Aaron Freundschuh

The Courtesan and the Gigolo

The Murders in the Rue Montaigne and the Dark Side of Empire in Nineteenth-Century Paris

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Aaron Freundschuh is Assistant Professor of History at Queens College, City University of New York.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 272
• Erscheinungstermin: 11. Januar 2017
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 228mm x 151mm x 17mm
• Gewicht: 382g
• ISBN-13: 9781503600829
• ISBN-10: 1503600823
• Artikelnr.: 45010366

Autorenporträt

Aaron Freundschuh is Assistant Professor of History at Queens College, City University of New York.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
1Elite Cosmopolitanism and Gentrification in Western Paris
chapter abstract
This chapter traces the historical geography of western and west-central
Paris in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with particular attention
to the neighborhood near the lower Champs-Elysées and the Rue Montaigne,
site of the horrific triple homicide that is the book's main focus. The
chapter introduces themes pertaining to spatial divisions of modern Paris,
highlighting the process of gentrification and the embedding of
cosmopolitan and bourgeois social elements in the area. The Paris of
Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann reinforced the very fantasies of
social-spatial purity that the Pranzini arrest would upend.
2The Crime Scene
chapter abstract
This chapter tightens the narrative focus around the March 1887 date of the
murders and visits the crime scene. The chapter introduces important early
investigative findings, as well as the central investigators in the case:
the crime reporter Georges Grison, Chief of Security Taylor, Deputy-Chief
Goron, the magistrate Adolphe Guillot, and Dr. Paul Brouardel, the renowned
forensics doctor and anatomist. The investigative rivalries among these men
constitute a narrative arc running through the book. The Pranzini case was
considered vital to attempts on the part of the police to fix its tattered
reputation as it attempted to "professionalize" in the 1880s and 1890s.
3A Reporter's Ambition: Georges Grison and the Rise of Investigative Crime
Reporting in Paris
chapter abstract
This chapter constitutes the first historical treatment of an important
figure in the rise of investigative reporting in Paris: Georges Grison. For
decades a fixture at Parisian crime scenes, Grison toiled as a lowly crime
reporter of the fait-divers newspaper genre. The argument is that Grison-a
deft professional networker, scandal-monger and controversial press
advocate who published under the pen name Jean de Paris-pioneered new
journalistic techniques as part of an ethos of investigation that appealed
to readers of the mass press. Working under the protection of press
freedoms guaranteed by the Third Republic and seeing in this case a unique
opportunity, Grison used this case to challenge the limits of printable
news and the role of the press in investigating crime.
4The Courtesan's Objects: Sexual Danger and the High Life of the Demimonde
chapter abstract
This chapter retraces the public fascination with, and the police
investigation of, Marie Regnault's early life, as well as her rise in the
demimonde. How was the life of a courtesan measured by Regnault's
contemporaries? Did her murder constitute a mournful public tragedy?
Regnault's murder is situated alongside other unsolved cases involving
demimondaines going back to 1879. A novel angle on the strategies of the
demimonde is in evidence in the so-called "secret archives" of the Vice
Squad-a powerful investigative division overseen by Taylor and Goron-as
well as in the material history of sex work that unfolded in Paris's most
prestigious auction house, the Hôtel Drouot, where Regnault's own
belongings were sold one year after her murder.
5Colonial Picaresque: The Trans-Mediterranean Investigation of a Migrant
chapter abstract
This chapter pieces together the Rue Montaigne investigation's eastward
movements through diplomatic, military, and political sources. The French
diplomatic corps's pursuit of Pranzini's past-ostensibly undertaken to
determine his prior criminal activity and his whereabouts going back to
1879-produced a wealth of data relative to Pranzini's family history, which
is here contextualized within the broader historical trend of European
colonial migration and settlement in the East during the nineteenth
century. In Alexandria, a magnet for southern European colonial settlers,
social hierarchies and racial tensions helped transform the exonym
"Levantine" into a pejorative-a category that Pranzini, a product of the
French empire in important respects, was coming simultaneously to embody in
Paris.
6Criminal Detection as Colonial War by other Means: Investigative Claims on
the Latin-American Rastaquouère
chapter abstract
This chapter proceeds along two parallel tracks while carrying the case
narrative forward to the interrogation phase. In order to understand how
the Pranzini case impacted the investigative imagination in Paris, the
chapter picks up Chapter One's discussion of the stakes of the
investigation for Security, arguing that this case was an important moment
in the agency's history. This was because Deputy Chief, a veteran of
colonial settlement and war, saw in the investigation's colonial dimension
an opportunity to valorize the colonial experience and culture that were a
source of pride within Security's ranks. Pranzini, meanwhile, was held up
as an example of a "rastaquouère," a racialized colonial category that
evoked European settlement in South America, unwanted social backwash, and
forms of criminality such as sex trafficking.
7The Trial of a Gigolo: Intimacy, Foreignness, and the Boulangist Crisis
chapter abstract
The Pranzini was an extraordinarily rowdy event, replete with outbursts of
laughter that are the subject of this chapter's inquiry. Linking the trial
to the rise of General Georges Boulanger and the early coalescence of
right-wing factions into a movement known to historians as the "New Right,"
the chapter argues that Pranzini-as a foreigner coded as an infiltrator and
sexual threat-became a convenient target for modern French political
xenophobia. As a gigolo, Pranzini was typed as risible, effeminate, and
recognizable on the butte of Montmartre; at the same time, he infused that
social type with hints of the exotic that could appeal to
independent-minded Parisian women.
8The Skin Affair: Punishment and the Colonial Body
chapter abstract
Chapter Eight recounts the grotesque aftermath of Pranzini's guilty
verdict. Georges Grison's revelation that Taylor, Goron, and one of their
underlings were each in possession of souvenirs fashioned from the
post-cranial cadaver of Enrico Pranzini set off a chain of events that led
to the stunning fall of Jules Grévy. More than a sensational anecdote, the
so-called "Skin Affair" nourished debates about the procedures surrounding
the death penalty, the punishment of the colonial body, and the right of
death-row convicts to exempt their cadavers from posthumous medical
research.
Conclusion: On Imperial Insecurity
chapter abstract
The Conclusion revisits the notion that for Parisians in the 1880s, the
political themes of criminality and colonial empire were intimately tied.
The Pranzini case took social theorists like Gabriel Tarde aback. At the
same time, other unwanted reverberations from overseas dealt fatal blows to
the careers of pro-colonial politicians like Ferry. Empire's promise of
security and stability was left most wanting as it pertained to discourses
on crime. In the months following the Pranzini Affair, Enrico Pranzini's
name officially entered the French parliamentary record. Xenophobic
politicians cited his example in their re-framing of immigration as an
imperial question; they cited his example, and the press coverage of the
case, as justifications for a stricter regime of immigrant control-one that
would endure for generations.