all: William Acton, The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs (London: J. & A. Churchill, 6th edn, 1875), p. 212. Available at http://archive.org/details/functionsdisordeOOactorich

  p. 51 century: See, for instance, Edward John Tilt (who had also written a key book on the menopause), ‘On Hysteria and Its Interpreters’, British Medical Journal, 16 December 1871, pp. 690–2

  p. 52 self-control: Julius Althaus, MD, MRCP, ‘A Lecture on the Pathology and Treatment of Hysteria’, British Medical Journal, 10 March 1866, pp. 245–8

  p. 53 large a one: George Drysdale, The Elements of Social Science (London: E. Truelove, 1861), pp. 179-85; above quote, p. 180. Available at http://archive.org/stream/elementssocials01drysgoog#page/n4/mode/2up

  p. 54 eleven languages: Mary S. Hartman, Victorian Murderesses (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), p. 158

  p. 55 clitoridectomy: In the 1860s Isaac Baker Brown thought female masturbation occasioned everything from hysteria to epilepsy to death. See his The Curability of Certain Forms of Insanity, Epilepsy, Catalepsy, and Hysteria in Females (1866); available at http://archive.org/stream/oncurabili- tycer00browgoog#page/n5/mode/2up. He was notorious for his clitoridectomies. But in 1867 he was expelled from the Obstetrical Society of London for carrying out the operations without consent, while the Lunacy Commission investigated him for carrying out unlicensed operations on ‘lunatics’. See also J. B. Fleming, ‘Clitoridectomy: The Disastrous Downfall of Isaac Baker Brown, FRCS’, Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology of the British Empire, 67(6) (December 1960), pp. 1017–34

  p. 56 marvelous results: Ibid., p. 248

  p. 56 functional disorders: Brighton Gazette, on front page of various issues during 1869

  p. 56 orgasm: Rachel P. Maines, The Technology of Orgasm (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999)

  p. 57 could not breathe: The Times, 17 January 1872

  p. 59 speak of desire: This is true even of passions between women, as that between Emily Faithfull and Helen Codrington suggests. See Emma Donoghue’s retelling of that relationship in The Sealed Letter (London: Picador, 2011)

  p. 60 so well: Summerscale, Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace

  p. 61 too strong: Ibid., pp. 204–7

  p. 61 had it: ‘The Robinson Divorce Case’, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 27 June 1858

  p. 63 middle life: The Times, 12 June 1876, as cited by Hartman, Victorian Murderesses, p. 165, but not found in The Times of that date

  p. 64 melancholy: J.-E. D. Esquirol, Des Maladies Mentales, 3 vols (Paris: Bailliere, 1838). Available at Gallica.fr. Vol. 2, pp. 32–7

  p. 67 the prison: The Times, 30 December 1871

  p. 67 correction: The Times, 1 January 1872

  p. 69 accused sister: Daily News, 16 January 1872. As below in description of Christiana

  p. 69 committed: ‘Household Crime’, Household Words, 1852, p. 277, cited by Robb, ‘Circe in Crinoline’

  p. 71 the second: See, for example, the images in Vaught’s Practical Character Reader (1902) in Public Domain Review, http://publicdomainreview.org/2013/03/19/phrenology-diagrams-from-vaughts-practical-character-reader-1902/, accessed 5 April 2013

  p. 73 shop in them: John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera, letter 30. Available at Archive.org

  p. 76 gesticulation: Daily News, 16 January 1872

  p. 77 prosecutorial behaviour: Thomas Seccombe, ‘Ballantine, William (1812–1887)’, rev. H. C. G. Matthew, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online edn January 2009, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/1227, accessed 5 April 2012

  p. 77 twice he lost: John Andrew Hamilton, ‘Parry, John Humffreys (1816-80)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

  p. 79 court of justice: Daily News, 16 January 1872

  p. 84 vicious impulses: From Henry Maudsley, The Pathology of Mind (London: Macmillan, 1895), cited in my Mad, Bad and Sad (London: Virago, 2008), p. 111. Also, see T. H. Turner, ‘Henry Maudsley’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

  p. 86 insane neurosis: Henry Maudsley, Responsibility in Mental Disease (London: C. Kegan Paul, 3rd edn, 1876), p. 40

  p. 88 complexity: See my Mad, Bad and Sad for a fuller history of this movement

  p. 89 be spared: Matthew Hale, The History of the Pleas of the Crown (1736), pp. 34–5, cited in http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/Legal%20Historians%20Brief.pdf, accessed 1 May 2012. United States Supreme Court, no. 06- 6407, Brief of Amici Curiae of Legal Historians in support of petitioner Scott Lewis Panetti v Nathaniel Quarterman

