The Courtesan and the Gigolo: The Murders in the Rue Montaigne and the Dark Side of Empire in Nineteenth-Century Paris by Aaron Freundschuh

Abstract

Freundschuh, Aaron. The Courtesan and the Gigolo: The Murders in the Rue Montaigne and the Dark Side of Empire in Nineteenth-Century Paris. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2017. ISBN 978-1-50360-082-9. Pp. 272. The “Pranzini affair” is one of the most remarkable crime stories of nineteenthcentury France. The triple murder could well have been an international myth as salacious and enduring as Jack the Ripper’s string of murders in fin-de-siècle London. Indeed, “the murders of London and Paris bear notable points of convergence, beginning with the outsize role of the mass press, which by the late 1880s had become a blinding industrial ream, saturating the streets and boulevards with paper, much of it printed with tales of hideous criminality”(3). The defendant Enrico Pranzini was a handsome migrant of Egyptian origin who fascinated the Parisian public with his good looks and ambiguous sexuality. The story was sensationalized in the press and the victims (an elegant woman,a child,and a domestic) were put under a microscope— particularly the victim who, at around forty years old, was said to be a high-class prostitute,known by the“faux-aristocratic pseudonym”of“Mme Montille”(2).Despite bearing all the elements of a tabloid news scandal and notwithstanding extensive coverage in the Parisian press,the Pranzini affair was soon forgotten.Aaron Freundschuh masterfully reconstructs the crime scene, investigation, trial, and press coverage of this remarkable scandal. Freundschuh transforms a historical true-crime story into a meditation on class, colonialism, and Third-Republic politics. Pranzini “became a metonym of the dark side of European empire and, as such, a repository for national anxieties and indigested animus”(9). Freundschuh locates the Pranzini affair as a key moment for the development of“the cultural imagination of the cosmopolitan colonial as criminal, like similar myths about Jews, freemasons, and socialists”; this cultural imagination “took hold in a political environment that colonial expansionism itself had, in some measure, destabilized”(197). One possible enduring effect of the Pranzini trial was the unification of the“forces of the New Right”through the conversion of the anti-Semite Édouard Drumont into an “ardent Boulangist” (148). After attempting a coup, General Boulanger, a minister and a darling of the far right, was reassigned to Clermont-Ferrand, enraging the Boulangists. This political scandal“shared newspaper column space for months” with the Pranzini affair, and the trial “became a platform for the public ridicule of deviant sexual identities” (148). Although the Boulangists were not universally anti-Semitic, the Pranzini affair was one of a series of polarizing events that consolidated anti-Semites, Boulangists, conservative Catholics, and monarchists into a coherent ideological block. The arguably seminal role of the Panzini affair in the consolidation of the fin-de-siècle New Right is only one example of Freundschuh’s deft contextualization of a minor incident in French history. This book is the rare contribution to French history that is gripping and readable enough for the 222 FRENCH REVIEW 91.3 Reviews 223 general reader, or for an undergraduate course, but which is detailed and nuanced enough for research or use in a graduate course. University of Memphis Melanie Conroy Ginio, Ruth. The French Army and its African Soldiers: The Years of Decolonization. Lincoln: UP of Nebraska, 2017. ISBN 978-0-8032-5339-1. Pp. 250. Ginio surveys France’s most desperate act to hold on to French West Africa, its former territories, via its army even after independence. Through a thorough examination of the protracted role played by the French Army, Ginio convincingly demonstrates how France had heavily invested in preventing the decolonization from being fulfilled in West Africa. The French army and its African soldiers will be the key component in a series of strategies and policies used by France to maintain its relations with that region. Beside the French army’s involvement in the usual warfare to consolidate its empire, it assumed most of the civilian responsibilities, such as education, social assistance, health, and participated feverishly, as Ginio puts it, in colonial decision making and in shaping the colonial agenda (xviii). Ginio is definitely the authoritative voice for conducting a work in this caliber given her constant...