Trials of Passion (28 page)

If this is not feminism, it is not altogether unrelated. There is an underlying similarity between the iconography the press use to illustrate feminists and
les vitrioleuses –
as the women become known. Both are portrayed as Amazonian, possessed and rabid.

At the end of an 1872 essay,
VHomme–Femme,
exploring the psycho- sexual nature of man and woman and the socio-religious settlement
they were currently enmeshed in, Alexandre Dumas
fils
had outrageously suggested, tongue only a little in cheek, that the way to deal with straying wives was –
Tue-la!
Kill her! He was in part referring to the famous Dubourg affair, in which a husband had with dagger and sword attacked his unfaithful wife in flagrante delicto – or at least in the apartment of her lover. She had died three days later. In love with this man well before she had been forced by her father to marry Dubourg, Madame Dubourg had found herself incarcerated for a time in an asylum, and when released she had taken up with her first love once more. Dubourg had received only a five-year sentence following his murderous, premeditated attack.

In his second most widely read novel,
L'Affaire Clemenceau
(1867), Dumas had already portrayed a virtuous husband killing a flagrantly deceitful wife and pleading his case in court. Having been criticized for his injunction to the male to kill his gallivanting wife, Dumas was also criticized for not allowing the betrayed wife in his play of 1872,
La Princesse Georges
, to carry out an equally passionate murder of her husband. The times were changing, and Dumas rode the shift in sexual relations: after the Marie Bière trial he wrote a provocative new essay,
Les Femmes qui tuent et les femmes qui votent
(Women who Kill and Women Who Vote (1880)). The two are closely related, Dumas contends, thereby outraging his vocal, moralizing, often Catholic opposition. Until the law – ever several steps behind shifting public mores – recognizes contemporary social reality and instates justice for women – mistreated by their own fathers, by seducers who abandon, by husband/fathers who stray – they will attempt to kill. And juries as well as the public will support natural justice over and above laws that are no longer just.

Dumas goes so far as to reproduce in the main body of his text a contemporary proclamation addressed to ‘the women of France' and calling for women's rights. In its argument for the vote for women, for seats on juries and in the judiciary as well as in Parliament, the declaration includes a telling line linking the treatment of women with the treatment of the mad, as if being woman were equivalent to being mad: ‘An Assembly of Men is about to legislate for women in the
same way as it passes laws on and regulates the mad: are women then mad people to whom one can apply regulation from above?'

This sentence grounds a linkage often made by late-twentieth- century historians between suffragettes and hysterics, and shows that the slippage between madness and feminism was one of which feminists as early as 1880 were aware. Dumas and the writer of the proclamation he cites both make the connection. There were two ways, the suggestion is, in which women could respond to the inequities of the day: they could become campaigners for change or they could become hysterics – either poised to shoot the men who had done them wrong or to fall ill of the oft-unarticulated injustices and conflicts that the values of the time trapped them in. In some cases, like that of Breuer and Freud's famous Anna O (Bertha Pappenheim), the two paths were part of the same individual's life.

Dumas argues, following the most vocal French feminist of the time, Hubertine Auclerc, that since women are subject to taxes, they must also have the vote. They will then also have seats in the Assemblée, and will be able to change the laws – on divorce, on seduction, on the rights of mothers and children. Dumas and Auclerc's logic didn't see fruition until sixty-four years later, in 1944. Meanwhile, the rash of
vitriolage
and shootings spread.

Trying to get to the root of why the public idealized these women, Dumas wonders whether it was because existing laws protected the guilty, not the innocent. The murderesses were The incarnation of an idea suddenly rising up against stubborn and insufficient traditions. The idea comes through fire and blood. It poses its personal and necessary demand against laws which were once excellent, but now that customs have changed, appear unjust and barbaric.' Of course, the murderer hasn't reasoned all of this out. No. She blindly obeys her passion. But her passion is seen to reveal a natural, incontestable human right, which society should have considered, but failed to.

