A Fortune in Lies

“Robbed of millions!”Footnote ¹ “Big Paris suit a swindle!”Footnote ² “None of those millions was there!”Footnote ³ These headlines dominated American newspapers on the morning of May 10, 1902. Their subject, a French woman named Thérèse Humbert, had been at the center of twenty years of lawsuits in France regarding a vast inheritance. That inheritance was kept in a locked and wax-sealed safe in Humbert’s lavish Parisian mansion. Now Humbert stood trial for fraud. Contested wills, broken betrothals, and conned creditors made for what the French prime minister Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau called “the swindle of the century” (Figure 1).Footnote ⁴

Figure 1.

Madame Thérèse (D’Aurignac) Humbert, depicted in the Washington, D.C. Evening Star, January 1, 1903. She was said to have borrowed hundreds of millions of francs from financiers and banks all across France, as well as stealing from the retirement funds of working-class Parisians.

As the story went, the peasant girl Thérèse was riding on a train in the late 1870s.Footnote ⁵ When she heard pained sounds from the next train cabin, she entered to find famed American millionaire Robert Henry Crawford suffering a heart attack. She came to Crawford’s aid, and he credited her with saving his life. Crawford died in 1881 and bequeathed to Humbert 100 million francs in his will in the form of securities. His nephews, Robert and Henry Crawford, soon appeared with a will of their own. It granted Thérèse a modest pension, then named Robert and Henry equal beneficiaries with Thérèse’s younger sister, Marie d’Aurignac, whom the millionaire wished to marry one of his nephews. The two wills were dated to the same day and signed by all the same people. What could account for this mystery?

When confronted with the two contested wills, Humbert and the millionaire’s nephews reached an agreement. If Thérèse’s sister Marie were to marry one of the brothers when she came of age, then the Humberts could keep the entire fortune. When Marie refused to marry either brother for twenty years, an extensive series of legal battles ensued. A court granted a contract of sequestration for the duration of the lawsuits. Until the suits were resolved, the 100 million-franc fortune would be locked in a safe and notarized.Footnote ⁶ Under the terms of the agreement, the Humberts could not touch any of this money under penalty of forfeiture.Footnote ⁷ Thanks to the millionaire’s will and the court contract, however, Thérèse Humbert had legal standing to borrow against the fortune using the safe’s securities as collateral – and borrow she did, to the tune of several hundred million francs. It was this fortune that served as the backdrop for twenty years of judicial jousting and a nation of bamboozled banks, all culminating in shocking headlines regarding a fictitious fortune on the morning of May 10, 1902.

This Gilded Age curiosity serves as a lens through which to evaluate the role of newspapers in mediating debates about women, gender, finance, and crime. The public turned to newspapers to read and be entertained by this sensational story about a French woman who somehow defrauded nearly every banker in France for twenty years. After the scam was exposed, an international pursuit followed, and Humbert and her family were eventually extradited for trial. At every turn, newspapers made Humbert’s ordeal into a morality tale – but a morality tale about what, exactly? Some spun the gendered angle that women should never be involved in finance in the first place, lest they turn out like Thérèse Humbert. Others emphasized the scheme’s criminality and fraudulence, amplifying the international reach of her story. Still more related to the scandal’s reliance on credit and lending to various economic crises that repeatedly rocked the financial world over the decades, arguing that Humbert’s exploitation of the nebulous credit economy was emblematic of the mercurial state of modern money. These cultural scripts played a role in how various media outlets depicted Humbert and her financial dealings.

This essay uses newspaper coverage of the Humbert swindle to explore the complex landscape of money, gender, and crime in the Gilded Age. Humbert was tried and convicted for her scam, and American newspapers covered the trial’s developments in great detail. Trials, as Wendy Gamber has rightly noted, are “narratives” that “help their audiences – jurors, spectators, and members of the reading public – grapple with larger social issues” that “may even suggest new problems – and new solutions.”Footnote ⁸ In covering the trial, these early twentieth-century newspapers not only served as public venues for information, entertainment, and social commentary, but also as a site for elucidating views on women’s place in the shifting economic and cultural landscape. Newspapers often featured sensationalized stories, especially when covering crime. Readers could not get enough of the stranger-than-fiction Humbert affair, which the Wichita Daily Eagle described as the “greatest swindle in history,” adding that the paper had “given, for months, in full, the details of the Humbert case.”Footnote ⁹ The Humbert scam’s fantastical, larger-than-life nature provided the perfect opportunity for the editors to spin a morality tale about women, money, and public scandals.Footnote ¹⁰

The story’s similarity to popular novels of the time, moreover, made the story interesting to readers. Humbert’s crime drew on cultural tropes that were thoroughly ingrained in the era’s fiction. Anthony Trollope’s The Duke’s Children and Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady, published in 1880 and 1881, respectively, both featured plots revolving around inheritances and heiresses. James’s Portrait even featured a transnational fraud in which an American heiress is swindled out of her inheritance by American expatriates living abroad. Humbert’s gigantic deception centered on her as the French heiress to an American millionaire’s wealth, fighting a protracted legal battle with the millionaire’s nephews. The similarity of these plotlines to the Humbert scheme was not lost on the newspapers themselves, which regularly remarked on Humbert in fantastical comparisons.Footnote ¹¹ The Indianapolis Journal remarked that the Humbert story constituted “a romance interminable enough to have pleased Dumas and intricate enough to have presented brilliant opportunities to a Gaboriau.”Footnote ¹² The Deseret Evening News in January 1903 called the fraud “the most gigantic swindle of the sort the world has ever known.”Footnote ¹³ A few months later, that same paper remarked that “it had all the glamour of Monte Cristo, and were Dumas living today he surely would give it a first place among his ‘Celebrated Crimes.’”Footnote ¹⁴ The New York Times reported that the story “beggars all of the astounding inventions of Dumas and Gaboriau.”Footnote ¹⁵ The Evening Star called it a “true tale that reads like a romance.”Footnote ¹⁶ The River Press announced it as “the most marvelous swindle ever devised.”Footnote ¹⁷ Finally, the fact that the fraudulent scheme ended in her arrest and imprisonment turned a sensational scandal into a rags-to-riches-to-rags-again morality tale.Footnote ¹⁸ Perhaps the case’s main draw was that it could serve multitudinous purposes as a morality tale about wily women, pecuniary peril, or cunning criminals.

The swindle’s coverage raised many important questions to the reading public, and indeed articulated a multitude of questions surrounding femininity and finance in the Gilded Age. First, newspapers and commentators nationwide, speaking through the Humbert case, wrestled with women’s participation in the financial markets and regular mechanisms of economic exchange. Gender archetypes that idealized women’s abstinence from financial matters seemed to be confounded by this woman, who scammed even the most prestigious of (male) moneylenders. Advice literature of the period disdained feminine financiers for reasons originating in essentialist gender ideologies. However, the lives of actual women, who regularly participated in the economic sphere, laid bare the messy contradictions in such beliefs. The American press covering the Humbert case thus had a fantastical case study to dissuade women from market activity, should they so choose. In so doing, the editors of these papers traded in gendered depictions of Thérèse Humbert’s appearance, deportment, and behavior, using Humbert’s scheme to moralize broadly about women in finance.

