by Philipp Blom
While the stylish and dignified master criminal Jacob was an ideal template for Arsène Lupin, France’s other great crime figure, the wicked Fantomas (first appeared in 1910), was not designed to attract sympathies. A sadistic and evil killer, he incarnated popular fears and managed despite many attempts at his capture to escape his nemesis, the great Inspector Juve. Finally, only history itself could end the sinister career of the ‘genius of crime’. His co-creator Marcel Allain simply sent him on the epic 1912 maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic.
German pulp fiction, incidentally, had no bestselling detectives and villains of its own. The taste here was for adventure stories in the Karl May mould, or for sentimental romances like those written by the immensely popular Hedwig Courts-Mahler, whose fame and fortune rested on 208 honest-but-poor-and-secretly-nobly-born-maid-finds-handsome-count-and-marries-him novels.
Those alienated by society were fighting both their own demons, and those who had condemned them to their isolation. But real cases like that of the psychotic killer Ernst Wagner were followed by the press with ardent enthusiasm.
The Wagner case is an example not only of the constituent parts of psychosis around 1910, but also of a remarkably enlightened scientific response to insanity. Despite his horrifying crimes, Wagner was declared insane and was not executed, but allowed to live out his life in peace, under medical supervision. The murderous schoolteacher even became a minor celebrity among psychiatrists. His doctor, Robert Gaupp, exhibited his articulate patient at one psychiatric conference after another.
‘I recognize that my crimes were the result of a severe mental illness, which is justly called “persecution mania”,’ wrote Ernst Wagner in a letter to Gaupp in 1920. ‘I declare today, that I was never…“persecuted”. Certain overheard words could be so interpreted as I did then - for there are coincidences and things without any logical correlation … but I would not have had to interpret them in this way. But one has the tendency to shift things which fill one’s own head into the heads of others.’ Wagner continued to correspond with his doctor and even sent him for publication a play he had written, entitled Madness. The rabid mind, it seemed, had become tender as a lamb: ‘I would ask you to forgive me all feelings of hatred and rage which were alive in me with regard to your person,’ the patient wrote to Gaupp. ‘If you have the opportunity to visit me here and consider it worth your effort to speak with me … you shall be assured of a friendly welcome. With the expression of my highest esteem, your grateful and devoted Ernst Wagner.’
Wagner drew a civil service pension and pursued his literary work, as well as maintaining a voluminous correspondence with various literary and medical luminaries. He died of natural causes at the Winnetal asylum in April 1938. His body was cremated and his brain sent to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut in Berlin for examination, though it was damaged in transport. It is still held in the collection of pathological specimens at Düsseldorf University.
15
1914: Murder Most Foul
The [London] docks are enormous; one loses all sense of proportion when one hurtles along the rails for miles past the ships on Albert Dock, straight past the long row of hulls prolonging itself as if in a dream. And the Albert Dock is only one of those making up London harbour. Here the modern world becomes completely fantastical. I have not had this sensation of the fairy-tale character of our world with such immediacy since seeing the slaughterhouses in Chicago. - Count Harry Kessler, Diary, 6 June 1901
On 28 July 1914, all of Paris was talking murder, a particular, outrageous murder which had been in the forefront of everybody’s mind. Three months earlier, on 16 March, a well-dressed woman had entered the offices of Le Figaro, the country’s leading conservative newspaper. She was Henriette Caillaux, wife of Joseph Caillaux, France’s minister of finance. Having asked to be shown to the office of the editor-in-chief, Gaston Calmette (the same Calmette, incidentally, who had written so savagely about Stravinsky’s Sacre a year earlier), she was told that the editor was out. She agreed to wait, and when she entered his office about one hour later she spoke a few words to Monsieur Calmette, pulled a revolver out of her fur muff and shot him four times in the chest.
When Henriette Caillaux came to trial in July there was hardly a person in France who did not know all the details of the year’s most sensational news story, particularly since minister Caillaux had been subjected to a hostile media campaign for some months. Irresistibly, the tale around him and his wife Henriette comprised not only a murder but a sordid affair, the fight for a political career, and a war averted. No detail was left untold. Mme Caillaux sold copies. During the trial itself, the Figaro, Calmette’s former paper, even went from eight to twelve pages to print verbatim reports from the courtroom.
