Behind the Scenes Minis: Murder and Benin

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. Oh, Tracy. We finally slotted in that horrible murder. We did. We did, and uh, I mean, I'm glad we held off a little bit on it because it just really did feel like just it was just too early to do something that grizzly. Happy New Year. Here's some murder question for you. Yeah, we know that Marie had been widowed at least once. We don't know what happened to the husband. Any speculation that no now. And what's very funny is that in the midst of all of the press that you look at, which does definitely cast her as like a villain, the fact that they're like, she's so ugly, she must be bad. I'm like, I'm gonna travel through time and punch a reporter in the face. But um, don't be violent kids. Um. But I'm shocked that none of them invoked that, And we're like, well, you know, she has a past. None of that ever comes up in any of those articles. So if there was info on him, I did not stumble across it. I mentioned both in the episode and just now that whole shenanigans um of talking about like that whole like her husband is so pretty, he can't be bad already irritating. Um. But I really lost my mind when I got to that article about how irritated Monte Carlo was with the whole thing, because it was so horrifying, and they were like, there's never a mention in that article of like that the woman Emma Levin was such a value member of our little community. None of that. It's just like, well, damn it. Now we have to figure out how to carry out this sentence. It's the it's the season, Like, what kind of messed up values are these? This murder caused us a lot of inconvenience. Oh um. I did want to note, just in terms of like housekeeping, we mentioned her jewelry being valued at thousand francs. I will say, estimates for that jewelry are kind of all over the place. Um, So if you look at additional articles about it, you may see different numbers. I went with the one that seemed to come up the most. The other thing that I wanted to mention is spellings, because they are also all over the place. Most of the time you will see Gould spelled with two oh s, I almost said to zeros, which is hilarious. Um, but you will also sometimes see it is g o U l D. So, just in case there is anyone out there who like me, is like, I'm going to go looking through old newspaper archives and you maybe want to find more stuff, the alternate spelling might help you get there. Although I did notice several places have kind of corrected for both of both of those spellings to point to the same articles. The inconvenience thing is going to hang me up for days days. Yeah, it does seem like something you would see in uh movie satirizing rich people, like a movie that would have sort of a like a murder but also kind of a comedic element where we are making fun of the people involved in the murder. Not exactly like Clue, but a little. Yeah. But Tracy, the fashionable season is just beginning. I just I can't that phrase in particular. I'm just like I cannot believe. Presumably an actual human journalist put that to paper and was like, yes, yet, let's go to print. There's also the part where they got the you know, hey, something something's leaking out of your trunk. Oh oh, I put our fresh chicken in there. I mean, I guess you could say that some sort of compliment to the chickens of France being more delicious than what they thought they might get once they got back to England. But that again, it was very weird. Uh. That That is the other thing that's very very fascinating to me is to watch the Goulds try to tap dance around the reactions to their various stories and amend them in ways to try to land somewhere that is palatable in terms of of ability to I'm going to say their audience, that's not really what it is. But two investigators in the court. Here's the thing. Because we have so many different versions, I don't know that anyone will ever know what really happened. Possibly the truth is in there in in some version that they told, or some combination of all of them would lead us to the truth. I mean, the the Acom's razor version, right. Yes, of course she wanted her money back, they didn't have it. They panicked and killed her. Um. That seems like the most obvious explanation, but I think the actual details are things that we will never really know. I kept thinking throughout probably is the way my brain was trying to soothe me of And I have said it to you many times throughout recording the line from the Corpse Bride where they saying and a murder most foul, and I think that I think that is getting me through not building a time machine to go back and cause some sort of chagrin to the people who wrote about how sad it was that Monte Carlo was so strained under this horrible besmirching of their fashionable season. I'm literally going to grouse about this for a good six months. I think, Yeah, it seems it seems legitimate, it seems appropriate. I'll put it on a list of grievance. I promise I'll move to happier things soon. We're recording three episodes in the session. Unless something goes wrong. This is the first one, so we'll see. Uh. None of them are happy in any way. I would say it's a particularly dour, grim recording session. But what I have on my list next is the opposite. I have a few things on my list, and I feel like I'm gonna try very hard. I keep picking. Can I'm in one of those grim phases. And it's not even that I'm so like I'm in any kind of like depressed state, or I think it's actually the opposite. When I'm in a fairly good mental state is when I can really take on the more grim ones, becoming completely debilitated by it. So I'm like, m M A murder most foul um. We'll see. I'll come up with something silly soon, I promise. I feel like before we we end this one, I should mention that I did not say in the episode that our listener male Jenna's came with a picture for two cats, and I did not take the time to mention how stink and cute those cats are. And I feel like they're very much in Tracy's wheelhouse. Not to give out your personal information, but you too have two adorable black cats. It's fine, I thought so, but yeah, because you share that sometimes online. But the pile of black cats, there's there's almost nothing better on earth. So Jenna, thank you, because I needed that too. This week, we talked about the the punitive expedition that Britain carried out in the Kingdom of Benin and artwork that was plundered from that expedition, and man, a lot of that stuff was very hard to read. Yes, the like British accounts of what they say they witnessed in the capitol truly are horrifying, And it's one of those things where you read them and you're like, this is so horrifying. It does not seem real to me. Um And so many not necessarily immediately recent, not things written just now, but so each other stuff just uncritically drew from those accounts, Like I found multiple references to these these very lurid eyewitness accounts as being authoritative, and it's like that this is obviously influenced by racist attitudes, like the when you read the language of all of the rest of the