The Cayo Affair: A Drama of Murder, Trial, and War

Part One: Murder

On March 16, 1913, if you ask Mrs. Caillot, she accidentally shot the editor of the popular newspaper “Le Figaro” six times.

Henriette Caillaux was the second wife of Joseph-Marie-Auguste Caillaux, who during his long career was a member of the Radical Party, Prime Minister of France (1911-1912), Minister of Finance on two separate occasions, and a courtesan on many separate occasions.

Historian Edward Branson even used his story as a case study of the politics of divorce in France during the Belle Époque before World War I. Sometime in the early 20th century, the aforementioned Caillot had an affair with a certain Berthe Eva Dupré (formerly Gueydan), a Cherpokaite, i.e. French-An American, who was the wife of a certain Jules Dupree.

From fortune to fortune she divorced Mr. Dupree and married Caillot. However, at this point, certain differences of opinion emerged between the couple. She thought she had cheated on her first husband with Mr. Caillot so that he would remain her beloved and eternal husband, while he thought that having an affair with a married lady was such a good idea that he should go back on it.

And so one Parisian day the lawful Madame Caillot discovered the letters, and was very furious. Caillot was very worried about the possibility of damage to his political career, and begged Bertha to forgive him. He promised to sever all ties with Henriette, and after much persuasion and even, according to the story, a dramatic kneeling and pleas on the verge of tears, she agreed – and in return for his promise she swore to him that she would destroy all the documents and not leave a single copy of them.

And indeed, that was the case. Caillot successfully and without scandal won the 1910 elections. Less than a year later, he had divorced Bertha, married Henriette at the end of 1911, and the couple were happy and content and very, very, very rich. Bertha was probably a little less so, but what could she do? They worked on her, in vain.

Caillot was Prime Minister in 1911-1912, very pro-German, he was forced to resign because it turned out that he had secretly negotiated with Germany without the permission of the President of the Republic. I recognize a pattern of behavior here.

Among the aforementioned conservatives was the newspaper Le Figaro, whose influential editor, Gaston Calmette, attacked it from both sides, and made Caillot the target of a sustained attack on corruption allegations. One of the things it published was a document that allegedly showed that Caillot had secretly tried to overturn a tax law while supposedly publicly supporting it.

The problem was, the document belonged to Cayo himself. In other words, it came from Cayo's house. Who had access to the document? Well, remember Berta? Remember how she promised to destroy all the documents in her possession?

Well, Joseph Caillot wasn't the only one who played a double game in the matter, and just as he promised to remain faithful to her and quickly divorced her when he no longer needed her, it turns out that Bertha promised to destroy and kept a copy for herself.

And that means that Berta also had copies of the current Caillot couple's highly illegal love letters, which is already a problem, because these letters could have created a political scandal and completely destroyed Minister Caillot's career.

The current Madame Caillot's fear that her not entirely decent letters would be exposed by Le Figaro must have been strengthened after Le Figaro published a letter from Mr. Caillot to Madame Caillot on March 13, 1914. The first, including the very personal signature Ton Jo, which can be translated as “your Yosla” (you can also not translate, I'm not forcing anyone).

This greatly stressed Joseph and also Henrietta, who decided to take her own initiative to eliminate the problem.

She went down to the basement with the merchant, where she practiced shooting at a dummy target; after she finished the cartridge, one of the employees kindly loaded a new cartridge for her (she didn't bother to practice loading) and she set off for the offices of Le Figaro, where she asked to speak to the editor, Gaston Calmette.

Since he wasn't in the office, she waited for him until he arrived, an hour later, and then he was told that there was a lady who wanted to talk to him. For reasons kept secret by the system, he agreed to meet the elegant lady, who was wearing gloves and all sorts of gadgets that hid the gun. When the two of them met, she asked him: "Do you know who I am?"

“Not at all, ma’am,” replied Calmette.

(According to another version, he said to her, “Hello, madam,” and she replied, “Hello, sir.” According to another version, he did know that she was Mrs. Cayo. You know, it was a little hard to get an answer out of him afterwards.)

At this point, Henrietta opened fire, emptying the magazine on Calmet. Three bullets hit, and he was seriously wounded and died a few hours later. The honorable Mrs. Caillot was taken into custody, and her husband resigned from his government post that very day.

Meanwhile, until the trial opened, the Honorable Mr. Caillou was busy – no, surprisingly this time No In conducting another affair with a married woman – in preparation for his wife's defense, while taking advantage of his great wealth, as he and his wife were one of the richest couples in France.

