In the ultimate pre-First World War trial of passion, it was the press itself that took on the aura of a betraying, abusive and hypnotically suggestive power to become the object of a passionate crime. Restoring female honour here was not a question of avenging seduction and abandonment, or an unrecognized child. By the turn of the century, the passionate female criminal had a sense of ‘reputation’ as finely honed as any male engaging in a duel. For Madame Caillaux, wife of a cabinet minister, this entailed targeting the newspaper editor who, she felt, had slandered her and her husband. The democracy of free expression, and a press that had fewer worries about privacy than has ever since been the case in France, were suddenly under direct attack. It is as if one of the victims of British hacking in 2012 had stormed into Rebekah Brooks’s or Rupert Murdoch’s office, taken aim, murdered and been acquitted – on the grounds that this is how nervous women behave under pressure.
As the belle époque drew to its end, the alienists’ understanding of women who committed passionate or impulsive crimes had infected what had been the norm. A ‘real woman’ had now become simply that nervy, emotional, suggestible, virtuous, domestic creature, hysterical by turn and weak of intellect, and ever subject to impulses beyond her control that made her either succumb to tears or explode in murderous rage. Examination by psychiatric experts was scarcely necessary to mitigate a crime that just couldn’t be helped, especially if the woman was honourable and married to a leading politician.
But this somewhat nostalgic vision of the feminine, as it played itself out in violence and in courtroom drama, was far more public wish than private reality. With feminism on the rise and war on the horizon, gender anxiety was electric. Had French Republican masculinity grown even more effete and decadent since the Franco-Prussian War of 1870? Had France become feminized in comparison to its enemy other, the bullishly masculine Germany? For a moment, it even seemed as if, while fearing the denaturing of male and female, at the same time the country secretly wanted its women to be pistol-wielding viragos adamant about honour – their own and their husbands’.
During the week of the Henriette Caillaux trial, 20–28 July 1914, no paper headlined the massing of troops more prominently than the murder case. France’s attention was on a courtroom where even the President of the Republic testified on behalf of the accused. Listening to the ricochet of Madame Caillaux’s bullets, the country seemed to want to blot out that other shot aimed at Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which rang out from Sarajevo and around the world. On the day of Henriette’s acquittal, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. One kind of passionate madness would soon be displaced by a more tragic one.
25. Henriette Caillaux Meets the Press
On the afternoon of 16 March 1914, a wealthy, well dressed blonde nearing her fortieth birthday walked into Gastinne-Renette, the small-arms shop in central Paris, and bought a Browning automatic pistol. She tried it out in the shop’s basement shooting range and managed to get three out of six bullets into the target figure. Then she went home to the Rue Alphonse-de-Neuville in the leafy 17th arrondissement, donned a formal tea gown, and wrote her husband a note: ‘If this letter is put into your hands, it’s because I will have done or at least attempted to do justice.’ Her chauffeur then drove her to the Rue Drouot, site of the offices of Le Figaro, no scandal sheet but a centre-right newspaper of record. Here she asked to see the editor, Gaston Calmette, gave her card to a receptionist and waited patiently, her gun invisible behind her capacious furs and muff.
The day before, Gaston Calmette had daringly crossed a line, violating a privacy of a sexual nature at a time when sexual matters were confined to the brothel, the bedroom and the confessional – or to the steamier pages of fiction, where the transgressive could be made to suffer for their sins. The front page of his paper had carried a facsimile of an intimate letter from the Minister of Finance, Joseph Caillaux, written thirteen years earlier to his then married mistress, Berthe Gueydan, who had subsequently become his wife, before she in turn a few months later was displaced in his affections by Henriette Rainouard – the woman who in 1911 would become his second wife, Henriette Caillaux. The published letter, signed ‘ton Jo’ the name it thereafter bore everywhere, was announced as the first of a promised series. This, Henriette Caillaux feared, would bear scandalous revelations of her own sexual nature.
The ton Jo’ letter contained cloying endearments, as well as the boastful revelation of a political ploy by the brilliant politician who would come to head the Radical Party. In 1914 when the belle epoque had moved into a moment in which traditional Catholic family values had once more acquired power, Caillaux’s adulterous and divorcing past acted to besmirch a politician many applauded as a man of superb skills.
