Corbin on Horowitz (2022)

Passion! Politics! Money! Sex! Lies! Murder! Such headlines splashed across the seventy-nine daily Parisian newspapers during Marguerite Steinheil’s rise to Belle Époque notoriety, fodder for a perfect roman feuilleton. “This is a book about a woman who lied her entire life,” writes Sarah Horowitz, opening the author’s note to The Red Widow, her acutely researched biography of Meg Steinheil, known facetiously to most French as “pompe funèbre” for her “role” in the sudden and scandalous death of President Félix Faure. But the story of this not-quite courtesan does not end at the Élysée Palace. For Horowitz, this bourgeoise is the ancestor of our contemporary “Karen,” who, when pinned and later acquitted for the double murder of her husband and mother, framed innocent people and benefitted from institutional structures meant to protect the wealthy at the expense of the less fortunate. The Red Widow, written as a commercial biography rather than an academic monograph, offers much more than juicy gossip and salacious details into Meg’s life as it presents (as the cover copy explains) “the scandal that shook Paris and the woman behind it all.” 

At once a crime novel, murder mystery, glimpse into le Tout-Paris, study of sex work, exposition of bourgeois (im)morality, and exploration of gender identity of Belle Époque Paris, The Red Widow follows a three-part structure. Before plunging the reader into Meg’s childhood, with its mixed bag of joy, artifice, loss, and deception, Horowitz offers a helpful reference in the “Cast of Characters”—listing individuals and their relationship to the heroine, and a preface presents the mysterious intrigue in medias res. “Part One: Between Scandal and Respectability,” ends with the fallout from Faure’s death, as we learn that in fact, being the president’s mistress is not the focus of this biography. Instead, things only get darker for Meg in “Part Two: Crime Fictions.” Horowitz, weaving a rich narrative, leads readers down logical paths before dismantling theories and exposing fresh evidence as readers question and posit hypotheses in this whodunnit of shock and awe. “Part Three: Myths and Legends” sketches Meg’s cultural and historical legacy somewhere between femme fatale and “grande amoureuse.” In an author’s note, Horowitz explains her research methods, namely the challenges of (re)constructing criminal accounts when primary sources are not known for their accuracy or veracity. In an era where gossip, secrets, and sensationalism abound in the daily press and personal memoirs, and police records may be doctored to protect victims and offenders alike, Horowitz succeeds in her objective of telling “a clear narrative of Meg’s life while keeping in mind the limits of the available sources. Sometimes that means reading into silences, sometimes that means making room for uncertainty, and sometimes that means privileging one account over another” (311).

In The Red Widow, Horowitz plainly demonstrates the (mal)functioning of laws and regulations as well as changes to conventional codes related to gender identification, sex work, bourgeois education, and divorce. By focusing on women, this work falls in line with recent publications such as the 2022 special edition of Tangence “Femmes criminelles et culture médiatique” edited by Mélodie Simard-Houde, Amélie Chabrier, and Ariane Gibeau, as well as recent books by Rachel Mesch, or the Canal+ series Paris Police 1900 and Paris Police 1905 in which the Steinheils feature prominently. Here, Horowitz also questions France’s Third Republic claim of meritocracy by highlighting the ways connections offered access to the right circles, cash, jewels, and government positions. 

Whereas Belle Époque Paris is often associated with its artsy party scene, this biography underscores the inequalities, racism, and prejudices that created a hostile environment for most of the city’s inhabitants, one where the police upheld a society in which “criminality lay with the dispossessed” (160) but the wealthy remained protected, clinging to their claim as rôle moralisateur. Horowitz argues that Faure’s death and the double murders revealed the hypocrisy of the bourgeois, whose principles were quite out of line with practice. The fiercely competitive daily press, hungry for a sensational scoop, contributed to the fall of this “façade of propriety” by publishing “salacious revelations about Meg’s life” (303). Consequently, Horowitz shows that although this explosion of codes was discombobulating for citizens, Meg’s criminal case became a “moment of clarity” (220), the tipping point where “rules shifted” (217) and decades of concealed misbehavior revealed relinquished favors. Knowing just what happened behind the closed doors of society elites meant anyone could see how the sausage was made; the Affair leveled the playing field in some respects. That said, when Meg stood trial, French justice “took a backseat to pleasures of the flesh” as her lawyer pleaded the case for this “grande amoureuse”—an innocent woman who did nothing more than uphold national tradition where “heterosexual desire defined France” (233). Yet another long-term implication of the Steinheil Affair: not only did it stoke the flames of distrust between citizens and their government, but in a post-Dreyfus nationalist environment, Horowitz points to the xenophobic rhetoric (which Meg spewed) as “poison in the veins of French society” (223) that contributed to the rise in fascism and antisemitism. 

Throughout her portrayal of Meg’s life, which, the author notes, is not unique, Horowitz stresses the undercurrent of Meg’s lifelong difficulty with the abandonment of her “male protectors,” leading us to consider the limitations and faults of gendered roles in bourgeois education. Meg may be manipulative and a liar, but to what extent is she to blame? She (and others in her family) also suffered from mental illness for which there was no support system; considering the cards she was dealt, it can be hard not to pity her.

In the afterward, Horowitz offers perspective, consideration, and perhaps cautionary advice for the keen reader. While today’s clickbait headlines tell of politicians’ sex scandals and suggest not much has changed since the Affair, nevertheless, the author maintains, activism and integrity have led to greater (though not complete) equalities among citizens (302). “Because if secrets and silences help maintain inequalities, then knowing the truth allows us to imagine a more honest and fairer society” (307).