Second, an increasing economic anxiety accompanied the turn toward credit. As the average household’s indebtedness increased around the century’s end, many were leery of money’s promise and peril.Footnote ¹⁹ Imagine such a person’s surprise to see that over in France, a woman borrowed 250 million francs over twenty years based on nothing but some forged documents, raising concerns in the papers about the nebulous nature of the American economy. If an entire nation of French bankers could be swindled by one woman for decades, then was not the Gilded Age economy, with its proliferation of schemes and scammers, also subject to such exploitation?

The convergence of these two streams made for an unbelievable tale as well as a tangled set of conundrums about the economy and gender. One paper opined, “Were not the truth vouched for by the French courts it would be impossible to believe that a woman could have borrowed nearly $10 million in twenty years on such a slim story as Mme. Humbert’s. The genius with which the scheme was devised is matched only by the audacity with which it was carried through.”Footnote ²⁰ The Chicago Daily Tribune remarked, “the details of the Humbert case are so astounding as to seem impossible, and yet every word is true.”Footnote ²¹ The fact that the details of the case were so intricate only compounded the intrigue surrounding the ideological questions raised by the scam, and indeed the scammer herself: Should women participate in finance? How should the economy be structured? Who wins and loses in a financial system so vulnerable to exploitation by those possessing sufficient wealth or cunning to game the system?

This essay argues that the Humbert story’s life in American newspapers was a cause célèbre that reflected public perception of femininity and finance. In so doing, it engages several key concepts in both the New History of Capitalism as well as the historiographies of gender and finance, especially the interconnected nature of economic, legal, and social developments. Capitalism was, at one time, treated as a fixed, inevitable development in the history of humanity. The New History of Capitalism has, among other things, shown how messy and unpredictable the processes of commodification and economic development were, especially during this period. Social developments influenced and were influenced by legal frameworks, which in turn shaped and were shaped by shifting economic realities. All of these tangled realities converge in this famed French fraudster whom history has all but forgotten.

A Fictitious Fortune Found Out

The economic scale of Humbert’s swindle inspired a deluge of commentary, and the court’s contract of sequestration granted her legal standing to borrow against the fortune in the safe. Estimates varied, with contemporary papers reporting that Thérèse borrowed anywhere from 20 million to 250 million francs against the securities in the locked safe (Figure 2).Footnote ²² Twenty years of litigative escapades did nothing to abate Humbert’s spending spree. She and her husband Frédéric purchased a lavish mansion on Paris’s Avenue de la Grande Armée, and she was reputed to own an opera box, vineyards, several country homes, and a steamboat to travel between them. They became the center of the Parisian social scene, throwing lavish parties and banquets. “The money was spent in most lavish style and the Humberts were leaders in fashionable eccentricities and all the luxuries that money could purchase,” according to one report.Footnote ²³ Thérèse’s taste in fineries kept her borrowing an increasingly large sum of money, always against the securities in her elaborately locked safe. For as long as the lawsuits continued, the safe remained locked, and the Humberts kept on borrowing.

Figure 2.

A crowd awaits the opening of the Humbert safe on the Avenue de la Grande Armée. This detailed illustration appeared in a Harper’s Weekly feature about Humbert, dated January 10, 1914. Sources from the period vary in their details about the opening of the safe. Some suggest that lawyers and creditors were inside the mansion, opening the safe at its typical location, only to find it empty. Others, including this Harper’s Weekly article, say that the safe was lowered onto the street while a “jeering Paris crowd” observed the opening. The details of its contents, too, vary from source to source; some say it was utterly empty, others that it contained naught but a belt buckle; others a few coins; still others a brick. The variation in the historical record notwithstanding, most sources agree that the opening of the safe was an earth-shattering revelation that upended French financial markets and exposed the Humbert scheme for its fraudulence.

This charade finally ended in May 1902, when a judge ordered the safe to be opened to take stock of the assets. On the morning of May 9, a crowd gathered outside the Humberts’ Parisian mansion as legal officials and creditors entered, “for there is not a man, woman, or child in Paris who does not know the outlines of this strange story by heart,” the New York Times reported.Footnote ²⁴ Inside, lawyers, creditors, and judges gathered around the safe, but the Humberts themselves were nowhere to be found. Once the safe was opened, all the creditors expected to be repaid, and the Crawford-Humbert affair could be resolved. When the locks were removed and the safe was opened, however, a witness exclaimed, “There is nothing in it!”Footnote ²⁵

Over the following months, investigators and lawyers pieced together an immense web of deception, fraud, and embezzlement. There had never been an American millionaire named Robert Henry Crawford, and Humbert had never saved his life. The Brothers Crawford were a counterfeit couple, played by Thérèse’s own brothers (Figure 3).Footnote ²⁶ Both versions of the made-up millionaire’s will were forgeries. Most importantly, the vast Crawford inheritance against which Thérèse had borrowed – to the tune of a quarter of a billion francs – had always been “fictitious millions devised by an equally fictitious will.”Footnote ²⁷

Figure 3.

The whole family (clockwise from top right): Thérèse, her husband Frédéric, brother Emile, brother Romain, and daughter Eve. Many papers in the United States reproduced photographs or other depictions of Humbert and her family throughout the trial. Some articles about the scam would fill an entire broadsheet, while others would appear as brief blips under “Foreign News” sections. Her portrait was well-known to American readers whose newspapers continually reported on the trial. This photographic spread appeared in the Northern Wisconsin Advertiser, August 20, 1903.

Humbert pulled off this remarkable swindle through a combination of forgery and expert manipulation of the legal process. She first forged the wills with two different beneficiaries, and counterfeited stacks of rentes, which were French securities certificates that represented the wealth inherited from the fictitious will. Once Humbert and her brothers began their legal sparring in the courts, the court’s order of sequestration guaranteed that the scam could go on for as long as the lawsuits proceeded. With her creditworthiness established and a fictional fortune as collateral, Humbert was free to borrow indefinitely.

All these loans were made on literally nothing; the collateral against which they were guaranteed was fictitious. Humbert’s creditworthiness relied on the forged rentes – the collateral to back up the loans – remaining under lock and key due to the court’s contract. As time went on, the social status and financial health that the loans afforded made the acquisition of more loans ever easier: her existing monetary status reassured lenders. She also sometimes relied on her connections to Gustave Humbert, her father-in-law and the former French minister of justice, to comfort concerned creditors. The combination of her fiscal and familial fortitude underwrote her massive fortune. Although estimates varied, papers generally agreed that Humbert personally garnered 100 million francs.Footnote ²⁸ Meanwhile, an amount as great as 700 million francs passed through her hands in the form of loans and interest.Footnote ²⁹

The draw for the bankers was obvious: lending large amounts of money to a well-known heiress and politician’s relative promised vast sums in interest. “Of course the rates of interest charged were large and that was the reason the bankers bit so eagerly at the bait,” one remarked after the exposé.Footnote ³⁰ As some lenders were known to charge up to 60 percent interest, a multimillion-franc loan would bring back double or triple the “investment” once it was repaid, so “everybody was eager to lend money to the woman who could give such ample security.”Footnote ³¹ After the swindle was exposed, papers commented on “the amazing credulity and gullibility of the moneyed men” from whom the Humberts borrowed, arguing that this swindle even outclassed the Ferdinand Ward scheme that bankrupted former President Ulysses S. Grant.Footnote ³² As the saying goes, once the lenders were in for a penny, they were in for a pound: since their repayment was dependent on Thérèse’s victory in court, they had no choice but to keep lending her money in her fight against the (fictitious) Brothers Crawford.

