Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection by Dorothy Hoobler, Thomas Hoobler
Authors: Dorothy Hoobler, Thomas Hoobler
Tags: History
Ads: Link
humankind’s deepest fears
and emotions. The size of the theater broke down the separation between the performers and the audience. All the tricks of
the trade were used to heighten the horror for its own sake and induce a reaction from the audience — to shock people out
of their conventional thinking. Success was measured by the number of audience members who fainted or threw up. The advertising
for the show noted that there was always a doctor in attendance. Increasing the opportunity for stimulation, the bar at the
theater served a special drink called Mariani wine, which contained, among other things, cocaine.
The theater’s intention to shock the middle class,
épater les bourgeois,
made it popular with the intelligentsia, but it also attracted people from the working-class neighborhood in which it was
located, slumming aristocrats, and tourists from all over the world. There were enough
guignolers,
regular customers, to guarantee that the performances were always sold out. They came not just expecting sex and violence,
but also secure in the knowledge that the “good guys” would never win. Not all the sex was on the stage. Boxes in the back
of the theater covered with latticework were trysting places, and janitors had to hose them out after performances. It was
a place of taboo and transformation.
Agnes Peirron, an expert on this form of entertainment, has written, “What carried the Grand-Guignol to its highest level
were the boundaries and thresholds it crossed: the states of consciousness altered by drugs or hypnosis. Loss of consciousness,
loss of control, panic: themes with which the theater’s audience could easily identify. When the Grand-Guignol playwrights
expressed an interest in the guillotine, what fascinated them most were the last convulsions played out on the decapitated
face. What if the head continued to think without the body? The passing from one state to another was the crux of the genre.” 48
In literature as well as in the theater, Parisians were fascinated with evil for its own sake. The French literary tradition
is studded with celebrants of the dark side of humanity: François Villon, the Marquis de Sade, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine,
Charles Baudelaire. This preoccupation with evil also made itself felt in literature for mass consumption: in 1911 the most
popular literary character in France was a criminal. Fantômas was the “hero” of a best-selling series of novels that sold
as fast as their two authors could turn them out. Fantômas was no Robin Hood figure; he carried out ruthless crimes for his
own pleasure, leaving the bodies of countless innocents behind. And in each book he outwitted the attempts of his nemesis,
Inspector Juve of the Sûreté (France’s equivalent of the FBI), to apprehend him. The criminal is always triumphant, and readers
loved it. Adding to the appeal of the books were their full-color covers, which rivaled even the Grand-Guignol in their graphic
detail. In the very first book in the series, the cover shows a masked man clad in evening dress and top hat towering over
the landscape of Paris. A second glance reveals that the man is carrying a dagger in one hand and seems to be seeking a victim.
Apollinaire, Picasso’s literary friend, author of experimental poetry and elegant pornography, embraced the Fantômas works
as enthusiastically as if they had been high art. He called the first book an “extraordinary novel, full of life and imagination,
lamely written but extremely vivid.… From the imaginative standpoint
Fantômas
is one of the richest works that exist.” 49 Apollinaire founded a group of like-minded connoisseurs known as La Société des Amis de Fantômas; they included Max Jacob,
the homosexual artist who at one time shared his apartment with Picasso. Other enthusiastic readers included Picasso himself,
the writers Colette and Jean Cocteau, and the painter Blaise Cendrars, who called
and emotions. The size of the theater broke down the separation between the performers and the audience. All the tricks of
the trade were used to heighten the horror for its own sake and induce a reaction from the audience — to shock people out
of their conventional thinking. Success was measured by the number of audience members who fainted or threw up. The advertising
for the show noted that there was always a doctor in attendance. Increasing the opportunity for stimulation, the bar at the
theater served a special drink called Mariani wine, which contained, among other things, cocaine.
The theater’s intention to shock the middle class,
épater les bourgeois,
made it popular with the intelligentsia, but it also attracted people from the working-class neighborhood in which it was
located, slumming aristocrats, and tourists from all over the world. There were enough
guignolers,
regular customers, to guarantee that the performances were always sold out. They came not just expecting sex and violence,
but also secure in the knowledge that the “good guys” would never win. Not all the sex was on the stage. Boxes in the back
of the theater covered with latticework were trysting places, and janitors had to hose them out after performances. It was
a place of taboo and transformation.
Agnes Peirron, an expert on this form of entertainment, has written, “What carried the Grand-Guignol to its highest level
were the boundaries and thresholds it crossed: the states of consciousness altered by drugs or hypnosis. Loss of consciousness,
loss of control, panic: themes with which the theater’s audience could easily identify. When the Grand-Guignol playwrights
expressed an interest in the guillotine, what fascinated them most were the last convulsions played out on the decapitated
face. What if the head continued to think without the body? The passing from one state to another was the crux of the genre.” 48
In literature as well as in the theater, Parisians were fascinated with evil for its own sake. The French literary tradition
is studded with celebrants of the dark side of humanity: François Villon, the Marquis de Sade, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine,
Charles Baudelaire. This preoccupation with evil also made itself felt in literature for mass consumption: in 1911 the most
popular literary character in France was a criminal. Fantômas was the “hero” of a best-selling series of novels that sold
as fast as their two authors could turn them out. Fantômas was no Robin Hood figure; he carried out ruthless crimes for his
own pleasure, leaving the bodies of countless innocents behind. And in each book he outwitted the attempts of his nemesis,
Inspector Juve of the Sûreté (France’s equivalent of the FBI), to apprehend him. The criminal is always triumphant, and readers
loved it. Adding to the appeal of the books were their full-color covers, which rivaled even the Grand-Guignol in their graphic
detail. In the very first book in the series, the cover shows a masked man clad in evening dress and top hat towering over
the landscape of Paris. A second glance reveals that the man is carrying a dagger in one hand and seems to be seeking a victim.
Apollinaire, Picasso’s literary friend, author of experimental poetry and elegant pornography, embraced the Fantômas works
as enthusiastically as if they had been high art. He called the first book an “extraordinary novel, full of life and imagination,
lamely written but extremely vivid.… From the imaginative standpoint
Fantômas
is one of the richest works that exist.” 49 Apollinaire founded a group of like-minded connoisseurs known as La Société des Amis de Fantômas; they included Max Jacob,
the homosexual artist who at one time shared his apartment with Picasso. Other enthusiastic readers included Picasso himself,
the writers Colette and Jean Cocteau, and the painter Blaise Cendrars, who called
Similar Books
