Consecrated to Crime by Agnes Repplier
"Consecrated to Crime" by Agnes Repplier is an essay exploring the enduring human fascination with historical crime, violence, and wickedness, arguing that places, persons, and events associated with evil exercise a magnetic pull on the imagination that virtue and goodness simply cannot match. Repplier opens by invoking Browning's portrait of a murderer sheltering at an altar, surrounded by admiring children, and uses this image as a lens through which to examine why crime so reliably captivates human attention. She cites Plutarch's preference for writing about wicked men as the shrewd calculation of an author who wished to be read, and she traces this appetite for darkness from ancient times through to the tourists of her own era. The essay proceeds through a series of vivid examples drawn largely from European history and the châteaux of France. Repplier describes travellers who seek out the sites of famous crimes with an eagerness they never apply to places associated with virtue or achievement. She recounts meeting an American tourist in Edinburgh who had spent an exhausting day searching through the city's worst slums in pursuit of the house where Burke and Hare committed their murders, passing over the city's genuinely magnificent and tragic history in favor of its most sordid corners. This anecdote crystallizes Repplier's central observation: ignoble guilt attracts more persistent pilgrimages than grand tragedy. She turns then to the Château de Blois, examining how the murder of the Duke of Guise by agents of Henry III has come to dominate every other association the place might hold. Despite Blois having witnessed the consecration of Joan of Arc's standard and the festivities of royal betrothals, and despite bearing the architectural imprint of Francis I, it is the Guise assassination that commands every visitor's imagination. Repplier quotes Henry James's appreciation of the episode as a classic crime, and she traces in detail the accumulation of ignored warnings that preceded the Duke's death, noting that his disdainful disregard for danger gives the story the quality of Greek tragedy. The château's guide, she observes, comes alive when recounting the murder in a way no description of Renaissance splendor could inspire. Repplier examines Catherine de Medici and Louis XI as figures whose known historical sins have been so thoroughly inked over by legend that it has become nearly impossible to consider their genuine political abilities or achievements. Catherine has been made into a romantic villainess who depopulates France with poisoned gloves, while Louis XI has been transformed into a hobgoblin whose reputation for cruelty has attracted a rich growth of invented horrors attached to the castles of Loches and Plessis-les-Tours. Repplier describes with dry amusement how guides at these sites manufacture evidence for atrocities that never occurred, pointing to rusty iron fittings as proof of Cardinal Balue's cage, or narrating the fictional habits of Tristan l'Hermite with the confidence of eyewitnesses, and she notes that tourists receive these fabrications with grateful credulity because they satisfy a desire that documented history alone cannot always meet. The essay's tone throughout is one of amused, self-aware complicity. Repplier does not condemn the appetite she describes; she acknowledges it as deeply rooted in human nature, connected to the glamour with which, as she puts it, the Serpent beguiled Eve. She invokes Stevenson's recommendation to entertain a sneaking kindness for unpopular historical figures, but she recognizes that such rational sympathy is always losing ground to the pleasures of moral horror. The guides who embroider their tales, the tourists who linger hoping the old stones are guilty of something, and the children spellbound at the altar-foot are all expressions of the same instinct. Repplier closes by returning to Browning's image of those children gazing at the murderer in the church, suggesting that educated modern travellers who peer into the gloom of supposedly blood-soaked doorways and shudder pleasurably are doing precisely the same thing. The essay is ultimately a meditation on how crime consecrates places and persons to a kind of immortality that goodness rarely achieves, and on the enduring human preference, however much civilization may complicate it, for darkness over light when the imagination is given free rein.
By Agnes Repplier · First published 1895 · Genre: Essay, Literary Criticism, Social Commentary · 4,407 words
First lines
The breathless fellow at the altar-foot, / Fresh from his murder, safe and sitting there, / With the little children round him in a row / Of admiration. / -- FRA LIPPO LIPPI.
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Consecrated to Crime is listed on Textopian as an essay by Agnes Repplier, dated 1895 CE.
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- Work type: Essay
- Author: Agnes Repplier
- Date: 1895 CE
- Language: English
- Genres: Essay, Literary Criticism, Social Commentary, Cultural History, Philosophy
- Length: 4,407 words
- Structure: 1 section, 28 paragraphs
- Reading fit: Fairly Difficult (10th-12th Grade)
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Genres
- Essay — Repplier's work is a collection of essays that examines the relationship between crime and society through analytical and reflective prose.
- Literary Criticism — The book analyzes literary representations of crime and criminals, examining how crime has been depicted in literature and culture.
- Social Commentary — Repplier provides critiques and observations about societal attitudes toward crime, morality, and justice throughout history.
- Cultural History — The work explores how different historical periods and cultures have treated, understood, and been fascinated by crime.
Tags
essays · literary criticism · social commentary · American literature · early twentieth century · cultural criticism · satire · wit · moral reflection · historical perspective · intellectual prose · bookishness