“Henceforth the circle of her bankers widened wonderfully,” and there was no bank or wealthy man “from the Pyrenees [Mountains, in southern France] to the Scheldt [River, in northern France]” who had not lent her money (Figure 4).Footnote ³³ Humbert borrowed “from all classes of people – bankers, usurers, small tradespeople, and country squires,” and “her notes were freely accepted by banks.”Footnote ³⁴ Bankers had a plain financial interest in lending to someone of Thérèse’s standing: her husband was the son of the French minister of justice Gustave Humbert. Such a loan virtually guaranteed a vast monetary return with interest, which explains why “few money lenders of France were unwilling to open their coffers to so rich an heiress who paid such magnificent percentages.”Footnote ³⁵ Although the small-time lenders had less to give, they too had reason to trust in Thérèse’s creditworthiness because of both her documentation and her personal standing.

Figure 4.

“The guests were entertained thus lavishly in the hope of exploiting or of compromising them,” read the caption on this illustration showing Thérèse in her “ultra-salon,” surrounded by Parisian elites who are depicted subserviently at her beck and call. This illustration also vivifies Humbert’s supposed taste in clothing, wearing an extravagant ensemble that only a wealthy Parisian heiress could afford. Her sumptuous soirées were reputed to have attracted scholars, politicians, moneyed men, and famous cultural figures, all of whom ostensibly added to her reputation and social capital. It was this reputation on which she occasionally relied to garner more credit or stave off leery lenders expecting a payment. This illustration appeared in Harper’s Weekly, January 10, 1914.

Crucial to the scam was the fact that Thérèse had legal standing to borrow against the fictitious fortune indefinitely. A creditor might wonder why the Humberts needed loans if they had inherited millions, and why the litigation continued for twenty long years. The key lay in the injunction granted by the courts, called a “contract of sequestration.” The fortune would be sequestered, or locked away, until all lawsuits were resolved. Because there were contested versions of the millionaire’s will, the nephews and Thérèse reached an agreement: the securities would remain in Humbert’s care until her sister Marie had come of age to marry one of the brothers. In the meantime, the contract prevented the Humberts from tapping into the vast fortune. They were explicitly forbidden “from alienating, under any pretext, a single share or bond or other piece of the great fortune, or [to] change the investment of a single stock or bond or other piece,” and should the Humberts “fail in the execution of a single clause” of the agreement, they would forfeit any claims to any of the inheritance (Figure 5).Footnote ³⁶ In Thérèse’s story, Marie impertinently refused to marry either of the brothers, and with the terms of the agreement thus unsatisfied, the lawsuits continued. The court injunction demanded that the safe remain locked, giving Humbert the legal pretext to continue borrowing on the supposed funds. This threatening clause’s language of forfeiture for failure to execute any part of the contract worked “better than any other in the imaginary agreement” by giving “her grounds for action after action, and therefore for delay after delay … It explains a quarter of a century of gigantic borrowings and of successful evasions.”Footnote ³⁷

Figure 5.

“The Fund Cannot Be Touched.” The French court’s “contract of sequestration” required that the safe remain locked, and this gave the Humberts legal pretext to borrow against the fortune without ever having to open the safe or distribute any funds. The term is foreign to contemporary American jurisprudence, but the concept of sequestration essentially meant something comparable to freezing Humbert’s assets. She was technically in possession of the fortune and even had a legal standing to say that she “owned” the inheritance, but was legally barred from touching or spending any of that money under penalty of forfeiture. This gave her both the financial backing to hypothetically repay the loans, but also a plausible reason for why, if she really had this fortune sitting in her safe, she would need to borrow in the first place. This artist’s depiction appeared in the Evening Star, May 24, 1902.

Despite the massive scale and duration of her swindle, Thérèse Humbert was unknown to American newspapers until the day after her safe was found empty. She became a press celebrity overnight, with her case garnering hundreds of pages of coverage across many states. The papers “could not reel off special editions fast enough,” since they were all “immediately snapped up” in the inner districts, and when copies did make their way to outlying areas, “they were eagerly bought at three or four times their regular price.”Footnote ³⁸ The spectacle of Humbert’s scam reflected a world undergoing many metamorphoses, while its coverage served as an opportunity for the shapers of public opinion to tell Gilded Age Americans how they ought to feel about money, crime, and the place of women in an ever-changing world.Footnote ³⁹ Thérèse Humbert’s chicanery captured a moment of multifarious misgivings about men, women, and money, and the newspapers were all too happy to recount it.

A French Fraud Abroad

The breadth of the Atlantic Ocean did nothing to abate the coverage that this French story received in America. Hundreds of newspaper articles kept readers informed of every development in the case. It was covered in papers large and small, urban and rural, and in all fifty states and territories that would eventually comprise the United States.Footnote ⁴⁰ The police searched for the Humberts for months, finally finding them in hiding in Madrid in late 1902.Footnote ⁴¹ After the Humberts were extradited to Paris, American newspapers constantly speculated on the forthcoming trial. This led the Topeka State Journal to remark that “every newspaper reader is familiar with the so-called Humbert-Crawford litigation.”Footnote ⁴² When the Humberts appeared before the Parisian courts in 1903, U.S. papers printed lengthy accounts of the courtroom antics. Even after the family was convicted, it and its members still popped up in headlines alerting the public to her prison illnesses, announcing the sale of their mansion to a touring club, chronicling Thérèse and Frédéric’s daily life behind bars, and noting their eventual release.Footnote ⁴³

Press coverage of the Humbert swindle is a useful vehicle for examining the ferment that the case caused, and the ideologies and anxieties that undergirded that reporting. Although the lauded goal of journalistic “objectivity” may be the cause of much ferment in the present day, journalism historically did not always aspire to that standard. The famous “paper wars” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the rise of “yellow journalism” – in which ever more detailed, wildly sensational stories were printed to boost sales – attest to the Gilded Age newspaper’s “capacity both to entertain and to inform.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Some of the facts in any given story may well have been true, but the contents of stories could sometimes be exaggerated, speculative, or dubiously sourced. Although it is highly unlikely that William Randolph Hearst ever actually uttered the phrase “you furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war,” the penny press paper wars of this period traded in larger-than-life stories featuring a combination of news reporting, social commentary, and an entertaining mode of presentation.Footnote ⁴⁵ Crime stories began to receive larger coverage in the urban papers, and the more shocking details that the paper could provide, the better it sold and the more the readers were entertained. Indeed, “sensational style and lurid themes … characterized crime reporting” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote ⁴⁶ The popular press and its readership had a hunger for stories that touched on topics of morality and legality, and the editors were in a position to work out their ideas through publication.

Although large papers like the New York Times, New York Journal, Chicago Daily Tribune, and San Francisco Chronicle could afford to produce their own stories about Washington politics and international affairs, small-town papers could not so easily employ writers in faraway towns or as foreign correspondents. For this reason, press agencies were crucial for filling local papers with national and international news.Footnote ⁴⁷ Many small-town papers, therefore, featured reruns of similar or identical stories on the same subject as the papers from several counties or states away, lending nationwide amplification to individual stories.Footnote ⁴⁸ The Humbert story’s international reach is in no small part due to the decisions of both press agencies and local papers to reiterate the swindle’s details over months and years, not the least reason for which being that the story’s lurid twists and turns sold papers.