It had all begun with the worst kind of cliché: with secret letters and furtive hotel visits by a married man and his lover, a charade worthy of a musical comedy. For Joseph Caillaux (1863-1944), the no longer youthful lover in the affair, this was a delicate situation. He was one of the new breed of technocrats who were pushing into positions of power, a financial expert who had been appointed finance minister for the first time at the age of thirty-six, an appointment which confirmed the self-made businessman in his high opinion of himself - one that few others shared. He was competent and daring, even his enemies had to admit, but he was a dandy, an arrogant, self-obsessed social climber. Being caught in flagrante would have been poison to his ambitions. He could be prime minister, president even. An affair could cost him the support he needed, Caillaux knew, and he had resolved the situation by divorcing his first wife and marrying Henriette. Her great charm made up for his lack of tact or humour, and the couple was popular in society. Nobody knew that they had been lovers. In 1911 Caillaux became prime minister, as he had planned.
1911 was a crisis year in Franco-German relations and in international politics - one of several points at which the world could have gone to war. Still resentful at the colonial understanding between France and Britain, in which the powers accorded each other a free hand in Egypt and Morocco respectively (leaving Germany out of the picture altogether), the German government had sent a gunboat to the Moroccan port of Agadir, asserting that they would not be ignored. Unknown to the Kaiser, the plan had been hatched months earlier by his foreign minister, Alfred von Kinderlen-Wächter, who had finally convinced the Supreme Warlord during a stay on the imperial yacht Hohenzollern as he was attending the Kiel regatta. There were already German firms in Morocco; German citizens lived there, and their interests and those of the state had to be protected at all costs. Wilhelm, who had been reluctant to antagonize his cousin George (or even the French) with such a gesture, agreed after some hesitation. Immediately a wireless telegraph signal was sent from the Admiralty to the imperial gunboat Panther, then off the coast of West Africa.
The German vessel changed course and prepared to meet destiny - an unequal encounter, since she was not the kind of ship the Kaiser would have chosen to represent his military might. This was the height of the Dreadnought race, during which ever bigger, ever newer, ever more devastating floating fortresses were launched in a bid for naval supremacy by all major powers. The Panther was no such fighting machine. It was slow, squat, and lightly armed with two 4-inch guns: a tomcat rather than a predator, ploughing asthmatically through the waves with its two stubby funnels and two masts. Its crew of 130 men included a brass band employed to demonstrate the splendour of German march music to native African villagers. Now its orders were to protect all Germans in Agadir from aggression from rebel tribes inland. It was an easy assignment - there were no Germans in Agadir. The sole specimen, a man named Wilberg, had been cabled that his presence was urgently required on the coast. Herr Wilberg had set out immediately from Mogador, 75 arduous miles away, where he had been stationed by a consortium of Hamburg investors.
Even as the Panther dropped anchor in the Bay of Agadir, Herr Wilberg, a strange figure in his white suit, was marching through the scorching heat, fighting off
insects. He turned up four days after his rescuer had arrived and did his best to attract the attention of his countrymen on board. When they finally saw a white man on the beach, surrounded by local fishermen, they sent out a boat to collect him. The mission had been accomplished, the entire German population brought out of harm’s way. The headlines of the German press were jubilant: ‘Hurrah! A deed! … Action at last, a liberating deed ... Again it is seen that the foreign policy of a great nation, a powerful state, cannot exhaust itself in patient inaction.’
Despite its modest dimensions, the Panther caused a first-rate storm. There were tense negotiations between Paris and Berlin, and the flame soon jumped the Channel. The British were determined to support France against any German claims to Morocco, the Germans warned the British to stay out of this fight, and Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, alerted the navy to a possible pre-emptive attack from the Kriegsmarine. All signs pointed to war. Then, suddenly, German chancellor Kinderlen pulled back from the brink. The negotiations with Paris would not touch on British interests in any way, he assured Lord Grey at the Foreign Office. It would be purely an affair between Germany and France.
