The year is 1899, and France is on a knife’s edge. The long-running Dreyfus affair, in which a French military officer was gaoled for spying based largely on the fact he was Jewish, has emboldened a massive Anti-Semitic movement; the government and courts push the case back and forth, satisfying no one.
All of which we learn in the opening scene of Paris Police 1900 from the French President himself while he’s enjoying a sexual favour from courtesan Marguerite ‘Meg’ Steinheil (Evelyne Brochu). Then he dies with his pants down, throwing the country into further turmoil (fun fact: this actually happened).
Across its eight episodes, French series Paris Police 1900 is about as far from a sanitised view of history as you can get; with its mix of real-life and fictional characters and a focus on the sleazy side of actual events, it’s closer to one of James Ellroy’s sprawling crime novels.
Here, no sooner is the President dead than we see a paperboy (and he is a boy), being brutally clubbed on the street, and when his father runs to help he gets the same treatment. Their crime? Selling a newspaper that offends Jules Guérin (Hubert Delattre), one of the leaders of the Anti-Semitic League.
‘Paris Police 1900’. Source: Photo numrique
Guérin thinks nothing of burning a newspaper stand to the ground; in a series that has more than its fair share of despicable characters, he manages to lead the pack. It’s hard to beat a bad guy who conducts rallies that feature him slitting the throat of a piglet live on stage (his family own a chain of commercial butchers, which still doesn’t make it right).
Among all this, Inspector Antoine Jouin (Jérémie Laheurte) seems like one more person struggling to keep his head above water in La Sûreté – the French police’s criminal investigation department in Paris. New police commissioner Louis Lépine (Marc Barbé) has returned to bring order back to the streets; elsewhere in the building, the sinister Puybaraud (Patrick d’Assumçao) and his muscle Fiersi (Thibaut Evrard) run black ops for the State, keeping tabs on what’s going on in a way the official law can’t. Puybaraud is Lépine’s bitter enemy; all the violence and brutality is maybe starting to get to Fiersi. It’s a lot to take in.
Then a woman’s mutilated body is found in a suitcase floating in the river Seine. Inspector Jouin takes on the case, and he’s going to have to move fast; someone else is out there tidying up loose ends in a very permanent way.
Paris Police 1900 is an epic series with a sprawling cast; we haven’t even got to the Anarchist gangs, or Lépine’s drug addict wife, or the feminist Jewish not-quite lawyer Jeanne Chauvin (Eugénie Derouand) who helps Jouin with his investigation. But while their paths rarely cross, it’s Jouin and Meg who become the twin points that this expansive series revolves around.
‘Paris Police 1900’. Source: Photo numrique
Jouin is the obvious hero, the morally upright, somewhat idealistic police officer driven by a desire for justice. He’s the man with the badge, the cop who operates as part of legitimate society; despite the office politics and the murky case he’s investigating, the morals of his world are largely black and white. As a woman on her own in Paris’ Belle Epoque, Meg can’t afford the luxury of any kind of moral stance.
Thanks to her role in the death of the President, she’s come to the attention of Puybaraud and Fiersi. Partly they want to keep an eye on her to make sure she doesn’t start spilling secrets to the press, and partly they’re interested because her profession makes her exactly the kind of woman they can use as a spy.
Meg is used to putting up a front, working her way through a world full of powerful men at a time when women couldn’t vote or have a bank account; who better to infiltrate Guérin’s thugs? Trouble is, Puybaraud and Fiersi’s last informant ended up as Jouin’s current case.
‘Paris Police 1900’. Source: Photo numrique
If Meg does her job right, she’ll be in the exact same situation that got her predecessor killed. And with everything else going on in Paris – the Dreyfus Affair isn’t going to resolve itself – when she does finally find herself face to face with the killer, she’s going to be on her own.
Paris Police 1900 airs at 10.45pm on Monday 31 January on SBS, continuing weekly. The series is also now streaming .
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