The Thérèse Humbert case, with its larger-than-life figures, massive sums of money, and an ambitious crime that lasted for two decades, provided newspaper editors with a perfect recipe for both high circulation and moralizing messages. One who particularly did not like wealthy capitalists could reprint Humbert stories praising her ingenuity against the elitist bankers whom she swindled.Footnote ⁴⁹ Others who were uneasy about a woman’s participation in the financial system had plenty of angles to undermine Humbert’s femininity and her “bravado” in joining the ostensibly masculine world of high finance.Footnote ⁵⁰ For these reasons, coverage on Humbert could be as moralistic or as entertaining as any given editor preferred.Footnote ⁵¹

Sparring over Separate Spheres

The cultural discourse around gender was fraught. On the one hand, many commentators in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era upheld a gender ideology that idealized women’s abstinence from monetary matters. On the other hand, women in this period participated in commerce, bought and sold household goods, and invested money of their own. This fact was well-known even to male bankers and financiers, who routinely remarked on women’s participation in the market economy in derisive terms. Despite many women’s experiences in the market, the American press was rife with gendered assumptions about a woman’s ability to buy and sell, and such outlets traded in gendered ideas to moralize about female financiers. Thérèse Humbert was no exception, and the public spectacle of her scheme provided an archetypal opportunity for expressing misgivings about women, finance, and criminality.

On the domestic level, most wives and mothers carried the responsibility of managing household budgets and making purchases. Relief workers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries regularly gave monetary assistance directly to women, on the (often true) assumption that men would drink or gamble it away. Many women, therefore, participated in the regular mechanisms of exchange when it came to purchasing food and other household necessities. Women from middle- and upper-class families, moreover, had often inherited or saved money, and these women then sought investment opportunities.Footnote ⁵²

Women venturing into the world of investment were often the victims of scams, not perpetrators. Commentators compared women to innocent “lambs to be fleeced” by male financiers, trading in gendered stereotypes to paint women as targets of swindlers, not as fraudsters themselves. The public in general, and women in particular, lacked good access to reliable sources of financial information, and laws governing investments were so vague as to be virtually useless. Many assumed that even educated women could not perform the most basic of financial tasks, like withdrawing or depositing money at a bank.Footnote ⁵³ On account of this gendered logic, the wealthy young men employed by some investment firms specifically targeted the fortunes of “unprotected women” who lacked male oversight. One particularly brazen Chicago firm sought control of women’s finances “by a system of flattery and attention,” a task that apparently required only “a few lunches, a theater party, a ride or other attentions of like nature.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Once a firm gained control of the woman’s fortune, they could freely spend it as a so-called slush fund and then morosely inform the woman that her investment had been lost in a turn of the market. Since few had access to any information about markets, how would anyone verify such a story? Women were therefore warned to stay away.

Although there was a general tilt against women’s participation in the supposedly masculine space of finance, the picture of gender ideologies was far from uniform. A minority of sources remarked that women had the capacity to be even better financiers than men. One New York stockbroker admitted that “a number of women are sharp as tacks” in the financial market.Footnote ⁵⁵ Pointing to an essentialized notion of femininity and gender, the New-York Tribune remarked that “women are the best detectors of forged notes and of debentures with altered numbers” because “the delicate tact of their fingers, combined with fine intuition, helps them.”Footnote ⁵⁶ At the same time, women who did venture into the economic sphere were often the source of consternation from male bankers. “A woman is a nuisance anywhere outside of her own home,” remarked the same New York stockbroker, “particularly in a broker’s office … Business instinct is not innate in the woman.” Another experienced banker believed that “the ordinary woman is a laughable, pitiable spectacle when she dabbles in stock trading.”Footnote ⁵⁷ The New York Times derisively remarked in 1880 that “ladies of large and independent means … had often met with losses because their facilities for information were not equal to those of men.”Footnote ⁵⁸ When women did participate, commentators usually marked them out as incompetent or unintelligent. In a jab from the Philadelphia Inquirer, a woman named Mrs. Cobwigger – a trope character of a foolish woman – tells her husband that she is withdrawing her money from one bank and putting it into another. “Do you think it is a safer bank?” the husband asks; the wife replies, “There is no comparison. They give you check books with lovely gilt edges.”Footnote ⁵⁹ The snippet portrays women in finance as akin to a foolish wife who can be lured by “lovely gilt edges” on a checkbook, thereby suggesting by association that all women are similarly doomed to economic folly.

A handful of women defied the stereotype to become financial swindlers themselves (Figure 6). When this occurred, commentators had a difficult time sidestepping gender ideologies to explain it. Guardians of these ideals often answered the conundrum by impugning or “queering” the femininity of the woman in question: a female who ventured into the market ran the risk of becoming “unsexed” by her contact with the financial world. In this framework, women were dainty, feminine, passive creatures, whereas men were brave, active risk-takers. The market was a cutthroat place where only bold gambits yielded results, making it a place naturally suited for men and not for women. A woman who participated in the market, therefore, ran the risk of becoming “unsexed” or insufficiently feminine. By bringing herself into that aggressive, risk-taking space, she corrupted her femininity and became “masculine” by association. Although this criticism applied particularly to female swindlers, any woman who achieved success in business might be pejoratively known by this term; if success in business required traits not associated with femininity, then a woman who achieved such success must be unsexed.Footnote ⁶⁰

Figure 6.

This illustration, appearing in the Evening Star, May 24, 1902, purports to show Humbert bribing a bank manager with 900,000 francs, presumably to persuade him to lend her more money. Commentators on the case during the trial were not blind to the motivation for lending her money: her enormous loans promised massive sums back in interest. They trusted her, moreover, because she had political clout and an apparent fortune locked away in her wax-sealed safe. If all else failed, she could appeal to her connections to the French minister of justice, Gustave Humbert, who happened to be her father-in-law. Although the sources vary on whether Minister Humbert was personally involved with securing loans or intervening politically on Thérèse’s behalf – with some sources bordering on wild, unfounded speculation in their accusations of the same – it is clear from the majority of sources that Thérèse herself frequently invoked his name to calm concerned creditors.

Degeneracy in Body and Mind

Commentators needed to make sense of women who defied gender ideals. Commentators thus portrayed women who pulled off swindles as vicious criminals with ghastly personal lives and horrifically malformed appearances. This personification very much applied to Thérèse Humbert’s situation. To uphold gendered standards of femininity, Humbert became a scapegoat for those seeking to explain how a woman could have been so vicious and “masculine.” Depictions of Humbert traded in exaggerated physiological and psychological descriptions of her vulgarity, because the physical bodies of immoral people were thought to reflect their heinous acts. Such coverage reflected the reigning criminological philosophy of the time, known as degeneration theory. This outlook held that criminals and underhanded people were physiologically corrupted (or “degenerated”) by their crimes; their bodies ostensibly bore the mark of their misdeeds. This theory explained why stereotypical criminals were brutish, malformed, unpleasant-looking people, whereas upright citizens were beautiful, kind, and well-mannered. Since beauty also carried associations of femininity, a criminal woman could be “read” as uglier and more degenerate, and therefore as unsexed or insufficiently feminine.Footnote ⁶¹

In depicting Thérèse Humbert as “degenerate,” the message was clear: by demonizing this woman who was out swindling and committing crimes as being physiologically degenerate, the commentator could emphasize that her behavior was unacceptable, and therefore ward off other women from “behaving badly,” lest they end up like Humbert. Although such portrayals acknowledged that her biological sex was female, their descriptions of her physicality and behavior interpreted her femininity as having been corrupted by her foray into the world of finance, thus rendering her unsexed. One article said that even her husband Frédéric “spoke of [Thérèse] as the one who wore the breeches,” and he himself was known to all of Paris as “his wife’s husband.”Footnote ⁶²