In 1911, when Caillaux had briefly been Prime Minister, he had managed by diplomatic means to avert an armed encounter with Germany over the latter’s sending of a gunship to Agadir in French Morocco. This feat of diplomacy lost him the premiership: he was soon pushed out for being too accommodating to the Germans. Although Le Figaro had, back in the mid-nineties, supported Captain Dreyfus when he was accused and then convicted of treason on fabricated evidence, and had indeed supported Caillaux, himself, over Agadir, as war approached, it took on an increasingly conservative cast. The paper now allied itself with the elite sectors of the nationalist right. Caillaux’s radical stance on progressive taxation, the first of the kind we recognize as altogether ordinary today, together with his stand against increased government funds for the military, had brought him their enmity.
In December 1913, Le Figaro's Gaston Calmette turned against the popular minister with a vengeance: each day brought new revelations and slanderous headlines, alleging collusion with the Germans, bribery, the theft of millions, sexual hi-jinks and illicit contributions to election campaigns. Caillaux, his cabinet colleagues and the President all feared that it would end, as Calmette threatened, with an expose of intercepted cables and secret documents proving that France had engaged in spying on Germany.
Taxed by her husband’s worries, confronted by what she experienced as the mockery of everyone in her circle as the libellous accusations of Calmette’s paper soared, Madame Caillaux could face the loss of her reputation no more. The threat Le Figaro had made, that more sexual revelations were to come, bringing her own intimate and adulterous past into the public arena, was the step that toppled her hold on reason. So she waited in a trance-like calm for the newspaper’s editor to return to his office. At six o’clock Calmette arrived, accompanied by the novelist Paul Bourget. When given Henriette’s card, the ever gentlemanly Calmette remarked to Bourget that he really couldn’t refuse to see a woman. Henriette was ushered in. No more than a few words were exchanged – ‘You know why I have come?’, to which he purportedly answered, ‘Not at all, Madame’ – before she pulled out her automatic and shot him six times.
Four bullets reached their destination. Moved from the offices on a stretcher, Calmette was heard by employees to be saying, ‘I only did my duty.’ At the clinic in Neuilly, he died later that night on the operating table. When Le Figaro's employees apprehended Madame Caillaux, she shrugged their hands off and exclaimed, ‘Don’t touch me! Je suis me dame. I am a lady.’ Then, ‘Since there is no more justice in France, only a revolver could stop this campaign.’
Flenriette waited quietly for the police to arrive. But when they did, she insisted that her own chauffeur would ferry her to police headquarters. Here she was promptly charged with murder and taken to a cell in Saint-Lazare.
Henriette Caillaux, as her testimony explained to the magistrate and eventually in July to the court, had suffered an overwhelming sense of shame at Le Figaro's attacks. She was a bourgeoise, after all, and the mother of a nineteen-year-old girl, whose mental purity (and, of course, her virginity) also had to be protected from the slander that was drowning the family. Henriette couldn’t bear going out in public any more and hearing the derision. She couldn’t tolerate the shouts in the Assemblée’s visitors�
� gallery of, ‘Go back to Berlin!’. She felt intensely implicated in what was said about her husband. ‘I was forced to steal away in shame. I didn’t want to say anything; I was like a mad crazy person ... I was overwhelmed by emotion.’ She was also overwhelmed by the dredging-up of unseemly past affairs. ‘They will finish by killing him,’ she told a friend. Furthermore, Le Figaro's exposure and direct evocation of her husband’s relations with Berthe Gueydan, the woman who had preceeded her as mistress, then as wife, may well have rekindled the turbulent jealousy that must have accompanied her early years as Joseph’s mistress. Their affair had flaunted social codes and involved not a little brazening out: the nationalist right would use this earlier history to cast aspersions and moralize.
