261: The Red Widow: Marguerite “Meg” Steinheil w/ Sarah Horowitz - A True Crime History Podcast

Paris, 1889: Margeurite Steinheil is a woman with ambition. But having been born into a middle-class family and trapped in a marriage to a failed artist twenty years her senior, she knows her options are limited.

Determined to fashion herself into a new woman, Meg orchestrates a scandalous plan with her most powerful resource: her body. Amid the dazzling glamor, art, and romance of bourgeois Paris, she takes elite men as her lovers, charming her way into the good graces of the rich and powerful. Her ambitions, though, go far beyond becoming the most desirable woman in Paris; at her core, she is a woman determined to conquer French high society. But the game she plays is a perilous one: navigating misogynistic double-standards, public scrutiny, and political intrigue, she is soon vaulted into infamy in the most dangerous way possible.

A real-life femme fatale, Meg influences government positions and resorts to blackmail―and maybe even poisoning―to get her way. Leaving a trail of death and disaster in her wake, she earns the name the "Red Widow" for mysteriously surviving a home invasion that leaves both her husband and mother dead. With the police baffled and the public enraged, Meg breaks every rule in the bourgeois handbook and becomes the most notorious woman in Paris.

My guest is Sarah E. Horowitz, professor of history at Washington and Lee University. Her book is called: "The Red Widow: The Scandal that Shook Paris and the Woman Behind it All".

More about the author and her work here: https://sarahehorowitz.com/

"The Red Widow" can be purchased here: https://www.amazon.com/Red-Widow-Scandal-Shook-Behind/dp/1728226325

The wedding video mentioned in the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsAmtvGVeXs

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