A marquis in the mud outside Paris
A rendezvous, an assault, a scandal: how Paris ostracised the Marquis de Custine without any law at all.
On 28 October 1824, an unconscious man was found lying in the mud outside the gates of Paris. He was naked from the waist up, had been beaten and robbed. The injured man was Astolphe de Custine: thirty-four years old, a marquis, writer and former diplomat from one of the best-known noble families in France.
Custine had arranged to meet a young soldier. But the rendezvous ended in a brutal assault. A group of soldiers is said to have attacked him and left him lying there. Exactly what happened was never established; Custine did not press charges. Even so, rumours about the background to the attack spread quickly.
Since the Revolution, same-sex relationships had no longer been punishable in France. Social ostracism, however, remained. The doors of the grand salons closed to Custine. Former friends mocked him, and a diplomatic career was now out of the question. His name became a byword for scandal. The Paris police also recorded him in their registers.
Custine nevertheless did not retreat into hiding. He continued to live openly with his English partner Edward Saint-Barbe, who had already been part of the household during the lifetime of Custine's wife, who died young. He still found a place in literary and artistic circles. Chopin visited him at his country house, and Balzac encouraged him to write travel accounts. Almost twenty years after the assault, Custine published "La Russie en 1839", a sharp critique of the Tsarist empire. In Europe the book found enthusiastic readers; in Russia it was banned. Today it is considered a classic of travel writing.
The files on the assault later disappeared. But Custine's story still shows how powerful social exclusion can be even without a criminal ban – and how a person can nevertheless preserve space for a self-determined life.