Sexual Crime, Religion and Masculinity in fin-de-siècle France

The Flamidien Affair

Timothy Verhoeven

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319744797
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia francesa

This book explores a vital though long-neglected clash between republicans and Catholics that rocked fin-de-siècle France. At its heart was a mysterious and shocking crime. In Lille in 1899, the body of twelve-year-old Gaston Foveaux was discovered in a school run by a Catholic congregation, the Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes. When his teacher, Frère Flamidien, was charged with sexual assault and murder, a local crime became a national scandal. The Flamidien Affair shows that masculinity was a critical site of contest in the War of Two Frances pitting republicans against Catholics. For republicans, Flamidien's vow of chastity as well as his overwrought behaviour during the investigation made him the target of suspicion; Catholics in turn constructed a rival vision of masculinity to exonerate the accused brother. Both sides drew on the Dreyfus Affair to make their case.

© The Author(s) 2018

Timothy VerhoevenSexual Crime, Religion and Masculinity in fin-de-siècle FranceGenders and Sexualities in Historyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74479-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Timothy Verhoeven¹

(1)

Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia

Timothy Verhoeven

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

In February 1899, the murder of a young boy in the northern French city of Lille set off a fierce contest between republicans and Catholics. The Flamidien Affair is an important though neglected episode in the clash that historians have labelled the War of Two Frances. What it reveals in particular is the role of masculinity in shaping the contest between republicans and Catholics at the end of the nineteenth century.

Keywords

RepublicansCatholicsReligionCrimeMasculinity

End Abstract

On Sunday 5 February 1899, a 12-year-old boy named Gaston Foveaux went missing in the northern French city of Lille. That afternoon he had set out for his school, Notre-Dame de la Treille , one of twelve in the city run by a Catholic teaching congregation, the Lasallian Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes. As on many previous Sundays, Gaston was heading for a youth club held on the school grounds. Upon arriving, he hung his cap and coat in their usual place, before joining the others in a religious service. Then, as everyone began moving towards the rooms where games and activities took place, he veered away from the main group and began climbing a staircase that led to a different part of the school. From that moment, Gaston vanished.

When he failed to return home for dinner, his alarmed parents went to Gaston’s school and, with the help of one of his teachers, Frère Flamidien, looked through various rooms. All that they found, however, was his cap and coat. The next day, his father undertook another fruitless search. On Tuesday , with no sign of the boy anywhere, the police conducted the most thorough examination yet of the school and its surrounds. By now, the local and national press were speculating about a terrible crime. On Wednesday, the mystery was solved in the most shocking manner. That morning, the school’s concierge discovered the body of Gaston Foveaux lying on a rug in a small waiting room near the entrance. Next to the body was a handwritten note, signed by an “ardent socialist”, apologizing to the boy’s father for strangling his son, a crime that the murderer regretfully ascribed to his “impure passion”.

Across the nation, the murder of Gaston Foveaux was front-page news. On the streets of Lille, the reaction was much more visceral . That evening and the next, crowds chanting “Down with the brothers! They should be hanged!” roamed the streets, throwing stones and bricks at Catholic schools as well as the office of the local newspaper, the Croix du Nord . ¹ In a letter to the prefect pleading for a security cordon, the superior of the Maison du Sacré-Cœur, Catherine de Montalembert, described her fears for the safety of more than one hundred female boarders as the school came under assault from violent protesters. ² Popular anger only increased when the press began reporting that the boy had been raped. ³ The crisis then reached a peak with the news that police had charged one of the teaching brothers from the school with the assault and murder of Gaston Foveaux. A descent into lynch law was only just averted when the carriage transporting the accused brother was surrounded and almost overturned by a crowd estimated to be from three to four thousand strong. ⁴ Cowering inside the carriage was the 35-year-old Isaïe Hamez (religious name, Frère Flamidien) (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1

Frère Flamidien

(Source Archives lasalliennes de Lyon)

The charging of Flamidien marked only the beginning of the controversy. In the months ahead, the question of his guilt or innocence would pit republicans and Catholics against each other, injecting further tension into an already strained political climate. Yet despite all the attention that it garnered at the time, the scandal appears only fleetingly in studies of the period. ⁵ Drawing on largely untapped archival records, this book offers the first comprehensive analysis of the Flamidien Affair. While presenting the evidence for both the prosecution and defence, my aim is not to pierce the mystery of what took place at Notre-Dame de la Treille on that evening in February 1899. Rather, the book makes two broad arguments. The first is that the Flamidien Affair should be recognised as a key episode in the “War of Two Frances”, the France of the Revolution versus Catholic, conservative France. The second concerns the central role of gender, and specifically of masculinity, in shaping and in driving their contest.

