Retour 11 CRIME AND CULTURE The "Problem" of the Female Criminal The serialized novel is able to create that frightening thing that is a popular mentality. . . . It is said that the life of a man ends always in resembling his dreams. Will the life of the people end in resembling their fictions? Maurice Talmeyr, "Le Roman-feuilleton et l'esprit populaire," Revue des Deux Mondes, 1903  In 1880, Georges Grisson donned his frock coat and hat, armed himself with a revolver, and embarked on an investigation of the vicious and criminal elements of Paris. In the chronicle of this adventure, he invites his readers on a "voyage of exploration" that promises to be "sinister and grotesque, distressing and droll." Grisson's announcement of his enterprise warns of the real danger represented by the city's debased population (witness his weapon), while engaging his readers with the titillating offer of scenes that are filled with "gross amusements," "ferocious joys," and "frightening pleasures." The particular appeal of this writing lay in the explicit mingling of pleasure and danger. Grisson's audience would immediately recognize the invitation to share in the voyeuristic, transgressive pleasures of the criminal story. In fin-de-siecle Paris, crime had become an imaginative obsession. Vignettes such as those Grisson promised proliferated across a broad cultural field that included journalistic, literary, legal, medical, and social scientific writings. Criminals were the subjects of popular ballads; they wrote memoirs from prison and figured prominently in illustrated supplements to mass-circulation newspapers. Forensic psychiatrists probed the medical dimensions of criminality in published case histories; former chiefs of police wrote multivolume memoirs that celebrated, in ironic juxtaposition, both crime and its containment; a specialized daily newspaper, the Gazette des Tribunaux, reported on the most intriguing or scandalous court cases, quoting the texts of criminal indictments and providing a reconstructed version of the interchanges of the courtroom; the faits divers of the new 12   popular press - those condensed stories about terrifying accidents, natural disasters, sensational crimes, mysterious disappearances, miraculous escapes, and otherworldly occurrences - came more and more to focus on violent and criminal events; popular theater featured criminal melodramas in its staple fare; novels and serialized romans feuilletons elaborated on real and fictional crimes, blurring the distinction between them; and professionals in law and criminology issued a steady stream of expert testimony in the courtroom and in journals, monographs, and reports from international conferences. Michelle Perrot has argued that "there are no 'facts of crime' as such, only a judgmental process that institutes crimes by designating as criminal both certain acts and their perpetrators. In other words, there is a discourse of crime that reveals the obsession of a society." My schematic listing of the variety and diffusion of criminal stories attests to a generalized preoccupation whose meanings for contemporaries need to be unraveled. Crime was the focus of both science and art; it evoked fear as well as fantasy. Not only did criminal stories make good press in the fin-de- siecle, providing the occasion for vicarious psychic and social adventures, but they seemed to promise access to deeper, more unfathomable truths. In evaluating this mass of documentation, we need to know how different narratives about crime worked in cultural terms and how different communities articulated and appropriated criminal stories. A crime always has the status of a symptom, in Dennis Porter's terms, a symptom that functions as an insistent question, inviting a discussion of causes and motivation. It is the purpose of this study to explore the ways in which contemporaries responded to the "question" of crime in the final decades of the century and in so doing to discover, along with Grisson and his readers, the various obsessions that gave crime its particular cultural resonance. The problem of crime seemed on one level a quintessential marker of a crisis in modern urban society. To contemporary observers, political and social stability in the final three decades of the nineteenth century appeared to be profoundly threatened by a range of pressing and apparently intractable urban problems: an organized working class espousing ideologies of resistance; the persistence of poverty and the unsettling presence of people who could not become bourgeois and did not revere bourgeois values; a mass society, apparently endangered from above by the decadence of the wealthy and from below by the pathology of unruly crowds. Many focused on crime as the symptom par excellence of these 13   various social threats. The most striking aspect of contemporary discussions of crime was not, however, the fear of physical danger that they evoked, but rather, anxieties about a new and disturbing experience of cultural anarchy. It seemed increasingly evident to politicians and professional men that laws, institutions, and the most basic customs of the society were being renegotiated through the somewhat haphazard processes of criminal trials. Traditional institutions appeared unable to guarantee traditional mores. According to one jurist, "one day it is the issue of the right to bring paternity suits, another day divorce . . . or the right to vengence, the impotence ofjustice to rectify certain injuries, the unequal distribution of wealth-all pass before the court." Those accustomed to thinking of themselves as arbiters of contemporary practices worried that the social problems signaled by well-publicized accounts of criminal activity appeared to be moving toward resolution in serendipitous ways, linked as much to the idiosyncrasies of the penal process and the volatility of popular opinion as to the dictates of law or established custom. The production and dissemination of criminal stories through emerging vehicles of mass culture similarly posed an unprecedented challenge to traditional authorities. New forms of popular entertainment - including especially the cafe concert, popular theater, and the mass-circulation press - suggested the possibility of an autonomous culture unsupervised by, and even resistant to, the values of traditionally dominant groups. Bourgeois critics deplored the theaters and music halls of the popular classes as agents of "the invading march of filthy licentiousness," while government censors attempted to expunge lyrics deemed politically dangerous from the popular repertoire. It was not accidental that a scientific literature on crime developed alongside a growing mass audience for criminal stories as self-appointed experts worried over the uncertain effects of suggestion on behavior and of pleasure on discipline. Actual criminal activity seemed less threatening than the domestication, if not the celebration, of crime that found expression in new organs of popular culture. For the established classes, it remained unclear on what terms social stability and a democratized mass culture could coexist. The contemporary concerns that produced this preoccupation with crime found their clearest expression in the figure of the criminal woman, who became in the closing decades of the century a pivotal character in the eclectic repertoire of criminal stories, factual and fictional, that cirulated so widely throughout the period. Nothing in the criminal sta- 14   tistics of these decades, however, accounts for this new obsession with criminal women. Women constituted a declining percentage of those arrested for crimes over the course of the nineteenth century, and, by the closing three decades, represented approximately 14 percent of all defendants- this low number including arrests for infanticide and abortion, categories in which women were highly overrepresented. Rates for violent crime by women were especially low: women constituted 5.7 percent of those indicted for homicide; 6 percent of indictments for theft with violence; 8.7 percent of assault and battery cases; and 13.3 percent of premeditated murders. It is possible that a certain amount of female lawlessness was masked by the criminal statistics. Between 1860 and 1890, the percentage of crimes heard in the main criminal court of Paris, the Cour d'Assises, declined from 24 percent to 18 percent, and continued to drop in the next two decades. As magistrates worried especially about the increasing willingness of juries to acquit women, female offenses were frequently transferred to the lower courts where, tried as misdemeanors rather than felonies, they received less harsh but more reliable punishment. In fact, Marie-Jo Dhavernas has speculated that French women were so marginalized within their society that they could not even violate its laws, making them regularly the recipients of "ces touchants faveurs". Thus, she argues, women made up a larger proportion of "apparent criminality" (that is, recognized but not pursued) than of legal criminality (crimes actually brought before the courts), and would probably have constituted a larger share of real crime (all infractions committed) if these figures could be known. But even if the official statistics distorted figures for female criminality, it does not seem that women's crime was perceived as growing alarmingly in this period. Acquittal rates remained high for women, passing 50 percent in the 1890s (in contrast to acquittal rates of about 30 percent for men), and female offenders were celebrities as well as pariahs. In her recent study of the discipline of criminology, Carol Smart notes that, historically, there has been little interest in women's crime because it could not be understood as a pressing social problem: there were too few offenders; most did not commit repeat offenses; female criminals were seen essentially as anomalies. In contrast, she observes, there is no shortage of research on topics such as female insanity and maternal deprivation, subjects that have been identified as having greater social relevance.ll It seems that the female criminal of late-nineteenth-centuryFrance should have been similarly consigned to a marginal space. What is 15   particularly interesting about the French case is this very disparity between a low-steady or declining rate of female criminality on the one hand and the explosion of a discussion about female crime across a broad discursive field on the other. What accounts for the outpouring of interest in criminal women in the fin-de-siecle? The work of Joan Scott, Mary Poovey, and others, has suggested that "those issues that are constituted as 'problems' at any given moment are particularly important because they mark the limits of ideological certainty," pointing to cultural tensions and ongoing struggles." In following this lead I am seeking to situate the problem of crime - especially women's crime - within larger processes of cultural definition. The discussion of female crime was on one level about the fling of sexual difference in a time of considerable challenge to conventional norms. Explanations of female criminality took as their starting point the disparity of crime rates between the sexes. Experts sought to determine whether women were more moral than men. They assessed women's lesser participation in crime in terms of their closer connection to religion, their role as nurturers, their ostensibly more childlike qualities. They suggested that low rates of female criminality derived from women's reduced intelligence, limited imagination, and more restricted access to opportunities for transgression. What was it, they asked, that moved women to commit violent crimes? Were there quintessentially female crimes? This set of issues that constituted the female criminal as a social problem invited a clarification of difference-an attempt to codify and stabilize gender identities in a period of unsettling social change. But on another level, the use of gendered understandings of crime provided the conceptual tools for evaluating contemporary culture. The attention to female criminality put into circulation a broad discussion of a syndrome of pathologies that were represented through - indeed, embodied in - the criminal woman. The