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Caroline Campbell, Aaron Freundschuh. The Courtesan and the Gigolo: The Murders in the Rue Montaigne and the Dark Side of Empire in Nineteenth-Century Paris., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 5, December 2018, Pages 1746–1747, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhy232
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In The Courtesan and the Gigolo, Aaron Freundschuh explores the brutal murders of Marie Regnault (forty years old), Annette Gremeret (early forties), and Marie Gremeret (twelve years old), as well as the execution of the man convicted of killing them, Enrico Pranzini, who may have been innocent. Freundschuh convincingly argues that the entire affair serves as an entrée into the broader forces that shaped the history of the early Third Republic, including late-nineteenth-century migration patterns, powerful gender norms, colonial expansion, the rise of the mass press, and shifts in policing and medical practices. The murders and ensuing trial made huge news in 1887, and the compelling story that Freundschuh tells at once humanizes the people involved and reconstructs the world in which they lived.
The first scholarly work about the murders, this fascinating account is divided into eight chapters that are thematically organized and include biographical reconstructions of the major players. Murders of women of the Parisian demimonde had stretched back at least eight years before Regnault and her servants were found in Regnault’s opulent apartment in a bourgeois area of Paris on the rue Montaigne. As Freundschuh points out, the Jack the Ripper murders began in London a year later. The number of reports on the London killings eclipsed the press coverage of the Parisian murders, leading the latter to be forgotten by historians and the general public alike. Freundschuh’s research is extensive and includes published sources such as newspapers and archival sources that include letters, juridical records, and diplomatic and military correspondence. The Courtesan and the Gigolo thus joins other excellent microhistories of sensational murders that are well suited to be assigned to students, such as Sarah Maza’s Violette Nozière: A Story of Murder in 1930s Paris (2011) and Gayle K. Brunelle and Annette Finley-Croswhite’s Murder in the Métro: Laetitia Toureaux and the Cagoule in 1930s France (2010).
