Legacy 20- The Flapper and the Murderer

“The Flapper and the Murderer”

Aug 17, '12 10:01 AM for everyone

As I’ve said before, it’s surprising what you come across in the columns of respectable historical journals.   Earlier this year I spotted a book review in a French language history magazine I take.  This related to a book called “La Garconne et L’Assassin; Histoire de Louise et Paul, deserteur travesti, dans le Paris des annees folles” by Fabrice Virgili and Daniele Voldman.   Naturally this intrigued me I popped it into my shopping basket in my next visit to Amazon France.

It’s a rather odd tale.   The central figures, Paul Grappe and his wife Louise, were working class Parisians.  They married young, before Paul had done his military service (this was relatively rare in pre- First World War France).   He was just over a month away from discharge when war came in 1914.   Sent to the front with his regiment, he was wounded in the very early stages of the fighting, patched up and sent back to the line.   There he picked up another wound which blew off part of his right index finger- it looks like a classic case of self-mutilation, though he managed to beat the rap when accused of that.  After months in hospital (the suspicion is that he was actively preventing the wound from healing) he was finally told he was going to be sent back into battle.  He promptly deserted, heading back to Louise in Paris.   It’s not clear who came up with the idea that he should switch genders and reinvent himself as Suzanne but that is what happened.  While Louise went out to work in a company producing army material (whose boss evidently knew what was going on but kept quiet about it), Suzanne took up home working making braces to keep army trousers up.   It’s suggested that Suzanne also did a spot of prostitution to boost the household budget though it’s not clear what the evidence for this is.  

The end of the war didn’t mean the end of the story.   Paul’s case lay outside the scope of an initial amnesty for army deserters.  The couple slipped into Spain for a short period (Paul reverting to male mode) but they couldn’t cope with life there and headed back to Paris.   Suzanne reappeared, living with Louise in what was presented pretty openly as a lesbian couple.   It wasn’t an exclusive relationship, though.   Suzanne in particular appears to have run through male and female lovers at a rapid rate, placing a contact advertisement in a journal significantly named “Le Flirt” and (it would seem) following up on the replies.   She had electrolysis to cope with beard issues (I hadn’t realised that process went so far back) and even got a job in a fashion house for a bit before getting sacked for trying to seduce a fellow (female) worker.   The fashions of the day, which favoured slender bodies and small breasts, worked for her- as indeed did a certain intellectual and cultural fashion for lesbianism and gender bending- Suzanne even got into the papers in female persona as an early parachutist.   Again it’s suggested that she was working the Bois de Boulogne as a prostitute- I wonder about that given the legal framework of French prostitution in the 1920’s which sought to keep the girls in official “Maisons de Tolerance”, with “irregulars” as they were known being hounded by the police (Suzanne surely would not have wanted to risk being pulled in on a police round up and having her identity discovered).   Louise, though she later tried to minimise her participation, was in on the act too.   The strain was beginning to tell on her, though, and she was actively seeking a special pardon for her husband when the French state amnestied all deserters at the beginning on 1925.

On one level, that was the end of Suzanne.   The “deserter in skirts” had a few days fame in the media but doesn’t seem to have taken up the persona again- though Suzy continued to exist in the shape of a portfolio of photos which Paul kept and which he was always keen to produce to back up his tales of how he’d lived as a woman (the photos at the top and bottom of this item presumably come from it).   Things didn’t go well.   Paul seems to have been a highly capable worker in the optical field but was incapable of holding down a job due to a violent temper.  He drank increasingly heavily- by the end he was on five litres of wine a day- and quarrelled endlessly with Louise, who left him briefly for another man but came back.  The birth of a child did little to help.   Eventually, late in 1928, Louise shot Paul dead with a gun which just happened to be lying round their rented rooms.   Despite a fair bit of evidence which pointed to premeditation, she got off on a plea of self-defence; it helped that she had the services of one of France’s leading defence lawyers but it looks as if even the police were not inclined to waste too much time on trying to break her story.  The case was a media nine days wonder, with the press (even politically leftist papers which might in other circumstances have had some sympathy with a deserter) only too happy to vilify the late Paul/Suzanne while viewing Louise as the real victim.