When it became clear that Britain would not allow a partition of Morocco (Kinderlen’s initial objective), the German chancellor understood that he had miscalculated. The calm but firm stance of the French and the unwavering British support were more than he had bargained for. He settled for French territories in equatorial Africa ‘in compensation’ for Germany’s renouncing any claim to Morocco: 100,000 square kilometres of disease-ridden swamps and grasslands in the Congo, to be precise. For Germany this was a debacle. Having risked international war to assert influence in Morocco and to secure Moroccan territories, Berlin had to settle for tropical swamps without either use or prestige.
The French success at the negotiating table was owed to the shrewd but measured instruction of prime minister Caillaux, who had led the negotiations from Paris. Caillaux was a businessman who had invested money abroad, mainly in South America, and he was a realist. He knew that Germany had outstripped France, not only in terms of population, but also in engineering, manufacturing and exports. He knew that in peacetime France needed Germany more than Germany needed France, and that a war would not be winnable. He knew that he had to come to a peaceful arrangement with the irascible but powerful neighbour, and he thought that a stretch of African marshland was not too high a price to pay for peace and prosperity. This moderation would become his downfall.
In a society dominated by mass media, politics are what they are represented to be, and the conservative press in France was adamant that not Germany but France had been the loser in this conflict. Losing Alsace-Lorraine to Germany in 1871 still rankled in the French memory, and giving up more territory seemed simply out of the question. Caillaux lost his post in 1912 and was made finance minister one year later. At last, the Agadir affair seemed over.
The conservatives, however, had not forgiven Caillaux for what they saw as his treason. When Raymond Poincaré became French president in 1913, wheels were set in motion to destroy Caillaux for good. The two chief axes of this attack were Gaston Calmette, the chief editor of Le Figaro, and the first Madame Caillaux, who had approached him with a stack of compromising letters giving insights, not only into the political life of the minister of finance, but also into his personal affairs. In flagrant disregard of all journalistic conventions of the day, Calmette set about publishing this correspondence, beginning with the political material. The mighty minister Caillaux, he knew, was enjoying the last days of his career.
Calmette mounted a veritable campaign of character assassination against the minister. Within a few months, 138 articles and cartoons appeared in Le Figaro, all of them attacking or ridiculing the politician. The best, however, was still to come. Among the compromising material handed over by the minister’s spiteful ex-wife were love letters he had sent to his then mistress, the second Madame Caillaux, who now took it upon herself to solve the matter in her husband’s best interests. ‘I’ll smash in his face,’ the minister had growled over dinner with his wife, as the first letter appeared in print. Henriette Caillaux began to be afraid that her husband would challenge the editor to a duel, that he might be killed, and that the secret of their early love would be exposed. Taking her husband’s official limousine, she had the chauffeur drive her to a gun dealer’s, where she tested a Browning revolver and bought it. Then she drove to the offices of Le Figaro, where she waited for the editor in his office. When he finally arrived she simply asked: ‘You know why I’m here, don’t you?’ then pulled out her revolver and emptied the cylinder. Four of the six bullets hit Calmette, injuring him fatally. The assassin stayed where she was, waiting for the police. For her husband she had left a simple note: ‘I’ll do it for you.’
Attractive assassin: Henriette Caillaux on her way to the trial.
The trial of Henriette Caillaux was a sensation. Having resigned from his office minutes after he heard of his wife’s deed, Caillaux himself worked for her defence. The strategy he had devised in accordance with the star lawyer he had hired was very simple: women, the court heard, were weak, emotional creatures and easily overwrought. Seeing her husband so viciously attacked by the press had upset the fragile balance of her feminine mind and she had acted out of mistaken loyalty, a crime de passion in the noblest sense of the term. The defence worked perfectly, and on 28 July 1914 Henriette Caillaux was found not guilty of murder, but of a crime de passion. She walked out of the courtroom, and into her husband’s arms, a free woman. France was titillated and scandalized at once. ‘The jury has acquitted Mme Caillaux,’ wrote the gossipy abbé Mugnier in his diary:
Ah! How the conservatives, how the Catholics will shout! They so love anticipating the Last Judgement, making rules, inventing sanctions! They love pain, love justice that causes suffering! No indulgence, no grandeur in forgiveness. One must expiate, they say. That good countess Armand told me, last Sunday, about the war: ‘we really need to be punished.’ This need to punish is in the blood of the faithful … They take communion, go up to the Sacré-Coeur and to the eucharist, the benedictions, [but] these good offices only inspire desires for evil, for condemnation, the love of a vengeful god. Ah! This is ugly …
Austria has declared war on Serbia.
