Abstract
In the long nineteenth century, crime reports in popular, sensationalistic broadsheets called canards sanglants contributed to making the crime of rape visible to a broader audience in France. The general public learned about heinous crimes, as vendors in public streets and squares shouted out and sang the papers’ titles and complaintes. Moreover, during the first third of the century, not only did statistical accounts of increasing crime make rape more noticeable, but the visual spectacles of the criminal were replaced by crime reports in the press, such as the Gazette des Tribunaux. After examining why rape sold papers, and explaining my larger corpus of 115 canards sanglants, this essay investigates the murky way in which seven particular crimes of alleged murder were represented in the canards sanglants – two in 1827, the others in 1843, 1852, 1879, 1887 and 1889. These seven crimes share several common features. Ambiguity is manifest in each case, as the crime report declares that only a murder transpired; however, linguistic similarities and parallels with the physical evidence at the crime scenes mirrored the crime of rape. My methodology looks at code words and blind spots that cause the erasure of sexual violence, illuminating what was previously unseen. Bensmaïa’s figurative use of scotoma, as well as the term’s etymology, paradoxically highlight the gaps, shadows or blind spots when legislating, examining or reporting cases of rape or attentat à la pudeur. Both canards sanglants and the legal and medical institutions focused more on brutal acts of sexual violence that occurred to child victims under 13 years of age, rather than to adults. Medical and legal discourses contained significant omissions and blind spots regarding the rape or sodomy of adults.1 Although rape gained greater visibility in the nineteenth century, seven verdicts provide examples of how signs of sexual violence occasionally remained invisible to journalists, judges and forensic doctors.
Keywords
La foule entoure le Palais de justice et envahit l’enceinte réservée au public. Il s’agit d’une de ces scènes judiciaires dont on recherche les émotions. Il s’agit d’un crime dont la monstruosité est de nature à étonner les esprits les moins faciles à se laisser émouvoir. (Jugement rendu par la cour d’assises des Vosges, 1852)
In the long nineteenth century, crime reports in popular, sensationalistic broadsheets called canards sanglants contributed to making the crime of rape visible to a broader audience in France. The general public learned about heinous crimes, as vendors in public streets and squares shouted out and sang the papers’ titles and complaintes (poems in verse, sung to a popular tune of the time that summarised and sometimes varied the narrative account of the crime story while occasionally presenting a moral). Moreover, during the first third of the century, not only did statistical accounts of increasing crime make rape more noticeable but the visual spectacles of the criminal were replaced by crime reports in the press, such as the Gazette des Tribunaux. After examining why rape sold papers, and my larger corpus of 115 canards sanglants, this essay investigates how seven canards sanglants presented rape in a more ambiguous manner – two reports from 1827, the others from 1843, 1852, 1879, 1887 and 1889. By focusing on the ambiguity manifested in each case described only as murder, I will show linguistic and legal similarities as well as physical evidence that parallel the crime of rape, suggesting that journalistic, legal and medical discourses demonstrate valences and variants of what Réda Bensmaïa figuratively refers to as scotoma. For Bensmaïa, a scotoma connotes ‘a psychological and ideological blindness to obvious things – i.e. to things that the eye can see but that the mind refuses to acknowledge’ (2009: 1878). Compared to murder, the less visible crime of rape is significantly more difficult to assess for both physical and cultural reasons.
Nineteenth-century France’s general fascination with heinous crimes was manifested in part through stories told and circulated in popular, crime-oriented news stories, called canards sanglants. 2 Indeed, by 1902, crime stories were the sixth most popular news report in the daily presses of France (Kalifa, 1995: 19), and court reporting of salacious cases was often the staple of the popular press. The canards sanglants knew how to excite their audience in the way they recounted monstrous crimes. They differed from the fait divers as the latter were not performative and appeared only in the columns of dailies or weekly newspapers. 3 In the epigraph taken from Jugement rendu par la cour d’assises des Vosges (1852), the public is waiting for a murderer to appear in court for his day of sentencing. The crowd attending the trial, or those who learn about it owing to the reporting of this canard sanglant, will come to know the gruesome details of how three women were murdered. One victim, Catherine Colin, may have been the object of another crime, with details we will learn about later, corresponding to the legal terminology for rape at the time. In the seven canards sanglants this article focuses on, the commonalities between them will be highlighted as they represented individuals who were rarely reported as victims of rape in the canards sanglants: six women, 18 years or older, and one 21-year-old male. 4 Most victims of rape were female children and most scholarship on rape of nineteenth-century France analyses child victims (see note 8).
Typically, in the 115 canards I studied, most victims were female children under the age of 15, and the great majority were both raped and murdered. Only three victims survived their rapes to tell about them. One supposes that the murder and rape of innocent children made for more heart-wrenching, sensationalistic copy than if the victims were adults. Certainly, children were easier targets for sexual crimes on account of their age, physical weakness and sexual ignorance (Devergie, 1837: 131–2; Sohn, 1989: 74). In those circumstances, the canardiers could hawk papers relating abominable crimes and the harshest of punishments, as the penal codes and tribunal judgements were most explicit and severe when the victims of rape were children under the age of 11 until the law raised the age to 13. 5
Public visibility of the canards sanglants: defining the canards sanglants and my corpus
Soon after the invention of the printing press, canards sanglants were sold in the city streets by vendors called canards, colporteurs or canardiers who shouted out their headlines. By the end of the fifteenth century, the canards sanglants had a loyal following: stories that previously only circulated orally now appeared in print (Seguin, 1954: 98). Usually small booklets of 4, 8 or 16 pages (quarto, octavo, in-12, in-16) in the 1820s, along with the small pamphlet-sized formats, the canards sanglants were printed on one larger poster-size sheet (in plano). The canards sanglants remained an important and competitive source of news for the masses until World War I (Seguin, 1969: I; Hélot, n.d.: 33). Seguin estimated that thousands of canards sanglants were published throughout the nineteenth century, each with a printing of between 1,000 and 20,000 copies. 6
Whether one consults the first studies written on the canards sanglants and the fait divers from the mid 1950s to the mid 1990s – Hélot (n.d.), Lever (1993) and Seguin on the canards sanglants (1954, 1955, 1959, 1969); Albert and Terrou (1970), Auclair (1970), Chevalier (2004) and Kalifa (1995) on the fait divers – or more recent scholarship – Cragin (2006) on the canards sanglants or Charle (2004), Vaillant and Thérenty (2001) or Feyel (1999) for the fait divers – the experts usually identify the canards sanglants as the ancestor of the French press, French journalism or the fait divers. Although most scholars categorise the canards sanglants as the predecessor of the fait divers and of mass circulation journalism, Cragin goes a step further in his Murder in the Parisian Streets, demonstrating persuasively that they also served as a model that the mass circulation newspapers copied: Millaud’s Le Petit Journal ‘not only borrowed the canards sanglants’ format and content, but also their techniques of distribution’ (2006: 37).
