Trials of Passion (32 page)

All this bears an uncanny resemblance to those other ‘imaginative' women letter and journal writers – Mrs Robinson, Christiana Edmunds – faced by the rigours of legal testimony. It also brings to mind the procedures of the infamous memory trials in the US in the 1990s, in which women claimed to have been abused as children by their fathers. In some of these cases, false memories, experienced as real by the subjects, seem to have been implanted via the therapeutic process – though in this slippery area of suggestion and sex in the family, definitive determinations of the ‘truth' of memory and imagination are ever difficult to unravel.

Bernheim repeats the question put to him. ‘You ask me if a hypnotized subject can be led to crime under hypnotic influence, without his own sense of responsibility coming into play?' But this question, he counters, ‘can't really be put about Gabrielle Bompard ... In her the absence or the perversion of any moral sense leaves the terrain open to receive criminal suggestion.' Bernheim draws a contrast between a person who has a developed moral sense and therefore cannot have it annihilated and be led by suggestion to commit a crime, and those other subjects who are gifted with a nervous impressionability which makes them susceptible. He makes an analogy with ordinary dream states. Some dreamers are not completely identified with the dream;
they know they're dreaming and playing a part, and their habitual consciousness subsists next to the dreamt one. But with other dreamers, they're incarnated heart and soul in their new role, and their former consciousness is annihilated. These latter would move into crime like ‘impulsive epileptics'.

Bernheim was ill during the Eyraud–Bompard trial and couldn't attend to give his expert witness himself. Jules Liégeois, the member of the Nancy school mentioned earlier, though not a doctor, came in his place. He was not permitted access to Gabrielle, but he nonetheless took up his right to speak without interruption. He did so for four hours, describing the doctrine and history of the Nancy school at great length. According to Bataille, his address was so soporific that no enactment of hypnotism was needed to put Gabrielle, as well as much of the audience, to sleep. He was refused permission to hypnotize her in court, so that he could re-enact the murder scene with her.

Liégeois described experiments showing how he had completely annihilated his subjects' individual will and liberty and had them commit terrible if unreal crimes. For example, he had a nephew poison his uncle – though the substance used was sugar not arsenic. He showed photographs of women who – through suggestion – had made flaming red words or marks appear on their backs, like stigmata. As for rape under hypnosis, even the Paris school allowed that this took place. Liégeois argued that Bompard had been hypnotized into an
état second
of long duration – an altered, or second, state of consciousness of which she could have no recollection and during which she participated in the murder without the knowledge of her ‘first', or ordinary, conscious self. Her lying was in fact an inability to remember events clearly. Throughout, she had acted unconsciously under Eyraud's command.

Brouardel's response to this was to mock and to state emphatically that what Liégeois called ‘suggestibility' was simply doing something that you were inclined to do in any case under the influence of someone who had a certain sway over you. Lovers and adolescents were contantly acting under the influence of others. This did not mean
their acts were involuntary or unwilled. They were not in a sleep state: Bompard was a willing accomplice, and though she might be something of a moral imbecile and depraved, she was not mentally disordered.

The president of the court was dismissive of Liégeois's expert opinion: The one outstanding fact that has been true for six thousand years is that the stronger will can possess the weaker: that is no peculiar part of the history of hypnotism; it belongs to the history of the world.' This was tantamount to saying that one didn't need newfangled ‘medical' notions to confirm that women were vulnerable to predatory men. That fact, however, could not absolve them of all responsibility for crime.

Wild, amoral, Gabrielle was not to win over the compassion of judge and jury: she was simply not a woman in the virtuous image that the times wanted.

Then, too, Liégeois's assertion that any nervous woman could simply be hypnotized into succumbing to seduction and rape by the steady gaze of a man overreached and elicited a negative reaction from both judge and jury. Too much was at stake. Not only the freedom of the individual mind, but the stability of the bourgeois family and the virtue of wives and daughters. Hypnotism by gaze alone made women susceptible to any stranger on a train. The court negated such an inflated assumption.

Yet the dread of hypnotism's power continued: the huge success of George du Maurier's bestselling novel about the powers of the hypnotist Svengali to induce a sleepwalking and singing trance in his subject, Trilby, is only one example of the idea's spread. Society's underlying fears about women's vulnerability to predators and mental fragility, a worry too about their unconscious or unspoken sexual desire, together with a concern about an insufficiently educated and ‘degenerate' underclass – all coalesced in the idea of hypnosis. And all this brought in train an anxiety about the stability of the bourgeois family, which was premised on women's virtue.

This fear of hypnosis and the power of the gaze is not so remote as
it may seem: in the 1980 and 1990s – another moment of change and anxiety about women's place, when questions of fundamental weakness or strength went hand in hand with demands for equal rights – American campuses were subject to a wave of accusations of ‘ocular harassment', in which women students and staff accused more ‘powerful' male professors of attacking their integrity by staring at them.

After Liégeois's sorry performance, Gabrielle's lawyer put aside the hypnotism defence in his final appeal to the jury: instead he focused on Bompard's weakness and youthful moral irresponsibility. The president of the court declared that though it was his duty to call for the ultimate sentence, he would be happy if the jury did not take him up on it: his feelings as a compassionate man were not in synchrony with his stern duty as a judge. The jury took up his lead and brought in a ‘guilty with extenuating circumstances' verdict for Gabrielle Bompard. She was sentenced to twenty years' penal servitude. Eyraud, whose lawyer had tried to prove that far from being Gabrielle's master, he had been her slave, completely in thrall to her seductive charms, was given the ultimate sentence. Though he appealed and gained a little time, he faced execution – apparently with great dignity – on 3 February 1891.