  p. 90 his affairs: Maudsley, Responsibility in Mental Disease, pp. 90–1

  p. 90 punishment: The full case from which other quotations are taken is available in A Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and Other Crimes and Misdemeanours, from the earliest period to the year 1783, compiled by T. B. Howell (London: Longmans, 1816), vol. 16, pp. 696–766. Available at http://books.google.co.uk/books

  p. 92 character of insanity: The Speeches of the Hon. Thomas Erskine (now Lord Erskine) when at the Bar (London: James Ridgway, 1813), vol. 1. Available at http://books.google.co.uk. Also quoted in Maudsley, Responsibility in Mental Disease, pp. 90ff

  p. 92 case of 1812: See R v Bellingham, Session Papers, Justice Hall, Old Bailey, 1811–13, Fifth Session 1812, pp. 263–74, cited in Kathleen S. Goddard, ‘A Case of Injustice? The Trial of John Bellingham’, American Journal of Legal History, voL 46, no. 1 (January 2004)

  p. 93 justice myself: Ibid., p. 8

  p. 94 right from wrong: Ibid., p. 12, and R v Bellingham, p. 273

  p. 95 adopted: OBSP R v Bellingham, 1812, case 433, at http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsphd=t18120513-5&div=t18120513-5&terms=john|bellingham#highlight

  p. 96 day and night: Much of Cockburn’s opening and closing statements can be found in G. W. Keeton, Guilty but Insane (London: Macdonald, 1961), pp. 62-105, 94

  p. 96 have to say: Ibid., p. 98

  p. 98 reasoning self: C. C. H. Marc, De lafolie: considérée dans ses rapports avec les questions médico-legales (Paris: Baillière, 1840), p. 6. Available at h ttp: //books. google. co. uk/bookshd=-hPaV 1 T29awC &printsec=front- cover#v=onepage&q&f= false

  p. 99 prevented: Hansard, 13 March 1843, ‘Insanity and Crime’, House of Lords debate, 13 March 1843, vol. 67, cc. 714–44

  p. 100 later noted: Maudsley, Responsibility in Mental Disease, citing Judge Ladd in the case of State v Jones in New Hampshire, p. 99

  p. 101 liable to punishment: Cited in Keeton, Guilty hut Insane, p. 104

  p. 102 cunning: See The Times, 16 January 1872, for the various quotations from the case

  p. 104 two years later: J. M. Rigg, ‘Martin, Sir Samuel (1801-1883)’, rev. Hugh Mooney, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/18210, accessed 5 April 2012

  p. 108 fortitude: The Times, 16 January 1872

  p. 109 medical men: Reynold’s News, 20 January 1872; The Times, 20 January 1872

  p. 109 Christiana Edmunds: Ibid,

  p. 110 reprieve: Ibid.

  p. 112 execution: Letter of 18 Januar
y 1872 from Baron Martin to Home Secretary, National Archives HO 45 9297/9472 C477970

  p. 113 diminished radically: Martin J. Wiener, Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness and Criminal Justice in Victorian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 19–23

  p. 114 other means: Robb, ‘Circe in Crinoline’, p. 186: ‘Women tried for poisoning their husbands between 1830 and 1900 were convicted 60% of the time – a much higher conviction rate than ... in general, in which only 40% of the accused were found guilty’

  p. 114 prison population: Lucia Zedner, Women, Crime and Custody in Victorian England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), passim. For current statistics on percentages of female to male prisoners, see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/ik/06/prisons/html/nn2pagel.stm

  p. 114 guilty of murder: Wiener, Men of Blood, pp. 128–30

  p. 114 1890s: Ibid., p. 148

  p. 115 manslaughter: Ibid., p. 149

  p. 115 was the same: Ibid., p. 133

  p. 116 consideration: National Archives H045/9297/9742 C477970

  p. 117 insane than Christiana: Memorial of Sydney Cornish Harrington, National Archives H045/9297/9742 C477970

  p. 117 outrage or injustice: Daily Telegraph, 22 January 1872

  p. 118 symptoms: Nick Hervey, ‘Gull, Sir William Withey, 1st baronet (1816–1890)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; online edn, May 2006, http://www.oxford dnb.com/view/article/11730, accessed 4 May 2012. See also my Mad, Bad and Sad