The canards sanglants have always had a highly oral and performative dimension to their presentation of news. This hybrid genre combined images, stories and songs, called complaintes. Their titles and text in verse or prose were shouted and sung as people in the streets gathered to hear the latest instalments of atrocious murders, trials or sentences, as shown in Figure 1, a lithograph depicting a colporteur’s family performing in front of a group of onlookers. A close look reveals copies of the canards sanglants in the broadsheet dimensions (in plano) draped over one arm of the mother and daughter to the right of the canard sanglant that hangs on an easel for display. For my own research, I have relied on Seguin’s definition of a canard sanglant: ‘Au xixe siècle le canard constitue une branche originale de l’ancienne et grande famille des “occasionnels” ces imprimés d’information non périodiques vendus à l’occasion des événements d’actualité qui retiennent l’attention et frappent l’imagination’ (Seguin, 1969: i, emphasis added). The canards sanglants studied here are distinct from the rubric fait divers and the inexpensive daily or mass circulation presses, such as La Presse (1836), Le Petit Journal (1863), Le Journal illustré (1864), the Gazette de Paris (1870) or the Petit Parisien (1876), etc. Broadsheets were sent to press as sensationalised news occurred, never appearing on any regular basis. The fast turnaround explains the inconsistencies in typography, capitalisation and less stylised writing. Also not all of the canards sanglants were the size of the format in plano such as the one in Figure 2, with a woodcut engraving taking up one third of the page, and the text and song taking up the columns of print. The reports of rape included in my larger corpus of 115 canards sanglants range from one paragraph to 16 pages. Some have illustrations, many do not.
The 1870 Troppmann case (2-DEP-CP-0008). Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris.
Horrible assassinat suivi de viol. Complainte à ce suject. Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Of the 3,300 nineteenth-century canard sanglants archived at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Tolbiac and Richelieu sites), the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris and the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, 115 reported on rape, spanning the years 1827 to 1908 and representing 4 per cent of all stories I have inventoried. Almost two-thirds (66 per cent) of my corpus used excerpts from other authoritative sources, such as the Gazette des Tribunaux, Le Journal illustré, the Journal du Commerce de Lyon or court proceedings. 7 Nonetheless, I have not been able to corroborate 34 per cent of my corpus in the elite presses to date.
My corpus spans five different political regimes that were known for their mostly repressive censorship laws against political publications and stories that offended the government, the church or public morality. Cragin notes that, throughout the century, French censorship evolved and each regime preserved most of the laws of its predecessor, adding its own ‘revisions, amendments, and additions to strengthen police controls over the press and adapt censorship to changes in the press’ (2006: 129). Seguin asserts that historically the canards sanglants never overtly participated in political or religious struggles and that the 5 February 1810 censorship law along with Article 10 of the decree influenced the canards sanglants to write sensationalised news or special-interest stories until the fall of the Empire, whereupon their narratives took on an historical propagandist tone. Never, did they ‘abordent de front … les vrais problèmes’ (1859: 69–71). In fact, Seguin suggests that the colporteurs/writers exercised a type of self-censorship in terms of avoiding writing about politicised topics for fear they would lose their brevets until Louis-Philippe’s reign (1959: 80, 83). Especially after 1881, when the censorship laws were liberalised, the canards sanglants continued to write about special-interest stories rather than political debates because it was their speciality – what they knew how to do best (Seguin, 1959: 105). Cragin maintains that the canards sanglants chose sensationalised topics because they sold the best (2006: 139). Moreover, writing about current crime stories allowed the canards sanglants and the mass-circulation papers to avoid a tax on political publications (Cragin, 2006: 129). In his third chapter, ‘The Failure of Censorship’, Cragin meticulously analyses the censorship placed on the popular presses. He summarises by stating that censors’ records ‘detail many loopholes in the press laws, weak administrators and inefficient police to enforce regulations and the resulting successful evasion of the laws by so many determined printers and peddlers; the popular press operated far beyond censors’ controls’ (2006: 139). The canards sanglants therefore did not experience such excessive hardships due to the censorship laws as one would think because they tended to stay clear of controversial political news topics and benefited from the ineffectual regulations of the censorship laws on this sensationalised crime-focused news.
Visible criminality: why and when rape makes the news
Anne-Claude Ambroise-Rendu has studied sexual assaults on children in the rubric of the fait divers in judicial, political and popular serialised newspapers of the nineteenth century. She states that, until the 1880s, rape was almost totally absent from her news sources (2007: 240–1). She also suggests that the only time rape was discussed in any systematic or developed manner was when there was also the crime of homicide or in papers printing excerpts of court trials (2007: 242). In contrast, the canards sanglants began reporting rapes in 1827 and continued until 1908. Only 50 years later do serialised presses begin to report on the crime too, following the lead of the Gazette de Tribunaux and the canards sanglants. However, my conclusions parallel her findings in one regard: in the 115 texts I have studied, only four victims of rape were not killed; the rest were raped and murdered. Quantitatively, rape was a highly underreported crime in the long nineteenth century, making all archival sources treating that type of violence extremely rare, and thus critical documents to analyse. 8
How did rape become a reported-on crime, even occasionally? George Vigarello (2000) identifies two social changes that made it more visible in France in the 1820s and 1830s. The first was the gathering of statistics on all facets of society – its population, industries, production, and crime – allowing analyses and hierarchies of infractions, criminals and criminal behaviour to be made. Raisson’s 1825 Le Code des gens honnêtes, documented that in every group of ten ‘upstanding citizens [honnêtes gens]’ one thief lurked (quoted in Vigarello, 2000: 126). 9 Hence, with a population of 1,200,000 in Paris, 120,000 were robbers or thieves, a tremendously worrisome statistic at the time. Abel Hugo’s 1835 La France pittoresque ou description pittoresque topographique et statistique des départements et des colonies de la France presented a full accounting of all crimes committed in France: in that year, the courts heard 218 crimes of rape, 708 of murder and 5,560 cases of theft (1835: 61). For Vigarello, ‘la possibilité nouvelle de comparer, grâce aux statistiques, le nombre de viols jugés selon les régions ou les années pourraient amorcer des raisonnements inédits sur ce crime, les plaintes qu’il suscite, les sentences qu’il provoque’ (2000: 127).