In the very month of Marie Bière's trial, a woman of thirty, one Hélène Dumaire, buys a revolver and shoots her former lover, Dr Picart – a
man whose child she bore while he was a medical student. Dumaire was, according to the press, a woman of not quite the impeccable virtue of a Marie Bière. She was certainly no innocent virgin, but she had supported Picart through his studies, only to be told at their end that he was now going to marry a richer, younger woman. Asked at her trial whether she regretted her crime, Dumaire answered forthrightly: ‘No, I'm happier that he's dead than married; I couldn't bear our daughter to have been an abandoned child.' Given this implacable honesty, the jury couldn't see their way to acquitting her. Nonetheless, given that she had killed a man – not merely wounded him, as in the case of Marie – her sentence was relatively light: ten years in prison.

On 18 May 1880, a month and nine days after Marie Bière's much discussed trial and verdict, the distinguished Comtesse de Tilly stepped out of her house in Saintes, a prosperous small town of some fifteen thousand inhabitants in the Charente-Maritime, went to her local chemists and purchased a canister of vitriol – commonly used in housework but which also burns, disfigures and blinds. Standing by the window of her home, she happened to spy the young
modiste
or milliner, with whom her cheating wastrel husband had long been having an affair that had set the whole of Saintes chattering. She flung the vitriol at the younger woman. ‘I did it for the children,' the ailing thirty-year-old countess, a woman known for her piety and seriousness, tells the magistrate. Her husband was robbing his children to pay for his mistress, who would become the mother of Madame's children when she died.

In court, Madame de Tilly was defended by the brilliant Maître Lachaud, now the women's advocate of choice. He evoked the heroism of her maternal love, the brutality of her husband's insults, the shaming clamour in the small town. He called Madame de Tilly a saint, whom the jury could only acquit so that she could leave the courtroom with her honour restored and utterly intact.

Despite the seriousness of the crime, they did acquit. As in other crimes of passion, they were acting on that
conviction intime
, that inner
conviction that they understood natural justice. After all, hadn't they learned in the course of the trial that the young mistress had had an indemnity of twenty thousand francs settled on her by Monsieur de Tilly, who never appeared in court and was presumed to have fled to America.

It was cases like that of Madame de Tilly, together with the emotional polemic played out in the press, in essays and plays such as those of Alexandre Dumas, that helped to modernize divorce laws in France. On 27 July 1884, the radical socialist member of parliament from the Vaucluse,
député
Alfred Naquet – a friend of the anarchist Bakunin and a Jew who had written much on marriage and divorce and been censored under the Empire – saw divorce legislation through the Assembly that effectively reinstated the revolutionary divorce law of 1792.

The new law, which would last until the 1970s with only small modifications, instituted divorce with fault. Either party could sue. For women like Madame de Tilly, who had hitherto had no recourse against adulterous and often thieving husbands, it was a huge boon. Divorce was now possible on grounds of adultery (with the caveat that the adulterer could not marry the third party for three years), injury, cruelty, addiction or long imprisonment. The ‘innocent' – wife or husband – was granted the children and a pension. Catholic France, whose 115 deputies voted against the law, was up in arms. The indissoluble union that made man and wife one was now dissoluble – by other means than vitriol. In 1885, France saw four thousand divorces.

It is unlikely that a working-class woman like twenty-three-year-old Amélie Sanglé – who on 16 November 1883 threw vitriol at the man she thought had taken her husband away from her, had led him to drink and to other women while she and her children by him starved – would have found her sense of justice appeased in the divorce courts. But the Paris Assizes did acquit her, even though the man she took aim at died of what was thought to be an associated meningitis the next day.