The newspaper’s remarks on Humbert’s appearance reflect the influence of degeneration theory. Many reports and portraits depicted her as “fat, fair, and forty” and remarked on her “stoutness,” “obesity,” and “ample waist,” traits that marked her out as degenerate (Figure 7).Footnote ⁶³ “Fat people should be regarded with most suspicion,” argued several articles; swindlers and dishonest people were ostensibly more obese than honest people, because such an appearance “is the result of dealing dishonestly with one’s stomach.”Footnote ⁶⁴ The article named Humbert as an example of an “embonpoint combined with dishonesty,” explicitly connecting Thérèse’s physical body to her scheming ways.Footnote ⁶⁵ The New-York Daily Tribune spoke of her as “pale, haggard and worried,” with a “short, snappy voice, pitched to a high, whining key,” while “her diminutive eyes glared ferociously, like those of a wildcat.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Later that week, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle claimed that Humbert, “the most notorious swindler of the age, is on the wrong side of forty. She is fat, coarse featured and vulgar in carriage and deportment.”Footnote ⁶⁷ What degeneration theory could not explain, however, was why a person only “looked criminal” after they had been found out. For twenty years, Thérèse Humbert was well-regarded by the élite of Parisian society, and people during that time did not suggest that she looked like a degenerate criminal.Footnote ⁶⁸ It was only after her arrest and trial that her female body was read as an unsexed, pseudomasculine, criminal body.

Figure 7.

“Fat, fair, and forty,” “stoutness,” “obesity,” and “ample waist” were descriptors used to denigrate Humbert after her scam was discovered. These labels played on a notion of degenerate people’s misdeeds being reflected in their weight. Humbert herself was never seen as having a “degenerate” body in the twenty years before her scam was exposed, showing the shortcomings in degeneration theory’s “reading” of criminal bodies as markers of vice. This photograph was reproduced in The Kalispell (Montana) Bee, December 22, 1903.

Femininity and “Hysteria” on Trial

Although the press depicted Humbert’s body as masculine, unsexed, or degenerate, another aspect of her behavior was always portrayed as feminine: her outbursts and erratic behavior in the courtroom. Popular discourse considered men to be rational and intelligent by their nature, whereas women were thought to be irrational, illogical, and “hysterical.” Newspapers constantly ran updates about the Humbert trial, including recounting each day’s events from the courtroom. These accounts often posited the rational male judge, jurors, and spectators as counterpoints to the hysterical, angry Thérèse Humbert.

One widely reprinted article noted that “Mme. Thérèse Humbert displayed her usual bravado” on her first day in court.Footnote ⁶⁹ Even upon her first entry into the courtroom, Humbert “haughtily … surveyed the crowd with a scornful air,” testifying “ramblingly” and “dramatically” before the jury handed down its verdict.Footnote ⁷⁰ A colorful Atlanta headline remarked, “String of Lies, Woman Shrieks: Mme. Humbert Won’t Keep Quiet During Trial.”Footnote ⁷¹ Another newspaper declared, “Mme. Humbert Was Talkative, Creates a Scene in the Court Room by Accusing the Judge of Prejudice.”Footnote ⁷² Still another quoted a doctor who claimed that Humbert had suffered from syncope, a diagnosis most frequently applied to “hysterical” women. The doctor reported that Humbert was “appallingly loquacious, and appeared to be the victim of hallucinations.”Footnote ⁷³

As the trial progressed, the “Woman’s Mendacious Effrontery” was said to routinely delay the proceedings.Footnote ⁷⁴ Several papers announced that “spectators were greatly amused” by Thérèse Humbert’s “outbursts” and “constant interruptions.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Several jurors interviewed after the verdict claimed that she may well have been acquitted, if not for her “rambling statements” and “wild” accusations that “irritated” the judge and jury.Footnote ⁷⁶ Others reported that she “broke down” after the sentencing into a “crying spell.”Footnote ⁷⁷ The August 11, 1903 headline from the Indianapolis Journal put the finest point on it: “Mme. Humbert Angry: She Interrupts the Court at Paris with Loud Declamations. Hearing in the Famous Fraud Cases Develops Little of Interest Except the Madame’s Expletives.”Footnote ⁷⁸ These articles reflect a dominant gender ideology that counterposed men’s supposed rationality and logic against feminine irrationality and, in Humbert’s case, insanity.

Even when the papers did not impugn Thérèse Humbert’s femininity, they routinely remarked on her clothing, face, and deportment as a source of vivid illustration, spicing up textual accounts of her “hysterics” with flamboyant descriptions of her physiognomy and wardrobe. One report referred to her as “low-browed, shock-haired, [and] yellow-skinned.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Her photograph accompanied many stories about her, and some noted her “beautiful teeth, black piercing eyes, [and] delicate yet plump hands.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Another noted that she sported “a becoming steel-gray gown and a dainty round hat, bearing a cut steel ornament and a cluster of white roses.”Footnote ⁸¹ When she was released from prison, the New-York Daily Tribune remarked that “she was terribly worried about her beauty, which she feared prison life had spoiled,” while the Columbia Herald noted that she wore “a black tailor made dress, with a black hat adorned with a short upright feather.”Footnote ⁸² The most notable piece came from the Indianapolis Journal. Detailing Humbert’s first appearance in court, it was a prime example of how her ornate attire and enthralling appearance were the subject of extensive analysis in the papers:

She had on a plain black tailor-made dress, a boa of silver fox, a flat toque straw hat … draped with a drawn-up veil … her eyes, the finest pair of eyes, perhaps, that ever shone in a woman’s head, hypnotized the bench, bar, press and all others present … She could give lessons in deportment to no matter what Empress, Queen or actress aspiring to play regal or heroic parts. She used her small, dark fan as though in her box at the opera. A card case hung on a finger of her right hand. This little touch gave her a ladylike air … The eyes are very full, singularly deep, dark, luminous, flashing fire, expressing indomitable, masterful will and commanding attention to anything she chooses to say.Footnote ⁸³ (Figure 8)

Figure 8.

Pictorial representations of Humbert often accompanied stories about her, such as this one from the Chicago Daily Tribune on May 26, 1902. Humbert was widely reputed to have expensive taste in “fineries,” including jewelry, clothing, and hats. The diamond merchants of Paris not only ostensibly lent her money, but also were said to have sold her jewels that she wore and later pawned for more money. Some depictions, like this one, featured her in elaborate attire to illustrate her supposed exquisite wealth and luxury, while others focused on her physiognomy as a source of moral commentary.

At other times, Humbert’s behavior was extensively described as a source of derision and laughter, not as an awe-inducing performance of power and class. “Her calmness in putting off her disclosures excited outbursts of laughter in which judges and spectators joined,” opined the Atlanta Constitution. When the testimony began to cast her unfavorably, Humbert “feigned illness” before “rousing herself from her supposed sick condition” to make another exclamatory denial of the evidence against her.Footnote ⁸⁴ A doctor testified that she had “suffered a lengthy attack of syncophe [sic],” which impacted her ability to withstand the trial.Footnote ⁸⁵

These vivid descriptions of Humbert’s demeanor, featuring breathless astonishment held aghast at her “unblushing audacity” as well as derision directed at the delusional nature of her deception, speak volumes to how she transgressed those same commentators’ gender expectations, thereby earning their criticism.Footnote ⁸⁶ Gender ideologies and their subversion thus played a role in how the story of the “short, stout, plain little woman” was covered.Footnote ⁸⁷ The writers played on depictions of Humbert’s physiognomy and livery to depict her as especially feminine (i.e., hysterical), despite simultaneously decrying her supposed masculinity. Even Humbert’s daughter Eve (or Eva) was the subject of passing commentary; some newspapers speculated that Eve was not a girl at all but was in fact a boy who “passed” as a girl to seduce wealthy men into lending her (or his) mother money (Figure 9).Footnote ⁸⁸

Figure 9.

