Camille du Gast: The Belle Epoque Daredevil Her Own Daughter Tried to Have Killed
Camille du Gast jumped out of a hot air balloon over Paris for fun, raced cars in a competition so deadly the French government shut it down mid-race, refused to abandon a sinking boat until her whole crew was safe, and rode alone across Morocco on horseback. Then, in 1910, her own daughter tried to have her murdered. Somehow she's still one of the least talked-about women of the Belle Epoque, a period that produced no shortage of famous eccentrics. Her real story is stranger and better documented than the version that usually gets passed around.
Quick answers
Who was Camille du Gast? A wealthy Parisian widow born in 1868 who became one of the first women to race cars and motorboats in Europe, then spent her later decades on animal welfare and women's rights campaigns after surviving an assassination attempt ordered by her own daughter.
Was she really the first woman in France fined for speeding? No, that particular claim usually belongs to someone else, the Duchess of Uzès, who's generally credited as the first Frenchwoman to hold a driving licence and the first fined for speeding, both around 1898. Du Gast learned to drive that same year and is usually named as the second.
Did her daughter actually try to have her killed? Yes. In 1910, her daughter Diane, in the middle of a bitter dispute over money, arranged for attackers to come after her at her own home. Du Gast survived and confronted them herself.
What did she do after she stopped racing? She spent roughly the last three decades of her life as president of France's leading animal welfare society, campaigning against bullfighting, serving as vice-president of a major French women's rights league and running charitable programmes for poor women and children, right up until her death in Nazi-occupied Paris in 1942.
A confectioner's daughter with a taste for danger
She was born Marie Marthe Camille Desinge in Paris in 1868, the daughter of a confectioner who'd been made a Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur. Where exactly the name "du Gast" came from is genuinely unclear, even to the people who've researched her most closely, but it's the name she raced, sailed and campaigned under for the rest of her life.
Contemporary accounts describe a self-possessed tomboy who trained as a concert pianist and singer, learned to fence, ski, shoot and ride, and generally showed no interest in behaving like the demure society daughter she was supposed to become.
A relationship, a scandal and a fortune, in that order
In 1889 she began a relationship with Jules Crespin, heir to and majority shareholder of the Dufayel department store, one of the largest in Paris. Their daughter, Diane, was born out of wedlock in October 1891, a fact that would matter a great deal later on, and the couple didn't formally marry until 1894. Crespin insisted du Gast keep using her maiden name professionally so it wouldn't get tangled up with the family business. He died young, in his mid-to-late twenties, sometime around 1895 or 1896 depending on which record you trust, leaving her a rich widow in her late twenties with one small daughter and no particular interest in a quiet life.
Jumping out of a balloon for the fun of it
Widowhood freed her to do exactly what she wanted, and what she wanted, it turned out, was to jump out of balloons. In June 1895 she made a parachute descent from a hot air balloon roughly 2,000 feet above the Faubourg Saint-Antoine district of Paris, working with the balloonist Louis Capazza. It's usually cited as the first parachute jump made by a woman, and it set the tone for essentially everything that followed: du Gast wasn't looking for a hobby, she was looking for the edge of what was considered possible for a woman of her class to do in public.
The record that keeps getting handed to the wrong woman
One detail about du Gast gets repeated constantly and is usually slightly wrong. She's often described as the first Frenchwoman to hold a driving licence and the first ever fined for speeding. Both records more properly belong to Anne de Rochechouart de Mortemart, the Duchess of Uzès, who's generally credited with earning her licence in 1898 and picking up the country's first speeding fine not long after. Du Gast learned to drive that same year, 1898, and is usually named as the second Frenchwoman to receive her brevet, a genuinely impressive distinction on its own that doesn't need borrowing someone else's headline to be worth mentioning. A similar mix-up follows Hélène van Zuylen, who actually beat du Gast to being the first woman in an official international motor race, competing under the pseudonym "Snail" in the 1898 Paris-Amsterdam-Paris race, three years before du Gast's own racing debut.