Back then, in 1907, when she and Joseph were first lovers, Henriette had been married for thirteen years to the writer Léo Claretie, nephew of the more famous Jules. Ironically, Léo wrote quite often for Le Figaro. The couple had two daughters, one of whom died around the time that Henriette and Léo divorced, in 1908. The guilt over the death must have been considerable. Nor would Berthe consent to divorcing Joseph in haste. Moreover, he put politics first, and so waited until after the election of 1910 to obtain his divorce. These must have been difficult years for Henriette, but once they married in 1911 she claimed true happiness had arrived, not to mention a joining of fortunes which made them one of the richest families in their circle.
Since it was clear, indeed confessed, that Henriette had killed Gaston Calmette, the court case in July seemed to hinge on only one question: was Henriette a ‘real woman’ – me vraie femme? A real woman, it seemed, was one who honoured her domesticity, was moved by emotion, and had fragile nerves and a weak mind that could be overwhelmed by a tide of feelings and spontaneous impulses. Or was Henriette a cold, calculating divorcée, an unsexed and manipulative virago, who, having already committed a crime against the family and thus the nation, had now planned her act meticulously and murdered a good man in cold blood?
These two popularly opposed stereotypes of the feminine still too often play into a court’s determinations of fundamental – rather than evidential – female guilt and innocence.
There was an additional moral question concerning Henriette’s character that hovered over the court proceedings: as a one-time adulteress, was she simply the wrong kind of woman, more demi- mondaine than the domestic angel her husband claimed? For all its romp and playfulness, the belle époque continued to pay heed to France’s Catholic heritage and at least in public separated reproduction from pleasure: a virtuous baby-bearing sexuality and maternity were for wives; pleasure, for prostitutes or mistresses. All the period’s contradictions, delusions and confusions about what women were and what they were meant to represent played themselves out in the spectacle of the trial and its coverage.
Henriette’s deed done, Caillaux had offered his resignation to his Prime Minister, but it hadn’t been accepted and the newspapers now lined up either for or against his wife and him. The left-leaning ones painted Henriette as the loyal, highly emotional wife, driven into a mad state by sleeplessness and slander. Her calm, her crossed hands and bowed head in the courtroom were a signal of her love of privacy and of her devotion to her husband, whose honour she wanted to salvage. Had he avenged himself in a duel with Calmette, the Republic could have lost one of its greatest men. So Henriette’s deed, as she stated in court, was also an act of patriotic sacrifice.
The nationalist right, on the other hand, led by the oft-rabid columns of Le Figaro, saw in Henriette a cool, self-controlled and cheating harlot – a whorish Hedda Gabler with unerring aim – married to a dishonest, sinful politician who had precipitated two women into divorce. Even the newspaper illustrators and photographers whose images now adorned front pages to such effect, represented Henriette in her lushly feathered hats and studiedly sober elegance either as a German-loving Valkyrie or as a sweet and demure Parisienne de bonne famille, whose old-fashioned father, had he still been alive, would have disowned her at the exposure of her dishonour.
26. A Woman’s Honour
The renowned advocate Fernand Labori represented Henriette at the trial, which ran from 20 to 28 July. The man who had so effectively battled for Dreyfus ran a straightforward argument: Henriette’s fear of a greater scandal, in which Calmette would publish her private letters and expose her early intimacy with Joseph, had overwhelmed her reason. Already suicidal at the first invasion of her privacy, it was this fear that had driven her to shoot Calmette the night before the announced letters were scheduled to appear. In effect, she was acting in self-defence. She was protecting her husband, her family and her woman’s honour. In this she was also defending France.
The matter of honour, as France moved inattentively towards war, played a substantial part in the trial’s proceedings. There was female honour – which meant standing up for one’s own unsullied reputation, that of one’s family and one’s husband. The crime passionnel was one extreme way of avenging it. There was male honour – which meant making a show of one’s courageous masculinity and reputation by finding satisfaction in a duel. An illegal but socially sanctioned and oft-engaged-in process, duelling perpetuated an old aristocratic practice within a Republican France that many felt had lost its sense of hierarchy and value by embracing Godlessness and mere riches. This same democratic France, particularly in Paris, as Proust’s opus so vividly reflects, adored its aristocrats. Born to solid rank and not just to the evanescent fluidity of capital, the crème de la crème, perception was, inhabited a world of honour and repute, of brave and dashing manliness and subtle gradations of female virtue. But honour and reputation were at the mercy of an unfettered press, which sullied what it touched, turned the private public, and just as in our own day, loved creating celebrities in order then to trash them, to the delight of its readers.
