Trials of Passion (24 page)

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 with 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.'

‘Didn't he say that you flirted with him, that you marked him out?'

‘Me, flirt?' ‘
Moi
,
coquette?
Marie smiles sadly.

‘I don't want to say anything that will offend you,' Bachelier offers. Tm only pointing out that polite, familiar, sophisticated relations were established between you.' He goes on to evoke their excursion to Saint-Sebastien, the promise of a rendez-vous in Paris, the fact that she found Gentien handsome, elegant, amiable, well brought up, and a man in a hurry ... Marie agrees to this last, and emphatically to the fact that her mother knew nothing of the tryst.

Président Bachelier pushes her on this: ‘See here, you were twenty- eight years old, no longer a child, an inexperienced girl. You'd spent ten years in the world of the theatre. You must have known very well what M. Gentien expected of you?'

Marie bows her head and says nothing.

Bachelier then leads her through to her discovery of her pregnancy during her time in Brussels. He interrogates her statement that Gentien urged an abortion first, there and then, with Dr Rouch in Paris. But even though Marie seems to be caught in an assertion that both Gentien and Dr Rouch deny, an accusation that the judge calls ‘ill-founded', she insists in a firm voice, above the growing murmurs from an excited public, that her accusation is true.

‘Monsieur Gentien finished by saying you were mad. Are you?'

‘Not at all,' Marie answers drily.

The interrogation now moves towards the eve of the birth of her child, and Marie's responses take on an intensity that provokes outbursts from the public. The president of the court has evidently nettled her by evoking how sick Gentien was of all the complications she ‘created', how he didn't want to ruin his relations with his family by publicly admitting her as a lover, how all this led to his decision to terminate his relations with her.

Marie bursts out, ‘Yes and on the eve of the birth of my child, he came to see me in a fury. He was full of reproaches. He left me in a terrible state. He clearly wanted to see both mother and child dead.'

‘Calm yourself,' Bachelier orders. ‘What is certain is that he didn't want to recognize the child as his. He didn't want you to recognize her either.'