The second change was the decrease in the visual spectacle of crime, guilt, and punishment. For example, 1828 and 1832 saw the abolition of the foot and collar shackles as well as the convict line where hundreds of prisoners, attached by chains, were led through the streets to prison or execution. In Vigarello’s view, the public display of the prisoner who was now hidden from sight in his cell was rendered even more present due to the ever-increasing number of articles, studies, reports and chronicles about crime (2000: 131). The press played an important role in making all facets of criminality visible again, be it the relating of the crime, the victim’s character and innocence, the criminal’s background and motivation, the crime scene, the forensic evidence, the ‘masses’ who assembled by the thousands to view corpses at the morgue, the citizenry who reacted to the crime or the theatricality of the courtroom trial and verdict. The canards sanglants represented all of those dimensions in their columns.
The Gazette des Tribunaux, ‘journal de jurisprudence et des débats judiciaires’ as stated in the paper’s subtitle, was founded in 1826 and cultivated an interest in crime stories. In particular, sexual violence cases in the Gazette des Tribunaux more than tripled in the space of 20 years, from the time of the newspaper’s inception in 1826 to 1846 (Vigarello, 2000: 132). It can be observed that an equal interest in rape existed in the medical world as well. From the 1830s onwards, although targeted for a very different reading public, rape was also a topic in a dozen medical reports published separately or in the leading scientific journal of the day, Annales d’Hygiène Publique et de Médecine Légale, authored by prominent forensic scientists or doctors performing autopsies, called médecins-légistes. One such report, Alfonse Devergie’s two-tome Médecine légale, théorique et pratique (1837), was considered the authority for doctors or presiding judges to consult when performing the court-ordered medical exams. 10
The nineteenth century saw the birth of current institutional structures, practitioners and discourses for matters related to investigative reporting and criminology (Kalifa, 2005: 9). Because my corpus often reported on judicial trials, the canards sanglants connect legal and medical discourses as these penny presses reported the juries’ verdicts and judges’ sentencing, which relied on doctors’ testimonies and autopsy reports. By reproducing the judicial and medical findings, the canards sanglants brought them to a broader, more popular audience. Their narratives are rich owing to the stories they tell about criminal proceedings on rape, the public’s fascination for crime, and the operating values concerning guilt, victims and perpetrators circulating in the nineteenth century.
Defined in French jurisprudence as an attentat à la pudeur until 1994, rape was often referred to as un crime de sang, falling under attentat aux mœurs. Throughout the nineteenth century, the penal code distinguished three kinds of attacks: ‘Attentat à la pudeur sans violence’ (Article 331), ‘De l’attentat à la pudeur avec violence et du viol’ (Article 332), and ‘Circonstances aggravantes de l’attentat à la pudeur et du viol’ (Article 333). 11 In all three articles, the language for victim and perpetrator was more neutral and could be applied to either sex. Victims were referred to as ‘la victime’ ‘la personne d’un enfant’ ‘un mineur’ or ‘des individus de l’un ou de l’autre sexe’ (Code Pénal, 1810). Although the language was neutral, half of the definitions stated that the victim would need to be under the age of 13 (Article 331), as attentat à la pudeur sans violence was written to protect children because ‘il y a présomption jusqu’à cet âge que l’agent a abusé de l’ignorance de l’enfant pour le flétrir ou le corrompre’ (Hélie, 1928: 661–2). The language describing the perpetrators of these crimes was vague, except in Article 333. They were called ‘agents du crime’, ‘le culpable’ or ‘agresseurs’. Both men and women could be victims of rape, though the language remained nebulous, and sodomy did not appear as a separate legal classification as it did in the Old Regime. A wife could not be raped by her husband (Cour de Cassation, 19 March 1910), but she could be a victim of ‘attentat à la pudeur avec violence et avec circonstance aggravante d’aide’, if she was forced to do ‘unconjugal acts’ with an accomplice of her husband’s in the presence of several other people (Hélie, 1928: 666). Taboos of the time or ‘unconjugal acts’ would have been kissing on the mouth, oral sex or sodomy. Kissing on the mouth was considered ‘obscene’ and would have been justification alone to be accused of attentat à la pudeur (Sohn, 1989: 86).