The Humberts’ daughter was variously reported to be named either Eve or Eva. Although many sources reported that she was in fact a girl, others made Eve’s gender the subject of some speculation. The roles of Humbert’s family in general, including her husband, daughter, and her father-in-law, are debated in various publications. Her father-in-law, the French minister of justice Gustave Humbert, was accused by some of politically intervening to obstruct the investigation into Thérèse’s financial conduct. Her husband Frédéric is largely depicted as a gaunt man with artistic talent but limited intelligence. Her daughter, however, was scandalously depicted by some as a boy who “passed” or posed as a girl in order to seduce wealthy men with the promise of sex in order to secure more money in loans for the mother. The mendaciousness of this charge is almost too outlandish for comment, but it does suggest the power of Humbert’s story and the strength with which it gripped the moral imaginations of readers. This depiction of Eve appeared in an issue of the Rice Belt Journal, January 9, 1903.

In some ways, Humbert was portrayed as “unsexed” or “masculinized” by her manipulations of the financial industry. In others, assumptions of women’s irrationality were played for laughs when describing their courtroom behavior. In still other depictions, her ladylike deportment and captivating physiognomy were described at length. In all these cases, assumptions about how women look, behave, and should (not) participate in market culture were key to how Thérèse Humbert was both portrayed and perceived, and this coverage helped reinforce those stereotypes in the minds of the reading public.

Mercurial Money

While Thérèse Humbert’s gender exacerbated the economic dimensions of her swindle, the colossal scheme itself did not occur in a financial vacuum.Footnote ⁸⁹ The American economy was undergoing major transformations at the turn of the twentieth century. The increasing indebtedness of the average household, shifting monetary standards, the emergence of cash, and the implementation of a standardized national currency in the wake of the Civil War were all sources of concern. There was both willingness and wariness around magical money that seemingly appeared and disappeared on a dime.Footnote ⁹⁰ When news of the Humberts’ massive loan scheme reached Americans, it added to a symphony of scandals, swindles, and scams that amplified the economic anxieties plaguing a society in the middle of monetary metamorphosis.Footnote ⁹¹

Prior to and throughout the Gilded Age, the instruments of financial exchange underwent significant transformation, including a formidable series of market panics. The nation’s complex economic structure involved bad bills, bad banks, and bad market practices. The financial instruments – cash, securities, and the like – were but tangible representations of an intangible financial world. Trading money relied as much on one’s faith in the ever-nebulous “economy” as it did on the note itself. When the nation’s complex financial systems came crashing down, as they did in 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, and 1893, people’s life savings were depleted, and the financial house of cards tumbled down once more. Richard Schneirov has convincingly argued that the Gilded Age itself began with the Panic of 1873, owing in part to the “falling profit rates and falling prices, together with rising bankruptcies, and economic instability [that] characterized the Gilded Age” following this pivotal event.Footnote ⁹²

Even when the economy was not suffering from a depression, scandals involving the manipulation of stocks, bonds, and other paper assets loomed large in the public consciousness. Railroads relied not on the exchange of goods or services but on the fungible value of assets that were merely paper representing the financial market itself. The “ability to control and manipulate the value of that paper became a new way to make money,” a practice that made possible new kinds of financial scams.Footnote ⁹³ Speculators would buy stock to inflate the price – and therefore the perceived value – of an unprofitable company’s assets and then sell it, leaving the new investors trapped holding now-worthless assets; this scheme would later be called the “pump and dump.” The fraudulent misrepresentation and manipulation of paper assets came to a head in the Crédit Mobilier scandal that broke in 1872. Union Pacific railroad executives billed nearly double what their railroad cost to embezzle the excess as profit, and subsequently paid off Congressmen to grease the legislative wheels, making for a swindle that involved both a business bamboozle and Congressional corruption. It is not difficult to imagine why financial failure and corporate contrivance made some citizens wary of the “market” and any ill-gotten wealth that may have come from it, even as others eagerly slammed bucks on the barrelhead to buy and sell at bucket shops. Insecurity in the economy intensified anxieties surrounding money; the monetary system’s fundamental instability contributed to a culture of uncertainty and risk.Footnote ⁹⁴ The result of this monetary culture included an uptick in what one would now call consumer debt.

Even prior to the consumer credit revolution of the 1920s, debt and credit were important tools to manage short-term and long-term expenses. Most households in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had both formal and informal debt – estimated by the 1890 census to total $11 trillion, or about $880 per household. Most American families required some form of credit. Farmers relied on it to purchase land and supplies for crops, and consumers frequented pawn shops and small lenders to make ends meet from week to week. People often pawned household goods as collateral, buying them back after the loan was paid off. Although lower- and middle-class consumers could not get credit from banks prior to the “credit revolution” of the 1920s, a great many of them relied on credit through these alternative sources.Footnote ⁹⁵

The key issue for credit acquisition concerned trustworthiness: how was it established? For those who lacked the creditworthy status granted by steady employment, other means of financial trust were required. Housewives relied on the pawnshop, whose collateral rested not in documentation but in the goods themselves, which could be resold for more than the value of the loan.Footnote ⁹⁶ The many financial panics of the nineteenth century, in addition to various ancillary bank failures, runs, and other fiscal trouble, contributed to a culture of fear and uncertainty surrounding banking and the new forms of monetary exchange.Footnote ⁹⁷

Many people sought a degree of social or class mobility by means of investment opportunities. A few got lucky enough to turn loans into lucrative investments, such as famed steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, who used borrowed money to buy stocks in a company right before it landed a highly profitable contract.Footnote ⁹⁸ Most people, however, did not see paltry investments turn into multinational corporations. Some invested in banks or securities, with varying levels of success. If a bank failed, many depositors got nothing in return. The brokers and financiers that traded on stock exchanges and operated shady shops for speculation, moreover, appeared as little more than gamblers.Footnote ⁹⁹ The capitalists operating these banks were not always well-regarded by the public, especially since some of them made fortunes on market manipulations and bank collapses in which normal depositors lost everything.