  p. 118 his house: Mark Stevens, Broadmoor Revealed, Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum (online); M. P. Park, R. H. R. Park, ‘The fine art of patient–doctor relationships’, British Medical Journal, 329 (2004), pp. 1475–80, http://www.bmj.com/content/329/7480/1475?variant=short, accessed 6 May 2012

  p. 119 accordingly: Sir William Gull to Secretary of State, Home Department, 23 January 1872, National Archives H045/9297/9472 C477970

  p. 121 acquitted as insane: Forbes Winslow, ‘Insanity and Homicide’, British Journal of Psychiatry, April 1872, pp. 64ff

  p. 121 next century: Anon., ‘The Legal and Medical Tests of Insanity’, British Medical Journal, 27 January 1872, p. 104

  p. 122 brain disaster: Anon., ‘The Legal Test of Insanity’, British Medical Journal, 3 February 1872, pp. 129-30

  p. 127 presence: Broadmoor Hospital Case Notes for Christiana Edmunds, pp. 206f, 208, 2011; D/H14/D2/1/2/1, courtesy Berkshire Record Office

  p. 129 kind to her: Broadmoor Hospital Case Notes, letter and notes of 1874, D/H14/D2/2/2/204/4

  p. 130 occasion for it: Ibid., p. 208, 8 July 1876

  PART TWO

  p. 137 shoot: Much of the material on Marie Bière comes from Judicial Dossier D2 U8 96 of the Archives de la Seine, now housed in the Archives de Paris. The dossier contains all the materials prepared by the juge d’instruction for the trial and includes police reports and witness statements, supplemented by newspaper reports of the trial proceedings. The most famous of these are from the pen of Le Figaro's Albert Bataille, the assiduous court reporter who from his arrival in Paris in 1875 at the age of just twenty had made a reputation as the best and most accurate of the court journalists. Marie Bière’s case also features in his Causes Criminelles et Mondaines de 1880 (Paris: É. Dentu, Éditeur, 1881)

  p. 140 follow her: Émile Zola, Carnets d’Enquêtes (Research Notebooks), p. 312, quoted in Frederick Brown, Zola: A Life (London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 418

  p. 142 open heart: Judicial Dossier D2 U8 96, pp. 6-8 of the juge d’instructions papers

  p. 160 evidence: Presse Judiciaire Parisienne, Le Palais de Justice: Son monde et ses moeurs, prefaced by Alexandre Dumas fils (Paris, 1892), pp. 340ff. I am indebted here as with so much else of this juridical matter to Ruth Harris, Murders and Madness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989)

  p. 161 criminal woman: Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero, Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman (La donna delinquente, 1893), trans. Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 183 and passim.

  p. 161 fin de siècle: Ruth Harris in Murder and Madness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) does far greater justice to this subject than I have space for here

  p. 162 prior crime: Eliza Earle Ferguson in Gender and Justice: Violence, Lntimacy and Community in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) provides interesting insight into this phenomenon and the mores of the working-class areas of Paris

  p. 169 legal arena: For a full exploration of this case, see my Mad, Bad and Sad

  p. 170 circulation: Hélie Courtis, Étude médico-légale des crimespassionnels (Toulouse: C. Dirion, 1910), pp. 10–11, 104–5. Cited in Edward Berenson, The Trial of Madame Caillaux (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 30-2

  p. 171 abortion: Jack D. Ellis, The Physician-Legislators of France: Medicine and Politics in the Early Third Republic 1870-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 208 and passim

  p. 174 drove to crime: Bataille, Causes Criminelles et Mondaines de 1880, pp. 13, 14, 20 and 37 passim below

  p. 178 juries: Le Figaro, 16 December 1882; New York Times, 11 June 1882

  p. 178 the name: Presse Judiciaire Parisienne, Le Palais de Justice, p. 288

  p. 182 asylum: Laure Murat, La Maison du Docteur Blanche, Histoire Tun asile et de ses pensionnaires (Paris: J. C. Lattès, 2001), p. 200

  p. 183 offence: Auguste Motet, ‘Accès de somnambulisme spontané et provoqué’, Annales d’hygiène publique et de médecine légale, 3rd series, 5 (1881), pp. 214–25 at http://www2.biusante.parisdescartes.fr/livanc/?p=216&cote=90141xl881x05&do=page, accessed 30 August 2012

  p. 184 maternity: Medical report dated 16 March 1880 in Marie Bière’s Judicial Dossier D2 U8 96

  p. 186 ten francs: Harris, Murders and Madness, p. 138

  p. 186 reporting: Notes found in Judicial Dossier D2 U8 156, 18 February 1884

  p. 192 procedure: ‘Maître Lachaud’, Le Figaro, 16 December 1882

  p. 194 lighter than mens: Harris, Murders and Madness, p. 210. See also Ferguson, Gender and Justice

