The fire that started a Victorian gender war

Paris, 1897. The Bazar de la Charité blaze killed 118 women and girls. Where were the men?

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Jump to:

• (00:00) - Intro
• (00:35) - Member shout-out
• (01:55) - Upcoming guests
• (03:04) - This week's story
• (04:25) -  Tuesday, May 4th, 1897: A fire at a Catholic charity sale.
• (08:13) - Cowardly Gentlemen and Working Class Heroes
• (10:43) - The "Knights Jitters"
• (11:54) - Heroes and martyrs in a political storm
• (14:32) - And women in all that?
• (16:41) - Did the behaviour of men cause more women to die?
• (17:56) - An intimate tragedy
• (18:46) - Outro

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Creators and Guests

Host

Isabelle Roughol

Journalist & public historian

What is Broad History?

The history you think you know, with women in it this time

[00:00:00] Intro
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[00:00:00]

[00:00:00] Isabelle Roughol: Hello and welcome to Broad History, a podcast about the history we think we know with women in it. This time, I'm your host, Isabelle Roughol.

First of all, I wanna say a big welcome to everyone who's new listening or reading Broad History. I did a cross post with my friend Jonn Elledge last week that brought in a bunch of new people. Instagram is booming, TikTok is booming. You might have found me that way. Either way, welcome. I'm thrilled to have broadened the community. If you wanna let me know who you are, I'm easily findable on all the socials, or you can email me, [e-mail]. I love to know who's listening.

[00:00:35] Member shout-out
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[00:00:35] Isabelle Roughol: I also wanna say a big thank you to members and donors who make it possible for me to do this.

We're just about the point that at least Broad History is not costing me in software cost. We're about covering software cost. It's just not paying for any of my time yet, but that will come. And I realise I never did a shout out to the members, which is something I've always done on my shows. So we're doing that now because we're on episode six and I can still catch up with the few members that I have.

So I wanna thank all of you individually. Here's the shout out.

Jessica, Caroline, Danielle, Michaël, Hannah, Naomi, Janet, Caroline, Alexandra, Ron, Katherine, Jacqueline, Patrick, and Bill. Thank you so much. And from now on we will shout out members in each episode, the new ones obviously, we're not doing the whole list 'cause we're about to take over the world.

And also thank you to donors. Cate is one, others are anonymous. You're all incredibly kind. Thank you for supporting this show. And if you're not a member yet, you can do that at broadhistory.com/membership. You can make a small monthly or annual donation or a donation of any amount that you like, but members get the podcast early and support independent publishing and podcasting. I cannot do it without you. Thank you so much.

[00:01:55] Upcoming guests
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[00:01:55] Isabelle Roughol: I'm really excited about the guests I have coming up on the show. I wanna tell you about them real quick for the next couple weeks. Kate Lister first is coming. She is the host of the incredible podcast, Betwixt the Sheets, and has a new book coming out about the history of female sexual pleasure. So that's gonna be a fun one you wanna tune in for. We're also gonna have Megan Kate Nelson talking about the American West and myths of the American Frontier.

And it's a bit of a taster for what I will be doing for the late spring and summer on the show, which is really exploring the American semi quincentennial, but from the perspective of women obviously. And finally, we will have Hallie Rubenhold. You might know her from her incredibly bestselling book, The Five. She looked at the history of the victims of Jack The Ripper, kind of retelling probably the most famous crime story in the history of the world, but from the perspective of the women who were the victims. And, she has another book that came out a few months ago. Again, historical true crime, but retold from the perspective of women. [00:03:00] So I'm really, really excited to be talking to her as well.

So that's what's coming up.

[00:03:04] This week's story
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[00:03:04] Isabelle Roughol: This week, however, I'm taking a break, but not, 'cause I have something for you. As I mentioned in the newsletter last week, I'm graduating. I'm officially gonna be a degreed historian and so my folks are in town for it. I'm just taking a little bit of time off to enjoy that family time. But I thought I would share with you some of the work that I did to get that degree, some of the research that I did. The story I'm sharing today is months, months of original research.

If you've been following me a while. You might have read it when I first published it in 2024, but I never read it. I never made audio of it. So if you'd rather audio, this is for you. A lot of people said they loved the story I read last week. They loved the fact that I read it. So, um, here we go. We're gonna do more of those. I just need to start writing more so I can read some more. But for this week we have a story and, bonus, it is set in Paris so you're gonna get to hear me use my French a lot.

Before I read it though, I should add that there are illustrations that are really worth it in the article itself, as well as sidebars that I could not include here, captions that have a lot of extra information. So if you're really interested in this, I strongly recommend that you go to the website, the link will be in the show notes, and you check out the written version of this as well as listen to the audio. You'll get a lot more.

The story is called The Fire That Started a Victorian Gender War. Enjoy.