Reading for rape not only involves analysing difficult, even gruesome narratives, but also reading in between the lines to interpret euphemisms and code words for rape, the perpetrator’s act and/or the victim’s demise. Over the years, I have re-evaluated seven canards sanglants, choosing to add them to my corpus, even though the text does not state explicitly that the victim was raped. The verdicts of the seven crimes in this article, prosecuted as murder, are re-examined based on the penal codes and the language of the law found within the narratives of the canards sanglants themselves as well as their depictions of victims’ bodies in various stages of undress. Their ambiguous details blur the distinctions used to define a murder also as rape. Among the seven canards sanglants cases involving adult victims, six were said to have been murdered; the seventh victim, la femme Donzeau, was declared raped (Cours d’assises de la Gironde, 1889). In the descriptions of the six adult murder victims, the violence endured, and the state of undress of their bodies would have minimally met the legal parameters of attentat à la pudeur sans violence (if the victims were 21 or younger, unmarried and accosted by a parent or grandparent) or attentat à la pudeur avec violence. In those six crimes, the verdicts appear to have been incomplete for
Lexical blurring of rape with murder: ambiguous depictions of crime, criminal and victim
Table 1 represents typical language in my larger corpus of 115 canards sanglants depicting rape, rapist and rape victim when the médecins-légistes’ reports and judges’ verdicts declared that crime had occurred. While the usual word referring to murder is ‘attentat’ or ‘meurtre’ in the canards sanglants, it is easy to see that some of the following terms could relate to murder too as they are more neutral, such as ‘un crime monstrueux’, ‘un forfait’ or ‘une atrocité inouïe’. In the 1835 ‘L’Affaire Lacenaire’ the double homicide was labelled ‘des forfaits’ (Procès complet de Lacenaire et de ses complices imprimé sur les épreuves corrigés de sa main quoted in Demartini, 2001: 17). The murderer was described as ‘un monstre’ and his acts represented ‘la monstruosité’ (Demartini, 2001: 68–176). In a canard sanglant that recounts the case of a murderer, Jeanne Weber (‘l’Ogresse’) – who was accused yet acquitted of having killed nine children in 1909 – was called ‘un monstre’ and ‘une meurtrière’, and her killings were labelled ‘forfaits’, ‘flagrant délits’, ‘crimes’ and ‘meurtres’ (Les crimes contre l’enfance, 1909). The seven canards sanglants in this study employ similar synonyms for murder. For example, in the 1892 Cours d’assises des Landes: le crime de Poyanne, the violence committed by three bandits ‘[des] infâmes scélérats’, is referred to as ‘attentats’ ‘le meurtre’ and ‘forfaits’.
Euphemisms for rape from my corpus of 115 canards sanglants.
The remaining terms in Table 1 have not been utilised for crimes of murder, and can be said to be coded specifically for the crime of rape. They overlap in part with euphemisms that Ambroise-Rendu found in the fait divers and more mainstream newspapers when they discussed rape, such as ‘derniers outrages’, ‘odieux attentat’, ‘attentat criminal’, ‘odieuses violences’ and ‘affaire delicate’ (2007: 244). Euphemisms for rape appear in the case of la femme Donzeau, whom the canard sanglant suggests was both raped and murdered. The report states that her cadaver ‘a subi les derniers outrages’, that she appeared to be the object of ‘actes odieux’, and that the perpetrators ‘assouvirent … leur brutale passion et … se livrèrent à des actes de lubricité’ (Cours d’assises de la Gironde, 1889: 2–3). Usually the canards sanglants do not condense so many ‘code words’ together as they have here. Only a small percentage of narratives in my 115 canard corpus depict rape in terms of eroticism or passion. 12
In the other six crimes where the verdict was strictly murder, the homicide was represented lexically with terms to depict murder or rape. The crimes were a ‘forfait’ (Troisième détail, 1827), ‘un éxécrable [sic] forfait’ (Assassinat au bois de Vincennes, 1843) and an ‘exécrable dessin’ (Jugement rendu par la cour d’assises des Vosges, 1852). The complainte of the latter takes the perspective of the murderer and, in rhyme, writes ‘après les avoir débauchées / Toutes les trois je les ai tuées’. Here, the crime of murder is referred to using terms that apply to rape: an act of ‘debauchery’ parallels linguistically an act of ‘lubricité’ or ‘depravation’, suggesting rape from our lexicon. In the text of that same canard sanglant we are told that the crime represents ‘la dépravation et cruauté [qui] confondent toutes les notions d’âme humaine’. In this example, the perpetrator is suggested to be a beast at heart, an ‘animal’, another code word for a rapist: beastly behaviour is how the rapist and murderers of la femme Donzeau and two other victims in the same narrative were depicted. The murderers are described as ‘tigres humains’, ‘monstres humains’, as well as ‘meurtriers’, ‘scélérats’ and ‘satyres hideux’ (Jugement rendu par la cour d’assises des Vosges, 1852: 2–3). Again, the terms ‘meurtriers’, ‘monstres’ and ‘scélérats’ are also used to describe murderers who do not rape their victims. Hence there is lexical ambiguity between both crimes.
In the other six canards sanglants, the murderers are referred to in less metaphorical terms and more factual language is used. One still notices a linguistic overlap with the terms of ‘un meurtrier’, ‘un assassin’, ‘un misérable’ or ‘un monstre’. In Assassinat au bois de Vincennes, the murderer is equally labelled ‘a scélérat’, like the murderess Jeanne Weber and the murderer/rapist in Cours d’assises de la Gironde. Hence, there is murkiness in terms of the language used to describe both murder and rapes. However, in the social imaginary of nineteenth-century France, the perpetrators of both crimes were thought of similarly – as other and as exceptions, incapable of acting within the norms of human decency. 13 In all seven crimes, the weapon of choice was either a hammer or a knife, except in one instance when the victim was shot dead. 14
If physical traits of the victims were provided, they were described as either pretty or beautiful:
None of the victims of rape (la femme Donzeau, Cours d’assises de la Gironde, 1889) or murder was described in terms of having been ‘soiled’ ‘dishonoured’ or having ‘lost their virtue’, including Aimée Millot who was revered as ‘virtuous’, even after her rape and death. In addition to the murder and rape of la femme Donzeau, another homicide was also represented in zealous terms that resembles the language of passion mentioned earlier. Either rape occurred (which I will return to) or the assassin, Henri Pranzini, entered into an altered state of ‘temporary insanity’ when killing Marie Renault. With knife in hand he ‘subissait l’ivresse du crime’ allowing him to ‘parfaire son odieuse besogne’ (Cours d’assises de la Seine. Affaire Pranzini, 1887). Moving from the overlapping rhetoric of rape and murder to specific narrative and visual techniques of the canards sanglants, we will examine one suspected rape case in which the literal subject of rape is not mentioned.