A very well-known lawyer was hired, Fernand-Gustave-Gaston Labori, who was, among other things, the lawyer of Emile Zola And of Dreyfus himself in the (second) trial in 1899, and he was given the difficult task of saving Madame Caillot from an early encounter with “Madame Guillotine” or a long prison sentence. He would not be alone: ​​a significant part of the defense took place outside the confines of the tribunal.

The problem was that this wasn't just a 'normal' crime, but a question: What exactly was the crime here? Romantic or political?

Caillot was the leader of the French Republican Left, as leader of the Radical Party; Calmet was a staunch conservative, and at that time there was a very noticeable struggle between the French Right and Left. Issues such as divorce (only allowed in France in 1884), morality and the impact on society were all preoccupied at about the same time.

And why do we care what kind of crime it is?

Ahh! Because this is where things get complicated. If this is a crime with a political background, meaning that Mrs. Caillot tried to eliminate someone who could have destroyed her husband’s career, then this is a cold-blooded crime and she deserves to die. On the other hand, there is another possibility: this is a “crime passionnel,” which is of course the crime committed by someone who doesn’t match the color of their gun to the color of their shirt.

Sorry, mistake. “Crime Passion,” a crime of passion, means that the gentle lady acted out of a passion that caused her to not act rationally. In other words, she may have intended to murder and did, but it was for the sake of her beloved husband and because she feared harm to her honor when incriminating letters were revealed (which did happen during the trial, oops).

The problem was, the jury would have to be convinced of this.
In 1918, in an article in the California Law Review, Robert Ferrari, a criminologist and law professor who taught at Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley, explained (with examples): Paris (He was 32 at the time of writing the article and already taught at both universities. Those were the days.) Because in the creamery business, the difference between Americans and French people is that Americans tend to convict the man and acquit the woman, but the French – the exact opposite.

Some argue that the French actually tended to favor women because they are irrational and it is impossible to assume that during a storm of emotions they will actually think about the consequences of their actions, after all, they are sensitive and romantic and giggle, hehe, but Ferrari brings decent examples of where and how against women in France, so at the very least we have to assume that the Caio couple had some reason to worry.

The particular cause for concern soon became a very serious cause for concern, because the right wing in its newspapers wanted revenge for the journalist's murder; the lawyer for the Calmet family, Charles Chenu (he was, among other things, the lawyer for the widow of Commandant Henri, the French officer who was arrested for forging documents against Dreyfus. Small World) did everything he could to convince the jury that it was a politically motivated, cold-blooded, well-planned murder – and apparently, he had a case. Buying the gun, the shooting range, the wait, firing the six bullets, all of these were quite significant. There was no doubt about the facts: there were witnesses to the murder, Madame Caillot confessed to it and showed no remorse.

To rescue his wife, Caillot needed not only a great lawyer but also outside help—he had plenty of money to buy both. And he also had timing: the trial began in July 1914, and France thought it was much more interesting than all the petty developments going on around Germany and neighboring Austria-Hungary, which had recently lost its boring heir apparent to the throne, to another gun, an FN Model 1910.

Part 2: Trial

In the previous part, we left Mrs. Caillot in prison, Gaston Calmet pretty much dead after the police shot him six times in front of witnesses (and hit him three), Mr. Caillot outside the government and thinking about how to ensure his wife's acquittal in court, and all France I am following the above story with great interest, at the expense of all sorts of side developments in Europe in the summer of 1914.

Mrs. Cailloux’s big problem was that the affair was not just a sensational story about a politician’s wife murdering the newspaper editor. Worse than that for her: the affair also fell on a struggle between the right and the left in France. Her husband, as mentioned, was one of the leaders of the French left; Le Figaro was a right-wing newspaper, and the loathing was mutual, to a degree that makes the debates in Israel seem like a civilized discussion between two gentlemen over a cup of tea at five in the afternoon, before discussing the results of the Ascot horse races.

The best line of defense was (again, as mentioned) to prove that it was a 'crime passional', a crime of passion, which was indeed committed, but it was committed because the madame could not control her emotions, and that on a romantic or honorable basis as a respectable mademoiselle. The problem was twofold, or perhaps threefold. First, the lady shot, on the very day she had specially bought a gun and practiced using it, an editor who had published letters to her husband – but clearly not the letters its.

Second, as mentioned, there is again disagreement about how much French courts have been willing to give women the protection of 'creme passionale.' I can't really decide between the opinions, but at the very least there was reason to be concerned.