  p. 196 difficult tasks: ‘Échos de Paris’, Le Petit Journal, 13 April 1880, p. 3

  p. 197 happy: Le Figaro, 8 February 1881, p. 4

  p. 201 from above: Alexandre Dumas fils, Les Femmes qui tuent et les femmes qui votent, ebook #29937 at Project Gutenberg (pp. 94–5 of the original text)

  p. 201 failed to: Ibid., pp. 25–6

  p. 204 nature: Judicial Dossier D2 U8 156

  p. 207 crowd: See, for example, Paul Aubry, La Contagion du meurtre: Étude d’anthro- pologie criminelle (Paris, 1896), cited also by Harris, Murders and Madness, p. 235

  p. 209 Hamming It Up: Le Figaro, 18 April 1883

  p. 211 unreliable: See Jean-Martin Charcot’s lecture of 1890, ‘Hypnotism and Crime’, reproduced at http://baillement.com/lettres/charcot_forum.html; and Gilles de la Tourette, L’hypnotisme et les états analogues aupoint de vue médico-légal (Paris: Plon, 1887), pp. 328–82; Jacqueline Carroy and Marc Renneville, ‘Une cause passionnelle passionnante: Tarde et l’affaire Chambige (1889)’, in Champ Pénal, Penal Field, 34th French Congress of Criminology, 15 September 2005, ‘Murder under Hypnosis’, in The Anatomy of Madness, vol. 2, ed. W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter and Michael Shepherd (London: Tavistock Publications, 1983), pp. 197–241

  p. 215 proud: Le Temps, 11 November 1888

  p. 217 criminelle: G. Tarde, ‘L’affaire Chambige’, Archives d’anthropologie criminelle, vol. IV (1889), pp. 92-108

  p. 218 alters: See my Mad, Bad and Sad, chapter 6

  p. 221 closer look: Archives for this case are in box D2 U8 267 at the Archives de la Seine, from which my trial information comes. Le Figaro followed the case, and though Albert Bataille didn’t take to its protagonists, it is collected in his Causes Criminelles et Mondaines for 1890. The illustrated papers loved the story and invented images for the main players. Jules de Grandpre Beau joint in the serialized feuilleton La Malle Sanglante (Fayard, 1890) d
evoted over a thousand pages to it, with illustrations, songs, extracts from the press and not a little padding about the vagaries of hypnosis, plus the kind of speculation that in Britain would fall under contempt of court

  p. 226 consciousness of man: Sigmund Freud, quoted in Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), p. 211

  p. 227 flesh: Reproduced at length, though perhaps not altogether accurately, in Grandpré Beaujoint, La Malle Sanglante, a distinctly sensationalist and popular rendition of the case

  p. 230 epileptics: Grandpré Beaujoint, La Malle Sanglante, pp. 56-60

  p. 238 Germany: Sophie Humann, ‘Henriette Caillaux tira six fois’, Valeurs Actuelles, 26 April 2012, http://www.valeursactuelles.com/histoire/actualit%C3%A9s/henriette-caillaux-tira-six-fois20120425.html, accessed 14 November 2012

  p. 239 campaign: Le Matin, 1914, pp. 3, 17

  p. 239 Saint-Lazare: Newspaper coverage apart, there are few remaining official archive sources for the trial of Madame Caillaux: a fire in the fort of Montlignon in 1974 put an end to the investigating magistrate’s dossier. The police records, whether by intent or accident, have also disappeared. The papers, however, gave extensive coverage both of the murder and of the July trial. Most of my rendition of the facts of the case comes from Le Matin, Le Figaro and Le Petit fournal for March and July 1914, as well as Edward Berenson’s fine The Trial of Madame Caillaux (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)

  p. 239 emotion: Le Petit Parisien, 21 July 1914

  p. 244 drove me on: Le Matin, 29 July 1914, carries the full text of the final day of the trial, which contains both advocates’ summary statements, recapitulating the evidence as well as their pleas

  p. 246 respect: Le Figaro, 30 July 1914; Le Matin, 29 July 1914

  p. 249 [her] offence: For the full materials on the R v Emma [Kitty] Byron case, see National Archives CRIM/1/80/3, C479803; also Ginger Frost, ‘“She Is But a Woman”: Kitty Byron and Edwardian Criminal Justice’, Gender and History, vol. 16, no. 3 (November 2004), pp. 456, 538–60