Blind spots in the canards sanglants
‘“If it bleeds, it leads” runs the venerable guideline of tabloids and 24-hour headline news shows – to which the response is compassion, or indignation, or titillation, or approval, as each misery comes into view’ (Sontag, 2004: 18). Sontag’s depictions draw a principal corollary between the journalism of past and present: blood and gore sell. And the canards sanglants knew how to sate nineteenth-century France’s hearty appetite for criminal atrocities. Sontag also spoke about the role of images when reporting the news: ‘Conscripted as part of journalism, images were expected to arrest attention, startle, [and] surprise’ (2004: 23). True, the artists, editors and canardiers of nineteenth-century France sought to startle and surprise their readership but they also sought to elicit horror and interest in their stories by their titles, images and verses. We will now see how the reporting of one victim, Jules Séchepine, used images and text to relay the events of the crime of murder and possibly sodomy.
In the 1843 Assassinat du bois de Vincennes, whose complainte was sung to the familiar tune of ‘T’en souviens-tu?,’ four wood engravings arrest the viewer’s attention (Figure 3). They are read from left to right from the top to the bottom row. One imagines that the hand sticking out of the ground in frame 2 is that of the victim being struck by a hammer in frame 1. The images follow the dramatic events found in the canard sanglant’s title and narrative. Sontag’s words are again helpful in analysing the impact of visual media:
Nonstop imagery (television, streaming video, movies) is our surround, but when it comes to remembering, the photograph has a deeper bite. Memory freeze-frames; its basic unit is the single image … The photograph provides a quick way of apprehending something and a compact form for memorizing it. The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall. (2004: 22)
Assassinat au bois de Vincennes. Bibliothèque nationale de France.
When looking over the four frames in Figure 3, the top two wood engravings show the scene of the crime, and the bottom two restore order. The first row illustrates the victim who is being dragged into the woods. His assailant will soon kill him with a hammer (frame 1). We are then shown the site where he was buried (frame 2). In the bottom frames, the criminal is arrested and sentenced (frame 3). He serves as the model perpetrator of a crime when taken to the morgue (frame 4): he lowers his body and displays remorse for his deed as he did in frame 2 where the title and canard sanglant narrative inform the reader that he falls to his knees before the cadaver to say a prayer, seeking forgiveness from God for the murder he has just committed. 16 In front of the magistrates and policemen, we equally are told he is fearful of God.
The first paragraph of the canard sanglant’s narrative relates that two policemen discover the still-warm corpse. Suggestive Gothic details of the living dead are reinforced by the hand signalling out from the brush and dirt. Frames 3 and 4 suggest the efficacy of the Vincennes police, its crime lab and courts. Frame 3 illustrates that the police have found the perpetrator and brought him in for arraignment. Equally present are the forensic doctors who performed the autopsy, as well as the magistrates and the presiding judge in frame 4. The victim, his body or a fragment thereof appear in three of the four frames: we see him right before he is killed, we see his hand emerging from the ground, and his cadaver at the morgue. The narrative, as we shall see, relates the kinds of violence he endured.
In Assassinat du bois de Vincennes (1843) the victim is a 21-year-old man, Jules Séchepine, who is an ‘ouvrier’ looking for work. Séchepine ends up being duped by a man of the same age named Houray Salmon. The perpetrator states that he knows someone who is hiring in the next town and invites Séchepine to join him. The victim follows Salmon into a dense, wooded area of the bois de Vincennes where he is murdered and buried. However, the canard sanglant begins the narration with two policemen who spy ‘une partie nue d’un corps humain’. Sexualised details titillate and drive the narrative account, including the onomastic first and last names of the victim which we will discuss shortly. We learn that the arm and hand belong to a man ‘d’une beauté remarquable’. The text then relates details of the crime: ‘après avoir été assassiné à l’aide d’un instrument contondant, il avait été complètement dépouillée de ses vêtements, à l’exception de sa chemise’. Behind the thickets (‘fourré’) of the woods, a hidden place genial for lovemaking or an assault, our gaze focuses in on Séchepine’s blurry naked body part. The doctor examines the places where the victim was assaulted with a knife and hammer: his head, forehead and heart. The doctor’s examination appears to go no lower than the victim’s bust. The canard sanglant does not indicate the typical protocols that forensic scientists would follow, such as an examination of the victim’s shirt or of the perpetrator of the crime. These protocols will be expanded upon later.
The autopsy report depicted in the canard sanglant reveals that the victim died of a wound to the chest: ‘une poitrine blessée’. I am troubled that the doctors do not mention Jules Séchepine’s state of undress in the canard sanglant. If one relies on the narrated events within the canard sanglant, differing versions of the same event are presented: either Séchepine is buried with his shirt on or the perpetrator leaves Séchepine totally naked, placing the victim’s bloody shirt over his own. If the latter version is correct, why strip a man after killing him? A reasonable explanation for theft resulting in murder is provided. When interrogating Salmon, the police learn that the criminal only wanted to steal Séchepine’s working papers: ‘Il paraîtrait que ce serait uniquement pour voler les papiers de la victime, qu’il aurait commis cet épouvantable forfait.’ The conditional and conditional past suggest conjecture, even when Salmon had been interviewed. Twice in the narration, stealing, murdering and stripping the victim of his clothes are presented as a logical sequence of events. The complainte is the fifth and final column of the canard sanglant; it ends the story with a moral wherein Salmon is God-loving and God-fearing. He is more terrified of eternity than death because he will be judged by the Creator.
Whether a fictitious or actual crime, this story has a sexual subtext; yet the canard sanglant report is blind to this fact and thus labels it murder rather than sexual violence. Nonetheless, one observes the suggestiveness of Jules Séchepine’s names. Jules – a synonym of maquereau or souteneur – creates links to (male) prostitution. Etymologically and in literary history, ‘une pine’ as a symbol for penis, ‘[le] membre virile’, has circulated since Jean de Meun’s thirteenth-century work Le Roman de la Rose. I question the medical and legal verdicts. It appears that murder was a relatively more ‘comfortable’ crime or a more convenient falsehood than male rape. It was a way of effacing sexual violence. Within the sexual suggestiveness of this story, there emerges cultural resistance where a blind spot does not completely cover up the possibility of rape. I feel Bensmaïa would call this a perfect exemplar of his figurative use of scotoma. In ophthalmology, a scotoma is when one suffers diminished vision. Shapes are perhaps cloudier. Black spots or a black circular rim around the circumference of the visual field develop. The former creates spots that obfuscate clear sight; the latter reduces peripheral vision. Literally, a scotoma can create blind spots. Here, the highest social institutions that search for truth and are bound to uphold justice demonstrate ‘psychological and ideological blindness to obvious things – i.e. to things that the eye can see but that the mind refuses to acknowledge’ (Bensmaïa, 2009: 1878). The police explanation and the autopsy are not convincing and do not explain why a body would be stripped naked when a robber ends up killing an innocent man for his working papers. It is in this same vein that Catherine MacKinnon asks a compelling and difficult question:
Dominant narratives are not called stories. They are called reality … Stories can be powerful, evocative, resonant, death-defyingly influential, yet cover up the most relevant possible facts, such as in Freud’s case, the realities of child abuse. How do you counter the appeal of a story that power wants to believe? (1996: 235)
To try to answer MacKinnon’s query, I submit that the canard sanglant is an example of the mechanism of the blind spot that seems to be shared by canards sanglants’ colporteurs/writers and their representations of the doctors and lawyers of the time.