The Paris jury had refused to buy into a psychology which emphatically stated that all humans were suggestible to forces outside their control. But the fear persisted beyond the courtroom. It even reached Parliament, where one deputy demanded that Liégeois and the Nancy school be banned from teaching their doctrine, since it had a destabilizing effect on the nation. In November 1892, France outlawed theatrical performances of mesmerism and hypnotism, in a bid to keep the practice under medical control. The move was echoed throughout Europe.

Liégeois's performance in the courtroom showered mockery on the Nancy school. The papers had a field day over the learned professor, and for a while he disappeared from the public eye. But he returned. In 1892, he called for a public programme of ‘moral vaccination' to protect every nervous woman in the country from the gaze
of dangerous magnetizers who might proceed to rape them. The process of inoculation would mean that a nervous woman would first be hypnotized by a reliable practitioner, who would insert a suggestion that immunized her against any later hypnotic influence. His project, of course, was never taken up: underlying it, however, we see the social imperative of the French medico-legal profession: it was their duty on behalf of the state to be responsible for whole populations, not only disturbed individuals.

In 1903, when Gabrielle was released from prison on parole, Liégeois at last had his opportunity to hypnotize her. She apparently relived the scene in which the murder of Bailiff Gouffé was suggested to her by Eyraud. Dr Albert Moll, in his updated 1909 history,
Hypnotism
, considers this re-enactment doubtful, particularly with a woman as mischievous and untruthful as Gabrielle; but he states that the possibility of a crime carried out under hypnosis cannot be ruled out.

Less than three years after the Bompard trial, the moral panic around hypnotism in France occasioned a near-tragedy, this time enmeshing a patient and targeting one of the very medics who had investigated its use.

At about 6.45 on the evening of 6 December 1893, a young woman walked into the consulting room of Gilles de la Tourette, Charcot's colleague at the Salpêtrière, and asked if he was the author of works on hypnotism. When the doctor said yes, the woman told him she had been hypnotized by various practitioners, that she was now in a parlous state and needed a loan of fifty francs. He asked her to leave her name and address and he would see that she got the money. As he stepped towards the door, the woman pulled out a revolver and shot at him three times. He managed to get into the hall before he collapsed.

Apprehended, it turned out that the woman had been a patient both at Sainte-Anne and at the Salpêtrière, where she had suffered from, amongst other symptoms, delusions of persecution. When released she had decided to avenge herself on her persecutors, whom she imagined had practised hypnotism! on her. She was once again
confined, and Gilles de la Tourette, the bullet lodged in his neck removed, healed and returned to his psychiatric practice. Distancing himself in his writing from any belief in criminal suggestion had not saved him from the slippery side-effects of hypnotism. The press furore around the subject had not only stirred debate but heated unstable minds.

IV

Naturalizing the Impulsive Feminine

In the ultimate pre-First World War trial of passion, it was the press itself that took on the aura of a betraying, abusive and hypnotically suggestive power to become the object of a passionate crime. Restoring female honour here was not a question of avenging seduction and abandonment, or an unrecognized child. By the turn of the century, the passionate female criminal had a sense of ‘reputation' as finely honed as any male engaging in a duel. For Madame Caillaux, wife of a cabinet minister, this entailed targeting the newspaper editor who, she felt, had slandered her and her husband. The democracy of free expression, and a press that had fewer worries about privacy than has ever since been the case in France, were suddenly under direct attack. It is as if one of the victims of British hacking in 2012 had stormed into Rebekah Brooks's or Rupert Murdoch's office, taken aim, murdered and been acquitted – on the grounds that this is how nervous women behave under pressure.

As the
belle époque
drew to its end, the alienists' understanding of women who committed passionate or impulsive crimes had infected what had been the norm. A ‘real woman' had now become simply that nervy, emotional, suggestible, virtuous, domestic creature, hysterical by turn and weak of intellect, and ever subject to impulses beyond her control that made her either succumb to tears or explode
in murderous rage. Examination by psychiatric experts was scarcely necessary to mitigate a crime that just couldn't be helped, especially if the woman was honourable and married to a leading politician.

But this somewhat nostalgic vision of the feminine, as it played itself out in violence and in courtroom drama, was far more public wish than private reality. With feminism on the rise and war on the horizon, gender anxiety was electric. Had French Republican masculinity grown even more effete and decadent since the Franco-Prussian War of 1870? Had France become feminized in comparison to its enemy other, the bullishly masculine Germany? For a moment, it even seemed as if, while fearing the denaturing of male and female, at the same time the country secretly wanted its women to be pistol-wielding viragos adamant about honour – their own and their husbands'.

During the week of the Henriette Caillaux trial, 20–28 July 1914, no paper headlined the massing of troops more prominently than the murder case. France's attention was on a courtroom where even the President of the Republic testified on behalf of the accused. Listening to the ricochet of Madame Caillaux's bullets, the country seemed to want to blot out that other shot aimed at Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which rang out from Sarajevo and around the world. On the day of Henriette's acquittal, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. One kind of passionate madness would soon be displaced by a more tragic one.

25.
Henriette Caillaux Meets the Press

On the afternoon of 16 March 1914, a wealthy, well dressed blonde nearing her fortieth birthday walked into Gastinne-Renette, the small-arms shop in central Paris, and bought a Browning automatic pistol. She tried it out in the shop's basement shooting range and managed to get three out of six bullets into the target figure. Then she went home to the Rue Alphonse-de-Neuville in the leafy 17th arrondissement, donned a formal tea gown, and wrote her husband a note: ‘If this letter is put into your hands, it's because I will have done or at least attempted to do justice.' Her chauffeur then drove her to the Rue Drouot, site of the offices of
Le Figaro
, no scandal sheet but a centre-right newspaper of record. Here she asked to see the editor, Gaston Calmette, gave her card to a receptionist and waited patiently, her gun invisible behind her capacious furs and muff.