[00:04:25]  Tuesday, May 4th, 1897: A fire at a Catholic charity sale.
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[00:04:25] Isabelle Roughol: Tuesday, May 4th, 1897. Fabienne Bouly has been entrusted to an old family friend for the afternoon. The little girl is to accompany Madame Legrand to the Bazar de la Charité, the annual month long charity sale where all of Parisian high society is sure to be seen selling or shopping to fund catholic orphanages in hospital. The place is packed. The pope's envoy was just here. There are duchesses and countesses and marchionnesses everywhere you look, even a princess. Charity is mostly a woman's job.

Fabienne looks the proper little girl of her rink in a dress of c and a bonnet over her impossibly long hair. But she struggles to play the part as Madame Legrand drags her from stall to stall amid the banners and pennants of a fake mediaeval street. The organisers repurposed a theatre set to dress up the temporary building they erected on a vacant lot in a chic eighth arrondissement. _Trompe-l'oeil_ paintings and drapes cover the cheap wooden walls.

A tarred awning protects shoppers from the elements. The shop fronts sound right out of a Rabelais novel – _Au Chat botté, Au Soleil d'or, A la Truie qui file..._

That alone would be an education. It's a Paris Fabienne would never know. The Baron Haussman finished remodelling the French capital a generation earlier. The narrow lanes of the mediaeval town have given way the wide boulevards running in straight lines across the capital. Goodbye disease, crime and unrest.

Everything Fabienne grows up around is new and a promise of progress, but [00:06:00] nothing so new and promising as the real reason she's accompanied the old widow, the cinematograph. Fabienne pulls her guardian insistently as she dares towards the side room of the bazaar, where for 50 _centimes_ a piece, they could see a few short films.

But another of Madam Legrand's high society friend interrupts her plan. Already, an elegant gentleman who's ringing the copper bell and ushering the last few spectators through the turnstile. The show is about to start.

Suddenly, Fabienne hears a tremendous boom. "Fireworks," the child thinks excitedly. No, fire. A cinema employee, she and the nation would later learn, struck a match too close to the projector's ether lamp. The air itself exploded. Flames now run up the walls, devouring fabric, cardboard, and dry wood. Nothing in their way until they reach the ceiling. In seconds, the tarred awning ignites and communicates the fire to the rest of the building.

Madame Legrand, stupefied by fear, holds her charge Close. Burning tar falls in a fiery rain, sticking to hats and light spring dresses, and soon turning women to torches. A droplet. Slides down Fabienne's bonnet, sets her hair on fire and burns a hole through her dress. Jolted by the pain, the girl frees herself from her guardian and runs to the front door.

She's one of the first people out onto the street.

Outside the bazaar passers-by and workers in neighbouring businesses rush to help. A groom puts out the fire in Fabienne's hair with his bare hands, and brings the little girl to a café across the road. She watches as men wearing the uniform of domestic service ram a car into the facade to open a breach. She watches another attempt to extinguish burning blouses and petticoats with a gardening hose. She watches as hundreds escape, bruised, dishevelled, some ablaze, and the structure collapses on the rest. By the time firefighters arrive, not 15 minutes later, the fire is out. There is nothing left to burn.

125 people have died. 118 of them, women and girls. One of them, Madame Legrand, born Edmée Hubert, 63 years old.

[00:08:13] Cowardly Gentlemen and Working Class Heroes
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[00:08:13] Isabelle Roughol: Cowardly Gentlemen and Working Class Heroes.

How could I not remember?" Fabienne told radio listeners 59 years later. Though less known today, the Bazar de la Charité fire was as vivid a tragedy to turn of the century Parisians as later the sinking of the Titanic.

The press was instantly captivated. One element marked the blaze as a tabloid blockbuster: the gender and class of its victims. Almost immediately, newspapers remarked on the gender imbalance. Only five men among the 125 dead.

Was the crowd that day really saw exclusively female, or was something was sinister at play?

The tragedy was dubbed a new Agincourt after the Hundred Years War battle when English archers slaughtered French forces, and it [00:09:00] seemed that not one titled family was spared the loss of a son. But this time the victims were noble women and the men were anything but.

" I saw men who seemed like raving lunatics and swung their walking sticks to carve a passage for themselves," a survivor, Mrs. van den Henvel, told a reporter the next day. The progressive newspaper _L'Eclair_ published 10 eyewitness accounts of violence, or at least inaction on the part of gentlemen. "My wife cannot complain about any men, nor can she credit them. Not one helped her escape," a wounded survivor's husband told the newspaper. The only named source, Louise Feulard, had nothing more to lose. Her husband rescued her, then ran back into the blaze for his daughter. Louise lost them both. She was roughed up by three men, she said, and she knew their names.