And third, the conservative right and the left performed a decent role reversal in their approach to the trial. The French left, which was mostly in favor of more equality for women, claimed that this was a gullible woman who was not responsible for her actions and should be entitled because it is impossible to expect a delicate and irrational creature like a woman to be fully responsible, while the French conservative right, which was mostly against the equality in question in the form accepted by the left, claimed that this was a cold-blooded murderer who was aware of her actions, just like a man. Let us recall that women's suffrage in France was granted in 1944. And that we are thirty years earlier.

So what do we do? The Kayo family's solution was a legal battle alongside a public campaign, and money. A lot of money. A lot of it.

On the legal side, all of France followed the divorce trial of Joseph Caillot from his wife Bertha. No, I wasn't confused. If you had attended the trial, you might have been confused yourself and thought that what was at issue here was Caillot's divorce from his first wife, and not the murder committed by his second wife. A whole pile of even more distinguished witnesses were called to testify, terrible filth was abounded, and there was much rejoicing.

And why so? Because Henriette Cailloux's line of defense was that in light of the publication of the "Your Yosselle" letter intended for Bertha, Henriette realized that Bertha was in possession of a cache of incriminating letters, and she was so afraid that Le Figaro would next publish embarrassing letters between her and her Yosselle while he was married to Bertha, and would harm her and her 19-year-old daughter, who would have to hear all the juicy stories that were currently being revealed on the witness stand, in all their details and grammar. And so the blood went to her head, and she lost her ability to judge.

And what about the shooting? Six times? Well, she bought the gun to scare Klamet and that was it, but when she got there, being a woman, etc., she went into a fit of rage, lost her free will, and committed a violent act without being aware of it. In other words, she unintentionally pulled the trigger, and then unintentionally pulled it five more times.

In front of them, Charles Chenault, the lawyer for the Calmet family, tried to use the story of the letters to prove that this was a treacherous couple and that the main victim here was actually Bertha, and since this was a treacherous couple, mercy was out of place. The fact that divorce was still a subject of moral debate in French society helped him.

The two incriminating letters were read in full in court, and shocked every educated Frenchman and woman, who could not conceive of the idea of ​​such things being presented in public, and therefore refrained from reading them. More than five times. Every hour. And of course it would be unthinkable, even if they read them, to talk about it. Except with family members. And friends. And relatives. And the newspaper seller. And the one who walks the dog. And all the inhabitants of the Loire in alphabetical order. What a great scandal!

Bertha did indeed become a victim in the trial, but specifically, of shawarma. Unlike what Schnou had expected, she was thoroughly fried on the witness stand, and she was a match for his goals. The hostility between her and Joseph Caillot was open and evident. The facts were that Caillot had been at least a year since he married her before he began another affair, and he had not bothered to show up to her social events while they were married.

But Bertha was not a good witness; she was cold (not as emotional as a good woman should be), irritable (something that worked well for Madame Caillot, less so for the former Madame Caillot), and aggressive (not feminine at all!).

Thus, although one of the letters Joseph wrote to Henriette included the sentence “One day I may win my [Berta] election,” but “in no case can I do anything before the election,” which shows Caillot as an apparently treacherous scoundrel whose timing of his divorce was influenced by political considerations (I would have felt more sorry for Berta if it weren’t for the case of Al Daft Etfuch), he still managed to launch an attack in which he blackened Berta’s character.

Bertha, Caillot implied – and more than implied – was not worthy of someone like him. She lacked the qualities to be a good wife to a politician like him; and all this in contrast to Henriette, who was of his class, and of a character suitable to be his wife. Implicitly there is some argument here about the damage that would have been caused to Henriette by the disclosure of the letters, since her status was higher than Bertha's.

Caillot also humiliated his ex-wife by mentioning the money she received in the divorce settlements while she was “pennyless when she entered my house” (Bertha received in the divorce settlements a fixed sum of 18,000 francs per year plus investments of 210,000 francs; the annual payment was equivalent to the annual salary of a director general of a government office. Caillot also claimed that she received half of his fortune, and it seems that he lied slightly). These statements were too much for the audience, who booed him.

To sum up, the defense attorney, Henriette, claimed that she was so afraid of the embarrassing letters being exposed in public (oh my, look how embarrassing they are!) that she temporarily lost her mind and killed Calmet. A clear case of passion, of an unhappy woman who feared for her status and, above all, for her public honor. And in France, everyone knows what public honor is and what the gap between private rooms and what happens outside is. After all, only 15 years earlier, the President of the Republic Félix Faure had managed to die in the arms of a young lover married to someone else, and still get a respectable and incredibly fake cover of his death in the popular Petit Journal.

