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Marthe Hanau, France's greatest, brainiest confidence woman (1939)
- mitchbob 6y ago"In 1939, Janet Flanner, The New Yorker's correspondent in Paris, wrote a profile of Marthe Hanau, a notorious con woman who defrauded the French financial markets during the nineteen-twenties and thirties. Hanau, Flanner observed, 'was the greatest, brainiest, most convincing and comical confidence woman France ever produced.' Her outlandish actions helped make Hanau a cause célèbre, even after it was revealed that she had defrauded investors of a hundred and fifty-five million francs (more than seventy million contemporary dollars). Her exploits were so egregious, Flanner notes, that they helped spur the rise of the Popular Front and its attendant socialist reforms in France."