Although capitalists were sometimes praised for hard work and ingenuity, the American public’s disdain for them occasionally cast Thérèse Humbert in a favorable light.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ “Sympathy on the part of the general public … in favor of the Humberts” was inspired by admiration for a woman who beat the “usurers” at their own game.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Headlines from the trial’s coverage announced that “usurers” and “sharks plucked [the Humberts] of their money.”Footnote ¹⁰² Another article remarked that “popular sympathy for the Humberts is due solely to the fact that the chief swindler is a clever woman and the chief dupes thick headed money lenders.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Readers could sympathize with Humbert since she took her money from hawkish lenders, who were “blood suckers” with whom “neither the law nor the public has any sympathy.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Most of her victims, said the Chicago Daily Tribune, were “astute notaries, lawyers, financiers, and business-men, whom the public consider were served rightly, for they ought to have known better.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The Tribune elsewhere opined, “Men who lend at 100 and 200 per cent perhaps deserve what the victims of the Humberts received. How many youths have been ruined by these same men? How many fathers have been driven to despair by the debts of sons made through the offices of these vultures?”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Some feared that anticapitalist sentiment might tip the scales toward Humbert’s ultimate acquittal: “Thérèse’s victims are almost all capitalists, company promoters, sharp eyed, hard fisted bankers and professional money lenders … [who] lent money on a 60 per cent basis. The dislike of financiers of this class is so marked … [that the jury] will be readily influenced by the fact that, after all, the only real sufferers are the unpopular money lenders, who are usually pretty able to look out for themselves.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Critics dreaded her potential acquittal, but positive feelings for Humbert notwithstanding, her swindle still brought American readers’ fear regarding – and fascination with – the new financial culture into sharp relief.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The entire scheme embodied both fear of being swindled and the fascination with getting rich quickly; while one illness or bad business venture could bring endless poverty, a well-timed investment could bring a life of wealthy excess. The fact that Humbert exploited the bankers for her own benefit interested readers, whose economic hopes might be delighted or dashed in an instant.

Humbert seemed to be the epitome of the high-society élite, which aided in her quest to secure more loans. According to the Irish journalist T. P. O’Connor, whose treatments of Humbert were rerun in American papers, she was reputed to have purchased “the box at the Opera, the mansion at the Avenue de la Grande Armée, the mansion at the Castle of the Living Waters, the modest farm at Orsonville, the many houses in Paris, [and] houses in the provincial towns,” as well as an insurance company and a winery.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The family was “living in Paris in regal style, and had an imposing chateau in the country,” according to the Tribune. Footnote ¹¹⁰ “The Humbert house became a political rendezvous of the first order,” remarked the Deseret Evening News, and “to madame’s dinners and luncheons came statesmen, jurists, artists, literati.”Footnote ¹¹¹ The Humbert mansion became “an ultra-salon, to whose glare the big moths of finance, politics, the aristocracy, art, letters and what not, fluttered. The more of these golden moths that came, the more their interesting hostess borrowed.”Footnote ¹¹² Humbert’s prominence and fame earned her the nickname “Le Grande Thérèse.”Footnote ¹¹³ With such a high public profile and perhaps the potential of doing business with her friends and associates, Thérèse Humbert’s reputation helped secure her creditworthiness in the minds of lenders.

The frequent remarks on her creditworthiness and social status reflected both a wonder at the scheme’s success and a necessity to elucidate the inner workings of the scam itself. Her story was false, but the loans were not; for this reason, papers needed to explain why anyone would lend Humbert money in the first place. If the readers might have wondered how she continually secured loans over the course of twenty years, the newspapers had commentary from her lenders explaining how Thérèse’s demeanor and political connections reassured them. One banker expressed skepticism about lending a large amount, so Thérèse suggested that he inquire of her father-in-law, Gustave Humbert. That banker testified, “[Gustave Humbert’s] position inspired me with such confidence that I ‘marched.’ I am in to the tune of three millions.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Another remarked that her generosity led public officials and bankers to turn a blind eye to the scheme: “her opera box was at the disposal of the judge, and when he could not use it he passed it on to other public functionaries. Seeing this intimacy her creditors took heart and not only refrained from pressing their claims but lent her more money.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ In providing these details, the newspapers depicted her not only as an elite woman but also as a politically connected swindler whose network of power kept her scams afloat for years.

Even those who took pains to investigate Humbert’s narrative came away reassured. Bankers and lawyers both claimed to have painstakingly pored over thick folders of certificates in Thérèse’s safe and found them to be legitimate; one said that he personally counted out 50 million francs’ worth of securities.Footnote ¹¹⁶ And yet, when the safe was opened in the presence of lenders and inspectors on the morning of May 9, 1902, it reportedly contained naught but “one collar button and one penny.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ The safe, having been opened and found empty, was a curiosity that did not go unnoticed: if it had been full of forged securities before, then where were the dummy documents on the day of judgment? “Her want of foresight in not filling the receptacle with ‘securities’ destined to the pulp mill, and which could have been bought at the rate of a few dollars a ton,” judged the Atlanta Constitution, “marked her intellectually as the stolid peasant that she is by birth … The story of Mme. Humbert shows the enormous marketable value of pure ‘cheek.’”Footnote ¹¹⁸ In taking a determinist view of Humbert’s life story, the paper suggested that Humbert was too stupid – that is, a peasant impostor of the upper crust rather than the genuine article – to have forestalled this ignominious termination to her scam.

These questions over how Humbert pulled off the scheme in the first place, and ultimately was found out, exemplified the tension between Humbert’s gender, social class, and financial genius, highlighting the broader ideological and economic controversies that her scam engaged. If she were such a “stolid peasant,” how did she pull the wool over the eyes of France’s wealthy lenders? As a woman, how did she outsmart the men who ostensibly should have caught onto the scheme? The San Francisco Chronicle had a ready answer: “There is no limit to a fascinating woman’s power of abstraction when she possesses a graceful form, a pleasant face and address and the hypnotic eye.” Accordingly, any man “young or old” will “yield” to the woman in question, “regardless […] of the cost of surrender,” whether the man be “the most hard-fisted money lender” or “the callow youth.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ This sentiment was echoed elsewhere; the Humbert story broke only two weeks after a volcanic eruption on France’s then-territory of Martinique killed 50,000 people, but “Parisian newspapers put the Martinique news on an inside page and printed [the Humbert] story in their most conspicuous columns.”Footnote ¹²⁰ In Humbert’s wake, the French public ostensibly said nothing about the “catastrophe” of Martinique but rather marveled at that “astonishing woman … Mme. Humbert!”Footnote ¹²¹ The astounding audacity and stupendous scale of Humbert’s swindle were said to have outclassed even a tragic natural disaster.

In addition to the belief that women should avoid participating in market exchanges and the mechanisms of finance because of women’s supposed inability to do so, Thérèse Humbert’s swindle both played on and amplified all the economic fears that surrounded America’s new financial culture in the Gilded Age. It relied on the new economy’s monetary machinery, while also reflecting the anxieties that everyday people had about the system of loans and credit encroaching upon their lives. The Wichita Daily Eagle moralized:

Many people’s wages did not provide for a living, and some used debt to manage that shortcoming. On the one hand, extensive coverage of Humbert’s swindle reflected concern about the abundance of victims; on the other hand, she gamed the system so well that readers could not help but take an interest. The scam lasted for twenty years, always with a new invention, pretext, or delay to maintain the deception.

Defiant to the End

Even in the courtroom and on the witness stand, Humbert did not admit defeat. Each day in court, Humbert put on a dramatic air, and newspapers took this as an opportunity to highlight what they considered to be her absurd behavior. After one hearing, the bailiffs were escorting her out of the courtroom; “she twirled around like a top and laughingly said: ‘Which way am I to pass out?’”Footnote ¹²³ Another article claimed that her hearing “gave another opportunity for a display of her theatrical talent.”Footnote ¹²⁴ In the final verdict, Thérèse and Frédéric were sentenced to five years in prison, one of her brothers to three years, and the other brother to two (Figure 10).Footnote ¹²⁵

Figure 10.