emergence of the "problem" of female crime in the fin-de-siecle points, then, to the intersection of two areas of cultural tension: new uncertainties about the role and place of women, and concerns about the nature of modern mass culture. It is my purpose here to explore the ways that the female criminal figured in the cultural transactions of fin-de-siecle Paris. In Perrot's terms, what obsessions of the society were revealed through the various discourses on women's crime? How did the female criminal come to stand at the center of anxieties about mass culture and shifting social relations as she stood before the bench of the Cour d'Assises? And what was the dis- 16   cursive and cultural place of the criminal woman as she circulated through and participated in the construction of the various stories about her? In seeking to answer these questions, I will be looking at collisions and collusions between the stories told by professionals in law and the new social sciences - attempts both to make sense of the cultural changes of the period and to secure their expertise - and those emanating from the more popular forums in which criminal stories became part of the public domain. This chapter will suggest how the female criminal became the most resonant site for exploring the implications of a perceived moment of cultural anarchy in which traditions and traditional authorities seemed to be losing their hold. Crime attracted so much attention in the fin-de-siecle because it had become one of the primary symptoms of what physicians and social scientists described as a new national disease: degenerescence - a condition characterized not only by physical deterioration but by parallel moral and intellectual decline. In terms that provided a counter-discourse to the rhetoric of progress, degeneration was understood as the disease of particular individuals as well as the condition of modernity itself, manifest in persistent social divisions, the irrational behavior of crowds, urban crime, and insanity. According to Daniel Pick, theories of degeneration "flirted and flitted between the dreams of purity and danger . . . in socially specific ways," suggesting sometimes that "degeneration involved a scenario of racial decline (Potentially implicating everyone in the society) and [alternatively] an explanation of 'otherness,' securing the identity of, variously, the scientist, (white) man, bourgeoisie against superstition, fiction, darkness, femininity, the masses, effete aristocracy." Concern about degeneration permeated social criticism precisely because it could not be reduced to one message or one context; rather, it emerged to conceptualize "a felt crisis of history" that could be seen equally in the national defeat by Prussia in 1870 or in pervasive and intractable social problems. Conservative moralists identified the national crisis as one provoked by relativism and materialism -a loss of faith that was epitomized in the "egoism" and individualism of republican ideals. Other commentators from diverse religious and political positions blamed the luxuries and commercial pleasures proliferating in the city for undermining the physical and moral integrity of the upper classes on the one hand, and for generating the envy, taste for luxury, and sloth of urban workers on the other. In the, terms of this argument, the urban environment was responsible for an increase in nervous disorders among the wealthy, while 17   workers, unsupervised in the midst of temptations, succumbed to vice. In effect, they construed the urban world of the late nineteenth century as the breeding ground for defective beings whose tainted hereditary predispositions were released by the disintegration of older, safer social struc-tures and practices. We can see a good example of this kind of linkage in the work of one legal scholar who explained degeneration as the result of "alcoholism, the indifference of the law toward human reproduction, an excess of civilization, and urban congestion." With such a diffuse etiology, degeneration theorists could link political fears about repeated revolution, unruly crowds, anarchism, and violence to anxieties about depopulation, alcoholism, crime, prostitution, insanity, and feminism. Criminology emerged in the fin-de-siecle as part of the new social sciences that aspired to provide the modern cure for the pathologies of modernity. Informed by a medical model of social analysis, it presented itself as a kind of public hygiene for the "epidemic" of crime, promising a scientific solution to the problems of social defense. Although a criminologist in 1899 described this preoccupation with the study of crime as evidence of an unprecedented expansion of "the prestige of evil" (le prestige du mal) - an exaggerated interest in things degenerate that was perhaps itself unhealthy - he softened his alarm in the end by granting crime a privileged status as a source of profound knowledge. According to the professor of legal medicine Alexandre Lacassagne, "societies have only the criminals they deserve." A dissection of the corpus of crime would therefore provide an anatomical sketch of the social body. In this conceptual frame, studies of crime and criminality (le virus criminel) could address a broad range of perceived social pathologies - including alcoholism, venereal disease, prostitution, degeneration, suicide - while producing a prophylactic knowledge of human sentiments - hate, greed, vengeance, love, despair-and a normative description of healthy and viable social arrangements, including appropriate relations between men and women and among social classes. These goals were to be accomplished by a new army of professionals whose separate and collective expertise could be deployed across the broad terrain claimed by criminology. The criminologist Gabriel Tarde made this point explicitly, boasting that a revitalized study of crime stood just at the intersection of the new human sciences - statistics, anthropology, psychology, physiology - which would illuminate "social facts . . . [that are] no longer confused and doubtful like the generalizations of earlier times, but are now as precise and certain as their details."' Crime came to be thought of as the most vivid and accurate reflection 18   of social customs and inclinations. The prison, along with the asylum, could be understood as "a living museum that enclosed a pathologically enlarged version of the tendencies of the day." The criminologist was assimilated, in this discourse, to the photographer (or the developer, le revelateur) who merely reproduced with absolute verisimilitude the precise image before him. As if to confirm this perspective, Marie Francois Goron, a former chief of police in Paris, described the accounts of his professional exploits as "social photographs that, without retouching, by their unadorned simplicity and horror, conveyed the truth." In the world of his subjects, "savage and vile as it was," one found oneself, Goron insisted, "closer to nature." Similarly, a reviewer for Le Radical spoke of former prefect of police Gustave Mace's autobiographical reflections, Un joli monde, as "a powerful study of social physiology [in which] the vices of our society are laid bare with a documentary exactitude." Criminology's claims to "photographic exactness" were, then, part of an effort to garner authority for the new disciplines, enhancing the appeal of expert knowledge that would be closer to nature, truer, and more authentic than ordinary knowledge. We seem here to be in the presence of what Denise Riley has recently described as the emergence of "the social," that is, of an intermediary ground between the old public and private arenas. This reconceptualized "social" became, in Riley's terms, a space in which newly defined sociological categories ("women," "the working class" "the criminal," and so on) were spread out, dehistoricized, and opened to remedial interventions. In their growing professionalization, social scientists produced "a total geography for comprehension and reform" that endowed them with responsibility for curing social ills and covered them with the mantle of disinterested, scientific humanitarianism. The discourses of the new social sciences envisioned a world managed by scientific experts, men of probity and discernment, protected from self-interest by a shield of class and profession: The dream of a truly evolved and civilized human society would be one in which each crime (committed by the proud, by the rich as well as by the poor), each illness and each madness, each pathological case, would be examined in the severe and serene halls of science by competent and capable men for whom the sole goal would be that of defending society against those who compromised the conditions of its existence, and who would cure, whenever possible, those who had offended it. This was an expertise that claimed authority not only to assess the viability and health of social arrangements but to plumb the depths of 19   the human psyche. We can hear something of the scope of this aspiration in a description of the near-mystical insights of the famous defense lawyer Charles Lachaud who had descended, step by step, into the mysterious underground of contemporary existence where he had seen every misery, known every horror, borne every shame, found every limit, examined all motives, reached the bottom of all suffering and of every social degradation. . . . Like the professor of surgery who makes use of his surgical practice to give an anatomy lesson, in each of his cases - by digging among feelings and human passions to their very roots, by sounding, even beyond consciousness, the silent depths of instinct - he finds the means to construct a veritable lesson in moral anatomy. Insisting that the study of crime was, for professionals, more than a vulgar curiosity, the criminal anthropologist Scipio Sighele claimed that "it is precisely in the analysis of evil that we find the explanation de notre moi." To many, the knowledge excavated from the dark underside of human life seemed to promise a means to understand, and then to control, the dangers hidden in the human heart. These were secrets, mysteries that could be unlocked only through a new kind of professional scrutiny. It is perhaps no coincidence that criminology and psychoanalysis emerged in tandem: parallel beginnings in the late nineteenth century of the sciences du moi. In his discussion of the development of the discipline of criminology, Foucault has charted the emergence of this preoccupation with the nature of the accused criminal. Although nineteenth-century criminologists remained divided in their assessments of the relative importance of sociological, psychological, and physical factors in provoking crime, he argues that in spite of these differences they increasingly focused on the character of the criminal. The crime itself seemed to carry less meaning than the defendant's personal tendencies. Foucault has offered a recent exam-ple that captures the implications of this late-nineteenth-century shift: "A man who was accused of five rapes and six attempted rapes between February and June 1975 was being tried in the Paris criminal courts. The accused hardly spoke at all. Questions from the presiding judge- "Have you tried to reflect upon your case?" -Silence. "why, at twenty-two years of age, do such violent urges overtake you? You must make an effort to analyze yourself. You are the one who has the keys to your own actions. Explain yourself." 