In this black evocation of the Belle Epoque, Fabien Nury is interested in the police of manners and in bacterial and mental infections which circulate in the capital.
by Thomas Sotinal
In 1905, French police are preparing to be the armed arm of the Republic in the quarrel between it to the Church, after the vote in December of the separation law. It closely monitors the socialists gathered since April within the SFIO.
But that’s not what Fabien Nury wants to talk about for this second season of Paris Police. The first bubble of passions, infamous or noble, born from the Dreyfus affair. It is to the most invasive form of the maintenance of order that the comic book author who became a creator of series devotes Paris Police 1905, six episodes dedicated to the Police of manners.
Admittedly, the characters encountered in Paris Police 1900, are not part of this service which, to its official missions (repression of deviations, control of the trade of the bodies), adds the traffic of shameful secrets. But the always very unruly inspector Jouin (Jeremiah Laheurte) must, to conduct an investigation, count with his corrupt colleagues; The prefect Lépine (Marc Barbé), increasingly disillusioned, tries to control these police officers more dangerous than offenders; As for the half-worldine Marguerite Steinheil (Evelyne Brochu) it is both the accomplice and the instrument of the brigade. The violent clashes of the first season is followed by the circulation of miasmas loaded with rumors, blackmail and contagion.
perverse fairy tale
Because the main agent who moves the bodies and minds of Paris Police 1905 is the pale treponme, vector of syphilis, discovered that year. Ingcurable and fatal (it will remain so until the discovery of penicillin), the large poison is also a shameful stigma, whose revelation defeats the careers and families. Inspector Jouin, married, anxious father of a very little girl, must investigate the death of a young man, whose body was discovered in the Bois de Boulogne, on the edge between the groves where prostitutes work and the Alleys or homosexual men (the “inverts” it is said then) try to escape the eyes and the repression. In the wood seized by the frost, the investigations of Jouin take on the pace of perverse fairy tale, still accentuated by the evocation of the Château de Bagatelle, a pass house which shelters bloodthirsty ogres.
Lack of this evocation of a past which is not so old (the last provisions of the penal code repressing homosexuality were not abolished in 1982) the incarnation of men who managed to live despite repression. Here, the “inverts” are bodies in the morgue or fathers of family prisoners of their secret. The other Narrative Police Wire 1905, evokes the condition of sex workers, inserted by the State and subject to health control which is also a social control. The scenario finds in the character of Rosalie Dantremont, a prostitute whose child dies for lack of care, while she is detained after being taken in a roundup, the object of compassion that lacks the other side of this dark season.
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