Very few studies existed on the topic of sodomy, and none was as thorough as that of Dr Tardieu, dean of the Paris Faculty of Medicine, published in 1859. His medical report provides guidelines for all médecins-légistes to follow when analysing crime scenes of murder and cases of sodomy. The position of the corpse is considered, both the criminal and perpetrator undergo an examination to see if there are signs of violence on either body as well as indications of having been an active or passive participant in a same-sex encounter or one involving a heterosexual couple. Tardieu underscores for his readers the importance of doing forensic tests on the victim’s shirt (1859b: 161). Tardieu’s report was not published in 1843 when Séchepine’s murder occurred. However, in medical reports by doctors analysing female rape (Tardieu, 1859b; Parts 1 and 2; Fabre, n.d., but after 1829; Devergie, 1837), the forensic scientists outlined the same procedures for other doctors to follow. They were directed to examine the genitals of both victim and plaintiff as well as to analyse especially the shirt that the victim was wearing when attacked. While the categories and procedures of law and médecine légale did provide a modus operandi of how to approach a crime scene and the investigations of the body or corpse, in this 1843 case the jurisconsultes and médecins-légistes were not able to see beyond their conceptualisations of victimhood or criminality when it came to sodomy or pédérastie. 17 One ponders why none of the typical protocols were followed. It is possible that taking a stand different from one’s peers could be risking oneself professionally, so uniformity of thought is preserved: that is, a homicide occurred rather than a murder and a rape. We will look at the specific language of the law in Article 331 of the penal code that defines attentat à la pudeur sans violence and return to Jules Séchepine’s murdered body, which was buried naked, except for perhaps a shirt.
Gaps and possible blind spots in French jurisprudence and medical reports
Article 331 of the French penal code concerns an attentat à la pudeur sans violence. It is considered a crime because it involves ‘le dessin de nuire à autrui ou de se procurer à soi-même un profit illicite’. As such, according to Articles 139, 179 and 231, the crime would be judged in the Cours d’assises (Hélie, 1928: 1). Amended by the law of 28 April 1832 and that of 13 May 1863, the perpetrator of attentat à la pudeur would be punished by ‘la reclusion’ if the victim were a child under the age of 13. If the perpetrator was an ascendant, i.e. the child’s parents or grandparents, the victim could be up to the age of majority (21 years old) unless s/he had married. To be classified an attentat force had to be used (Hélie, 1928: 661). There is also another distinction that is found in the following specifications of Article 331:
Tout acte de débauche commis sur la personne de l’enfant, tout acte de dépravation et d’immoralité, rentre dans les termes de la loi. (1) … [Note 1:] Ainsi le fait de prendre une jeune fille dans ses bras, de la porter dans une bergerie, de la renverser sur le sol et de relever ses jupes, constitue un attentat à la pudeur …
As can be seen from the above, owing to decisions made by the Cours de Cassation on 5 November 1881 and on 11 July 1914, examples of raised petticoats on girls under the age of 13 years old or up to the age of 21 if it involved her ascendants, is of particular interest, as the article states that any lifting of this garment would suffice for an aggression to be considered attentat à la pudeur. In all other circumstances when the victim was 13 years of age or older, married or unmarried, Article 332 would be applied which provides further clarifications of how to classify violence related to an attentat à la pudeur avec violence, une tentative de viol or rape:
Les deux éléments du crime [du viol] sont donc le commerce illicite et la violence. Ces deux faits sont l’un et l’autre constitutifs du crime. Si la jonction illicite ou la violence n’est pas constatée, il peut y avoir une tentative de viol, ou un attentat à la pudeur, il n’y a plus de viol. (Helie, 1928: 666, emphasis added)
We will now see how the victims in seven canards were often thrown to the floor and had raised petticoats. The circumstances of the crime are crucial to demonstrate that in addition to murder there was also the possibility of an attentat aux mœurs that was not recognised by the legal and medical establishments.
Table 2 provides excerpts from the seven canards sanglants of interest. We will find the victims in various stages of undress, like Séchepine. After each excerpt, I have indicated whether the canard sanglant related a crime of murder alone or murder and rape. Each female victim’s petticoat is lifted up and each was thrown to the ground; however, no mention of a possible attentat à la pudeur or tentative de viol was discussed except in the case of Catherine Colin (Jugement rendu par la cours d’assises des Vosges, 1852). For all of the canards sanglants’ cases, the crime scene’s depiction of the victim’s body position and/or degree of undress would have allowed for vaginal or anal penetration. As Article 331 articulated, raising a girl’s petticoat becomes material grounds to charge the aggressor with the crime of attentat à la pudeur.
Stages of undress and nudity in the seven analysed canards sanglants.
The canard sanglants’ depictions highlight a sexual tone or context when the victims have raised or pulled down clothing, although the crime is said to be murder as opposed to murder and rape. In the canards sanglants, the women’s petticoats were lifted up to the knees or higher, or their undergarments were removed, as was the case with Jules Séchepine in Assassinat du bois de Vincennes where the male victim’s trousers and possibly other undergarments were taken off. If we read through the feminine – that is to say, look at the Jules Séchepine case through the lens of French jurisprudence concerning females in Article 331 – we can see a corollary between a female’s pulled-up dress or pulled-down petticoats and his pulled-off trousers. This approach allows us to consider what appears to have been ignored in French law. In the examples of Table 2, when only murder was charged, no mention of attentat à la pudeur – with or without violence or attempted rape – was made. Yet when the victims’ clothes were raised, pulled down or taken off entirely, it suggests that both murder and rape occurred at the scene of those other six crimes.