A young woman showed a bruise on her shoulder, a kick from a man as she was getting up from the floor. Another woman did owe her life to an unknown man. She escaped by following his footsteps as he muscled his way through the crowd. "Men more often got up with their skin than with their honour," the newspaper concluded.

None of the offending men were named. The accusation was too bold to print. Even the investigating judge, Mr. Bertulus, did not want to know:

"Whenever witnesses stray from the object of my inquiry and rail against men whose cowardice failed them, whose brutality sometimes delayed their escape, I stop them immediately. I am not here to investigate matters of morality or honour. I refuse to hear the names of men who showed such a lack of courage. To save one's neighbours, to sacrifice oneself is not a mandate. To abandon women and girls is not against the law."

[00:10:43] The "Knights Jitters"
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[00:10:43] Isabelle Roughol: The gender war turned class war. The shortcomings of gentlemen were set against the heroism of working class men. The kitchen staff at the neighbouring Hotel du Palais took a sledgehammer to a barred window overlooking the back of the Bazar and pulled more than a hundred women to safety. The cabbie Georges, the plumber Piquet, the roofer Desjardins were all spotted running into the flames time and time again, each time pulling a woman out alive.

Popular songs were quickly published. "Les Chevaliers de la frousse", you might translate it as "The Knights Jitters", mocked cowardly aristocrats and clergy, and celebrated working men. "Don't go to drawing rooms, hoping to find real men. Go to the faubourgs, to see what we're made of. some

Today's readers may have more compassion for men who panicked or look to their own safety in a terrifying situation. But in a world still strictly defined by gender and class, wealth and status were justified by a presumption of moral and intellectual superiority. If upper class men started behaving like street rabble, the whole social order was put into question.

Soon the conversation was not about the tragedy that had befallen women, but about what meaning men could assign to it.

[00:11:54] Heroes and martyrs in a political storm
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[00:11:54] Isabelle Roughol: The political storm that surrounded the fire raged in newspaper articles, songs, and sermons. [00:12:00] The republican press rebuked calls for national solidarity in mourning. They lamented that the death of high society women were marked by weeks of grief-stricken coverage, while the nation remained indifferent to lethal mine accidents that killed just as many.

For weeks, newspapers published hagiographies of working class heroes, even organising a large banquet for them. Radical politician and future president Georges Clémenceau wrote in an influential article: " See these proper young gentlemen hitting panicked women with their canes, with their boots only to cowardly run from peril. See these servant rescuers, see these workers come by chance, heroically risking their lives like the plumber Piquet, who saved 20 fellow humans and, fully burnt himself, returned to his workshop, without saying a word. Meditate on that if you can, last representative of the degenerate casts and bourgeois rulers of the class spirit."

Perhaps an attempt at appeasement from the authorities, 232 people received medals: policemen, firefighters, medics, stable hands, street sweepers, print shop workers, domestic servants, cooks, café waiters, and so on. Only 14 of the 232 were women, despite the many reports of heroic action and abnegation inside the building.

Meanwhile, the conservative press focused on remembering victims, sometimes with extreme pathos. Insisting on religious motifs of martyrdom. It noted the same rescuers, only to emphasise solidarity across society and a devotion of "small folk," denying the idea of class warfare.

It attacked the opposing press, which quote, "under the pretence of glorifying small folk slander those who weren't lucky enough to be born a plumber."

Tensions reached fever pitch at the national funeral held at Notre Dame four days after the fire. With President Felix Faure and his secularist government in the front row, Dominican preacher Marie Joseph Olivier delivered a scathing sermon: " No doubt God wanted to deliver a terrible lesson to this arrogant century," he proclaimed. "France deserved this punishment for it abandoned its tradition." The provocative speech, which turned the victims into martyrs against progress, secularism, and the Republic, got Olivier fired from Notre Dame. Nonetheless, it represented a non-negligible current in French conservatism, and the debate persisted for weeks, all the way to the parliamentary floor.

[00:14:32] And women in all that?
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[00:14:32] Isabelle Roughol: And women in all that.

Women's voices in this controversy were so few, I can literally count them. Four female columnists wrote a handful of articles.

Though the vast majority of people present at the Bazar were women, most eyewitness accounts in the press are from men. The objectification of victims began as soon as the blaze had extinguished their screams. Newspapers seem to relish in describing what fire did to [00:15:00] women's bodies with a level of scatological detail only appropriate to a forensic pathologist's report. I will spare my listeners.

They depicted families and servants stepping over charred bodies or poking at them with a stick to get a better look at a ring or a clump of hair. Many could only be recognised by a sliver of underwear left unburnt, a chance for more prurient descriptions. At the end of the scene, the woman was often named and bared for millions of readers.

