Sexual Crime, Religion and Masculinity in Fin-de-siècle France: The Flamidien Affair by Timothy Verhoeven

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sexual Crime, Religion and Masculinity in Fin-de-siècle France: The Flamidien Affair by Timothy Verhoeven Aaron Freundschuh Timothy Verhoeven, Sexual Crime, Religion and Masculinity in Fin-de-siècle France: The Flamidien Affair. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. In February 1899, Gaston Foveaux, age 12, was abducted, sexually assaulted, and murdered at Lille’s Notre Dame de Treille school, where he regularly participated in a youth club. After more than two days, his body was found on the school grounds, a space supervised by the Lasallian Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes. Gaston’s belongings, including a coat and cap, turned up elsewhere in the school. When questioned by investigators, the concierge (who had been situated near the walled entrance) said that he had been been paying especially close attention to all comings and goings during the likely timeframe of Gaston’s disappearance, and that the boy had not left the school. The culprit, in a ploy to throw investigators off the scent, left a faux apology next to Gaston Foveaux’s body, signed “an ardent socialist” (2). Soon enough, one of the members of the teaching congregation of Christian brothers at the school, Frère Flamidien, age 35, was named the prime suspect. Placed under arrest, Flamidien was questioned for several weeks. Swift and awful was his public humiliation, yet he stood his ground. The so-called Flamidien affair ended abruptly when the case against him was thrown out on procedural grounds. Frère Flamidien was released, and the Foveaux case went cold. In this slim volume, Timothy Verhoeven, Senior Lecturer at Monash University, takes the view that the Flamidien affair was a “key moment in driving even deeper the wedge between republicans and Catholics” in finde-siècle France (6). Over the course of seven brisk chapters, Verhoeven sustains a discussion of the major contextual elements of the scandal. These include the ideological battle over public education, and the competing norms of masculinity that set the celibacy of the Christian brothers against the republican ideal based on marriage and procreation. When he was forced to stand before the corpse of Gaston Foveaux in a common mise-en-scène known as la confrontation, Flamidien was overcome with tearful emotion, a reaction that set him apart from his brethren within the school’s teaching congregation. To investigators, who typically relied on [End Page 201] pseudo-scientific techniques to decipher guilt on the faces of the accused, Flamidien had given himself away. Another flimsy investigative method, graphology, was used to pressure Flamidien into confessing. According to Verhoeven, Flamidien’s steadfastness inspired his defenders to refashion the retiring brother as the “Catholic vision of masculinity” and a “Christian model of heroism” (69). It is on these themes, especially as they are explored in connection with the disputed practice of celibacy, that this microhistory stakes its strongest claim for the historical relevance of the Flamidien affair. The local Catholic press organ, La Croix du Nord, rejected republicanism’s insistence on narrowly prescribed norms of gender, and since the teaching congregants took vows of celibacy, this point of contention could not be kept separate from the “school wars” that divided republicans and Catholics in the early decades of the Third Republic. Having watched the Church stand in reactionary opposition to the very idea of democracy in the century after the Great Revolution, republicans in Lille were irate to find the city’s Catholics uncooperative in this murder investigation. Crowds assembled in the public square after Flamidien was apprehended. A Lille street poster denounced Flamidien as a “product of his milieu” and cautioned those who mistook clerics for the moral guides they pretended to be (81). At certain points in this study, the long-simmering inter-generational conflicts between Catholics and republicans completely eclipse the specific evidence presented by the Foveaux crime scene, and along with it the individuals who participated in the investigation. The result is an uncritical emphasis on the themes of anticlericalism and Catholic victimhood. The author supposes, for example, that the “anticlerical mind” (35), haunted by visions of clerical pedophilia, drove investigators to suspect the Christian brothers at Foveaux’s school. But the material clues detected at...