Article 365 of the 1808 Code d’instruction criminelle did allow a criminal to be charged with several crimes; only the most severe sentence, however, would be passed if s/he was accused of more than one crime (Salle, 1835: 218). Moreover, French law in 1830 states that the presiding judge should interrogate the jury about the possibility of dual crimes if murder took place preceding, during or after crimes such as theft or rape (Duvergier, 1830: 219–20). Interestingly, in the cases of my other 109 canards sanglants, the criminal was found guilty of both rape and murder. Yet if the judge or jury were to select the harshest sentence, murder was more severe than rape, as the former called for capital punishment and the latter la reclusion, travaux forcés à temps, or travaux forcés à perpetuité, depending on the nature of the crime and the age of the victim, though it should be noted that both sentences were considered ‘des peines afflictives et infamantes’ (Hélie, 1877: 16). 18
How often were adults seen as victims of rape? Anne-Marie Sohn’s scholarship of nineteenth-century archives judiciares in France demonstrates that judges found adults as well as children to be victims of sexual assault. 19 The medical reports of doctors Tardieu and Pénard also included children and adult men and women as victims of rape or sodomy. 20 Rarely did the canards sanglants report on adult victims of sexual assault. It is possible that presiding judges (or juries) in the canards sanglants’ reports might not have been ready to contemplate that adults were also victims of rape, attempted rape or attentat à la pudeur avec violence. It is also possible that the médecins-légistes exercised excessive caution when presenting their conclusions to the judge. They may have followed the approach articulated later by Dr Brouardel, who advised the medical world that language must be unambiguous when pronouncing that a crime had occurred. If the doctor had any doubt he must conclude and say ‘Il n’est pas démontré, qu’il y ait eu violence, strangulation, viol, etc.’ (Brouardel, 1906: 5). If a doctor was not instructed to conduct a medical report for rape, it is possible that lesser crimes were not considered during the examination and prosecution phases of a trial.
In my seven cases, a pattern emerges: the crime of murder also resembles the crimes of murder rape. Roland Barthes’s categorisations of what constitutes a fait divers structurally resonate when reading these crimes of murder in the canards sanglants where ‘le peu égale le beaucoup’ (1964: 193). Barthes submits that repetition in a fait divers creates a ‘relationship of coincidence’ (1964: 194). Here he was talking about repetition when reporting on the same crime, such as the same jewellery store being robbed three times or someone winning the lottery several times. Yet one can apply Barthes’s theorisation more broadly, when a relationship of coincidence occurs regarding a narrative detail that has been repeated seven times when relaying the crime of murder. For Barthes, meaning is derived by the emergence of a pattern of coincidence: ‘il n’est pas possible que la répétition soit notée sans qu’on ait l’idée qu’elle détient un certain sens, même si ce sens reste suspendu’ (1964: 194). In the canards sanglants, the repetitious coincidence of raised or pulled-down garments may reveal that rape transpired in those cases. Yes, one could argue that those seven crimes illustrate an example of yet another trait of the Barthesian fait divers, ‘le comble’ – a situation of bad luck. The victims’ state of undress would simply add more drama or sensationalism when describing the scene of the crime – when both the crime scene and the clothes of the victim are in a dishevelled, even mutilated state, showing the heightened anger or physical force of the attackers. Yet, Barthes reminds his readers that ‘la chance et la malchance ne sont pas des hasards neutres’, underscoring that:
elles appellent invinciblement une certaine signification [et] toute coïncidence est un signe à la fois indéchiffrable et intelligent … Causalité aléatoire, coïncidence ordonnée, c’est à la jonction de ces deux mouvements que se constitue le fait divers: tous deux finissent en effet par recouvrir une zone ambiguë où l’événement est pleinement vécu comme un signe dont le contenu est cependant incertain. (1964: 196-97, emphasis added)
In these seven cases, a pattern of coincidence and ambiguity reigns. There exists a pattern of misreading clues or potential blind spots when assessing the scene of the crime whose significance and meaning surpass a mere structural characteristic belonging to the genre of the fait divers.
In the medical community, on whom the courts relied for their examinations, there appears to be cultural blindness, based on the age, chastity and whereabouts of the victim. In the first citation Devergie is speaking about female rape; in the second quote, Salle is discussing male rape:
Le viol peut être effectué à tout âge; cependant c’est surtout depuis trois ans jusqu’à dix-huit, que se commet presque toujours. Il s’adresse plus particulièrement aux filles vierges. (Devergie, 1837: 142) Si le crime est commis hors de[s] établissements [comme] à bord des vaisseaux, dans les prisons, dans les pensions des hommes, [ou] dans les séminaires, la victime ne pourra être qu’un enfant, car un adulte et même adolescent sont pourvus d’une force qui rendrait vaines toutes les tentatives.
21
(Salle, 1835: 224)
All the aforementioned victims in the canards sanglants were 18 or older: Aimée Millot was 19, Marie Renault was 40, Catherine Colin 33, Jules Séchepine 21. Those older than 13 could be victims of attentat à la pudeur avec violence, tentative de viol or viol. Except for la femme Donzeau, the victims’ married status was not mentioned and we know that an ascendant did not attack them. Although not all canards sanglants were published by 1881, the time when the 5 November 1881 case was admitted, 22 three crimes were, and the victims endured greater violence than the acts that were denounced by the Cour de Cassation.