20   -Silence. "Why would you do it again?" -Silence. Then a juror took over and cried out, "For heaven's sake, defend yourseIf?" The juror's outburst makes visible the extent to which the fact of a crime and the apprehension of the individual responsible for the act had become merely the opening moment in a judicial process that was finally about something else - that is, about a dangerous or deviant individual whose condition of delinquency might even precede the commission of a criminal act. The business of the court, Foucault argues, increasingly replaced the question of "What must be punished, and how?" with the question "Whom do you think you are punishing, and why?" In terms of penal practice in the late nineteenth century, this shift was apparent in the expanding use of the concept of extenuating circumstances to mitigate formal legal penalties, in efforts to "individualize" penalties so as to create a two- or three-tiered system that responded directly to the issue of motivation, and in the introduction of the expert testimony of psychiatrists who would situate the crime within a comprehensive, "scientific" portrait of the criminal so as to calibrate precisely the social danger and possibility of rehabilitation presented by the accused. Foucault's analysis does not, however, account for the particular determination to dissect the nature of the female criminal in the fin-de-siecle. In his neglect of the ways that assumptions about gender difference fractured discussions of criminal character, Foucault's analysis misses the convergence of anxieties about social disorder and cultural anarchy in the figure of the female criminal, the quintessential unruly woman of the fin-de-siecle. This focus on femaleness, which I wish to underline, was grounded in patterns of thought that conceived of women as uniquely capable of reflecting back the contours of social life - as the mirror through which society would recognize itself. The poor working- class women who passed through the Cour d'Assises suggested, in a well-entrenched model of social analysis, all that was wrong with modern urban society. The prostitute, the seduced and abandoned unmarried mother, the unreliable domestic servant, and the thief each brought into focus the unresolved social problems of the urban agglomeration: social anarchy, unregulated sexuality, poverty, class envy. This use of a female figure to represent urban social realities was not new; it had typified nineteenth-century social criticism. Throughout the 21   century, bourgeois investigators had discussed the perceived pathology of the city in terms of the condition of working-class women. At least from the time of the publication of Jules Simon's L'Ouvriere in 1860, the social debris of modern urban society had been represented by descriptions of the impoverished and degraded working woman. Lurid evocations of her situation stirred endless speculation on questions of moral and political economy, calling forth "scientific" analyses to account for her condition and remedial strategies to cure it. Commentators who wrote about the lives of working-class women nearly all described a prototypical descent into une vie desequilibree as the conditions of urban life exacerbated women's inherent or inherited weaknesses. In a kind of classic formulation, one author suggested that there were two types of ouvriere: the first, a woman born in the city and endowed with "appropriate female qualities" who became a seamstress, milliner, hairdresser, clerk, florist, or laundress, married a worker capable of supporting his family, and worked only until the arrival of children; or the second, a migrant woman, separated from her family, who arrived in the city either as a domestic or industrial worker and, bouleversee by poverty and city ways, slid fatefully into prostitution. This double image produced an imagined "before" when urban life was less fraught with moral dangers, when workers found their natural place and lived settled, responsible lives. At the same time, it condemned both the new type of city woman and the new city. With similar intent, one medical commentator diagnosed the scourge ravaging French society as "the unrestrained luxury of women," who, seduced by the false glamour of clubs, cafes, spectacles, and public dances, deserted their homes, abandoned their modesty, and, in imitation of courtesans, were fatefully thrown onto the public thoroughfare. In this analysis, working women's susceptibility to corruption derived in large part from an acquired refinement, "superior to their condition," that was typical of aspiring urban working women. These pretensions, which allegedly made them unsuitable partners for members of their own class, turned them into the easy prey of upper-class men. In the hyperbolic language of one criminologist, "The wolves [loups ravisseurs] seek to devour this victim, so pure, but so frail, so isolated. No matter where she turns . . . the peril is everywhere . . . she is lost. . . . Oh! each year there is a long and wretched list of martyrs." Another commentator lamented the decline of the small workshop and the loss of the protection of the patron, which, he argued, led to "unsupervised lunches, solitary evenings, and the suggestions of loneliness," ultimately the ground for theft and 22   infanticide. Working women, deprived of familial or patronal supervision, were then trapped. Either, he speculated, the novelties that they needed to attract men would lead them to shoplift in a department store or to some kind of swindling, or an unwanted pregnancy would force an abor-tion or infanticide. Dangerous in both her autonomy and her dependence, the working girl became a permanent fixture of studies of the urban social landscape, one that often merged discussions of criminal behavior with overtly sexual concerns. In Denise Riley's terms, this working-class woman who emerged in the rhetoric of social criticism was a strange hybrid who stood in a somewhat ambiguous position to both "class" and "women." She was more, according to Riley, than the female section of her class; her femininity filled a distinctive space, overflowing class, that provided the "point where 'society' could best endeavour to meet the threatening and threatened class in its intimate form." It was, then, not only the working-class woman but the prostitute who most acutely came to represent the actual and symbolic center of anxieties about class and gender relations, about sex and power. The collapsing of the working woman into the prostitute - the quintessential figure of overflowing femaleness and the social equivalent of the criminal - is most evident in contemporary usage of the same term, femme isolee, to name both the unregistered prostitute and the female wage-earner living alone in furnished rooms. Femvmes isolees suggested together "the domain of poverty, a, world of turbulent sexuality, subversive independence, and dangerous insubordination." The condensed and popularized version of these assumptions is evident in Zola's famous (1880) description of Nana: [She was] a girl descended from four or five generations of drunkards, her blood tainted by an accumulated inheritance of poverty and drink, which in her case had taken the form of a nervous derangement of the sexual instinct. She had grown up in the slums, in the gutters of Paris; and now, tall and beautiful, and as well made as a plant nurtured on a dungheap, she was avenging the paupers and outcasts of whom she was the product. With her the rottenness that was allowed to ferment among the lower classes was rising to the surface and rotting the aristocracy. She had become a force of nature, a ferment of destruction, unwittingly corrupting and disorganizing Paris between her snow-white thighs. Nana became the prototype of the prostitute saturated with depraved sexuality-the "seminal drain" and "putrid body" that inserted itself into bourgeois households, corrupting bourgeois patrimony. But she also evoked a more specific political danger that had come to be represented 23   in terms of a (sexually) threatening woman. In accounts of the civil war of 1871 and the revolutionary government of the Commune, these potential political dangers became explicit. Although there was considerable evidence that pointed to men as the incendiaries who had set fire to Paris during the upheaval, contemporary opinion, fueled by rumor and sensational press reports, latched tenaciously onto the figure of the petroleuse, a "hideous and fierce but sexually compelling female figure," as the vengeful perpetrator who allegedly set the fires, enacting literally the latent female threat to overturn the political order. Contemporary social scientific literature similarly cast women as agents of political upheaval. In the words of one crowd theorist, "by its routine caprice,... its credulity, its excitability, its rapid leaps from fury to tenderness, from exasperation to bursts of laughter, the crowd is woman, even when it is composed, as almost always happens, of masculine elements." By the I 880s, then, there was a well-established pattern of representing social and political disturbance by images of dangerous women, or, put slightly differently, contemporary popular and social scientific writing understood the changes that were transforming modern urban life in terms of a specifically feminized problem of disorder. The figure of the criminal woman both borrowed from and added to this rhetorical tradition. She, like the other images of disorderly and dangerous women, was both real and imagined. And like other unruly women, she pointed to all that was wrong with modern urban society. Descriptions of this modern deviant female in the writings of fin-de-siecle criminologists were in fact largely formulaic, following a larger pattern that produced taxonomies or physiognomies to describe a set of criminal "types." In the words of the criminologist Camille Granier, female criminality highlighted women's nature: "To put into relief the feminine entity, the study of her dark side, her criminality, is as useful to the sociologist as shadowing is to the graphic artist." Underpinning this general project were two deeply held assumptions: that female nature was timeless and eternal, and that women, unlike men, constituted a homogeneous category. Lombroso and Ferrero were repeating a broad consensus when they wrote that "all women fall into the same category, whereas each man is an individual unto himself; the physiognomy of the former conforms to a generalized standard; that of the latter is in each case unique." Much like Freud's nearly contemporaneous posing of the riddle of femininity, the discussion of the female criminal would, it was hoped, produce a knowledge of Woman in both her normal and more aberrant forms. 24   The specificities of the female criminal type thus derived from older assumptions about dangerous women and worked to reinforce those perceptions, while adding more contemporary concerns. What was new in the discussions of fin-de-siecle criminology was an expanded cast of dangerous women. The concerns of criminologists extended beyond earlier preoccupations with the alleged pathologies of working women to include female criminals who belonged to the upper classes: the murderesses, adulteresses, and kleptomaniacs who, through their criminal acts, stepped out of their protected social positions and became the centerpieces of notorious causes celebres. This enlarged constituency of criminal types was understood to point especially to a dangerous instability in the traditional family, to shifiing gender expectations, and to problems of supervision and authority in a mass society. Fin-de-siecle femmes criminelles became the signs and instruments of a particularly modern malaise. Henri Thulik provides us with a fairly complete description of a set of assumptions about national decline, provoked and made visible by criminal women, that had by 1885 gained considerable currency: Scientists have finally aroused public attention. Cries of alarm are heard everywhere: the size of the population is diminishing; infant mortality is increasing; infanticide and abortion have become, as in America, routine phenomena of daily life; prostitution is growing; people seek shameful and sterile pleasures; the vitality of France has been undermined. . . . From another perspective, women defend themselves against men with vitriol and with the revolver. They no longer seek legal justice, which does not have the power to protect them; hence they take vengeance. This weakening of the nation, these vices and violences, are symptoms of a profound sickness from which France is suffering. National anxieties were, in Thulih's analysis, collected around the "vices and violences" of women. The new divorce law of 1884, reintroducing divorce after nearly a century in which it had been illegal, raised the spectre of domestic chaos. And, as national anxieties in the fin-de-siecle became increasingly focused on the size of the population, the female-identified crimes of infanticide