Victorian Murderesses: The True History of Thirteen Respectable French and English Women Accused of Unspeakable Crimes by Mary S. Hartman part II

Continuing from Part 1:

The chapter concerning Madeleine Smith and Angélina Lemoine involves murders that occurred as the result of sexual relations outside of marriage. The common thread here is that both women, fed a steady diet of romantic literature, initiated sexual relationships laced with faux romantic ideals, which compromised their social standing, and that they then took actions to remedy their errors.  The Lemoine case is interesting for the argument that Victoire Lemoine (Angélina’s mother), who was obviously the main instigator in the murder, was judged not as much as for the crime but for her “Voltairean beliefs, her separation from her husband, and most importantly, her ‘failure’ as a mother,” and the judge zeroed in on the “pernicious literature” Angélina was allowed to read.  While it’s impossible to argue that Angélina’s reading did not play a role in her relationship with the family’s coachman, rather than blame the literature itself, these days we should rather blame the isolated, sterile life Angélina led in which reading added the only available avenue for romance and escape.

With the reconstruction of the Constance Kent case, the author built an alternative scenario which seemed somewhat questionable, but in the case of Célestine Doudet, a solid case is argued for the homeopathic doctor father’s complicity in deaths of his daughters at the hands of their French governess. The widowed Dr Marsden placed the care of his 5 daughters under the care of Célestine Doudet with explicit directions regarding the manner in which one of the girls was to be ‘cured’ of masturbation. The case against Doudet is clouded by the father’s negligence, instructions, and sexual paranoia. It’s incredible that so many people ‘investigated’ allegations brought by a concerned neighbor, and yet the abuse continued until it could no longer be concealed. The appalling mistreatment of the children, although ostensibly to ‘cure’ sexual behaviour, includes an element of sexual masochism and sexual frustration, and the subsequent case against the governess opened the door onto Victorian sexual repression & corporal punishment (this chapter includes the mention of clitoridectomy–the Victorian cure for masturbation and the development of a locked ‘panty-girdle’ device in use at many boarding schools) ; those Victorians found more ways to not talk about sex than anyone else and that indeed seems to be the case here. Murder and its justification boiled down to the question of masturbation, and just how far one should go to stop it.

The pathetic result of the case was its reduction to the question of whether or not the Marsden girls were or were not masturbators. In the process the children were forced to be as much defendants in the proceedings as Célestine Doudet. Both sides, after all, accepted masturbation as a morally culpable act which produced recognizable physical consequences. The children, then were literally on trial.

I’m not going to delve into the whole book, but chapter 4, for this reader, was the most fascinating in the book. Titled The New Woman, this chapter examines the cases of Florence Bravo and Henriette Francey, both examples of the ‘new woman’ whose increased visibility in society “expanded her theoretical opportunities to raise the moral tone of society [but] it had also, according to observers, made her recognizably more open to dangerous and corrupting influences.”  Sexual improprieties lay at the heart of the cases of Florence Bravo and Henriette Francey. Newspapers of the day went wild with the Florence Bravo case–not only had she separated from her first husband, she had a married lover in her past and had the audacity to dye her hair red! Florence Bravo was a wealthy, independent woman who’d escaped the noose of a miserable marriage only to find that she was in the same state shortly after marrying for the second time. Henriette Francey, also a married woman, shot her victim, hunting him down when he fled her home and finished him off in front of witnesses while stating that she hoped he was dead. Her defense was that the man she shot had tried to rape her–although that version of events becomes somewhat suspect as the chapter continues.  This story’s notoriety was magnified by the dead man’s reputation; he was called  “Don Juan of the subprefecture” by the newspapers.

The author states that the Francey case was just one of many of a “growing number of cases since the 1870s in which women were committing acts of criminal violence and successfully defending themselves by pleading honour or revenge.” Chivalry played no small role in both cases, and when questioned, both of the accused women fell back to, or relied on traditional views of Victorian women, and in these cases, those traditional views of women saved both of the accused. Henriette’s version of events–that she allowed a man who’d try to rape her once–back into the house and was alone with him a second time, while she armed herself a revolver ‘just in case,’ makes little sense, but there was a great deal of intelligent strategic planning; she clearly modeled her case on that of a similar crime involving a certain Mme. Hugues. Witnesses testified that the victim was a relentless Lothario, and thanks to the appeal of her argument, Henriette Francey was acquitted to the sound of cheers. ” She emerged, for the jury  at least, as another of the favorite female creature is Victorian imagination, the wronged woman.”  The author builds a plausible version of the true events of this case, and if she’s correct, then Henriette Francey committed the perfect murder.

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