Article 332 stated that one characteristic of attentat à la pudeur avec violence is that violence had to be used. Unfortunately, what constituted violence remained legally fuzzy because Hélie states ‘la violence n’a jamais été définie par la loi’ (1928: 665). Three examples in 1883, 1884 and 1885 provided some parameters to explain aggravated circumstances. For most of the century, judges had no guidance in ascertaining what constituted violence in attentat à la pudeur avec violence. Yet Tardieu highlights that bruises on a victim’s hands, arms, neck or groin area represented possible traces of violence just like fissures or tears on men’s or women’s genitals or anus. Lastly, Article 332 stated a third stipulation to differentiate the two kinds of attentat à la pudeur. rape or attentat à la pudeur avec violence were committed ‘pour satisfaire une passion’. L’attentat à la pudeur sans violence ‘diffère du viol en ce que le viol a pour objet de procurer à son auteur les jouissances (Hélie, 1928: 664). Only two crimes, as we saw early, those of la femme Donzeau and Marie Renault, suggest passion-like language. 23
There is a considerable gap between representing rape as a forceful (but pleasurable) sexual experience for the ‘author of the crime’ and the euphemisms used to describe rape in the canards sanglants. Yet, this crime of violent rape was acknowledged and examined when the victim was penetrated vaginally (Salle, 1835: 225; Tardieu 1859a) or anally (Tardieu, 1859b). In thinking back to the Assassinat du bois de Vincennes (1843), it is possible that some crimes were too heinous to write about or imagine. In my larger corpus of 115 canards, only four victims of rape were male (0.04 per cent). 24 Already in 1835 (Salle), male rape and sodomy were discussed in forensic science, but Tardieu was the first doctor to devote an extended study to it (1859b). His repugnance is emphasised three-fold when beginning his essay by drawing on Fodéré’s view: ‘“Que ne puis-je, s’écriait Fodéré, éviter de salir ma plume de l’infâme turpitude des pédérastes!” Comme lui, j’ai longtemps hésité à faire entrer dans cette étude le tableau repoussant de la pédérastie’ (Tardieu, 1859b: 119).
Fear of contamination becomes a leitmotiv in the writing of those doctors who studied homosexuality and sodomy. In the medical world of nineteenth-century France, Salle (1835), Tardieu (1859b), Pénard (1860) and Fabre (n.d.) wrote on homosexuality, paedophilia and sodomy. It was a crime ‘contre nature’ (Tardieu, 1859b: 123; Salle, 1835: 225), ‘repoussant’ (Tardieu, 1859b: 119), ‘un vice honteux’ (Tardieu, 1859b: 119, 123; Fabre, n.d.: 346) involving a ‘une funeste passion’ (Pénard, 1860: 100). Practitioners of ‘ces abominables turpitudes’ (Pénard, 1860: 99) had ‘goûts dépravés’ (Tardieu, 1859b: 123) and ‘une imagination déréglée et de la plus scandaleuse débauche’ (Fabre, n.d.: 346). Yet Tardieu’s reasons for writing the most complete study at that time were as illuminating as they were admirable: a new forensic category need to be added to la médecine-légale, as there was a growing number of homicide/sodomy cases that were alarming the nation. Nonetheless, Tardieu writes the following on this new topic of pédérastie, which in nineteenth-century France connoted homosexuality, male prostitution and paedophilia:
L’ombre qui enveloppe [la pédérastie et la sodomie, et] la honte et le dégoût qu’ils inspirent, en ont, de tout temps éloigné les regards des observateurs: et l’on ne doit pas s’attendre à trouver dans les auteurs les données nécessaires à la solution des problèmes de médecine-légale que soulève la pédérastie. (1859b: 120)
There are silences and shadows that surround these behaviours, an image that recalls the Greek etymology of scotoma, meaning darkness. Already in 1837, Devergie noted that many médecins-légistes did not systematically examine the anus of the plaintiff and accused when it came to cases of rape or attentat à la pudeur (1837: 144). It becomes clear that many experts were improperly trained or chose to look the other way.
Concluding remarks
Bensmaïa’s figurative use of scotoma, as well as the term’s etymology, paradoxically highlight the gaps, shadows or blind spots when legislating, examining or reporting cases of rape. As we have seen, it is possible that reporting on cases of murder that appear also to be crimes of rape demonstrate the legal and medical institutions’ inability to recognise in writing that certain brutal acts of sexual violence may have occurred to victims other than children under 13 years of age. Discourses in the popular canards sanglants and in medicine and law contained significant omissions and blind spots regarding rape, sodomy, paedophilia and homosexuality. Certainly, an adult victim of rape and murder would not provide such sensationalistic copy to sell in the canards sanglants. ‘The literary story rarely etches itself into material reality, whereas the legal story potentially always does’ (Scarry, 1996: 167).
The narratives and stories reported in canards sanglants provide us with rare historical insight into the codes and prejudices regarding crimes of murder that also suggest rape. Their sensationalised stories reached a different public from the readership of the medical reports. More than literary embellishments, their narratives reproduced judicial settings, crime scenes and the court rulings to an avid cross-section of people. Yet, as cultural documents of the nineteenth century, it is not surprising that the canards sanglants, like the courts’ and doctors’ findings, showed possible cultural blind spots, when murders may also have been accompanied by crimes of rape. The clarity of these seven cases remains murky and troublingly ambiguous, while the protocols for assessing rape and especially sodomy were clearly articulated and quite straightforward.
Because stories were proclaimed through the streets of France, the canards sanglants made money from criminal behaviour and a victim’s demise. As Scarry suggests, the legal story can etch itself into material reality, into the consciousness of a time and place. While in some instances the canards sanglants filled an important gap by reporting rape when other journalistic sources did not, they nevertheless participated in the same blindness, or erasure, found in medical and legal discourses. The stories told in the canards sanglants fascinated audiences in the past and can still engage current readers. For contemporary audiences, they produce unanswered questions regarding a previous century’s criminal code and punishments, allowing twenty-first-century scholars to re-examine nineteenth-century criminality without the same cultural prejudices. In so doing, new narratives of possible rape crimes come more sharply into focus because the mechanisms of cultural blindness have been exposed and critiqued. Although rape gained greater visibility in the nineteenth century, seven verdicts provide examples of how signs of sexual violence occasionally remained invisible to journalists, judges and forensic doctors.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the anonymous readers of both Nineteenth-Century French Studies and French Cultural Studies for their excellent comments and suggestions which strengthened and refined my study’s arguments. This work was supported by a Jeremy Niles Research Grant and a Humanities Summer Stipend, grants offered by the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech). The research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.