and abortion and the apparent growth of unregulated prostitution, the "pursuit of shameful and sterile pleasures," seemed to be at the heart of issues of national strength. In contemporary minds, women's growing demands for greater rights in marriage and greater protection for irregular liaisons, including the right to bring paternity suits (la recherche de la paternite), as well as the emergence of a small but worrisome feminist movement, confirmed anxieties about a disturbing tendency toward gender slippage. All threatened to 25   profoundly destabilize traditional family patterns and masculine authority. The female offender could be seen, then, as one link in a chain of disruptive women whose social place needed to be restabilized. For cultural critics and a wide range of professionals, the malaise of modernity and the malady of the modern female converged. The perennial "mystery" of women invited experts to produce a knowledge capable of ordering and making sense of social relations. By invoking "the eternal feminine" and linking women's behaviors to nature, bourgeois experts could construct a set of expectations that they deemed timeless and universal, remaking social norms according to their own deepest wishes. Gerard Wajeman has described the nineteenth-century incarnation of the disease of hysteria as a kind of pas de deux, a collaboration between patient and doctor that enacted the conditions by which a mystery produces a knowledge. According to his analysis, the hysteric posed the enigma of herself in such a way as to necessarily evoke a response firom the person who had the position and power to respond. The cultural importance of the criminal woman may be understood in similar terms: in her antisocial behavior she raised disturbing, unresolved questions about gender and class relations in the early Third Republic; and in her symbolic mobility, she provided the material and discursive site for bourgeois authorities to attempt to address these issues, to "solve" the problems. She was, literally, a source of knowledge. I am using "knowledge" here in the sense described by Joan Scott, when she speaks of knowledge as "the understanding produced by cultures and societies of human relationships": Such knowledge is not absolute or true, but always relative. It is produced in complex ways within large epistemic frames that themselves have an (at least quasi-) autonomous history. Its uses and meanings . . . are the means by which relationships of power - of dominance and subordination - are constructed. Knowledge refers not only to ideas but to institutions and structures, everyday practices as well as specialized rituals, all of which constitute social relationships. Knowledge is a way of ordering the world; as such it is not prior to social organization, it is inseparable from social organization. The examination of the criminal woman must be understood as part of efforts to stabilize social relations and practices through the ordering potential of knowledges that were widely held and broadly diffused. Scientific pretensions notwithstanding, criminologists could neither control criminal behavior nor attain a monopoly on interpretations of 26   criminality. Their expert knowledge worked to construct, in D. A. Miller's apt phrase, convictions about "the normality of normativeness"; it did not produce social discipline or certain, uncontested knowledge. Most important in undercutting scientific authority was the way that the discussion of crime escaped from the purview of experts and percolated through popular culture. The kind of mastery over crime aspired to by criminologists seemed, in their minds, to be continually thwarted by the serendipity of an intrusive mass culture that glorified crime and defied professional wisdom, producing alternative discourses on both criminality and the criminal. The jurist Guillot noted, for example, that modern crime had become "veiled," transformed in some sense, so that it was no longer understood as a brutal act, but had become the subject of conversation in salons and the inspiration for novels, its dangerousness masked by its pervasive presence in contemporary life. According to another legal scholar, contemporary society had been "split open by literature"; social questions were no longer addressed in the privacy and silence of the professional's study, but had become part of the democratized public domain. So, he argued, issues of grave social import were discussed not only in the academies and ministries of state but in "the tumult of workshops and in conference rooms which placed their podium indiscriminately at the disposition of popular orators." Thus, although criminologists had hoped to provide a kind of social hygiene for modern urban society, their professional and cultural aspirations were always tempered, and indeed compromised, by what they perceived as the cultural anarchy of mass society- "unauthorized" authors and proliferating interpretations that deprived experts of the final word. Not only were the public spaces of conference rooms sites of challenge and confusion, but private acts of reading seemed also to have grave public consequences. The novelist Paul Bourget claimed, for example, that Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir had caused an incurable moral poisoning among young people of his acquaintance, and criminologists and doctors noted that suicides often were found with underlined copies of Goethe's Werther in their pockets. Such poison-by-novel could also spread beyond individuals to institutions. One magistrate worried that novelists (especially Zola) had fatefully vulgarized scientific material, particularly the tenets of criminal anthropology, spreading complicated philosophical doctrines among people ill-equipped to perceive the subtleties of the argument. He argued that even educated people could be seduced by the entertaining mise-en-scene that drove the novel's plot, and would fail to 27   see the ways in which a vulgarization that weakened belief in the effi-acy of free will could disarm society in its time of great peril. Making the point even more directly, a legal critic observed that the minds of jurors had been irremediably contaminated by exposure to intellectual currents they could not assimilate: All the ideas of the century are introduced so as to reflect in a troubled mirror. The school, the army, the novel, and the newspaper have acted on the minds [of jurors] so that they carry within themselves all the philosophical doubts that lawyers or experts can awaken. . . . Today, with the jumble of systems, with vulgarized theories spreading everywhere, announcing the fateful persistence of atavistic traits, determinism, the corrupting influence of the social milieu, how is it possible for juries to declare with any serenity or assurance that this person is guilty? In retaliation against this implied call for censorship, the literary critic Ferdinand Brunetiere - disdaining the pretensions of jurists "who spoke of their science in the same terms as did physiologists and astronomers"- quipped that neither Rousseau nor Voltaire had looked to official authorities for permission to write about social organization! The Chambige affair in 1886, however, seemed to confirm in particullarly vivid detail the perils of the novelistic suggestion. Mme Grille, a thirty-year-old nother and wife of a respected bourgeois functionary, was murdered at a villa near her Algerian home by her lover, twenty-two-year-old Henri Chambige, a minor literary figure who insisted that they had acted together in a double-suicide pact that had literally misfired. The ambiguities surrounding Chambige's story, the pristine reputation of Mme Grille, the disparity in ages between the alleged lovers, and the exotic ambiance and hint of sexual disorder all gave this case a high degree of visibility, inviting, in its suggestive disarray, the intervention of professional authorities to bring order to the story. Several experts focused on the medical aspects of the case - the apparent irrationality of Mme Grille's actions and the personal pathology that might have linked her to Chambige. But other criminologists were quick to point to this event as "truly a literary crime." These commentators understood the "facts" in a way that foregrounded Chambige's connection to literary circles. In their version of the affair, Chambige had been especially influenced by Taine's Histoire de la litterature anglaise. Of particular importance were Byron's reflections, recorded by Taine, that he "would be curious to experience the feelings that a man must have when he has just committed a murder." Shortly 29   before the crime, the argument concluded, Chambige had told friends that "he would like to experience the feelings of an assassin in order to analyze them." Enhancing this literary allusiveness, Chambige, condemned to seven years of forced labor, wrote a prison autobiography in which he claimed, "I often told Mme Grille that people admired the lovers created by Alfred de Vigny who died together, that it would be a great beauty to die in this way, and that we would be admired." Chambige became, in this interpretation, neither a cynical killer nor a man driven by an impossible passion, but rather the instrument of an artificial or imitative passion that was, at bottom, literary. By drawing out and brooding over these connections, contemporaries linked literary decadence to a cultural pathology that rendered reading dangerous for the most impressionable segments of the population. Criminologists came to understand the effects of this seepage of criminal stories into popular venues as a problem of "contagion." The presumed vectors of contagion were multiple: the family, tainted by bad heredity and a sordid environment; the collection of already susceptible people in milieus such as prisons where their latent tendencies would be activated; public spectacles, especially executions; and above all the popular press. While the dangers of reading novels were worrisome, it was the sensational accounts of crime in the popular press that drew the most sustained concern. According to criminologists, these staple columns of the new popular journalism inevitably spawned copycat acts, a thesis they saw confirmed in the formulaic structure and pronounced fashionability of particular criminal behaviors. In its daily recapitulation of criminal stories, the press allegedly became "the fuse that ignited explosives accumulated here and there." Mace reported, for example, a case that became the archetypal anecdote animating discussions of crime and the press. In 1877 in the village of Carmaux, a young dressmaker had been seduced by a miner. When he refused to marry her although she was pregnant with his child, she blinded him with vitriol. At the criminal hearing, the presiding magistrate questioned: "Your imagination had un-doubtedly been exalted by unhealthy reading. Did you read novels?" The defendant replied: "No, monsieur, I never read them; but I saw the story of a young woman who took vengeance in this way in a newspaper. It is that which gave me the idea to do as much." Lest the message be lost, Mace commented that "imagination can have terrible consequences." Crime becomes here the product of imagination; they are causally linked through the medium of the press. 