The most popular swindler of France’s nineteenth century was Robert Macaire, a stage character premiered at a popular Paris theater in the early 1820s. The actor Frédéric Lemaître turned the melodramatic villain into something genuinely threatening to polite society. His Macaire was supremely arrogant, mocking, and contemptuous. He ridiculed all things holy: virtue, honor, loyalty, friendship, the family. While establishment figures were censorious, many others embraced Macaire’s spirit as the honest portrait of a new social type: the convincing opportunist who succeeds with a string of polished lies. Honoré Daumier captured the type in his One-hundred and one Macaires, a series that ran in the satirical press depicting an entire society of frauds and impostors, including doctors, lawyers, tycoons, newspapermen, and professors. Macaire’s popularity reflected the pervading unease with bourgeois society’s vaunted freedoms in entering the trades and professions.
This paper follows the public career of the impostor Macaire in his many guises, with special focus on an eccentric book by a scholar of ecclesiastical history, The Testament of Robert Macaire: Thoughts and Maxims of This Storied Character (1840). It is one of the most revolutionary works of its day. The content is classic Macaire, but the mood is dark, animated not by cheerful expedience but fierce accusation. The urgency of its central theme–the malign sway of money–is unswerving. Money does not just influence views of a person’s worth. Money creates it, regardless of merit. The conclusions the author points to are at once moral and political: the only response is class warfare led by the proletariat. The view reveals a special kind of concealment in the age of revolutions: a crook whose upside-down worldview is the one accurate vision of a contemptibly perverted society.