Before her trial, Amélie was observed by the nuns and doctors at the prison infirmary of Saint-Lazare, where she was also delivered, when the time came, of a child. A very full ‘mental state' report on Amélie from Dr Auguste Motet shows what by now are the regular categories according to which avenging women are examined and clinically described, even when they (and their victims) are working- class. Motet searches in Amélie's family and her past, where he finds reports of nervous crises, ‘not epileptic in nature'. This, together with late onset of menstruation and a promiscuous ease in moving between partners, leads him to diagnose a
petite hystérie.
Such a minor hysteria is so common a female malady as to be attributable to almost any woman, and brings in its train no mental aberration that can excuse a violent act. Whatever compassion Motet may feel for this young woman in her rage, jealousy and despair as she attacks her target, he can find no delusional imaginings in her, or moral confusion.

Motet does, however, revealingly note the influence of ‘contagion by example'. The notion of contagion comes from Pasteur's work with microbes. The crowd psychologists borrowed it, hypothesizing that ideas and extreme acts could spread from mind to mind in the same way as disease. Dr Motet states that just such a contagion has driven women to vitriolic acts. But since this contagion doesn't fall into any larger medical category of delirium, it cannot be an excuse for crime. A ‘transitory mental trouble' that has no pathologic precursor in the patient's history is no evidence of mental alienation.

If in medico-legal eyes, despite her
petite hystérie
, Amélie is a responsible working-class woman who has committed a crime and should therefore be punished, the jury nonetheless acquits her. As Dumas might have said, they seem to think that Amélie, delivered of a baby while awaiting trial, has natural justice on her side. The epoch's juries are on the whole more radical than the psychiatrists, who line up firmly behind the state, which also pays their fees. They may take thorough histories of their patients, they probe for signs of ‘insanity', but they refuse to allow their ‘insights' into the individual mind to be used as an excuse for crime. They are agents of control.

Yet somehow their reports, perhaps by forefronting the passions and pathologies, emphasize the frailty of the individual mind. These may have signalled to more forgiving juries and the public a sense that the individual and her aberrations counted for more in the meting out of justice than any exemplary punishment. As for the protection of the social realm and any dangers these vengeful individuals presented, their hunch was that these acquitted women would not repeat their offence. The ones cited here never did.

III

Hysteria, Hypnosis and Criminal Responsibility

As the Third Republic steered its unsteady modernizing and democratic course through the 1880s, putting science and secularism in the foreground in its attempt to create upstanding Republican citizens, it met with the formidable populist challenge of the seemingly heroic monarchist General Boulanger and his reactionary politics of the three Rs – Revenge on Germany, Revision of the Constitution, and Restoration of the Monarchy. (Rhetoric played its part, too.)

Boulanger's popularity soared, until a putsch seemed imminent. The very way in which this happened made progressives – the new scientists and social scientists amongst them – worry that the suggestions of a sensationalist popular press could work their way into the minds of a gullible populace without the owners of those minds being aware of the process. A modern mass public, it seemed, could, just like any individual, be magnetized, mesmerized, hypnotized, and prey to suggestion. Consciousness was an unsteady entity: it could be led astray or even abolished under the sway of a more powerful individual. Emotive, half-grasped ideas could, like germs, spread with contagious fury through a badly educated and perhaps ‘degenerate' crowd. All this, even before there was any such thing as the Twittersphere.

Worries about how the mind worked, and indeed how to counteract popular notions that occult forces were at play when individuals felt possessed by gods or demons, fed the investigations of the neurologists, the alienists and the medico-legists. Their concepts, arguments and language, in turn, were translated by the press and distributed to a wide public, who assimilated and replayed their ideas in diverse ways. Keen to engender a ‘scientific' study of the mind and its diseases, as well as treatments, the doctors were also eager to rid the public sphere of those they considered charlatans: a guileless populace might imagine that mesmerists and theatrical magnetizers or hypnotists shared a work sphere with doctors and scientists. They didn't. The doctors and psychologists were interested in the phenomenology of hypnotism and altered states – the how, the why, and the what effect of the process. They were interested in how suggestion worked, whether it needed a ‘weak' mind prone to dissociation to take effect, or in addition some kind of physical triggering such as a sudden flash of light – as the German Hugo Miinsterberg, who would later become the propagator of ‘applied psychology' in the United States, speculated at the turn of the century.