Trials of Passion by Lisa Appignanesi

Author:Lisa Appignanesi
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Pegasus

IV

Naturalizing the Impulsive Feminine

In the ultimate pre-First World War trial of passion, it was the press itself that took on the aura of a betraying, abusive and hypnotically suggestive power to become the object of a passionate crime. Restoring female honour here was not a question of avenging seduction and abandonment, or an unrecognized child. By the turn of the century, the passionate female criminal had a sense of ‘reputation’ as finely honed as any male engaging in a duel. For Madame Caillaux, wife of a cabinet minister, this entailed targeting the newspaper editor who, she felt, had slandered her and her husband. The democracy of free expression, and a press that had fewer worries about privacy than has ever since been the case in France, were suddenly under direct attack. It is as if one of the victims of British hacking in 2012 had stormed into Rebekah Brooks’s or Rupert Murdoch’s office, taken aim, murdered and been acquitted – on the grounds that this is how nervous women behave under pressure.

As the belle époque drew to its end, the alienists’ understanding of women who committed passionate or impulsive crimes had infected what had been the norm. A ‘real woman’ had now become simply that nervy, emotional, suggestible, virtuous, domestic creature, hysterical by turn and weak of intellect, and ever subject to impulses beyond her control that made her either succumb to tears or explode in murderous rage. Examination by psychiatric experts was scarcely necessary to mitigate a crime that just couldn’t be helped, especially if the woman was honourable and married to a leading politician.

But this somewhat nostalgic vision of the feminine, as it played itself out in violence and in courtroom drama, was far more public wish than private reality. With feminism on the rise and war on the horizon, gender anxiety was electric. Had French Republican masculinity grown even more effete and decadent since the Franco-Prussian War of 1870? Had France become feminized in comparison to its enemy other, the bullishly masculine Germany? For a moment, it even seemed as if, while fearing the denaturing of male and female, at the same time the country secretly wanted its women to be pistol-wielding viragos adamant about honour – their own and their husbands’.

During the week of the Henriette Caillaux trial, 20–28 July 1914, no paper headlined the massing of troops more prominently than the murder case. France’s attention was on a courtroom where even the President of the Republic testified on behalf of the accused. Listening to the ricochet of Madame Caillaux’s bullets, the country seemed to want to blot out that other shot aimed at Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which rang out from Sarajevo and around the world. On the day of Henriette’s acquittal, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. One kind of passionate madness would soon be displaced by a more tragic one.

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