“The Swindle of the Century”: Fraud, Finance, and Femininity in the Gilded Age

Abstract Thérèse Humbert was a lowly French peasant until she saved the life of an American millionaire who left her a vast inheritance, but after twenty years of litigation over said inheritance, a massive web of deception unraveled. The millionaire had never existed, his “nephews” were actually Humbert’s brothers, and Humbert herself had swindled Europe’s moneyed men and working-class laborers out of millions of francs. Overnight, Humbert became a celebrity in the American press, even after she was convicted and imprisoned for fraud. The French swindler’s onslaught of coverage in American newspapers shaped Gilded Age anxieties about money, credit, and the place of women in an ever-changing world. Gender ideologies concerning women’s place in the economy and turn-of-the-century financial instability made the Humbert swindle irresistible to the American press, who saw the story as an opportunity to moralize about women and finance. The sheer scale of Humbert’s fraud and its American coverage make the story remarkable today as an astonishing episode in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, especially among cultural historians and those interested in the New History of Capitalism.