And outside the courtroom? Outside, Mr. Caillot invested a lot of money in buying sympathetic media, which would help promote his story in the way he wanted. This had planned consequences for the trial, and somewhat less planned consequences for France in the First World War.

Part 3: War

As mentioned in the previous section, the defense attorney formulated a defense strategy that included focusing the trial specifically on Mr. Caillot's ex-partner, with whom he cheated on his current partner, on the emotional turmoil that forced his current partner to shoot his editor (although she had no intention of shooting him at all and the trigger was accidentally pulled six times), and on such emotional testimony from Caillot, who spoke of his love for Henriette and her respect, that an English reporter claimed that such a dramatic performance in England could only be seen in a theater - a French theater.

But apart from appealing the lawsuit, Mr. Caillot didn't just put his hand in his pocket, he put his hand in his pocket, took out a lot of francs and with them financed a decent journalistic campaign on his behalf. Of course, the right-wing press could not be mobilized in his favor - after all, Mrs. Caillot had fired the editor. הA right-wing newspaper, and Mr. Caillot was not particularly popular there even before.

But in France at that time there was no shortage of people who could be bought or made an offer they wouldn't want to refuse. So Mr. Caillot went about scattering his fortune in the newspapers and bought himself positive publicity. Of particular importance to his case was the fortune he scattered on the weekly Le Bonnet Rouge (The Red Bonnet) and its colorful editor Miguel Almereyda.

He chose the name Almerida for himself because when you pronounce the letters in French, it says "everything is shit," and in the past he has been in prison several times for these and other activities, such as calling for draft refusal, praising rebellion, planning sabotage, possessing illegal weapons, and if we believe the official charges – also trafficking in stolen goods.

But by the early 1920s, Almeriida and his newspaper La Guerre sociale (The Social War) had become more moderate, in the sense that they generally no longer called for violent revolution, and had gained a wider readership. However, it has been argued that Almeriida could still, at short notice, bring as many as four thousand people into the streets ready to fight the police or right-wing demonstrators.

At the end of 1913, with great timing, Almeriida founded the satirical weekly "La Bona Rouge," which was a clear ideological enemy of the royalist right-wing of Le Figaro and its late editor, and its publication, of course, required money.

And Caillot poured in money. So much money that the Bonaventure Rouge could afford to turn from a weekly into a daily, Almerida could afford to finance a lavish lifestyle, and provide Caillot with Corsican bodyguards.

In exchange for this money, the newspaper published news on the left and the right supporting Caillou, and Almeriida led a (funded) and enthusiastic crowd of supporters in court, which was not at all like the court you imagine, except that in your court two of the judges almost challenged each other to a duel, the witnesses screamed at each other, the word subjudice is of course unfamiliar to anyone, and the defendant's husband claims without any factual basis that the murdered man, under the guise of an advertising budget, received a bribe from the Hungarian government, with which it is clear that France will soon be at war.
Outside the courthouse, by the way, it was no longer quiet: there were several riots, riots, and beatings between Cayo's supporters and his opponents.

The efforts bore fruit, and on July 28, 1914, the twelve jurors entered the room. Most of them were avowed supporters of Cailloux, chosen at the beginning of the trial at random from six thousand Parisians, and their names were kept in a closed and sealed box, which, quite by chance, fell when it was brought to court, so that the fact that the seals were broken did not arouse any suspicion, of course, and of course did not arouse any allegations that Mr. Cailloux had paid for the whole thing to happen.

It did not take the jury long to reach a decision: in less than an hour they came out and announced – eleven to one – that Mrs. Caillot was acquitted. “Bravo, jurors!” the “Bon Rouge” exulted. “Despite the scandals, the legal attacks, and even the open threats, the Seine jury did justice. Anyone who saw Mr. Caillot on the stand… [saw] a man of rare qualities… more than anyone else, he is a *leader*” (emphasis in original).

Others were less enthusiastic: In front of Kayo's house, when he threw a victory party for his friends, a large crowd gathered shouting "Death to Kayo," and an angry crowd threw stones at Kayo and his wife several times in the following days.

But within a few days, Paris was forced to turn its attention to another, somewhat less glamorous event: on August 3, 1914, German soldiers crossed the border into Belgium; before long, they would also arrive in France. The legal matters disappeared from view. Caillot himself, who was expected to return to the political arena if his wife was acquitted, did not do so, because his conciliatory approach towards Germany became a little less popular with the outbreak of war; he and his partner moved to the south of France.