30   This recurring anxiety about the problem of contagion was fueled by the enormous growth of the reading public in the final decades of the century and the parallel expansion of the newspaper industry, which by 1880 produced 67 daily newspapers in Paris alone, with a circulation of slightly more than two million. Between 1880 and 1914, the golden age of the popular press, criminal stories appeared not only in novels and specialized journals such as the Gazette des Tribunaux, but in the faits divers and romans feuilletons of hundreds of daily newspapers that sold for one sou apiece. The fait divers had its origin in the canards of the first half of the century - broadsheets hawked by street venders who shouted out the latest details of extraordinary crimes or scandalous or curious events. Successful canardiers began to collect several stories in one brochure, a format soon copied by owners of the daily and weekly press, who sought to replicate a winning formula. The earliest papers, Faits divers (1862) and Le Journal illustre (1863) provided the model for a rapidly expanding market. By the 1890s in Paris, both Le Petit Journal (with areadership between 300,000 and 500,000) and Le Petit Parisien published an illustrated Sunday supplement devoted to faits divers that were announced in multilined, sensational headlines and accompanied by colored illustrations designed to closely reproduce actual scenes. Especially after 1870, these stories became both increasingly formulaic and bloodier: "A horrifying crime / six children assassinated / by their mother / and thrown in a cesspool"; "A crime without precedent!!! / a woman buried alive / by her children / horrible details"; "a terrifying crime!!! / a 60- year-old man cut in pieces . . . / horrible details!"; "A drama of madness / a mother who kills her child." But stories less blatantly salacious also entertained because of their enigmatic and quirky juxtapositions of the expected and the unusual. Relying on paradox for its effect, the fait divers rejected the banal (a husband kills his unfaithful wife) in favor of a twist that made the story compelling: a husband murders his unfaithful wife while she prays in church. Serialized novels (romans feuilletons) addressed similar material on the bottom half of the page (the rez-de-chaussée romanesque) of these same newspapers. Women typically read the installments aloud in the concierge's loge, and often removed the daily episodes from the newspaper and assembled them in homemade books they shared with neighbors and friends. The fait divers and the roman feuilleton made use of similar rhetorical patterns; they depended on an element of surprise to achieve their effects, and addressed similar themes in a language they had made fa- 31   miliar, inflected by strings of adjectives and epithets. Both genres reduced the distance between the events of the story and the audience, mobilizing the reader's attention and participation through the deferred resolution of the plot. In fact, crimes reported in the faits divers often read like romans feuilletons, ending with the expected formula: "the sequel to follow in the next edition." Both the faits divers and the romans feuilletons worked through what Anne-Marie Thiesse has called a socially defined intertextuality in which everything referred to a prior set of references. Readers were encouraged to experience the pleasure of reencountering the familiar under the apparent differences of the surface details of stories that were, in effect, récits types. They intentionally blurred the line between real and fictional events, mixing elements of each so as to create a stock of characters and situations that emerged through well-understood, shared assumptions about motivation, causality, and outcome. Critics were not wrong in their perception of an emerging popular culture that appealed through its combination of the familiar and the shocking - an appeal that could become dangerously "contagious." In the face of the disruptive potential of unsupervised interpretation - of placing pieces of cultural information in the public domain - one self-proclaimed arbiter argued for moving criminal matters behind closed doors, protecting "justice" from the contamination of the crowd as medicine had used antisepsis to prevent contagion: [Unlike medicine], justice, which ought to be a social medicine, seems to take great pleasure in leaving wide open ail its chambers where one ought to be curing the patient who is the criminal, so that the flood of human curiosity comes to disturb it, so that it is blown about by all the passions, and, finally, so that all the microbes of crime escape to poison the environment, thanks to the press who disclose and disseminate them like pollen - to fertilize other crimes throughout the world. The solution seemed to be the reporting of criminal activity in summary only, deleting all salacious detail. The press was asked repeatedly to censor itself. In an impassioned speech to the International Congress Against Immoral Literature and the Dangerous Publicity of Criminal Events, the physician Paul Aubry concluded with a heady image of the dismantling of feudalism in 1789: "Let us have our night of August 4; let us spontaneously renounce our Gazette des Tribunaux in its criminal sections, and you will see that your circulation . . . will not decline as you dedicate your talents to a more noble enterprise." These anxieties had not abated more than a decade later when the 32   failure of self-censorship produced a more extreme effort to restrict the circulation of criminal stories. The Violette law, passed by the Chamber in 1910, established fines of 500 to 1000 francs for the publication of drawings or portraits related to crimes (against life, property, and public morality) that had occurred during the preceding ten years, or the reproduction of details about these crimes from the pretrial investigation, the judgment, or the sentencing. The same penalties applied to the reproduction in posters or leaflets distributed freely on public thorough-fares of similar but imagined crimes. At a meeting of the section on moral and criminal psychology of the Institut General Psychologique, members voted unanimously to support the passage of this law, confirming the dangers of mental contagion for susceptible people in unsupervised or unhealthy milieus, and arguing that, in light of these grave conditions, it was "the duty of men who had, in their careers, acquired a special competence in these questions to publicly offer their disinterested opinion." While some criminologists argued that everyone was vulnerable to the power of morbid suggestion, that even "the most virtuous person has locked within himself a sleeping criminal," the more typical worry was that the wrong people were reading criminal stories. Those with particular vulnerabilities to the "solicitation to imitation" were individuals "predisposed" to suggestion by either a hereditary or acquired susceptibility, "a particular semimorbid impressionability" in people with weakened capacities of resistance. In another version, those most likely to be driven to homicide by suggestion (or contagion) were sick individuals in whose illness "the instinctive, sentimental, passionate element was more significant than in a merely intellectual disorder." The language here, while coded, is in fact transparent. Those individuals who succumbed irresistibly to criminal suggestion were not the ones who peopled the serene and severe halls of science, were not competent and capable (bourgeois, professional) men of probity and discernment. They were, rather, the worrisome groups - workers and especially women - who, according to standard, unquestioned presumptions of the period, were likely to lose control; to be erratic, overexcited; in whom instinctive responses predominated over intellectual ones; in whom the will had become feeble through faulty biology or moral lassitude or both; who were more likely to respond to "unhealthy incitements, antialtruistic and antisocial suggestions." Commentators on female criminality typically discussed women's use 33   of vitriol and the revolver in the 1880s and 1890s in terms of fads generated by women's reading. They also saw bourgeois sexual morality threatened by the unconventional, if not criminal behaviors allegedly sanctioned in novels whose audience was largely female: There are women who are adulteresses in their dreams before becoming so in fact. The fall of the soul is a long one, with the exception of the pathological case of a Messalina: they pass through a slow period of preparation and of evolution, during which the novel has a more or less clear and explicit influence, often playing the role of the Devil as Tempter." George Sand in particular came under fire. Her novels were condemned for undermining traditional marriage and, even more, for "exalting . . . the poetry of ill-matched unions and for ennobling the love between coachmen and granda dames, which has contributed to throwing young women into 'the arms of their subalterns." In a celebrated legal case, Mile Lemoine was accused of killing the baby that she had conceived with her coachman. At her trial she blamed literature, claiming that the novels of George Sand, especially Valentine, had disturbed her spirit. The novel in question turned on the relationship between a peasant and a countess who was persuaded by the peasant that "it would be beautiful and noble to elevate a humble person and to bring joy to a worm in love with a star." Criminologists rushed to confirm the link between literature, moral lapses, and crime. In the words of a lawyer before the criminal court of Aix: "Modesty is like the thread that holds all the pearls of a necklace; cut the thread, and all the pearls fall." I have found virtually no references to men being led into adultery by novelistic suggestion; the fall-by-suggestion was apparently a danger to which women were particularly, if not exclusively vulnerable. A discussion of popular culture that appeared in the Revue des Deux Modes in 1903 provides a more direct expression of this anxiety about the subversive effects on the most vulnerable sections of the population of a specifically literary contagion. The author, Maurice Talmeyr, began by noting the ubiquitous presence of the cheap press. He imagined returning from a ball at six or seven in the morning, viewing workers as they began their day's activities, carters pulling their wagons, concierges opening their doors: We encounter the dairymen and the women carrying bread. And what do we notice? Everybody is reading the newspaper. And what are they reading? The feuilIeton! . . . The newspaper is the leifmotif of the street. What does the assistant 34   butcher do as he is waiting for orders? He reads the newspaper. What does the coachman do while he waits for a fare? He sits on his seat and reads the newspaper. Open the basket of the maidservant and you will find a newspaper." For this flâneur, the roman feuilleton had become the daily manna of "the crowd," creating a repertoire of classic stories that were, in his words, "not merely repeated, but hereditary," passed from generation to generation, producing a set of values and a cast of characters that constituted the popular imagination. Talmeyr worried about what he saw as a virus anarchiste - manifested in disrespect for religious figures, sympathy accorded the unmarried mother, glamour surrounding the criminal. For him, these themes from mass culture constituted a series of images that seemed to be passed through a deforming set of "coloring lenses" - in short, the world turned upside down; workers had become heroes in their own lives, displacing altogether hommes du monde. He closed with a warning: "The roman feuilleton is able to create that frightening thing that is. . . . It is said that the life of a man ends always in resembling his dreams. Will the life of the people end in resembling its fictions?" It is not a coincidence that Talmeyr expressed his worries about the handing on of stories that were "not merely repeated, but hereditary" in terms of a transmission among females - from the grandmother to the mother who nourished her (worker-)daughter on these tales-as if the vector of subversion had become not the popular press but mothers' milk. "There is not one person who comes in contact with the people who has not noticed," wrote another critic, "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." Experts spoke of women as "more readily penetrated by the influences of their environment than were men," more suggestible, more easily swept away by the fantasies produced by urban glitz and less resistant to the lures of urban vice, more corruptible by literature, theater, and leisure than were men. Medical opinion confirmed such beliefs and contributed to their currency. In his study on the contagion of crime, Dr. Séverin Icard empha-sized the "decisive influence" that reading exercised on woman's spirit, especially in the dangerous moments of her reproductive cycle, and claimed unequivocally that women (and children, the feeble, the degenerate) ceded to the power of suggestion more readily than did men. His study uses only examples