The War of Two Frances

Through all the political upheavals experienced by nineteenth-century France, a fundamental cleavage appeared to hold constant. Republicans venerated the French Revolution as a breakthrough towards a democratic and secular nation. A loose alliance of conservatives and clerics remembered the Revolution very differently. For them, the overthrow of the ancien régime was a catastrophe, unleashing the instability and social conflict that had bedevilled France ever since. With the advent of the Third Republic (1870–1940), the clash between republicans and Catholics entered a particularly rancorous phase. Adversaries launched harsh attacks across the fault line. Writing in the national Matin in 1888, the radical parliamentarian Arthur Ranc saw a nation “cut in two” between republicanism, which enshrined liberty of thought and civil rights, and clericalism, which for Ranc entailed “submission to religious ideals and the domination of the Church”. This was now a zero-sum game. “This one will kill that one, or that one this”, Ranc predicted. ⁶ Catholic commentators were just as strident. In an 1889 speech defending Catholic schools , the conservative deputy Albert, Comte de Mun described a nation divided between what he termed the modern-day Jacobins, a group that “believe in nothing, and want everyone else to be like them”, and the pious and faithful men and women bravely defending the principle of freedom of conscience and the “independence of souls”. ⁷ Through the last decades of the century, there was no shortage of such declarations, with each side pointing to a fundamental disagreement and blaming the other for worsening the divide.

If contemporaries saw deep social and political cleavages, however, historians have argued for a more nuanced approach. As early as 1925, Georges Weill challenged this vision of a France split into two hostile camps. There were always, he wrote, third parties with no clear or rigid affiliation, from republicans who thought religious faith necessary as a bulwark of social order to the many Catholics who preferred secular over religious schools on the grounds that their pedagogy was more modern and innovative. ⁸ Other historians have since elaborated the critique. To be a republican, as Sudhir Hazareesingh argues, did not necessarily entail a deep-seated revulsion for the Church. Moderate republicans recognised the social utility of Catholicism, even if rejecting it in their personal lives. ⁹ Politicians who built reputations as ferocious opponents of religious influence sometimes show, on closer examination, a more indulgent set of attitudes. This is the case for Léon Gambetta , who, as prime minister, famously declared clericalism to be the enemy of France. Yet Gambetta’s letters to his long-time mistress, Léonie Léon, are sprinkled with references to Catholic imagery and sacraments. ¹⁰ Furthermore, as Robert D. Priest argues in his recent study of the reception of Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus, periodization is critical. ¹¹ Far from an unbending and constant animosity, the relationship between Catholics and republicans shifted in nature and intensity in response to changes in the political and social climate. Together these scholars have made a persuasive case that the image of a nineteenth-century France permanently divided into warring republican and Catholic camps obscures both the range of ideological configurations available to key actors as well as the ebbs and flows in their relations.

Timing certainly helps explain the intense reactions generated by the Flamidien Affair. In the years preceding 1899, there had been some signs that the War of Two Frances was cooling. In 1892, Pope Leo XIII called on French Catholics to cease agitating for a return of the monarchy and instead rally to the Republic. But while a handful of leading Catholics such as Albert, Comte de Mun , heeded the Pope’s instructions and emerged as ralliés, the policy met resistance from diehard Catholic royalists, and would in any event soon be eclipsed by the greatest scandal of the era. When a Jewish army captain named Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of passing military secrets to the German embassy in 1894, the stage was set for a resumption of the culture wars. The vicious campaign on the part of certain Catholic orders, notably the Assumptionists, against Dreyfus and his supporters sparked an intense republican backlash, making the National Assembly once again, in Maurice Larkin’s terms, “an anticlerical wilderness”. ¹²

For several months in 1899, the Dreyfus and Flamidien Affairs jostled with each other for newspaper space. On February 10, the day that much of the press announced the arrest of Frère Flamidien, the National Assembly voted in favour of a law establishing a special court of appeal to reconsider the 1894 conviction of Dreyfus for treason, beginning a process that would lead to his return to France, his retrial and, eventually, his pardon. In the same month, the nation was shaken by a further series of crises. On 16 February, President Félix Faure died in office; at the state funeral, the leader of the right-wing Ligue des Patriotes, Paul Déroulede , launched an attempted coup d’état. Historians have judged this to be an amateurish plot with little chance of success. But republican leaders were rattled, and many suspected Catholic involvement. ¹³ Even by the standards of the Third Republic, the first few months of 1899 were a particularly turbulent period.

Overall, however, an analysis of the Flamidien Affair suggests that we should not take the revisionist approach to the War of Two Frances too far. There were some commentators who urged caution, calling on all sides to suspend judgement until the police investigation was complete. Republicans should not rush to condemn a celibate Catholic before the proof of his guilt was clearly established; Catholics, in turn, should accept that one of their own may well have committed a ghastly crime. There was no need, in this view, for the murder of Gaston Foveaux to spark another round o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Gaston Foveaux: Lille and the War of Two Frances
• 3. Charles Delalé: Republicans, Celibacy and the Performance of Masculinity
• 4. Dr. Castiaux: Legal Medicine, Pederasty and Effeminacy at the Fin de Siècle
• 5. Cyr: Catholic Masculinity and the Defence of Frère Flamidien
• 6. Les Flamidiens/Les Dreyfus: The School Question and Collective Guilt
• 7. Émile Zola: “Vérité” and the Aftermath of the Affair
• Back Matter