These readers were legion in a country of forty million where literacy was almost total. The four main papers alone printed some 4.5 million copies a day; each was probably read by at least two adults. Given the large number of other papers, both Parisian and regional, this meant every adult read at least one paper. This was mass circulation on an unprecedented scale, and the power of the press – which like Le Matin’s motto claimed ‘to see, know and say everything’ – was vast. Nor were there any libel laws in the Napoleonic Code to allow redress, or right of reply – and so men fought duels; and women like Henriette Caillaux could be driven to kill so as to preserve their reputation. Politicians often engaged in duels: Georges Clemenceau, twice Prime Minister and principal author of the Treaty of Versailles, fought twenty-two. As Gabriel Tarde, the jurist and sociologist, noted in his Études Pénates et Sociales (1892), the first part of which is entitled ‘The Duel’, the new culture of honour and duelling was the product of an unstable world of mobile capital, but in particular of the newly powerful press, ‘a steam engine for the fabrication and the destruction of reputations on an immense scale’. Like wealth, honour could be destroyed overnight. Defamed and dishonoured, citizens looked for redress beyond the law.
During the trial, it became clear that Joseph Caillaux had talked of sending his seconds round to call on Calmette. He had decided against it, because to fight a duel would be to raise Calmette to his own level. He had no fears: he was a first-class shot, as the attendants at the firing range at Gastinne-Renette where he practised daily, confirmed. But Calmette was beneath him, a fraudster of sorts. The editor had acquired millions during his tenure at Le Figaro – sums, as Caillaux revealed, having managed to access his will, that it would take an ordinary bourgeois family 150 years to acquire. Caillaux himself, however, had no more money now than the millions he had inherited from his prosperous family.
The slur from the nationalist press that German-lover Caillaux had been emasculated, was less than a man, and so his wife had had to go out and retrieve his male honour for him, nonetheless made the rounds. This was just one more reason why Henriette had doubly to prove that she was a true, meek a
nd mild, submissive woman, despite her outing with the Browning pistol. Honour took on even greater amplitude on the fifth and sixth days of the trial, when the president of the judges, Louis Albanel, suffered what he felt was an insult from a deputy judge. The latter instantly apologized, but exposed his disagreement with his superior, in full and in public, in the pages of Le Figaro. Albanel called for satisfaction in a duel; his deputy countered that his own seconds would be calling. The duel was delayed only by the arrival of war – that far larger playing field on which masculinity and honour could be tested.
Henriette stated that she had shot Calmette in order to restore honour to her husband and herself. During the instruction period, she had explained to the investigating magistrate that Calmette’s frenzied and unabating attack on her husband had driven her mad. She felt that her body was inhabited by two opposing forces, the irrational one being the stronger of the two. ‘It was like having two separate beings inside myself, like two separate wills. On the one hand I wanted to go to an afternoon tea a friend had invited me to, and I put on a town dress; if I had intended to go to the Figaro ... I wouldn’t have dressed up. On the other hand, I felt a greater force take hold of me and this was the one that drove me on.’
Madame Caillaux’s language is one learned from the epoch’s mind doctors and other much reported crimes of passion. There is a certain irony in her having killed a newspaper editor, since it is the sensational coverage given to such crimes that furnishes her with the responses and explanations of her behaviour she needs. Nonetheless, she inflects the popular scenario with elements of her own particular case. She kills, she says, as if in a dream, overwhelmed by emotions alien to her ordinary self. She is in a second state, a trance, like that of a hypnotic subject, but also like those of the doubled personalities that Pierre Janet had investigated and made graphically public. Her automatic weapon corresponds to her own unconscious mental state: once given the space, it has a will of its own. It takes her over. She is, to use our own colloquialism, on automatic pilot. She talks of feeling hypnotized by a ‘cinematographic film ... that flashes before her eyes’ in which she sees her husband kill Calmette, and she forces herself to position herself in her husband’s place. She is in that sense both man and woman.
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