account, it's clearly there. So it's like so much repeating of these same things without really examining, Hey, follow this other racist language in here has not held up. Why is this piece of it still being approached as though it is an impartial account of what this fighting force saw when it invaded a capital of another nation. Yeah, So it's tricky. Uh So I made sure as as much as I could when I was researching this um, Like a lot of my papers were written by Nigerian historians, other people living in uh from parts of West Africa to get their perspective and there read on what was happening, rather than trying to just like parrot nineteenth century account that's clearly threaded through with like biases of the day that we're specifically being used to continue subjugating African kingdoms and empires. I had two thoughts to have nothing to do with that. Okay, they have nothing to do with any of the hard stuff, which is not to make light of it or try to divert from it. But um, one thing that delighted me so much when I first opened this document after you sent it over was the mention of one of my favorite things, fractals. Oh yeah, yeah, well, and it's like that that fractal part sounds really cool. But over and over again I found these uh you know, mainstream articles that were like, yeah, Europeans were really jerks when they first saw these African capitals because they didn't understand. I'm like, but all these accounts I just read did not seem really it sounds beautiful. That's one of those things that makes me um. To me, that very concept of developing like a a building a city apply any sort of design on a fractal it is evidence to me of like an advancement of thinking, and not the opposite, which is how it's sometimes like they're like it's confusing, which it wasn't obviously to to everyone, but later on they tried to pitch it that way, and I'm like, all you are showing me is that you do not understand the mathematics of nature, which lots of people don't. But um, and I'm not even saying I do. I just have a the vaguast drive by grasp of it. It like to say that that is evidence that it was it was confusing, versus evidence that they were onto something that cultures of the time we're largely putting people in square and rectangular boxes, which are like the simplest and most basic kinds of of design. It just struck me as hilarious that that would be the case. Um. The other thing that I wanted to mention when we were recording, but it would have really like sidelines is um you had included in your outline, UH the years that various countries had outlawed execute public execution M and you mentioned specifically France, UH and the outlawing of public guillotine NG in nine, which sounds late. However, I will bet that there were a few people in our listening audience who, uh that peaked their memory, because we talked about that on an episode where we talked about one of our topics was a person, a famous person who attended the last public guillotining in France. Do you remember who it was? I don't remember this at all. Christopher Lee? Oh wow, No, I did not remember that. Yeah, he he attended the last public guillotineing in France. Yeah, which is something that comes up as a factoid about him when you look at like quick, you know, Christopher Lee was amazing and he genuinely was, as you know if you listen to our episode. But um, yeah, that that always makes me think about it when I think about the end of guillotining and how late it came, I'm like, no, really late, Like an actor you have loved in many things saw it. Yeah, which is just a way to connect that thread through history. So yeah, one of the things that I think has added a layer of complexity to you, like discussions of what is the best repatriation plan, which we mentioned in the episode, but didn't go into ton of a ton of detail on is that a lot of these pieces, Like it's not just a standalone work of art, it's like an expression of the nation's history that was done within a specific context to record that history. And questions of like if you put this, if you hang this on a wall in a museum without that whole historical context there, Like even if there's a little plaque hanging up next to it, it's like, hey, this is what this was about. Like there are some questions about like how is that going to be adequate to really convey what this meant? Um? And I was actually trying to remember because I have seen the items from Beningen that are in the Museum of Fine Arts here in Boston, which I have not been I haven't been into that building in a couple of years because we're having a pandemic, And I was trying to remember, like, how how was that for sented? How did I can that I conceive of these things as works of art or did I conceive of them as works of art that were also cultural objects that were meant to represent something beyond like a depiction of an animal, you know? Uh, And it's it's tricky and complicated. Um well, especially because those two things can overlap right right for sure, you could have seen it in both of those ways simultaneously without any sort of conflict between those concepts, which is I think another reason that people have had trouble accepting them as one or the other. Yeah, and it's some of the same questions when we've talked about in the United States um nagra and the repatriation of cultural objects and human remains to indigenous nations, Like a lot of those exact same questions are exist with all of these pieces from the Kingdom of Benine. It's like, uh, this is a cultural object that came from a kingdom. They clearly belonged to that kingdom. Here in the US, there is a lingal a legal framework has been written for what to do, and with these particular pieces, some of that is is sort of unanswered at this point, and that's one of the reasons that it has been a long process. I'm not saying at all that Nagara has made it an There's still a lot of a lot of stuff that just takes forever to get through with Nagar. I'm not saying that that like solved all of the issues, but like it's a layer that has that makes the the treatment a little different. These are always tricky because there's no I mean you talked about there's no easy answer, Like, there's no if you look at it with any level of nuance, it only becomes more complex and more difficult. Yeah, which is always the peril of of studying anything like this. Yeah. Well, and I think the thing that that can seem like the most obvious option, which is like repatriate them to the Kingdom of Benin. What does the Kingdom of Benin want? Like, what does the current obe want? What will that person's success or want? Like, There's still a bunch of stuff to work through all of that. I'm sure we'll continue to evolve significantly over the next years and even decades. So if you'd like to send us a note about anything, we're History Podcast at I heart radio dot com and we're also all over social media at misson History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. You can subscribe to our show on the I heart radio app and where else you like to get podcasts. 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