City Crime Flashcards
Arrested by Vidocq’s team 1815
Self-styled marquis de Chambreuil, Director General of the Royal Stud
Comédie Humaine
Balzac, 1829-47
Paris must change. Its constitution is diseased
Doin and Charton, Lettres sur Paris, 1830
arrested age 16 for the crime of sleeping under a tree
Hippolyte Raynal
Crime stats = crucial measure for the condition of urban life.
Quetelet, Recherches sur le penchant au crime aux différents âges, 1830
Phrase ‘dangerous classes’ into popular use
1840s, for gypsies, vagrants, mems of inferior class, mould or stock
Vidocq’s memoirs
Early October 1828
V on Criminal argot
Vidocq, Les Voleurs, 1836
50 pages on criminal argot for Lacassagne
Nougier, end of 19th C
Poetry, including to Louis-Philippe - ‘men of property give me the horrors/ I have a hard heart and an evil mind’
Lacenaire
Malheur et poésie
Raynal, 1834
Sous les Verroux
Raynal, 1836
Père Goriot
Balzac, 1834-5 ft Vautrin
‘All you have done is to unearth the Gazette des Tribunaux - which had 12 000 subscribers these 20 years past’
Feb 1843 review of Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris
1st Issue of Gazette des Tribunaux
1 Nov 1825
‘the book must have already moved… from the reading rooms to every shop counter in town’
Viennet, Nouveau journal de Paris, Oct 28 1828
Pathological change, society as a whole not just individual. Heredity. Physical degeneration to intellectual and moral collapse
Morel, Traité des dégénerescences, 1857
Valjean = rural. Unemployed. Desperate to feed his 7 children. Robbed baker’s shop.
Despite acknowledging English stats showed 4/5 crimes in London from hunger, distinguishes redeemable Valjean from urban criminal
Hugo, Les Misérables, 1862
‘The towns make men ferocious because they make men corrupt. The mountain, the sea, the forest make men savage, but often w/o destroying their humanity’
Hugo Les Misérables, Book II Ch6, 1862
‘there is another society… made up of shadowy individuals… bandits who are hated without exception and who constituted the principle social peril.’
Rabasse, Parisian Police officer, 1872
Ruined Hulot fam with malice
Balzac’s Cousine Bette
Maillot, accused of murdering an elderly widow, ‘At the age of seven I found myself alone on the streets of Paris… A child, I was abandoned to every danger, I was lost… My life’s been passed in prisons… That’s it. It’s fate… I’ve never known anything but theft. I stole. I ended by killing’
Vicomte d’Haussonville, Revue des Deux Mondes. D’Haussonville insists this story not exceptional
Sympathetic view of prostitutes. Places them within the poorer working-class. Desperate, helpless economic situation
Parent-Duchâtelet, De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris, 1836
Nana = epitome of prostitute as moral threat to society. End of novel, French army marches to destruction at Sedan as suppurating corpse decays in hotel bed
Zola, Nana, 1880
France needs not harsh punitive institutions but unemployment insurance and poor relief
Raynal, Sous les Verroux, 1836
1829 - the murder of the Barrière de Fontainbleau
‘a few more steps and you reach the abominable pollard elms of the barrière Saint-Jacques…. concealing the scaffold… Saint-Jacques… has always been horrible’
Hugo, Les Misérables, 1862
Dodgy barrières
Montfaucon, Faubourg, Saint-Marcel
Reconstruction of Paris. 117 000 buildings destroyed, pushing working-classes to outskirts of the city, recreating Paris as emphatically bourgeois.
At centre of Paris, narrow streets and crowded, popular lodgings of the Ile de la Cité were cleared out and replaced by new police HQ and the Palais de Justice
Baron Haussman, 1853-70
Le Petit Journal est
- Circulation of 600 000 by time of Troppmann’s execution, January 1870
Combined circulation of entire French press 1860
150 000 (Kurian)
French press circulation 1870
1 million (Kurian)
French press circulation 1910
5 million (Kurian)
Photography popularised in France
1850s
