On 17 March 1887, the bodies of Marie Regnault, her servant, Annette Gremeret and Gremeret's young daughter were found dead in number 17 of the rue Montaigne, Paris. Alias Régine de Montille, Regnault was a courtesan who had moved to the coveted, post-Haussman area of the lower Champs-Elysées. The triple homicide occurred at the cusp of a bourgeoning culture of international news reporting, and at a time when mass migration and the violence of colonial wars were quickly becoming part of the cultural consciousness of the metropole. At the scandal's storm centre was the prime suspect, Enrico Pranzini, an Egyptian-Italian migrant who was deemed a duplicitous gigolo by reporters and high-ranking officials alike. What did investigators, doctors, journalists and magistrates have to gain personally from Pranzini's alleged guilt, and how did this relate to France's recent colonial and military failures?
Aaron Freundschuh's The Courtesan and the Gigolo is a sweeping, multidisciplinary study that brings together the political, geographic and cultural turmoil that existed within Paris, and French colonies more broadly, near the end of the nineteenth century. The rue Montaigne murders provide a centre of gravity around which Freundschuh paints an expansive picture of ‘imperial insecurity’ (p. 199), a conceptual framework that he argues has been missing from Parisian historiography to date. Freundschuh codifies the disproportionate level of public and media interest in Pranzini as part of European anxieties about migration, reverse colonization and racial mixing. He contends that these anxieties run parallel to more local concerns about social borders and Parisian crime.
The author opens with an account of the gentrification of the lower Champs-Elysées since the latter half of the eighteenth century, as well as its place in the history of Parisian prostitution since the 1840s. He traces the cultural and political evolution of the area to the reign of Napoleon III and the Second Empire, which brought with it the era of Haussmanization, the expansion of the city's 20 arrondissements and the dramatic rise in real estate prices around the Grands Boulevards. The first chapter is necessarily condensed, as the author attempts to account for a long history. However, Freundschuh's precise geographic focus means readers will not be overwhelmed with copious amounts of information.
The author provides close examinations of Regnault, her private boudoir and the life of a courtesan. Of particular interest here is Freundschuh's juxtaposition of respectable society women and the demimondaines, who provided an ‘alternative domesticity’ (p. 92). The two worlds not only existed side by side, but overlapped. Distinctions between the two collapsed somewhat at popular art auction houses such as the Hôtel Drouot and, more importantly, because of the notorious vice squad of the Third Republic, which kept files on women of both the monde and the demimonde.
Chapter 3 provides a compelling analysis of Parisian reportage, as well as the often-terse relationship between investigative reporters and police. Baron Haussman's remodelling of the city promised a new, safer Paris. Yet, crime reporting and the sensational fait-divers columns were in their formative years during this period. In particular, Freundschuh sketches a portrait of reporter Georges Grison, whose coverage of the rue Montaigne murders was exhaustive. Grison acts as something of a microcosm for the study's focus on the evolution of news reporting; for Freundschuh, Grison is the perfect distillation of the cultivated xenophobia and conservatism that followed colonial failure. This section of the study showcases some of the author's best writing and ideas. He steps outside the limits of discipline, into literature and art, depicting Grison's investigative style as a non-fictional extension of crime novels and sensation fiction, while comparing Grison's attention-to-detail to pointillist painters, who ‘aestheticized the microdot’ (p. 68).
Mid-way through the study, Regnault disappears somewhat, as the focus switches in the fourth and fifth chapters to the arrest and interrogation of Pranzini, issues of cultural hybridity and the racial stereotyping of the colonial Levantine and rastaquouère. The success of these chapters is that they demonstrate with clarity how the imperial mindset of the colonial frontier infected the policing of urban crime; from Napoleon I's creation of the gendarmerie, to the appointment of François Goron as deputy chief of Security, a war-hungry veteran who saw little difference between a soldier and a police officer. However, while the study does indeed come full-circle in the end, this turn of course from Reganult to Pranzini is somewhat jarring. Except for the introduction, Pranzini is barely mentioned up to this point and his sudden placement at centre stage disrupts the novelistic quality of the reading, as if one were beginning a new book entirely.
The author concludes by merging 1880s French politics with Pranzini's trial and its aftermath. Of importance throughout this section is the rising threat of Boulangism, and the pressure this placed on the decisions of legal magistrates such as presiding Judge Onfroy de Bréville during trial, as well as President Jules Grévy following Pranzini's verdict. Freundschuh gives special attention to what became known as the Skin Affair, and insightfully questions how meaning, specifically criminality, is inscribed onto the colonial body within the imperialist legal system. An ambitious and original text that bases its theories on national boundaries and crises in relation to migration, The Courtesan and the Gigolo is not only comprehensive, but timely.
