Odd this day
The assassination which led to the First World War. No, no: not Archduke Franz Ferdinand — Henriette Caillaux, wife of the French finance minister, murdering the editor of Le Figaro…
We start our tale in 1908, when politician Joseph Caillaux is married to his first wife, Berthe (who had been married to another man when they met). She has just broken into his desk and found a letter from him to Henriette (who had just divorced her husband in order to marry Joseph), explaining to his mistress that he can’t divorce Berthe until the (1908) election is out of the way.
Joseph and Berthe… came to an understanding: he would dump Henriette, and she would burn his letters. She did, in front of Joseph’s lawyer, but only after she had sent them to her sister, who photographed them before returning them. Perhaps Berthe suspected, rightly, that Joseph wouldn’t really drop Henriette. Either way, she had an insurance policy. Once re-elected, Joseph left Berthe for Henriette, and Berthe gave the letters to Gaston Calmette, editor of France’s oldest newspaper.
In 1911–12, Joseph was Prime Minister for just over six months, during which time he prevented war with Germany despite a crisis over their competing colonial interests in Morocco. By 1913, it looked as though he might get the top job again — and, if that happened, he would bring France closer to Germany, because he’d been vocally less than keen on the Entente Cordiale that made relations with Britain friendlier than they had been for… well, ever.
He also wanted to introduce progressive income tax, which isn’t the sort of thing that tends to make you popular with newspaper editors (or proprietors), and, into the bargain, it is also rumoured that he and the man from Le Figaro were rivals for the same mistress. (Indeed, gossip suggested that he was trying to get a divorce from Henriette in order to marry a woman who was, at the time, married. Joseph, it seems, had a type.)
It was generally agreed at the time that newspapers would not delve into the private lives of the rich and powerful, but Calmette really didn’t like Caillaux. Between December 1913 and March 1914, he published 110 separate attacks on the former PM, including articles and cartoons. Plus, the letters were dynamite, containing phrases such as
There is only one consolation. It is to think of my little one, to see her in my arms as at Ouchy (God, what delicious moments!) … A thousand million kisses all over your adored little body.
…so, on 13 March, having manfully resisted the temptation until then, Calmette published a front page photo of one of Caillaux’s letters. It wasn’t one of the saucy ones, but it did imply that Joseph had publicly supported a tax bill while manoeuvring behind the scenes to scupper it. Henriette thought the… intimate details of their lives couldn’t be far behind, so she went to the newspaper’s offices without an appointment, her hands concealed in a fur muff, and waited to see the editor.
Once in front of the man, she emptied a pistol into him. According to historian Jack Beatty,
Witnesses heard a gap between the last two shots, suggesting she had pursued the man and shot him while he cowered under the desk.
She told the court at her murder trial that she fired the first shot “at the floor, to cause a scandal”, and when asked about the other five, said:
They went off by themselves.
Between the murder and the trial, another shooting had taken place, but no one in France paid any attention to the events in Sarajevo, because the gossip was just so much fun. Plus ça change…
For one thing, Joseph’s first wife, Berthe, was a witness, and he took the opportunity when he was on the stand to tell her that she had been “too forceful, too strong-willed, and too intelligent for his needs” — thus informing his current wife and the world at large that he liked her because she was compliant and thick. It’s a wonder she chose to shoot the newspaperman, really.
Henriette was found not guilty by a majority of 11 to 1, after the jury had deliberated for less than an hour. According to historian Christopher Clark (in The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914), this was a “surprise acquittal … on the grounds that the provocation to her honour justified the crime”. Jack Beatty says they bought the story that she was shooting at the ground, but — oh, dear — that bit of the floor just happened to be exactly where Calmette was cowering.
Either way, it can’t have hurt that Joseph Caillaux put on quite a show in the witness box, savaging the victim’s reputation, telling the jury it was all his fault for not taking his wife’s distress seriously, and “plucking out his monocle to dry a tear”. Nor that Henriette
gasped and cried and even fainted on cue
But it may also have helped somewhat that the sealed box from which six judges drew the names of jurors every month was found to be unsealed in May 1914 after a bailiff apparently dropped it. The judges re-chose the names for July, and by some extraordinary coincidence, almost all of the men selected were sympathetic to Caillaux. Also, trial judge Louis Albanel was a “close friend of the Caillauxes”, which may go some way to explaining how Joseph got away with his courtroom histrionics.
Anyway, Joseph didn’t become PM again; by the time anyone was paying attention to geopolitics it was too late to avert WWI; and the Caillauxes couldn’t possibly get divorced after all that scandal, so they were stuck with each other until death did them part. If I’m being entirely honest, isn’t really accurate to suggest that WWI wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for this incident, but it is one of the intriguing ‘what ifs’ of history.
And either way, President of France Raymond Poincaré knew what he thought. According to David Fromkin’s 2004 book, Europe’s Last Summer, he remarked that
the affair had put new ideas in his head: he might send out his wife to shoot down his own opponents.