Starting last and finishing 33rd anyway
Du Gast got properly interested in racing after watching the Gordon Bennett Cup, the prestige international motoring competition sponsored by the American newspaper publisher James Gordon Bennett Jr., a man who'd later cross paths with her again in an entirely different context. She entered the 1901 Paris-Berlin race behind the wheel of her late husband's 20-horsepower Panhard et Levassor, the only woman in the main field of 122 entrants, riding with a mechanic who carried an aristocratic title of his own, Hélie de Talleyrand-Périgord, Duke of Sagan. Officials put her at the very back of the starting order, seemingly on principle rather than merit. She finished 33rd overall in just over 25 hours, though some records put it closer to 22nd, a discrepancy that says more about how loosely these things were recorded in 1901 than about her actual performance. Either way, she was the only woman to finish the race at all, and the press started calling her "la Valkyrie de la Mécanique," the Valkyrie of the motorcar, a nickname that stuck.
The following year she tried to enter a proposed New York to San Francisco race and was turned down flat, with organisers stating outright that her application was rejected because she was a woman. It's a smaller, less dramatic story than what happened to her a year later on the road to Madrid, which is probably why it gets left out of most retellings, but it's a useful reminder that the resistance she faced wasn't limited to one infamous French government ban. It was a running theme.
The race that killed spectators and the driver she stopped to save
The 1903 Paris-Madrid race earned its nickname, the Race of Death, before it even reached the Spanish border. Cars capable of tremendous speed were sent down public roads lined with crowds who had no real concept of the danger, and the results were catastrophic: several drivers and mechanics were killed, along with a number of spectators, and the French government shut the race down entirely once it reached Bordeaux, ordering the remaining cars towed the rest of the way by horse. Du Gast was driving a 30-horsepower De Dietrich and running well inside the top ten, by some accounts as high as sixth, when she came across a fellow competitor, the British driver Phil Stead, pinned beneath his overturned car. She stopped, got him free and by most accounts likely saved his life through the first aid she gave him at the roadside. Her own final classification once the race was called off is recorded differently depending on the source, anywhere from the mid-40s to the high-70s, which barely matters next to the fact that she gave up a competitive position to help a stranger in the middle of the deadliest race in motorsport history.
Banned for being a woman, so she took to the water instead
In 1904, the French sporting authorities barred women from competitive car racing altogether, citing what officials described at the time as "feminine nervousness" or "female excitability," language that tells you plenty about the actual reasoning involved. It effectively ended du Gast's four-wheeled racing career at its peak. She didn't take the hint to slow down. Instead she moved into motorboat racing, piloting a launch called Marsoin on the Seine at Juvisy-sur-Orge that September, and by December 1904 she'd become the sole female official of the Automobile Club de France, a position that let her stay involved in the sport that had just formally shut her out of competing in it.
She wouldn't leave the water until her crew was safe
Her motorboat racing career produced the single most dramatic story of her life. In April 1905 she entered a 100-kilometre race at Monaco in a boat called La Turquoise, without finishing. The following month she commissioned a 43-foot steel-hulled launch named Camille, fitted with a 90-horsepower engine, for the Algiers to Toulon trans-Mediterranean race. A violent storm hit the fleet mid-crossing on 13 May 1905, disabling all seven competing boats and sinking six of them, hers included. By every account, du Gast refused to abandon the sinking Camille until the rest of her crew was safely off it, then went into the sea herself and was pulled out, unconscious by some accounts, by the destroyer Kléber. Two months later, race officials declared her the winner anyway, on the reasoning that her boat had made the most progress toward Toulon before it went down. James Gordon Bennett Jr., the same man whose racing cup had first drawn her into motorsport, is said to have called her "the greatest sportswoman of all time."
A painting scandal that had nothing to do with her
In 1902, in the middle of an inheritance dispute with her late husband's family, du Gast found herself accused of having posed nude for Henri Gervex's 1885 painting La Femme au Masque, a work that had already been circulating and generating gossip for close to two decades by the time her name got attached to it. Both Gervex and the painting's actual model, a woman named Marie Renard, testified on du Gast's behalf that she'd had nothing to do with it. It didn't fully clear her name in the way she'd hoped: she went on to lose a defamation suit she brought against the lawyer, Barboux, who'd helped spread the rumour in the first place, a reminder that even a false scandal could do lasting damage to a woman's reputation in Belle Epoque Paris, regardless of how thin the evidence behind it actually was.
