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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 Rogol. First of all, I want to say a big welcome to everyone who's new, listening or reading Broad History. I did a cross post with my friend John Elledge last week that brought in a bunch of new people. Instagram is booming. TikTok was booming. You might have found me that way. Either way, welcome. I'm thrilled to have brought in the community. If you want to let me know who you are. I'm easily findable on all the socials or you can email me issaroadhistory.com I'd love to know who's listening. I also want to say a big thank you to members and donors who make it possible for me to do this. We're at just about the point that at least Broad History is not costing me in software cost, we're about COVID in software cost. It's just not paying for any of my time yet. But that will come. And I realize 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 want to thank all of you individually. Here's the shout out. Jessica, Caroline, Danielle, Mikael, Hannah, Naomi, Janet, Caroline, Alexandra, Ron, Catherine, 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 because we're about to take over the world. And also a thank you to donors. Kate 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@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. Cannot do it without you. Thank you so much. I'm really excited about the guest I have coming up on the show. I want to 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 going to be a fun one you want to tune in for. We're also going to have Megan Kate Nelson talking about the American west and Myth 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 Hayley Rubenhold. You might know her from her incredibly best selling book the Five. She looked at the history of 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. So I'm really, really excited to be talking to her as well. So that's what's coming up this week. However, I am taking a break, but not because I have something for you. I as I mentioned in the newsletter last week, I'm graduating. I'm officially going to 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 here we go. We're going to 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 going to 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. Tuesday, May 4, 1897. Fabienne Boully has been entrusted to an old family friend for the afternoon. The Little girl is to accompany Madame Legrand to the Bazaar de la Charite, the annual month long charity sale where all of Parisian high society is sure to be seen selling or shopping to fund Catholic orphanages and hospitals. The place is packed. The Pope's envoy was just here. There are duchesses and countesses and marchionesses everywhere you look, even a princess. Charity is mostly a woman's job. Fabienne looks to a proper little girl of her rank in a dress of Borderie anglaise 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 pennons of a fake medieval street. The organizers repurposed the theater set to dress up the temporary building they erected on a vacant lot in a chic 8 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 Habilay novel. Au chabot auxolez d' or a l' trique et file. That alone would be an education. It's a Paris Fabienne would never know. The Baron Haussman finished remodeling the French capital a generation earlier. The narrow lanes of the medieval town have given way to 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 nothing so new and promising has the real reason she has accompanied the old the cinematograph. Fabienne pulls her guardian as insistently as she dares towards the side room of the bazaar, where for 50 centimes apiece, the could see a few short films. But another of Madame Legrand's high society friend interrupts her plan. Already an elegant gentleman is 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 is one of the first people out onto the street. Outside the bazaar, passersby and workers in neighboring businesses rush to help. A groom puts out the fire in Fabien's hair with his bare hands and brings the little girl to a cafe 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, disheveled, 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 Aidme Hubert, 63 years old. Cowardly gentlemen and working class heroes. How could I not remember? Fabien told radio listeners 59 years later, though less known today, in the Bazaar de la Charite, 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 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 they really saw exclusively female? Or was something more sinister at play? The tragedy was dubbed a new Agincourt after the Hundred Years War battle when English archers slaughtered French forces. And it 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 Leclerc 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 Folard, 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 honor, the newspaper concluded. None of the offending men were named. The accusation was too bold to print. Even the investigating judge, Mr. Berthelius, 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 stopped them immediately. I am not here to investigate matters of morality or honour. I refuse to hear the name of men who showed such a lack of courage to save one's neighbors. To sacrifice oneself is not a mandate. To abandon women and girls is not against the law. The gender war turned class war. The shortcomings of gentlemen were set against the heroism of working class men. The kitchen staff at the neighboring Hotel du Palais took a sledgehammer to a barred window overlooking the back of the bazaar and pulled more than 100 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 Chevalier de la Frust. You might translate it as the Night's Jitters mocked cowardly aristocrats and clergy and celebrated working men. Don't go to drawing rooms hoping to find real men. Go to the Faubourg to see what we're made of. Today's readers may have more compassion for men who panicked or looked 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. The political storm that surrounded the fire raged. In newspaper articles, songs and sermons, the Republican press rebuked calls for national solidarity and 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 organizing a large banquet for them. Radical politician and future president Georges Clemenceau 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 burned himself. Return to his workshop without saying a word. Meditate on that if you can. Last representative of the degenerate castes and bourgeois rulers of the class spirit. Perhaps an attempt at appeasement from the authorities. Two hundred and thirty two people received medals. Policemen, firefighters, medics, stable hands, street sweepers, print shop workers, domestic servants, cooks, cafe 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 emphasize solidarity across society and a devotion of small folk. Denying the idea of class warfare, it attacked the opposing press, which, under the pretense of glorifying small folk, slandered those who weren't lucky enough to be born a plumber. Tensions reached fever pitch at a national funeral held at Notre Dame for four days after the fire, with President Felix Ford 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 traditions. The provocative speech, which turned the victims into martyrs against progress, secularism and the Republicans got Olivier fired from Notre Dame. Nonetheless, it represented a non negligible current in French conservatism, and a debate persisted for weeks, all the way to the parliamentary floor. 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 bazaar 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 seemed to relish in describing what fire did to 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 recognized 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 this spectrum, victims were sublimated as martyrs, celebrated as symbols more than individuals. The Duchess of Alenon, sister of Austrian Empress Sissy, 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 organized the evacuation. When finally there was no escape, a nun fell at her feet. Oh, Madame, 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 survivors diaries or letters to illuminate us. So did the behavior of men cause more women to die at the Bazaar de la Charite? 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 bazaar. 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 sexual. 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. An intimate tragedy. The Palais de 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 recognize 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 burnt hair, alone in the cafe 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. This was the fire that started the Victorian gender war research written and read by me, Isabelle Rogol. 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 the thoroughest retelling of the bazaar Ashaite fire that exists in English. If you're curious for bibliography, I'm happy to share it. Just email me isaadhistory.com if you want to 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 researched 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 I 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 bazaar 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 bazaar 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@broadhistory.com membership. You can also make a one time donation if that's your 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 am so grateful to the members who already support my work. That's@broadhistory.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, Isabel Hogal. I will talk to you very soon.