Cherchez la femme
Cherchez la femme is a French idiom that has been adopted into Germanand means something like: Find the woman! meaning: There is a woman behind it!
When French was still the language of education in the 19th century , this expression made its way into upscale German conversation. Meyer's encyclopedia from 1888 writes: Où est la femme? (French, “where is the woman?”), the French criminalist's saying, according to which one has to look for the woman behind it in a cunning criminal attack, hence one also cites: Cherchez la femme! ("Looking for the woman!").
The sentence Il ya une femme dans toutes les affaires; aussitôt qu'on me fait un rapport, je dis: 'Cherchez la femme' is the motto of the police officer Jackal in the novel Les Mohicans de Paris (1854, German The Mohicans of Paris ; as a stage play first performance August 20, 1864, there II , 13. 3) by the elder Alexandre Dumas on the Parisian underworld.
Title of theater and film
Cherchez la femme is also used elsewhere as a title:
- Cherchez la femme or Die Geister vom Mummelsee , episode no.27 of the 1973television series Tatort
- Cherchez la femme , operetta composed in 1911by Ralph Benatzky (1884–1957)
- Cherchez la femme , Austrian feature film from 1921
- Cherchez la femme , French feature film from 1955
- Song of Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band
- Cherchez la femme, episode 67 of the crime anime Detective Conan ( German first broadcast on July 16, 2002)