Alone on horseback across Morocco
Du Gast's adventuring didn't stop at racing. In 1906 she rode alone across Morocco on horseback, an undertaking that was remarkable enough on its own merits before you factor in the political backdrop: Morocco was in the middle of serious instability, and du Gast met with the rebel leader known as the Rogui, Bou Hmara, who was then leading an uprising against the Sultan. She wrote about the encounter in her 1909 book Ce que m'a dit le Rogui, or What the Rogui Told Me. She followed the trip by attending the 1906 Algeciras Conference, the international meeting that addressed Morocco's sovereignty and colonial status, and returned to the country twice more on official French government business, once in 1910 for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and again in 1912 for the Ministry of Agriculture, distributing medicine and demonstrating farming techniques on both trips.
Her own daughter tried to have her killed
The defining trauma of du Gast's later life came in 1910, and it came from inside her own family. Her daughter Diane, by then an adult and reportedly locked in a bitter, mercenary dispute with her mother over money, arranged for attackers to come after du Gast at her home on rue Léroux in Paris.
Du Gast survived and reportedly confronted the assassins herself, and they fled. It's the kind of detail that would dominate the retelling of almost anyone else's biography, and in du Gast's case it marked a genuine turning point: friends and biographers describe her withdrawing from public racing life afterward and pouring her remaining energy almost entirely into the causes that would define the rest of her life.
Three decades of animal welfare, feminism and fighting bullfighting
From 1910 until her death, du Gast served as president of the Société Protectrice des Animaux, France's leading animal welfare organisation, a role she held for roughly three decades. She took over running a Paris dog refuge that had originally been founded, fittingly, by James Gordon Bennett Jr. himself back in 1903, closing the loop on the man whose racing cup had started her whole motorsport career in the first place. In 1927 she used her own money to fund the modernisation and expansion of an animal shelter at Gennevilliers. She became vice-president of the Ligue Française du Droit des Femmes, the French League for the Rights of Women, in the years after the First World War, and she took direct, sometimes physical action against bullfighting, which was technically illegal in France but rarely enforced. In June 1930 she led a demonstration of several hundred protesters at Melun, complete with smoke bombs, that ended in a clash with gendarmes. Alongside all of this she funded centres for orphans and impoverished women, provided healthcare access for poor mothers and children and helped raise money for her causes by giving piano and singing recitals, putting her old conservatory training to use decades after anyone expected her to still be performing.
She died the way she'd spent thirty years living
Camille du Gast died in Paris on 24 April 1942, in the middle of the German occupation, having spent her final years still devoted to the charitable causes she'd taken up after 1910. She was buried in the Crespin family tomb at Père Lachaise Cemetery, alongside the husband whose fortune had made her entire second act possible. In 1929, more than a decade before her death, the French authorities had already renamed a Paris street rue Crespin du Gast in her honour, one of a genuinely small number of Paris streets named for a woman. A technical school in Chalon-sur-Saône, training students for careers in the automotive trade she'd once been formally banned from competing in, carries her name today.
A throughline that runs straight through the twentieth century
Du Gast wasn't the only woman of her era to force her way into a machine built by and for men, and the pattern she set kept repeating for decades after her. Five years before her ban from car racing, the mother-and-daughter duo Effie and Avis Hotchkiss rode a motorcycle across America together, proving the same point on two wheels that du Gast had already made on four. Decades further on, Vivian Bales rode solo across the United States on a motorcycle and became America's first cover girl for the sport, a fresh generation running into the same old arguments about whether a woman belonged behind the controls of a machine. And in the sky rather than on the road, Bessie Coleman had to leave the United States entirely and train in France just to become a licensed pilot, a country du Gast herself had spent years proving wrong about exactly this kind of thing. None of them knew each other's stories. All of them were fighting the same fight du Gast had already fought and mostly won, one race, one boat and one balloon jump at a time.
