A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

in another remarkable case of the period: that of Jean Baptiste Troppmann. Born in Alsace in 1869,
Troppmann was the son of a poor mechanic who - like Samuel Green and Lacenaire - was illtreated
by his father and defended by his mother. He grew up a homosexual. At school he was
bullied, but showed such violence when he was attacked that they finally stopped. At work in his
father’s workshop, he was bullied by his brother until one day he seized a hammer and hit Edward
in the face. After that, Edward let him alone.
Troppmann performed athletic exercises until he gained a remarkable bodily strength. He read and
re-read Eugene Sue’s absurd concoction of Gothic horrors The Wandering Jew. He studied
chemistry in secret, probably to learn about poisons. Everything about him indicates the typical
‘loner’ who is determined to make his mark in the world.
His method of making his mark was to plan the murder of an entire family. When he met a wealthy
businessman named Kinck, he tried to persuade him to invest in various moneymaking schemes, all
of which Kinck wisely turned down. Finally, Troppmann persuaded Kinck to accompany him on
some kind of business trip; as soon as they were in the country, he gave Kinck a glass of wine laced
with cyanide; Kinck died immediately. Troppmann buried the body in a forest, and lured the eldest
boy, Gustave, into the countryside; he was stabbed in the back and buried. Finally, Troppmann
persuaded Madame Kinck - who was pregnant - and her five children to accompany him to meet
her husband. They took a cab to Pantin, near Paris, where Troppmann claimed her husband was
staying. He persuaded them to alight in a lonely spot, paid off the cab, then killed them all in a
field.
The next morning a workman noticed blood on the road, tracked it to a spot where the earth had
been newly dug, and gave the alarm. The bodies of the Kinck family were unearthed. The ferocity
with which they had been hacked suggested a sadist - the two-year-old girl had been
disembowelled. A label in a child’s coat enabled the family to be identified. Troppmann was
arrested in Le Havre, where he was hoping to escape to America with the money he had taken from
the Kincks. He was publicly executed, and the novelist Turgenev was allowed to accompany him
from his cell to the guillotine. His description makes it clear that Troppmann was determined to die
well. Turgenev was impressed by the good-looking, twenty-year-old youth, and obviously felt that
this execution was a barbarity. One of his companions remarked that he felt they were not watching
the execution of a common criminal, but that this was the year 1794 and they were present at the
death of an aristocrat. Yet Turgenev took care not to mention the nature of the crime for which
Troppmann was condemned.
Troppmann, then, was another ‘assassin’, another ‘man who was too strong for his particular social
environment’. Yet again, the most puzzling thing about the crime is that element of miscalculation;
it seems as absurd, as excessive, as the Ratcliffe Highway murders. How did he come to plan
anything so stupid? We discover the answer by glancing into the novel that Troppmann read again
and again - The Wandering Jew by Eugene Sue. It is about the brilliant and evil Father Rodin, a
Jesuit priest who is determined to secure for his order the vast legacy that should go to the last
seven members of the Simon family - descendants of the wandering Jew who mocked Jesus and
was condemned to walk the earth until the second coming. So he sets out to prevent them from
being present to claim the legacy: one is drugged, one declared insane, one jailed for debt, and so
on. The wicked priest is finally killed by poisoned holy water that he accepts from someone’s
fingers. The Wandering Jew became Troppmann’s Bible; it explains, for example, why he took up
the study of undetectable poisons. But he decided to go one better than Father Rodin and kill all his
victims. Troppmann was a victim of his own fantasies - or rather, those of Eugene Sue.