The public was not given any time to recover from this murderous excitement. On 31 July, three days after the Caillaux acquittal, another murder shook the country. Jean Jaurès, the great orator, main defender of Captain Dreyfus, president and heart of the Socialist Party, one of the most universally respected politicians in France, was gunned down in the café du Croissant in Paris and died soon afterwards. A nationalist had taken exception to his call for a general strike in protest at the next war which was looming on the horizon, just as it had done at Agadir three years earlier. These were the great crimes that exercised French public opinion in July 1914. As newspapers were overflowing with the latest on the murders of Calmette and Jean Jaurès, very few column inches were left for other murders such as that of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in faraway Sarajevo.
The shots fired at Gaston Calmette from Madame Caillaux’s Browning became a national sensation, partly because they resonated strongly with the preoccupations and anxieties of the period. Many motifs were drawn together in these cases: the French worries about being strong enough to stand up to overbearing Germany; the rise of the technocrat (Caillaux) and the thrust of modern politics; the crucial role of mass media; the colonial background with its sordid deals; the naval arms race and the constant threat of escalation; the violent deeds glorified by the Futurists and the anxiety about rising violence in everyday life; and finally the fact that Mme Caillaux was not content to be a passive wife, but instead took the initiative in killing a powerful man. This was the perfect murder of the time.
The Vortex of Infinite Forces
Fifteen years had passed since the 1900 World Fair, fifteen years in which the world had changed radically.
Some of these changes - the growing cities, the factory chimneys, the rail tracks and Dreadnoughts - were very obvious. Others were less apparent but all the more profound. The War would bring them to the surface and shake what was left of the old order. But the modern world was present even before the first German soldier crossed the Belgian border.
To the American writer Henry Adams, the sight of the silently powerful dynamos at the 1900 Fair had been a revelation. Their hidden velocity made them a symbol of a fundamental upheaval at the heart of civilization, he wrote:
Power leaped from every atom, and enough of it to supply the stellar universe showed itself running to waste at every pore of matter. Man could no longer hold it off. Forces grasped his wrists and flung him about as though he had hold of a live wire or a runaway automobile; which was very nearly the exact truth for the purposes of an elderly and timid single gentleman in Paris, who never drove down the Champs Elysées without expecting an accident, and commonly witnessing one; or found himself in the neighbourhood of an official without calculating the chances of a bomb. So long as the rates of progress held good, these bombs would double in force and number every ten years.
Impossibilities no longer stood in the way. One’s life had fattened on impossibilities. Before the boy was six years old, he had seen four impossibilities made actual - the ocean-steamer, the railway, the electric telegraph, and the Daguerreotype; nor could he ever learn which of the four had most hurried others to come.
The rush of modernity caused danger (the accidents, the terrorist bombs), the anxious feeling of speeding along without control, of holding on to live wire, flung and ‘whirled about in the vortex of infinite forces’.
Adams’s elderly gentleman, timidly driving down the Champs-Elysées in his automobile and watching out anxiously, would have been born around 1840, and his grandmother might still have had memories of France before 1789, of the ancien régime. His grandchildren would witness the mushroom cloud disperse over Hiroshima and watch live on their televisions as the first man walked on the moon. The most important intellectual, scientific and emotional changes dividing these two worlds occurred in the years between 1900 and 1914. At the 1900 World Fair, Adams had declared the culture of the traditional principle of female fertility, the Virgin, dead, replaced by that of the Dynamo’s surging power and generative force. In choosing these two emblems, he had also identified the two central motifs of change in the 1900s: machines and women, speed and sex.