of women's crimes committed through contagion or "imitation" (except for a brief discussion of imitation among animals, 35   where he notes, for example, that when one cow aborts, all the pregnant cows begin to abort!). Finally, in a move that brings together all the elements of the alleged syndrome, he tells the story of a woman he was treating who had baffled the most experienced physicians with the variability and incoherence of her symptoms. Icard eventually discovered that her various diagnosed illnesses occurred in alphabetical order: his patient had been reading a dictionary of popular medicine that appeared in installments; as soon as she read the descriptions, she fell ill with the symptoms that had been offered up to her. He has managed in this account to link the unspecified social dangers of popular culture (including the vulgarization of scientific material) to women's reading and finally, in the context of his essay, to crime, condensing a set of assumptions that led prosecutors regularly to inquire about the reading habits of female defendants. In this critique of the democratization of culture, the theater was also construed as an especially pernicious site in its capacity to produce both passion and knowledge among those who were alleged to be more suggestible and less discriminating. Félix Moreau, professor at the law faculty of Aix, expressed a common complaint when he wrote that of all the means for promoting an idea, perhaps the most powerful of our times is the theater. . . . Our dramatists are well aware of the authority at their disposal, and they seem to have given themselves a more pragmatic goal, a mission more profoundly social than the analysis of character and the depiction of passions which, until our day, had been the purpose of theater. They do not hesitate to express their opinions, implicitly or explicitly, on every social problem. It would not be entirely outrageous if, one day, the government should decide to submit its proposed legislation to an advisory commission selected from among the masters of the theater rather than from the Council of State! Citing the "distortion" of professional knowledge disseminated through this unfortunate mingling of law and drama, Moreau concluded that playwrights "ought not to interfere" in realms that they understood only incompletely: "chacun son métier." Not surprisingly, such claims for professional monopoly made no sense to more literary types. Balzac, Hugo, Dumas fils, and the Goncourt brothers all regularly visited (and commented on) the sessions of the Parisian criminal courts. It was the courtroom that in fact demonstrated most effectively the urgency of the problem of contagion in this period, because it was in the courtroom that the seepage of criminal stories into popular culture 36 occurred most regularly, with the greatest visibility and elan. The Cour d'Assises had become flagrantly carnivalesque, its public benches filled by representatives of le grand monde, eating sandwiches, drinking champagne, and waiting for the drama to begin." According to one commentator, the theater and the court generated similar expectations: the audience came to be entertained, to laugh, to weep, and to applaud. More and more, plays turning on amorous intrigues were performed in stage settings resembling the Cour d'Assises, while spectators in the criminal courtroom expected to be able to shout "Bravo!" at the end of the day. The growing practice of correctionnalisation that sent cases to the lower courts, turning many crimes into misdemeanors and leaving the high court only the most "decorative crimes," seemed to confirm theentertainment function of the principal criminal court. One critic concluded that "France does not have, in reality, a criminal jurisdiction; what remains to her is a set, where, to the great benefit of judicial eloquence, several représentations de gala are played." Noting the circuslike parade of witnesses and the lengthy oratorical duels, a commentator cynically observed that, as the twentieth century approached, for a case to become une belle affaire, it would have to have at least fifteen scenes in five acts. To complete the image of dramas within dramas, we have only to listen to Maurice Garcon's description of a criminal court hearing: Recently during a session of the Cour d'Assises, Alexander Dumas [fils] had taken a seat behind the President to gravely watch the development of a crime of passion and to serve as a sort of sovereign arbiter; magistrates and jurors, desirous of being true Parisians, followed with great interest the signs of approval or disapproval that he was able to convey. It seemed that the justice of the Cour d'Assises had become "une justice théâtrale." Since the 1830s, popular theaters on the appropriately nicknamed Boulevard du Crime had made the criminal melodrama a standard genre, providing a well-established literary frame and set of references that participants brought with them to the courtroom. Criticizing judges who had become "literary psychologists," Garcon could claim with some validity that "the Parisian makes real the artist's fantasies." In actual practice, the fashions of courtroom eloquence reinforced the elements of spectacle. During the July Monarchy, for example, hearings were formal and ceremonious, coldly solemn, characterized by a kind of grandiloquent prose punctuated with references to classical Greece. This style was gradually replaced by one clearly influenced by literary patterns drawn from Romanticism-including a reliance by the defense on the rhetori- 37 caI gestures of interpellation, exclamation, and question and response, which foregrounded emotional effect at the expense of juridical analysis. This stylized presentation of a heated appeal on behalf of the client reached its most seductive articulation in the defense pleadings of Charles Lachaud, whose courtroom speech was recognized as the prototype of the widely imitated genre of "l'éloquence criminelle." According to witnesses, Lachaud strove to establish an intimate communion with the jurors, holding them with his eyes, and working over with them, as if in collaboration on a common project, every resistance that they might have to his arguments until he believed that he had won their assent. An acknowledged master of psychology, he manipulated with considerable success the drama taking place in the courtroom itself, even as he addressed the dramatic developments that had brought his client and his audience together. The trial of Marie Bière in 1880 provided a particularly vivid example of theatrical justice, demonstrating not only the performance standards of the courtroom, but the heightened emotional transactions among all the scripted and unscripted characters - court personnel, witnesses, and an audience that included Alexander Dumas (fils) along with several members of the aristocracy. Marie Bière, a young lyric singer and actress, had been seduced by Robert Gentien, a wealthy homme galant who had fathered her child. He broke off their affair after the child's birth, refusing paternity, refusing even to look at the child, and, in an ultimate disavowal following the child's death, refusing to attend her funeral. Several months later Marie Biere exacted her vengeance; she shot Gentien twice in the back as he walked in the street with his new mistress. The case had more than enough elements to make it the stuff of popular melodrama: Biere had been chaste before her liaison with Gentien, uncharacteristically resisting the bohemian life of the theater; Gentien had urged her to have an abortion, but her maternal instincts had prevailed; a cache of passionate love correspondence survived and became part of the court record; before her vengeful attack, Biere had attempted suicide at her lover's feet; and, finally, Charles Lachaud would plead for the defense, bringing all of his rhetorical passion to Marie Bière's assistance. Not surprisingly, the conclusion faithfully followed the melodramatic script. Marie Bière was acquitted of attempted homicide; Gentien was forced to flee town in disgrace, amid vague threats of extradition. For our purposes, the most interesting aspects of the courtroom hearing emerge in the way judgments were made and opinions registered. The 38 prosecutor opened with an argument in which he outlined the informal codes that permitted men to take and discard mistresses at will. His speech drew noisy disapproval from the audience, not only, or even especially, because of the particular morals of the monde galant that he invoked, but because his presentation had been so tasteless, so lacking in style or talent - "an attack always cold, dry and systematic" - in effect, nothing but a harangue. Even more significant was the press's ultimate condemnation, not of Marie Bière, nor of Gentien, but of the prosecutor who had had the arrogance to pursue a conviction that was so far out of touch with public opinion. La Lanterne reported, for example, that "the jury, in acquitting Mlle Bière, had performed a useful service. . . . In contrast, the conduct of the prosecutor . . . as is merited, will be sharply condemned by all men of sensibility [gens de coeur]. This magistrate rested all his honor on obtaining the conviction of an unfortunate woman who had won such complete sympathy from the public." According to wit-nesses, the verdict was read by sobbing jurors in the midst of general pandemonium, leading a more cynical spirit to suggest that the victorious defendant be canonized as Sainte Marie, patron saint of gunsmiths, to whom abandoned women might make pilgrimages to have their revolvers blessed. This ironic voice notwithstanding, Marie Bière had won in the courtroom the celebrity that she had sought, unsuccessfully, in the theater; she had become "the heroine of Paris." A crowd estimated at three thousand people waited in the street for the verdict; they nearly overturned her carriage as she was carried in triumph to her home where she held an audience for journalists from all the major Paris newspapers. The case of Marie Bière brings into focus the dual implications of the problem of female criminality in the fin-de-siècle - highlighting contested domestic issues and shifting standards in private life on the one hand, and the newly powerful effects of popular opinion on practices and institutions in the public sphere on the other. In providing a glimpse of sexual and social transgressions (embroidered by romantic poetry and private correspondence), it offered both compelling entertainment and an opening for discussions of codes of sexual morality and social relations between men and women. In its confrontation between the dramatic Lachaud and the phlegmatic prosecutor (appropriately witnessed by Dumas), the case confirmed the link between literary conventions and the unfolding drama of the courtroom. And as the criminal drama of the courtroom-as-theater played out the drama of the crime, fundamental 39 values and practices were placed before the court of public opinion. Most important, Marie Bière's diary, which had been transcribed by judicial officials and incorporated into the trial record, had become the authoritative source that shaped accounts of the crime and won popular opinion to her side. By granting her perceptions and emotional responses such extraordinary public exposure, the defense had, perhaps inadvertently, called into question the exclusive rights of jurists to tell their own story. In the triumphant acquittal that vindicated the attempted homicide, the Biere case ultimately raised the issue of authority: Who should interpret the criminal act? What was the effect of Marie Bière's positioning of herself as a romantic heroine, or of her own voice becoming the source of the story's popular appeal? What was the relation between institutional justice and popular opinion? Did popular opinion reflect a consciousness that was essentially literary? Who would be the heroes and heroines in the emerging social order? And what would be the consequences of affirming Marie Bière's right to vengeance? In commenting on the increase of crime in relation to cases such as Bière's, one legal scholar addressed these issues directly, claiming that it was the court's failure to punish offenders and not literary suggestion