Paris, 1933. Oscar Dufrenne, a music hall magnate and notorious homosexual, is found murdered in his office. Despite the arrest of a suspect, the investigation is at a standstill. A desire to return to order, political violence, and a slow evolution of morals: the case paints a portrait of France between the two wars.
Florence Tamagne, a specialist in marginalized groups in European societies—from homosexuals to young people, including rockers—gives us here the fascinating account of a crime that has never been completely solved. By patiently unraveling the different threads of a tangled story, she elevates a news story that “for many months fueled (this section) of the popular press, but also the editorials of political newspapers” to the rank of symptom of the malaise that was eating away at France, grappling with the contradictory consequences of the Great War, between the aspiration for a return to order and the desire for social transformation.
A self-made man to the social fiber
It all started with the crime: on the night of September 24, 1933, Oscar Dufrenne was found dead, murdered in his office at the Palace, a former music hall converted into a cinema. Far from being unknown, the victim had a certain notoriety at the time: a municipal councilor of the 10e arrondissement of Paris and general councilor of the Seine, he was also president of the Fédération des spectacles, as well as director and co-owner of several performance halls. Coming from a working-class background in Lille, Dufrenne had left his hometown poor and without baggage to make his fortune in the capital. Type of self-made manhe had become a wealthy notable thanks to his hard work, his creativity and his interpersonal skills.
The story of this assassination first gives the author the opportunity to paint a picture of the world of entertainment and boulevard theatre from the 1910s to the 1930s in Paris and in the fashionable resorts of Normandy and the Côte d’Azur. If the success of revues, theatres and music halls had not diminished during the war, authorized after a brief ban to reopen under censorship surveillance from the autumn of 1914, it grew during the Roaring Twenties. This was an opportunity for Dufrenne to enrich himself by offering colourful and glittery shows, very popular with the public.
Alongside performances with multiple scenes in scantily clad clothing – “obscene”, as their detractors called them – Dufrenne was also a combative defender of the interests of his profession with the public authorities. Sensitive to the difficult conditions of theatre workers as well as those of artists, he fought against their precariousness and their random salaries. While personally contributing to the financing of the retirement home for artists in Pont-aux-Dames (Seine-et-Marne) created at the turn of the century, he sought to provide solutions for unemployed artists, both at the municipal level and in his daily practice. He tried in vain to have the “right of the poor” abolished.
This tax dating from the Ancien Régime was levied on the proceeds of shows to feed the coffers of the Public Assistance. For the city councilors, it seemed moral and normal that the distractions of some should serve to alleviate the misery of others. For Dufrenne, the tax weighed on the profits of the directors of the halls and therefore reduced the artists’ fees. Everyone must defend their own poor!
Political notability and “homosexual subculture”
In the early 1930s, before the difficulties caused by the economic crisis, the character was at the height of his success and on the verge of entering politics. In April 1929, at the age of 54, Dufrenne entered the campaign for the first time, on behalf of the Radical Party. He ran in the municipal elections in the 10the arrondissement, this district of Paris including many performance halls. His program emphasized the defense of shopkeepers and small trades living from the theater (stagehands, costume designers, restaurateurs, etc.). He was easily elected thanks to their support.
Very present at the Council meetings, he sat there until his death, tirelessly proposing measures in favor of theaters and social hygiene, planning for example to build a school group on the land left free by the demolition of the Saint-Lazare prison. Having acquired a taste for these activities, he decided to run for deputy in the legislative elections of May 1932, an election he narrowly lost to the candidate of the right.
This is because the man, whose professional success as a producer of shows aroused envy and jealousy, had a lifestyle that was anything but in keeping with the canons of notability: he made no secret of his homosexuality and his belonging to the milieu of “inverts”, despised by the right-thinking.
The question of homosexuality is the third theme addressed by the author, supported by her perfect knowledge of what she calls the “homosexual subculture”. If the expression underlines the marginality of homosexuality in society, one could just as well speak of a “milieu”, or even a “culture” in its own right. In any case, the fact that homosexuality acquired greater visibility during the period did not prevent its disapproval and repression.
This characteristic played a large part in the scandal of the Palace affair. Because, Florence Tamagne tells us, “if it fascinated the public, it is because it revealed a homosexual subculture in full mutation, characterized by very different ways of living and defining one’s homosexuality”, less hidden and a little better accepted. Because the murder of Dufrenne made headlines in newspapers of all stripes for 3 years, it forced the press and therefore public opinion to mention the existence of the homosexual milieu, as well as to relaunch the debate on the merits and forms of its repression.
Guilty or ideal victim?
The police investigation brought to light “a homosexual prostitution that usually remained in the shadow of female prostitution, which was much better documented and highly regulated”. Thus, suspicion of guilt quickly fell on a certain Paul Laborie. Not only was he a sailor, an obligatory figure in “the market for the desires of homosexual practices”, but he had all the makings of a bad character. Violent, quarrelsome, thief, playing false identities, he lived off prostitution, his own as well as that of men and women he kept under his thumb. An occasional drug trafficker, he was the ideal culprit.
Despite the serious charges against him, the police lacked evidence and the investigation was stalling. This fueled rumours used, or even incited, by the victim’s political adversaries, in particular the involvement in the crime of the son of Louis-Jean Malvy, former Minister of the Interior and Radical-Socialist MP for Lot. Against the backdrop of a police war, the right used the affair to castigate the moral decline of the country. For them, “the bodily and sexual metaphor was in full play: the body of France, of the Republic and the body of parliamentarians seemed to merge into the same decay”.
Following recent work on the news item, the author sheds light on a section of French society in the first half of the XXe century. On the one hand, the sympathy and compassion of the workers in the entertainment industry, many of whom followed the funeral of the “king of the night”, as well as the solidarity of homosexual circles, faced with the hostility of the police. On the other, the stigmatization of “immorality” and the defense of good morals and the family. This clash between two conceptions of the social body benefited the accused, during his trial before the Assizes of the Seine, opened on October 21, 1935.
A bundle of concordant charges weighed on Paul Laborie, suspected of premeditated murder. Knowing that he risked the death penalty, the defendant fiercely denied everything of which he was accused, while many witnesses summoned to appear withdrew or retracted their statements, sowing confusion among the jurors. Little by little, doubts began to creep in about the merits of the investigation. Above all, the victim, because of her personality, saw herself imperceptibly transformed into the culprit, she who, by her “bad morals”, offended good morals. And Florence Tamagne concluded:
Despite the evidence gathered by the police, which left little doubt about the defendant’s guilt, the hearings quickly turned into a farce.
Because of the obscurities and contradictions of the investigation, because of the light shed on the victim’s lifestyle and practices, Laborie was quickly acquitted and the police methods denigrated in a trial that ended up becoming that of homosexuality. A victim turned guilty, an acquittal in the form of a return to order?