The Art of Crime Airwave Media

Introducing Queen of Crime: Madame Tussaud and the Chamber of Horrors

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Born in 1761, Madame Tussaud studied the art of wax modeling under Philippe Curtius, owner of the most famous wax museum in pre-revolutionary Paris. Sometime around 1780, Curtius opened a special exhibit in his establishment called The Den of Illustrious Thieves, in which he displayed wax effigies of notorious murderers. He had an early hit with a sculpture of double poisoner Antoine Francois Desrues, a struggling grocer who wanted to live the life of an aristocrat whether he could afford to or not.

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On July 12, 1789, a crowd of protestors furious over King Louis XVI’s policies swarmed Madame Tussaud and Philippe Curitus’s wax museum, demanding busts of prominent political figures. This episode led to bloodshed that same afternoon. Two days later, a mob stormed the Bastille, a medieval prison, marking the outbreak of the French Revolution. Soon after, the Den of Illustrious Thieves exhibited objects associated with the Bastille, including an effigy of the notorious Comte de Lorges, a prisoner who supposedly languished there for three decades. 

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As the French Revolution ran its course, the monarchy crumbled, and the nation descended into wanton violence. During the Reign of Terror, thousands of French citizens went to the guillotine, and Tussaud made waxen replicas of important revolutionaries’ severed heads, including that of Maximilien Robespierre. In 1793, she also created a wax tableau inspired by perhaps the most notorious crime of this period: the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat. 

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After marrying and starting a family, Madame Tussaud accepted an offer to partner with another showman and exhibit her handiwork in London. To her dismay, she soon realized that she had teamed up with a snake. Despite a rough start in the British capital, Tussaud scored a major hit with a wax effigy of Colonel Edward Marcus Despard, a convicted traitor who was hanged, drawn, and quartered in February 1803.

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From 1803 to 1808, Madame Tussaud toured Scotland and Ireland, exhibiting her handiwork in major cities. During this time, she took drastic measures to win her freedom from her exploitative business partner, Paul Philipstahl. Tussaud went years without creating new figures related to crime, but in 1828 she introduced a likeness of William Corder, perpetrator of the infamous Red Barn Murder. This brutal homicide sparked a cultural phenomenon that lasted for the rest of the nineteenth century and beyond, inspiring books, broadsides, murder ballads, peepshows, plays, and even movies.

Show notes and full transcripts available at www.artofcrimepodcast.com.

If you'd like to support the show, please consider becoming a patron at www.patreon.com/artofcrimepodcast.