It’s a sad little story in many ways.   I found the book distinctly frustrating, though.   It’s very short (about 150 pages of actual text, in generously large print).   Virgili and Voldman (V/V) admit that they came across the case while researching something else and to be honest it has the air of a pot-boiler done for a non-academic audience.  Despite its short length, some bits feel like padding.   I’m not sure we really need a day by day record of Paul’s regiment’s activities in August 1914 to get the point that he saw enough action to make a diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder plausible- though he’d clearly been a difficult individual even before he saw fire.   By contrast Paul/Suzanne’s activities for the period 1915-18 are dispatched in under four pages.   V/V seem to have based the book largely on material related to Louise’s trial, supplemented by a bit of digging into publicly available material directly related to the two central characters.   They don’t footnote any of the original archive material, so it’s impossible to tell where (say) the claims about Suzy in the Bois come from.   It appears that a great deal of material ended up in the hands of Louise’s defence counsel, including correspondence relating to Suzanne’s “Le Flirt” advert and even parts of a diary which Paul/Suzanne was keeping in the early 1920’s which have a great deal to say about his/her hyper-active sex life.   Very little of this makes it into the book, though, in other than very generalised terms.   I appreciate that V/V didn’t want to write a sensationalist piece of vintage porn but it would be nice to see a bit more of the evidence directly rather than have to take their word for what’s there (for instance they argue that Paul/Suzanne found bisexuality rather hard to cope with- which isn’t entirely the impression one gets from the facts they present).   Above all they seem to be working to a very narrow agenda which precludes asking too many questions, even about issues very directly linked to the case (where did the gun come from, for instance?).   I can’t help feeling that a historian working in an English language context would have wanted to do a great deal more with the material- even though they’d probably have drowned the story in post-modernist gender studies jargon.

There are just so many questions about Paul’s life as Suzanne which remain in the air.   Just how many people outside the immediate family circle knew?  We know Louise’s boss during the War did but who else did?  Leaving sexual partners aside (and there seem to have been plenty of them), I assume at the very least the beautician doing the electrolysis must have had a pretty good idea.  The photos suggest Suzanne looked pretty good, height wasn’t a big issue (she was 1.60 metres or 5 ft 3ish tall) and she developed a very convincing voice but I’d be amazed if none of the neighbours wondered- let alone Suzanne’s work mates in a largely female work force.  What stories did the couple work out to explain the missing tip of her right index finger?   How far did respondents to Suzy’s advert (which was aimed at a putatively lesbian audience) know what they were letting themselves in for- a bona fide lesbian who fixed up to meet her might not have been too happy with what they got?   She got at least one reply from a t-girl, which may or may not be significant.   Is it possible to match the replies to diary entries to get a sense of whether the letters which survive represent all the ones Suzy received or whether there were further contacts which don’t figure in the surviving archive?   Where was the money coming from- parachute jumping was not a cheap hobby, which implies some generous/wealthy partners (and just possibly a spot of blackmail)?   Was she linked to any t-girl scene which may have existed in Paris (there was some correspondence in 1925, after her story hit the papers, from people seeking tips about electrolysis which implies that there was a market)?

Above all, how did Paul/Suzanne see things?   As I noted above, V/V imply that he/she found bisexuality a bit difficult to cope with and perhaps the diary entries substantiate that view but since we never see any direct quotes it’s hard to judge.   I suppose I have my own angle of vision on this but one or two facts seem suggestive.  It’s interesting that she opted for electrolysis- which must have been even more painful back in its origins than it is now.  This implies that she accepted she might be in the role for the long haul.  Obviously she couldn’t know for certain that a full amnesty was going to be decreed- but past precedents would have suggested that one would eventually come.  She seems to have been a bit of a poser for the cameras (how unlike the average t-girl J) and there’s even a hint that she may have made some money selling photos, at least after 1925- the photo at the top is autographed by Paul .  There’s also an empty folder in the archive labelled “Indecent photos”- it’s anybody’s guess what that may have contained.   Paul clung to the photo album showing Suzy in her finery with real passion- Louise came to hate it and it was a major bone of contention between them.    It’s hard to say for sure but I read V/V as implying that Paul’s drink problem became a lot worse after 1925, when he had to stop being Suzy and had no realistic prospect of being able to reassume her identity.     This suggests to me that Paul invested rather a lot in Suzy and found it increasingly difficult to cope when she was taken away from him. 

I don’t think Paul Grappe was a particularly easy person to like- it’s striking that he seems to have had almost no real friends, unlike Louise- and he would probably have been a difficult character even if there had been no war in 1914 (Paul was a womaniser during his military service, for instance).   I do however find myself with a bit more sympathy for him than I think V/V do.  Even if he stumbled into the role of Suzanne by accident, she appears to have allowed him to be someone he wanted to be.  Sounds awfully familiar…..

A final thought.   I wonder if H E Bates ever heard of the Grappe case; there are some intriguing parallels with “The Triple Echo”…..