that caused crime; he argued that the crisis was not generated by romantic literature but by the failure of authority. We might insist that the authority in question was both institutional and literary, involving not only the formal power to punish or excuse, but also the emerging ability of popular opinion to establish meaning - a power that could make Marie Biere a heroine. Bourgeois authorities were clearly worried about their ability to preserve a domain of professional authority immune to the contamination of public opinion. Ironically, however, while professionals saw their expertise compromised by popular accounts spread about indiscriminately through a literary and social contagion, they were in part responsible both for the seepage of this material into popular culture and for the slippage between popular and scientific writing. A striking example of this slippage is evident in the special genre of memoirs written by former chiefs of police. Although Goron described his reminiscences as "photographies sociales," "true stories, without retouching," they were produced and packaged precisely like Eugene Sue's serialized novel Les Mystères de Paris, with the four massive volumes originally appearing in 10-centime illustrated-pamphlet installments. Similarly, even as Mace simulated scientific authenticity, collecting in his musée criminel the actual gun fired, 40 the actual hanging cords that figured in various causes célèbres, his critics lamented the literary pretensions that led him to "mix the personalities of the roman feuilleton with the sad figures, all too real, whom he had interrogated, imagining a theatrical setting for these stories" and creating, not the unadorned, mundane world inhabited by common criminals, but rather the thousand-and-one Parisian nights or "les Mysteres de Paris naturalistes." Seemingly oblivious to the paradox, criminological studies endlessly repeated the sordid details of sensational cases even as they ritually condemned prurient interest in crime, soon producing a stock of familiar criminal lore and a long list of infamous causes celebres that were so well known as to become reference points in both high and low cultural forms. In what Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have described as a characteristic ambivalence toward "the low" that pervades nineteenth-century reformist literature - an ambivalence that pushed reformers to make central the socially marginal - criminologists fused fear and desire. This literature of social science conveyed simultaneously a repugnance and a fascination that inflected discussions of fearful Others - the slum dweller, the domestic servant, the prostitute, the criminal - who inhabited bourgeois imaginations as much as they populated bourgeois urban spaces. Criminologists themselves seemed only vaguely or intermittently aware of the ambiguities of their project. Despite Sighele's denial of "vulgar curiosity" and references to the "severe and serene halls of science," professional discussions of "the self [le moi]" in its criminal form teetered dangerously on the edge of voyeurism. Police chief Goron described his own memoirs as an effort to "raise the roofs of the houses of the capital" so as to permit a view (or a peek?} at the "human perversity" inside, while a skeptic wondered rhetorically if one could attribute Mace's revelations, "his desire to see all and to know all," to something other than professional duty. In ironic self-recognition, Mace dedicated one of his many publications, framed as nocturnal walks through the hidden sites of Parisian debauchery, to "the most spiritual of Prefects of Police of the Third Republic." Describing somewhat more explicitly the fantasmatic component of this investigatory enterprise, Sighele wrote: We want to savor the psychological convulsions, the agonies and the tortures, the surrendering; and the treacheries of the soul of the guilty; and we find in the summaries in newspapers, in books that rummage in the most secret abysses of the lives of criminals with the cold and lucid impassibility of a scalpel, not only the satisfaction of our curiosity, but a strange emotion that is at once egoist and feline. 41 Another prison investigator expressed a similar compulsion, but revealed rather more explicitly some of his own ambivalence as he yielded to curiosity: There is a sort of complex and mysterious attraction, arising at once from the overwhelming taste that we all have to a greater or lesser extent for the horrible, the abnormal, and the monstrous, from the morbid pustule which leads us to scratch and rub away at badly healed wounds and to find in this strange habit I don't know what sort of treacherous pleasure, and finally from the confused belief in the enormous social importance of a problem that would perhaps be immediately dangerous to leave unresolved. Reassuring themselves with a sense of the urgency of their tasks and pushing aside the "confusion" about the nature of their own engagement, the new social scientists who sought to extend their authority were, then, both victims and perpetrators of this unsettling mixing of genres that blurred distinctions between the stories produced by and for a mass audience and the more specialized knowledges of the professions. Criminological and more literary or popular texts existed in a kind of symbiosis, each reinforcing the conclusions of the other with little regard to differences between the "truths" of science and the creations of art. Stendhal in Le Rouge et le Noir, Flaubert in Madame Bovury, and Zola in La Bête humaine fictionalized stories they had found in faits divers. Confusing the territory further, convicted criminals such as Mme Lafarge and Lacenaire wrote memoirs that became best-sellers. But this sliding between fact and fiction in literary works is perhaps less telling than the erasing of distinctions that regularly characterized "empirical" criminological studies. In fact, the credo articulated by Zola in explaining the naturalist novel could as readily have been the protocol for professional criminologists: The novelist starts out in search of a truth . . . he starts from known facts; then he makes his experiment, and exposes [the character] to a series of trials, placing him amid certain surroundings in order to exhibit how the complicated machinery of his person works. . . . The problem is to know what such passion acting in such a surrounding and under such circumstances would produce from the point of view of an individual and of society. . . . Finally you possess knowledge of the man, scientific knowledge of him, in both his individual and his social relations. Scientific experts wrote of vengeful women and unnatural mothers as Medeas, sexually suspicious women as modern Messalinas, finding in these ancient prototypes models that explained the "complicated ma- 42 chinery" of contemporary deviants. In Sighele's study of morbid psychology, he explored the dependencies that led two people to enact a crime by calling upon literary precursors - Iago and Othello, Heloise and Abelard - and he invoked Balzac and Hugo to confirm his empirical findings. It is useful here to look more closely at Sighele's text to see how this particular kind of elision worked. He began with a lesson from Balzac: "The humanity of the courtesan," says Balzac, "consists of splendors that lift her to the angels." Sighele glossed this truth: "In effect, some of the most noble sentiments, that of motherhood, for example, sometimes are manifest in the prostitute in their most sublime form." He concluded by citing Parent-Duchatelet's scientific study of prostitution: "In tears, a prostitute told me [reports Parent-Duchatelet] that it was the dignity of motherhood that revealed to her the abjection into which she had fallen." In the structure of this story, Sighele has inserted himself between literary and social-scientific truths. In this search for verification, the expert could also move in the opposite direction - that is, from social science to literature. This directional shift is evident, for example, in Sighele's acount of a case reported by Mace. A pimp was arrested in 1885 for beating his prostitute and was sent to jail for six months. Mace noted that during this period the prostitute continued to help the pimp in every way that she could and was waiting for him on his release. The explanation that Sighele offered for this story - alleged confirmation of the empirical evidence - came first from the Goncourts and then from George Sand. He concluded that prostitutes prove the aphorism of the Goncourts that "women experience in love a passionate desire to grovel," or, in Sand's terms, "love is a state of voluntary servitude to which women aspire by nature." Literary evidence and empirical "fact" merged, in this analysis, to produce the knowledge of the expert. The references to literature provided the language that confirmed older stereotypes, bringing them into discussions of more modern perils where, once invoked, they simultaneously attested to professional competence while undercutting the exclusive authority of the professional. In the end, the search for truth that began with "known facts" and sought to establish the "complicated machinery of the person" - a search pursued by both naturalist novelists and empirical scientists - did produce a knowledge of character "types" who moved in familiar ways 43 through conventional scenarios. But at the same time, the popularization of criminal stories raised new issues that destabilized the conclusions of science and produced unexpected ambiguities. Episodes such as the trial of Marie Bière brought home with particular force the subversive possibilities of criminal stories that had become more accessible through their literary allusions and more familiar by their diffusion in the popular press. Not only actual criminal cases (reported in professional and more popular formats) but also fait: divers and serialized novels featured new kinds of social actors who challenged both customary assumptions and legal practices. In 1882, for example, a fait divers entitled "L'Eau forte" (Vitriol) raised issues that could not be readily resolved by the knowledge of experts. This was the story of Julie and Benjamin, who had lived together for four years. According to the narrator, when Julie gave birth to their daughter, she was forced to register the birth with the sad inscription "father unknown." Although Julie begged Benjamin to honor the promise of marriage that he had "so ardently made" before the pregnancy, he abandoned her and moved to another city. Julie brought a successful suit against him in civil court and was awarded 1,000 francs in damages. The court acknowledged that "her conduct had been unimpeachable except for the seduction of which she was the victim," that "she continued to be held in high esteem in her region," and that the promise of marriage had been valid. From the narrator's perspective, Julie's credentials were in order. She brought forth letters addressed to her father in which Benjamin promised marriage and referred to her as "his dear wife." According to the court, its decision to protect the honor of the victim and support the interests of the child was "a charitable act of justice and morality." Forcing the plot forward, Benjamin continued to flee. When Julie found him in Paris and asked him either to marry her or give her money, he responded that she could go walk the streets (faire le trattoir). Finding herself without recourse, Julie attacked Benjamin with vitriol as he left his workshop, wounding him slightly. Julie was arrested; Benjamin brought a civil suit for damages. He was awarded 100 francs by the civil court, and Julie was condemned by the criminal court to eight months in prison. Condensed in this fait divers are a set of issues that refer to social codes and their violation - to women's disadvantages in both custom and law, and to the inability of traditional institutions to regulate domestic life, ensure public order, or render justice. It presents a liminal world without stable standards or effective authority, indirectly evoking the unsettled 44 conditions of contemporary culture. Like Marie Bière's case, it implicitly pointed to unclear rights in domestic conflicts between