Madame Jeanne Cazals, the young and elegant wife of a rich French industrialist, left her couturier’s shop at seven in the evening, wearing a brand-new mink coat and with fifteen million francs’ worth of jewelry all over her body. She blended into the crowd concentrated on Rue Faubourg Saint-Honoré—maybe the most elegant and one of the busiest streets of Paris—on her way to meet her husband. She never arrived at that date. Madame Cazals disappeared without leaving a single trace, a single piece of evidence that would allow any conjecture about her whereabouts. Desperate, the police are clinging to a confidence Madame Cazals seems to have made, some time ago, to a close friend: “I’ve fallen into a mechanism it seems impossible to get out of.” It is an unusual clue. Madame Cazals’s habits were absolutely regular. Her reputation irreproachable. But in a city like Paris, where one hundred thousand people disappear mysteriously every year, no possibility should be ruled out.
The Cazals case has brought a related problem to the front pages of the newspapers: the white slave trade. It is now a much-discussed question. The police believe in it. All the newspapers that have investigated the matter agree that the main South American market in the white slave trade is the city of Caracas.
But it has been difficult to alarm society, despite the substantial amount of coverage: in recent years, thirty thousand girls have been kidnapped in Paris and sold to numerous cabarets and public places all over the world. The principal markets, according to these investigations, are in North Africa and South America.
For the first time since the existence of this murky trade in human flesh began to be periodically raked up, French public opinion is showing militant concern. This afternoon I attended a public meeting, mostly made up of mothers, who were requesting a more energetic intervention from the French government to deal with the problem. The French justice system knows of many cases. But unfortunately, whenever the newspapers have taken up the issue, public opinion seems to think it is simply journalistic speculation. Now things are different. In the National Assembly, Deputy Francine Lefevre has put all the international and internal political problems to one side in order to raise this question desperately. No doubt remains: the white slave trade exists, and it is run by powerful organizations with agents and clients all over the world, operating in all the great capital cities. Especially in Paris.
For a start, the police have begun to take rigorous control over certain apparently innocent and tempting classified advertisements: “Simple job, 40,000 francs, for young ladies, eighteen years of age.” An eighteen-year-old girl does not easily resist temptation. In many cases it might be an honest job. But the exceptions are tremendous: the applicants are roped into a contract, flown to North Africa, and sold there like any piece of merchandise. It is a business that produces a one hundred percent profit.
The way the agents of the organization operate resembles a fictional film. At the beginning of this year, on the Champs-Élysées, a car stopped at seven in the evening in front of the big illuminated shop windows. A man got out of the car, grabbed a student by the arm, and shoved her into the vehicle. She was never heard from again.
But in reality, the first contacts are usually more ingenious than brutal. A magazine recounts the case of Yvonne Vincent, who one lazy Sunday afternoon was at home in the company of one housemaid. Her mother had gone to the pictures. At dusk, a kind nun had knocked on the door with bad news: her mother had been in a car accident. The nun showed up with false news and false intentions. Parked outside the door, there was a car driven by an accomplice. It was the last time Yvonne Vincent was ever seen.
Another case, told without proper names, is that of a girl who was on her way to catch the Metro after having spent the whole afternoon with her friends in the Bois de Vincennes. While she was waiting for a red light to change, an elderly blind woman asked her to help guide her across the street. Nobody knows what happened on the opposite sidewalk, for that happened on September 18, at quarter after six, and the girl still hasn’t arrived home. The police have reason to believe that these two girls—like the majority of the thirty thousand missing girls in recent years—are in some part of the world, working as prostitutes by reason or by force.
The mechanism seems to be very simple: once persuaded, the girls are taken to North Africa or South America. A beautiful, young, compliant Frenchwoman can cost up to half a million francs, almost two thousand dollars. But the person who pays that sum feels he has the right to exploit the merchandise to multiply his investment. Once a girl has been imprisoned by the mechanism, she has very few possibilities of ever returning home. The organization can pursue her to the ends of the earth. However, some have had the courage and luck to escape. One of them was Suzanne Celmonte, who at twenty-one years of age told her incredible adventure on television a few months ago. She was a singer in a modest nightclub in Paris. One night, fate introduced himself to her elegantly disguised as an impresario. He hired her for a cabaret in Damascus for two thousand francs a night. The girl needed to be on the ground before she realized that she was expected to do much more than sing. Without losing her sangfroid she got in contact with the French consul through the authorities and was repatriated. The international police used this case as a springboard in order to dismantle a ring, which is now leading some pretend impresarios to prison.
Pretenses are so well kept up and the agents of the operation so skillful that the police cannot break their solid appearance of legality. They need a stroke of luck, almost a coincidence, like the one that jailed Francis Raban, a comfortable Frenchman who appeared to be as honorable as can be. One night, when he was at Orly preparing to board a flight to South America with a woman who was not his wife, a detective had an impulse to examine their papers closely. The woman’s were fake.
That detail disclosed Francis Raban’s true personality. He was set up in Paris as a large-scale exporter. He periodically received succulent checks in U.S. dollars from Venezuela. Now he is accused of having exported girls for several years.
The newspapers that point to Caracas as the principal market in South America do not quote many concrete cases. But a popular magazine recently linked Raban’s case to that of a servant kidnapped in Paris and sold in Venezuela. According to that source, the girl was hired as a waitress in a bar. But she roundly refused “to be more than nice to the clientele.” As punishment, she was driven out to the deserted San Félix ranch, five hundred miles away from Caracas. She managed to escape with the help of two French explorers who arrived by chance. How many cases like that might be found right now in Venezuela?
January 12, 1957, Elite, Caracas