ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the sensational 1863 trial of Dr. Edmond Couty de la Pommerais for the murder of his mistress Julie de Pauw as a window into the creation of a market for life insurance in nineteenth-century France. The Pommerais affair, a media circus widely reported in newspapers throughout the country and abroad, provided many French people with their first exposure to the workings of life insurance, still a relatively arcane financial tool in France during the first half of the nineteenth century. In studying the trial transcript, as well as the various newspaper and pamphlet reactions to it, this chapter will focus on: (1) popular understandings of life insurance as manipulated by Pommerais in his relations with de Pauw and in his self-justification to the court, and (2) how these popular understandings, in which insurance could be seen as a money-making instrument akin alternately to an annuity or to gambling, underscored critiques both by the de Pauw heirs and by the public prosecutor.