men and women at the same time that it presented a challenge to formal and customary authority, enacted by new social actors (often represented as violent women) and supported by shifting popular beliefs. In reflecting on stories like this one, professional experts and cultural critics wondered along with Talmeyr whether the life of the people would end in resembling its fictions; whether traditional authorities could resist the subversive effects of a wide-ranging, free-wheeling popular culture; and even whether women were being forced, under contemporary circumstances, to exact private justice. Talmeyr's critique of the roman feuilleton suggested that "the people" had become "the living repository of all sanctities, of all genius, of all sublimity." But what Talmeyr anxiously assumed as a fact or outcome was, I am arguing, an issue that remained unresolved; more important than the specific effects of individual stories about ordinary or dangerous characters was the space opened for a discussion of contemporary culture. Criminal stories pointed to problems - people who did not fit, values that seemed dangerous, behaviors that threatened conventional standards, conflicts (invisible and unacknowledged) between groups, in stitutions that perhaps were not working. How would these problems be addressed in a mass society? Criminal stories had become the lightning rod that gathered the social and cultural tensions of the period. They implicitly asked questions about the relation between classes and sexes. They brought to public attention the problems of unmarried mothers and seduced and abandoned working women. They provided a vehicle for a discussion of adultery, of the rights of women in marriage, of unregulated sexuality, of cross-class alliances; they raised the question of how public authorities could contain the passions that threatened social peace. But they did not offer solutions. Rather than moving toward resolution or closure, criminal stories advanced a negotiation centering on the tension between formal authority and customary practices. The slippage between fact and fiction in criminal stories and the rehearsal of these stories in popular and scientific formats signal shifts in accepted understandings of social and cultural codes, as well as efforts within diverse communities to reimagine social relations, to retrieve an elusive stability, and to set new standards. In contrast to the worried responses of late-nineteenth-century critics like Talmeyr, more recent studies of popular genres have tended to 45 see them as essentially conservative. Michelle Perrot, for example, has dubbed the proliferation of sensational stories in the popular press "the colonization of the popular imaginary." From this point of view, criminal stories may be understood as essentially strategic - part of an attempted solution to both the problem of crime and the crisis in authority that worked to draw the popular classes into mainstream culture. Emphasizing this conservative function, Perrot notes that in place of the decentralized and serendipitous publication of stories by canardiers who wrote and rewrote their accounts in response to their street audiences in the first half of the century, these same stories were later written by journalists employed by mass-circulation newspapers. In this milieu such stories allegedly became implicated in a broader campaign to attach the popular classes to the republican order; they became propaganda vehicles to form the republican citizen. The rez-de-chaussée romanesque (the bottom half of the page devoted to stories) served, then, as one component of the larger integrative functions of the daily press. According to this analysis, the very act of cordoning off the abnormal, of locating crime at once on the margins of the society and within specific entertainment columns of the press, would define ever more clearly the province of the normal. And the satisfaction of symbolically breaching the constraints of ordinary life, of entering imaginatively into the realrn of the deviant and the defiant, might confirm the very order that was temporarily and fictively undermined - vicarious experience called in to substitute for the real thing. Critics who emphasize the conservative impact of popular genres also note that the structure of these popular stories encouraged conventional ways of social seeing. Such stories sought to evoke emotional effects through an appeal to universal truths, eternal values, stable and permanent meanings, and normative assumptions about cause and effect - that which goes without saying - that was largely insulated from a particular historical context. Roland Barthes has made this point in describing the fait divers as a closed structure that refers to nothing outside of itself. He compares this self-contained story to a report of an assassination that he designates, conversely, as news - that is, political - because "it fits into an extensive situation outside of itself, previous to and around it, . . . the manifest term of an implicit structure which exists before it. . . . Like the fragment of a novel, it is partial information." In contrast, he argues, the fait divers, more like the short story, is complete. This very pretension to closure releases the story from its historical moment and allows the fiction 46 to operate in a space that it claims as neutral or eternal, certainly not political - producing sociological categories and psychological types stretched out in a dehistoricized space. This closure and self-containment serves to obscure the immediate context and the possibility of multiple or contradictory interpretations. Although it is possible to imagine such essentially conservative effects, I am arguing that it is more likely that the impact of popular criminal stories was multivalent, neither conservative in the ways described by Perrot and Barthes nor directly subversive as critics at the time imagined. Studies in mass culture have demonstrated that popular groups can make use of ritualized and literary opportunities for transgression to articulate alternative meanings, challenges to cultural authorities and practices. And recent work in literary criticism has shown how inevitably unreliable ideological appeals to the imagination are; how meaning that is created through an interaction between readers and texts can be monitored neither by ideology nor authorial intention. We cannot assume that the invocation of eternal truths and fixed character types reflected the beliefs of readers; I must argue quite the opposite possibility. The very structure of these texts, relying as they did on surprise and a certain disruption of expectations about causality, surely encouraged imaginative license. Thus, while these formulaic stories did attempt to promote conventional ways of social seeing in a format that implicitly confirmed the norm, they also were responsible for more ambiguous cultural outcomes - opening a space not only for alternative readings but, more important, for an extended negotiation around new and pressing tensions within the culture. Even as the faits divers and romans feuilletons presumed a neutral context, detached from and unencumbered by the political, readers of these stories clearly inhabited imaginative and mate-rial universes informed by both politics and culture. In sum, late-nineteenth-century efforts to cure the contagion of crime were responses to a question mal posée. In the end, the various forms of criminal stories neither guaranteed bourgeois values nor undermined bourgeois society. Criminologists and other professionals hoped to claim interpretive authority as they used these stories to construct and consolidate their expertise. But accounts told by scientific experts did not remain finally authoritative, immune from popular revision and appropriation and insulated from literary and journalistic tampering. Thepopular/literary and scientific versions of criminal stories were, finally, 47 overlapping and inseparable, producing not any particular truth about crime or criminals but rather engaging a wide audience in ongoing negotiations over a set of implicit questions posed by the fact of crime. The literature on contagion explicitly made the connection between the problem of cultural authority and female criminality. On the one hand, criminologists connected women's crimes to their suggestible predispositions and to their reading, linking female nature to cultural and social anarchy and symbolizing the danger of the lower classes in the eruption of sensational acts by women who copied each other's criminal behavior. Women's crime seemed to represent the most worrisome consequences of mass literacy and democracy, in which traditional patterns were fatally compromised by a kind of virtis anaychiste spread through the organs of mass culture. If women were the mirrors in which society could recognize itself, then the contagion of women's crime and all that it rep-resented could not be ignored. Because of its dramatic character, its symbolic valences, and the wide press coverage that made women like Marie Bière and Mme Grille national figures, female criminality became the material and discursive site where bourgeois authorities could attempt to address the problem of mass culture as they sought to secure their professional authority and cure the syndrome of modernity. On a second level, female crime and the stories it generated pointed to specific problems that were moving from the realm of private domestic life into explicitly public arenas. Jacques Kayser has aptly described the effect of the popular press on fin-de-siècle culture as "the fait diversification of the political sphere, a process that turned politics into stories and engaged a mass audience in discussions of public questions that were rendered immediate and intensely personal by their representation through familiar rhetorical codes and melodramatic plots. It seems evident that the press could as readily turn stories into politics. Women who pursued their seducers and demanded retribution from the fathers of their children suggested both women's economic vulnerabilities and the inadequacies in the legal codes and practices that regulated women's rights in domestic and public life. Women charged with infanticide and abortion in effect produced a discourse that paralleled and promoted public discussions of depopulation and its links to laws that prohibited women from initiating paternity suits. Women who shoplifted in department stores raised questions about female autonomy, economic dependency, and the uses of new public spaces. Female violence that turned on adultery and betrayal generated and reflected growing dissatisfaction among 48 reformers with the provisions in the civil code that regulated marriage. In the domestic dramas recounted in women's crimes, the female offender documented shifting popular opinions about such issues as the responsibilities of paternity, standards (double ones) for judging adultery, and the social codes that governed heterosexual relations. These criminal dramas mobilized popular sentiment around issues of private life that were beginning to attract more public attention. As a double anomaly - someone who had violated both the legal and gender codes - and as the quintessential symbol of the problems presented by a new popular culture, the criminal woman was a titillating figure, positioned dangerously on the cusp of cultural change. Female criminals - as objects of investigation, as subjects of literature and the popular press, and as defendants passing through the criminal justice system - drew public attention to instabilities and uncertainties in contemporary life. Like the hysteric, the female criminal posed the enigma of herself. And like the hysteric, she dramatized for popular and expert audiences a range of issues that pointed not only to questions about women's nature but to issues that would animate the contemporary public arena. The criminal woman was identified as a problem, then, not because of increasing rates of crime, nor even because she was scarier or more disturbing than her male counterpart, but because she was positioned at the center of transitions that would define the character and culture of Third Republic France. Haut | Retour