In 1885, in Geneva, a mother slit the throats of her four children, before placing white lilacs on their corpses. The crime caused an “emotional storm” in the city. For the mother, prison or asylum?
We know the media’s attraction to criminal news items, any case that is slightly out of the ordinary, due to the exceptional nature of the crime or the personality of its perpetrator, immediately rises to the rank of “cause célèbre”. For several decades, historians have been rereading the archives of these exceptional crimes, showing that they reflect in their unfolding and their judicial and media treatment the society of their time, while sometimes proposing different approaches.
We have discussed the “sensitive” story of the woman killer Pranzini by Frédéric Chauvaud. Vacher has just been the subject of a monumental work by Marc Renneville, giving us to read the entirety of his assizes procedure file and the writings of criminologists on the shepherd killer, while developing an analysis, as a historian, of the questions raised by the personality of the criminal and the judicial investigation.
The “wheel of misfortune”
Michel Porret’s work has a dual characteristic. First, the French reader discovers an original case, both in its location – Switzerland – and in the nature of the crime committed, that of the murder of her children by a mother. Then, the historian aims to restore, while analyzing it, the unfolding of this case, from the crime committed to the release of its author from the asylum, by placing himself as close as possible to the sources that are meticulously exploited. The result is particularly successful. Rarely are we given the opportunity to follow with such precision and rigor the history of a crime, from the judicial investigation of which it is the subject to the debates that it arouses in medical circles, on the question of madness and responsibility with regard to criminal law.
The crime of the “Medea of Geneva” shocked the city as soon as it became known, on the morning of May 2, 1885. The night before, she had slit the throats of her four children with a razor, then placed a few white lilacs on their corpses before attempting suicide with atropine.
The first chapter sheds light on this “drama of the night”. Living in the populous, rather disreputable district of Saint-Gervais, rue de Coutance, Jeanne Lombardi is marked, according to her own words, by the “wheel of misfortune”. Orphaned at a very young age, placed as a servant, she marries a widowed shoe merchant and, upon his death, as a second wife, a tailor, Joseph Lombardi who, often drunk, beats her and her children.
Hated by her in-laws, abused by a fickle husband who threatens her with a revolver, she ends the day on the 1ster May, punctuated by several arguments, by the fatal decision, feeling that her children “would be happier dead than alive with such a father.” This is what she will tell the police officers in charge of the investigation, at the end of it, after their long description of the crime scene and the forensic examination of the children, only one of whom survived, remaining speechless and severely handicapped in breathing.
The second chapter describes and analyses the “emotional storm” caused in the city by this exceptional crime: crowds stationed near the “house of mourning”, at the doors of the morgue, a huge procession accompanying the coffins of young children during the funeral, then, after the trauma, the gradual return to calm, while Jeanne, delirious, initially treated at the cantonal hospital, behaves like a model prisoner in prison where she is the subject of daily reports on her condition. It is then time for the judicial investigation (third part): forensic examination of the bodies to establish the evidence and determine the modus operandi, interrogations of Jeanne and witnesses (family, neighbours) by the investigating judge Fléchet, information gathered in the neighbourhood (the “voice of the suburb”) by the judicial police.
In this information, the medical experts – about ten of them are mobilized – have a prominent place (fourth part). Their reports are presented and analyzed at length, from that of the coroner Gosse, of traditional tone, insisting on the rationality of the modus operandi and concluding with criminal responsibility, to those of the majority, alienists among the most prominent of the time mainly, who, using the autobiography of Jeanne that they arouse, rely on her words to analyze the mental illness (the “anxiety masked by hysteria”), the act committed reflecting a form of altruistic homicide or “combined suicide”.
Trial and criminal liability
The next part is devoted to the trial. We enter the Geneva courthouse with the author, follow the course of the trial after the jury is constituted, listen to the testimony of the witnesses – who give the bad role to the husband, Joseph Lombardi whose attitude appears cynical – and the interrogation of Jeanne. The latter, impassive, does not come out of her pathological state, justifying her crime, regretting not having been able to kill the surviving child and even affirming that she would finish “her work” if she could.
The debates essentially revolve around the question of her criminal responsibility. The experts, summoned as witnesses, have already had the opportunity to express their conclusions. Few are those on whom the prosecutor will be able to rely in his indictment to demand a criminal sanction. Jeanne’s defender, lawyer Lachenal, can follow the majority of them in denying any responsibility and requesting acquittal, the “true abode of the insane” being the asylum and not prison.
This will be the verdict, Jeanne being interned at the asylum of Vernets (last part) where, under the name of Jeanne Moral, she will benefit from clinical monitoring giving rise to daily reports. On May 10, 1894, under the terms of a final favorable medical assessment, considered cured, she can leave the asylum to go and settle in Algeria, in Sétif where she will marry in February 1897 for a third time a servant, giving birth a fifth time a few months later.
The “Lombardi case” would give rise to many questions and criminological analyses on criminal contagion, alienation and crime and, in the immediate future (1887), a modification of the Geneva Code of Criminal Procedure, the jury now being able to answer a question on the mental alienation of the accused.
An “ideal type” of the judicial moment
In his conclusion, which focuses on the fact that the case bears witness to the triumph of the medical and the pathological over the legal in the treatment of crimes committed under the influence of “madness”, Michel Porret states that he wanted to “distance himself” in order to “fit together and order as best as possible the facts and the speeches of the protagonists of the Coutance crime in order to give them a social meaning” (p. 271).
The bet is held. Some of the sources, accompanied by a relevant iconography, are given in appendices, including Jeanne’s autobiography. For those familiar with a procedural file, it is obvious that the author has been able to extract the maximum amount of information from the numerous pieces it contains. The description and analysis of the facts are carried out with extreme precision, as an entomologist or a “bloodhound”, to use a term that the author extends to other participants than the police officer on the judicial scene.
The reader knows the addresses of almost all the protagonists, enters the maze of the Morgue or the Palais de Justice, without getting lost. Ignorant of the course of an investigation or a trial, he benefits from a complete and luminous initiation. In addition, the sense of formulas (the forensic doctor “scalpel detective”), a writing sensitive to Jeanne’s depression which perfectly highlights the poignant images that she uses (the “wheel of misfortune”, the “gnawing worm”, the “queen bee (who wants to leave) with her hive”, the first verse of a poem quoted in her autobiography “Rien ne parle à mon âme”) give the work a beautiful literary quality.
Exciting, enjoyable to read, The Blood of Lilacs invites us to continue the investigation in search of similar crimes. If the Lombardi case is an “ideal type” of the judicial moment, where alienist doctors prevail over magistrates, it would be interesting to follow an evolution and to compare with other “killer mothers”. Jeanne Lombardi makes several references to an identical crime, cited in a Lyon newspaper in 1884. That same year, by chance during a query on the daily press, we spot, in Paris, a mother wanting to die by asphyxiation with her children because of her poverty.
We can also wonder if, in Jeanne’s case, the prospect of social decline (which Joseph, her husband, would later experience after his bankruptcy) did not reinforce her anxiety, while she had experienced a certain social advancement as the daughter of a stonemason, thanks to marriage. The comparison with “altruistic suicides” would also be interesting. This beautiful history book that Michel Porret offers us is worth reading and pondering for all future research into the history of crime and the “misfortune” of living.