At the other end of the spectrum, victims were sublimated as martyrs, celebrated as symbols more than individuals. The Duchess of Alençon, sister of Austrian empress Sissi, was the fire's most famous victim, and soon its glorious icon. A nun who survived recounted her last moments. "Go, don't worry about me, I'll be the last one to leave," she told a young woman as she organised the evacuation. When finally there was no escape, a nun fell at her feet: "oh, madam, what a horrible death." To which she responded, "Yes, but think that in a few minutes, we will see God."

The story does not say how the narrator could have seen this and yet survived herself to tell the story.

Most absent of all are not the victims, but the hundreds of survivors, some with lifelong injuries, all undoubtedly with unimaginable trauma and with stories worth telling. Contemporary press coverage mentioned many, if only to reassure society that they were safe. Then they quickly disappeared from both journalism and academic literature.

There has been no research in survivor's diaries or letters to illuminate us.

[00:16:41] Did the behaviour of men cause more women to die?
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[00:16:41] Isabelle Roughol: Did the behaviour of men cause more women to die at the Bazar de la Charité? There is, frustratingly, no convincing evidence either way.

Authorities chose not to investigate. The press was split and too partisan to be entirely reliable. We're not even sure how many people were at the Bazar, somewhere between 700 and 1500.

We do know the vast majority of the crowd were women. We know their clothes were impractical and highly flammable. We know the building was a death trap. We cannot discount individual acts of panic.

The controversy mostly died down after two weeks when _Le Gaulois_, a newspaper friendly to the upper classes, published a long investigation, exonerating the gentlemen. The Republican press then turned against the survivors accusing them of choosing their class over their sex.

"These ladies know that the individuals with whom they associate and whom they marry to their daughters are the most cowardly, the most abject, the most despicable men imaginable. But in the interest of religion and aristocracy, they will continue all the same to pretend they believe in their respectability."

They could not win.

[00:17:56] An intimate tragedy
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[00:17:56] Isabelle Roughol: An intimate tragedy. The Palais de [00:18:00] l'Industrie, just a block away. Where the bodies are laid out for identification, is a pathetic scene the next morning. Red-eyed husbands, fathers, sons and brothers walk up and down the aisles, inspecting every mutilated corpse, hoping to recognise one, two or more beloved faces. Hoping against hope not to. But it's often a female servant who cries out. She can better tell her mistress by the buckle of a boot or the stitch of a corset.

It is hours before a woman spots a little girl with burned hair alone in the café and leads her by the hand to the rallying point. As they turn the corner in view of the Palais de l'Industrie, there under the porch, Fabienne sees her father and leaps into his arms.

He had been looking for her among the dead.

[00:18:47] Outro
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[00:18:47] Isabelle Roughol: This was   "The Fire That Started a Victorian Gender War," researched, written and read by me, Isabelle Roughol.

If you're curious where a lot of these vivid details come from, it's from a retelling by Fabienne of her memories some 60 years later to French public radio, as well as a very thorough reading by me of the French press at the time. There's some academic literature as well, mostly in French. There isn't much in English. This might be thethorough-est retelling of the Bazar de la Charité fire that exists in English. If you're curious for a bibliography, I'm happy to share it. Just email me [e-mail]. If you wanna know more, first check out the website, broadhistory.com. There will be a link in the show notes to the actual article.

There are illustrations in there, floor plan that helps you kind of better understand what happened. There's a lot more that I haven't shared, in the article, because I could talk about this forever, again, as most things I research.

It was a particularly dire accident for the cinema. It almost killed the industry.

It was such a scandal that the cinema felt like a very unsafe technology. It did cause a lot of fires in the early years that almost brought down the cinema, before it really had a chance to get going.

It also completely changed fire safety. A lot of sort of fire safety rules were inspired by the absolutely disastrous fire safety conditions of the Bazar that led to so many deaths in such a short time.

I can also recommend a TV show that was on Netflix a few years ago. You might still be able to find it in some countries. It's called The Bonfire of Destiny. It is a fiction about the lives of women in Belle Epoque Paris, so that's the Victorian era of France, and the quite sexist restrictions that existed on the French bourgeoisie at the time, but mainly the first episode is a reconstruction, quite accurate and quite harrowing, of the Bazar fire. So that's something that you can check out. Again, it's called The Bonfire of Destiny.

I hope you enjoyed this reading.

If you would like to support more independent research and storytelling around women's history, you can take up membership at broadhistory.com/membership. You can also make a onetime donation if that's your [00:21:00] preference. Members get early access to the podcast, so they got to listen to this a few days ago.

All of it goes to support independent publishing and podcasting. I could not possibly do this without you, and I'm so grateful to the members who already support my work. That's at broad history.com/membership.

This was Broad History, a podcast about the history you think you know with women in it this time, and I'm your host, Isabelle Roughol I will talk to you very soon.