This side-by-side of Humbert and her safe illustrates the way that some editors and reporters used Humbert’s swindle to moralize about women, crime, and the fleeting nature of fortune. On the left is a depiction of the safe being opened, this time apparently being inside her mansion as opposed to on the street. On the right, a “study” of Humbert herself. The interstices feature comical bags of money flying away. This illustrated the moral of the story: she had swindled all this money, but it proved to be ethereal (for her lenders and herself). This panel appeared in the Topeka State Journal, February 6, 1903.

Even during her imprisonment, the papers updated the public on her daily life and various illnesses. The Wichita Daily Eagle published a minutely detailed schedule of her daily prison activities, including the wages earned for her work behind bars, admonishing that her livelihood would now come through “hard work” (as opposed to dishonest swindling).Footnote ¹²⁶ The Saint Paul Globe remarked that she would spend the next two decades “making woolen socks for convicts” as punishment for her crimes.Footnote ¹²⁷ Yet another summarized, “In spite of her prison regime the witness was dressed in a fashionable costume and maintained her former jaunty appearance and the same bold, defiant attitude.”Footnote ¹²⁸ One preached that Humbert might be transferred to an insane asylum because she had “developed such a mania for writing abusive, incoherent letters” to the authorities concerning the Crawford fortune.Footnote ¹²⁹ An Atlanta Constitution article published after her release from prison, during which time she still claimed to possess the millions, remarked that “she is million mad. The very word upsets all her mental balance, though she is perfectly sane on every other subject … Her place is ready for her in the madhouse.”Footnote ¹³⁰ Her sentence was eventually commuted due to an illness, and papers alerted the public to her release and retirement to a quiet countryside life.Footnote ¹³¹

Although many considered Humbert’s exploits to be absurdly comical, others wrote of her actions with a grave tone. At least ten creditors had committed suicide, the New York Times reported, while the Atlanta Constitution claimed that “the mysterious case swallowed up fortunes, ruined many men and has caused a number of suicides.”Footnote ¹³² Still others believed that some lenders had been assassinated for attempting to expose the Humbert fraud; “ten creditors dead, either by suicide or assassination, must be added to the total of her responsibility.”Footnote ¹³³ Regardless of whether these assertions were factual or exaggerated, “murder made for good copy,” and gave the story a dark and suspenseful vicarious element.Footnote ¹³⁴ For those whom she had duped, the gigantic swindle bore direct similarity to hell itself: “How easy is the descent to Avernus! The millions, the reputation, the glory and the glamour, all are gone and in their place have come poverty, disgrace, the dungeon cell.”Footnote ¹³⁵ After the Humberts were released, one newspaper pithily summarized the scope of their lives: “The ease with which the Humberts made certain French bankers believe that a safe contained securities of great value, against which the bankers advanced many millions of francs, when it contained nothing, was one of the most remarkable feats in the history of swindling.”Footnote ¹³⁶ Other swindlers pulled similar cons, but none matched the duration or the audacity of Humbert’s scheme.

The New History of Capitalism in the Gilded Age

Humbert’s scam, moreover, highlights the tensions between class, capital, gender, and finance in what Leon Fink has called the “Long Gilded Age.”Footnote ¹³⁷ Humbert’s swindle, trial, and imprisonment lasted for much of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and indeed encapsulated some of the key trajectories of American culture in the period. The fervent ferment over Humbert’s interminable, intricate “long con” captures a moment of profound distrust in American society: the suspicion of high-society elites and wariness of wealthy capitalists merged in the person of Humbert, whose political and social privilege and ostentatious wealth made her ruin all the more spectacular. Money itself was the subject of much consternation because it held “a power both alluring and dreadful, revealing an unfathomable enigma below the stormy surface of market society.”Footnote ¹³⁸ The simultaneous fear and fascination over financial failure and fortune found a singular expression in “the most notorious swindler of the age,” whose ill-gotten wealth purchased clout and comfort for a time before a disastrous public tumble into disrepute.Footnote ¹³⁹ Perhaps most powerfully, the ongoing battles over women’s work and place in the capitalist system were amplified and brought into sharp relief by “Le Grande Thérèse,” whose femininity – or lack thereof – provided a discourse for expressing the morality of money and women’s participation in both the market and the moral economy.

The story of Humbert’s swindle and others from the period, moreover, provides fruitful avenues for exploration in the new history of capitalism, gender, and the state. As Sven Beckert has rightly noted, the renewed vigor with which capitalism in its myriad forms has been historicized, scrutinized, and categorized opens many new paths for bridging formerly isolated disciplines, such as gender, economics, politics, law, religion, immigration, and international relations.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Although detailed observations of each of these areas remain to be done, some preliminary questions arise straightaway that Humbert’s swindle might illuminate. How, for example, did Americans think about issues of finance after discovering how Humbert manipulated the existing economic machinery? How might Humbert’s gender have played a role in her story’s American newspaper coverage? Did Humbert’s gender prove right the ideologies that discouraged women’s participation in financial markets (lest a woman become unsexed), or did it lay bare the flaw in those ideals?Footnote ¹⁴¹ In light of the Humberts and myriad other swindlers in the financial world, how did regular Americans attempt to navigate the market economy? Did men attempt to reinforce gendered ideals about market participation, and if so, did women defy such limitations?

In Humbert’s case, the ideology imputing hysterical stupidity and unrelenting deception to women was by no means diminished by the completion of her sentence. “The great Thérèse’s first hours of freedom were rather pitiable … she left the prison … with an undiminished capacity for bluffing the world,” wrote the New York Times. Journalists hounded her as she walked, and Humbert “lost no time in repeating” her story, which the paper called “as preposterous as ever.”Footnote ¹⁴² One interviewer recounted Humbert’s vivid recollection of the location where the fortune was kept after her release: “I can see it with my eyes closed – there is a great coffer, and inside it they lie … one hundred and eleven [millions]! Oh, if they would only let me go!” This interviewer came away assured that “in a few weeks or a month she will have to be shut up again, this time in a lunatic asylum” because she was mentally unwell.Footnote ¹⁴³

Although Thérèse Humbert’s story is not unique, its scale and impact were one-of-a-kind. The “swindle of the century” involved a colossal sum of money, bankrupted rich capitalists and poverty-stricken workers, and crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the form of constant newspaper coverage. The implausibility of a woman successfully executing such a convoluted and profitable scheme for two decades added to the case’s international profile. The American press could not get enough of the Humbert story, running well over six hundred articles about her, the trial, the history of the swindle, and its political ramifications.

Despite its relentless fame at the turn of the twentieth century, Humbert’s swindle has been all but forgotten in contemporary literature. The most recent works on her are Hilary Spurling’s 1999 biography of Humbert and a chapter in a 1984 monograph about French legal history.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Her story is nevertheless worth remembering. The Weekly Gazette summarized it best when it opined, “The exact details of this unprecedented series of forgeries and misrepresentations if found within the pages of the most pronounced and most imaginative of fiction would at once be condemned by the critics as an impossibility.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Humbert’s swindle resonated with the American press because it both captured and articulated turn-of-the-century apprehensions about women’s place in the economy, which was itself a source of much consternation and fascination. In the retelling of the Humbert swindle, both the press and the public found a venue for hashing out complex tensions surrounding gender, crime, and economic anxiety. At a moment when American culture was undergoing massive change, writers and editors saw the Humbert story as the perfect opportunity to sell papers and sermonize to readers. The “swindle of the century” served as a forum in which to ponder the perils of wily women and felonious finance.