• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1230 0

who argued that criminals were atavistic types — that is, degenerates who had regressed on the scale of evolution — believed that all women were biologically inferior to men and hence inherently atavistic. 2 This did not mean that all women would eventually become criminals, but that they were more susceptible than men to influences that could produce aberrant behavior. These influences were as varied as the menstrual cycle, the pressures of urban life, and even the faits divers crime stories found in the daily newspapers. Any of these might produce a passionate response that could drive women to criminal acts. So could feminism. In the words of Théodore Joran, a rabid antifeminist, emancipated women acquired “a taste for carnage” because they could no longer contain “the instincts of brutality and savagery that, in [women’s] proper state of subordination,” were kept under control. 3

Of course, one result of the belief that women could not control themselves was that courts and juries were frequently more tolerant, not to say forgiving, of women accused of crimes. Ann-Louise Shapiro, a modern feminist author, found that the acquittal rate for women in France was over 50 percent in the 1890s, while only about 30 percent for men. Women criminals sometimes became “celebrities as well as pariahs.” 4 The Cours d’Assises were popular places to go for entertainment, and society women were often spectators at the trials of other women. They were known to bring picnic baskets containing canapés, sandwiches, and champagne to consume during recesses. Furthering the trend, many theater companies found that audiences flocked to plays that imitated courtroom dramas.

Shapiro cites a famous case of the 1880s in which Marie Bière, a young actress, shot Robert Gentien, a young man-about-town who had fathered her child. Gentien refused to acknowledge the infant as his own and even when the child died did not attend its funeral. Bière shot him twice in the back as he was out walking with a new mistress. Though she failed to kill him, she was tried for attempted murder. Bière’s attorneys showed that Gentien was her first lover, that she resisted his suggestion to have an abortion because she wanted to be the mother of his child, and that she had even attempted suicide in his presence in a vain attempt to win his sympathy. Bière was acquitted by twelve male jurors who wept openly as their verdict was announced.

La Lanterne editorialized that “the jury, in acquitting Mlle. Bière, had performed a useful service.” 5 A wittier commentator, in Le Figaro, wrote that the defendant “be canonized as Sainte Marie, patron saint of gunsmiths, to whom abandoned women might make pilgrimages to have their revolvers blessed.” 6 Gentien himself was obliged to flee Paris to avoid public opprobrium.

i

The popularity of crime stories, not only the supposedly factual faits divers but also the fictional feuilletons, was often cited as a cause of female criminality. One social critic, Jules Langevin, stated that “the roman feuilleton performs the same ravages in women’s brains, perhaps does even graver damage, than does alcohol in the brains of men.” 7 Writing in 1902, a Dr. Séverin Icard cited the case of a young woman who regularly came to his office with a bewildering variety of symptoms. Finally, Dr. Icard noticed that the diseases these symptoms indicated were occurring in alphabetical order. Further investigation revealed that the patient had been receiving copies of a medical dictionary, issued in installments, and so developed hysterical symptoms of the disease described in that month’s reading.

The sexism went both ways. Two murder cases in the Belle Époque created enormous scandals, not only because the accused in both cases were women of good breeding, but also because they used their femininity to evade responsibility for what seemed like utterly ruthless crimes. Certainly what happened to these two murderers stood in stark contrast to the members of the Bande à Bonnot. And their trials showed that the search for truth — or the attempts to conceal