As for Almerida, the supporter of Franco-German reconciliation, the ardent anti-monarchist and anti-militarist… he continued to publish his newspaper without interruption. And there was a fear of interruption: he, like many others on the French radical left, was listed in the “B folder” (or “B drawer”) of the French intelligence service, as someone who should be arrested immediately in the event of war to prevent subversion (or espionage).

However, at the end of July 1914, when it was clear that war was inevitable, he was not arrested; instead, he was visited by the French Minister of the Interior, Louis-Jean Malvay (Louis-Jean Malvy), a close associate and protégé of Caillot. The combination of Almerida’s position in the French radical left plus his connections with Caillot (and probably, through him, with Malvy himself) led to Malvy coming to consult with Almerida. Not only did Malvy leave the meeting with the unsurprising recommendation not to arrest the people on the list, but during the meeting he made Almerida a proposal: if the people on the list did not cause trouble (including, and especially, Almerida himself), then not only would they not be arrested, but the French Interior Ministry would finance the “Bon Rouge” from its secret budget.

This was not exactly blackmail on Malvi's part, because Almerienda held the cards: neither Malvi nor Cayo wanted it to be revealed after the war began that they had previously financed a newspaper that was in favor of appeasement with the enemy, or that they had connections to those arrested for subversion against state security. A widespread arrest of the people of "File B" would probably have led to exactly this result.

Moreover: Mulvey meant that by institutionalizing the left-wing critique of the "Bone Rose" on the war and the government, he could avoid violent opposition to the government from the left. To paraphrase Lyndon Johnson's famous adage, Mulvey preferred that his enemies be inside the tent and drink inside.

Not surprisingly, the offer was accepted.

The price was indeed paid: Malvi was hung up on by some police official who was the only one (apart from Almerida, that is) who thought that it was not necessary to arrest everyone on the list, and recommended that the government act accordingly, since that was the opinion of the professionals. Moreover, he ordered not to arrest Even one From those listed in the file, except for 'foreigners registered as spies'.

The “Bonne Rouge” announced in a headline that “the government will not use File B” (apart from “subiodica,” the term “information security” apparently did not have a suitable translation into French), and issued a passionate and short-lived patriotic sermon: “Brother socialists, let us forget the ‘Internationale’ and our red flag. Our new song is the ‘Marseille’ and the flag is the Tricolor!”

It wasn't long before Almerienda returned and was involved in contacts with all sorts of dubious elements, not necessarily political: for example, he abandoned a campaign the newspaper led against alcohol consumption and its destructive consequences when a major manufacturer began paying the newspaper. One could understand him: quite a bit of money was needed to finance his expensive car, an apartment for each of his lovers, and other expenses that were unavoidable in reality.

As for the French government, it accepted Malvy's recommendation and for three consecutive years from the outbreak of the war it hardly used the emergency measures it had planned against internal political subversion, and gave free rein to particularly lively debate – including allowing free action by socialists who maintained certain ties with their German colleagues, including anarchists who continued their opposition to the state, and other such unruly elements.

It is commonly argued that this had a severe impact on French morale, which was subject to incessant preaching of defeatism (although it must be said that the level of the French command and the terrible number of losses in the war contributed to this, as I think), to propaganda financed by the Germans that was spread through their friends from before the war or third parties (sometimes innocent and sometimes less so), and to subversion disguised as patriotism, that is, a style of articles in which they explain how strong Germany is and how weak France is and how excellent the German command is and how bad the French one is, and talk about the obligation to fix this for the sake of France, but the emphasis and message is on 'France has no chance.' This policy apparently also had an impact on the widespread mutinies in the French army in 1917, which, among other things, broke out not only because of the terrible bloodshed, but also because of political incitement among the recruits.

Almerida himself was arrested in 1917 but soon committed suicide in prison, in a manner that was incredibly convenient for all involved. His paper's financial director, Émile-Joseph Duval, who also wrote for the paper under a pseudonym, was arrested on his way back from Switzerland with too much money that a German agent had transferred to him for the paper (he himself lived very modestly), tried for treason and receiving money from Germany, and executed in 1918.

Caillot also spent some time in prison for treason but was acquitted after the war. Many others who were to be arrested in 1914 were arrested in 1917, when mutinies in the French army and the instability of the French political system during the war led France to decide that the previous system of administration was no longer working, and to a dramatic change in policy towards political debate and suspicion of subversion.

And so the six bullets fired by Madame Caillet had a significant impact on the internal politics of France, on its ability to present a unified policy during the war, and on the internal subversion efforts to which the Germans contributed as best they could –

And all this, as the jury ruled, without her even intending to shoot!