A young girl poisons her parents: thus begins the Violette Nozière affair, one of the most resounding of the 1930s. Family norms, authority relationships, the role of the press, social imagination: the news item tells the story of an era.
One night in August 1933, when an 18-year-old Parisian girl alerted a neighbor about a suspicious smell of gas coming from the small family apartment she occupied in a working-class neighborhood of the capital, two bodies were discovered there, with no apparent connection to any asphyxiation. It quickly turned out that the young girl, whose guilt was established in a few days by the police, had poisoned her parents, leaving the father dead and the mother still alive. The press immediately seized on this news item. Thus began the Violette Nozière affair, one of the most sensational of the 1930s.
It has since given rise to an abundant fictional and historical literature, as evidenced by the latest work by Anne-Emmanuelle Demartini, professor of contemporary history at the University of Paris 13. In line with the work of Alain Corbin, his work emphasizes social sensibilities and imaginaries, as well as transgressive practices studied, in particular, through legal archives. The question here is to understand how the case developed and why it had such an impact, another way of understanding a social imaginary.
Media coverage of crime
In the preamble, the author warns the reader that “it is up to the historian to convert private crime into a mine of reflection and questions.” Thus she constructs Violette Nozière’s crime as an object of history and proposes a way of making history with a legal case, the archives of which are exceptionally rich for those interested in the social history of an era. Her demonstration is based on three sets.
The first, the least developed, is devoted to the presentation of the elucidation of the crime, the truth of the guilt of the accused despite her rapid confession, the evidence, the possible accomplices, the motive(s) retained which were difficult to establish because of the silence or the confused statements of the accused. The account of the trial takes up relatively little space, in particular because, a year after the discovery of the crime and its media coverage, the emotion had subsided and attention was turned back to the political upheavals of 1934.
Anne-Emmanuelle Demartini justifies her lesser attention to “proven facts”. For her, “the truth is in the way in which an era reveals the play of its anxieties, examines itself and speaks out”. The truth, she insists, is “in the collective mobilization, at the heart of the 1930s, around domestic crime which heated up a questioning of family and social norms considered to be disrupted, of roles, identities, authority relationships and hierarchies”. Thus, “in the multiple stories whose production was driven by crime, the invented and the imagined are not necessarily the enemies of the true”.
This is why the second set, which occupies a good part of the book, is devoted to the role of the press, a medium which “makes possible the collective appropriation of judicial affairs and which begins as soon as the crime is brought to the attention of the public”. This is followed by a detailed analysis of the way in which daily newspapers, both news and opinion, as well as weeklies and the magazine press (including the popular Detective) report this parricide which is incomprehensible to part of the public.
The author describes the layouts, the titles of the articles, their position in relation to the rest of the content, the typography, the choice of photos. She notes how the story of the drama is part of a context of competition between the different daily news outlets, at a time when the conquest of the public is over. This largely explains “the escalation, the rhetoric of revelation, the logic of the sensational and even the care given to the layout to retain readership.”
Gender logics
By studying this journalistic production, Anne-Emmanuelle Demartini paints a picture of the mental universe (a notion dear, along with that of social imagination, to the historiographical movement to which she belongs) of a large part of French society in the 1930s. A patriarchal society, still living under the trauma of the Great War, where gender assignments have become rigid, where the fear of women’s emancipation hovers.
From this point of view, Violette Nozière, who broke the taboo of parricide, can only frighten with her youth, her status as an intellectual (she was a high school student), her free sexuality and her desire for independence. Through the story of the investigation, gender logics are brought to light, all of which refer to the commonplace of feminine weakness and perversity. This is embodied in the figure of the poisoner, “carrying a coherent system of often very old representations and clichés, backed by a thought of the difference between the sexes”.
According to the author, this figure is an important key to understanding the impact of Violette Nozière’s crime and its lasting impact on the social imagination. Especially since the system of representation of the poisoner was reinforced by the expertise of psychiatrists who associated, to explain the case of parricide, the feminine, imagination and sexuality.
The third set runs in filigree throughout the book, before being tackled head-on in the last pages. Was Violette Nozière the victim of incest and was the motive for the crime not revenge for the abuse perpetrated by her father since she was twelve? While the accused only broke the silence to explain her actions by her father’s behavior, and she gives details, not retained by the investigation after some verification, it is her free sexuality, with multiple partners, which becomes the key to her personality and behavior.
For the author, the incest theory is firmly rejected by the prosecution, as it clashes with the reputation of the father, a good husband, a good worker, thrifty and hard-working, affiliated with the CGTU and esteemed by her professional entourage. And Anne-Emmuelle Demartini concludes convincingly: “The daughter’s obviously deviant sexuality makes it unnecessary to consider the father’s sexual deviance.”
The father dethroned, the daughter rehabilitated
With this reinterpretation of parricide, the death sentence of Violette Nozière on October 12, 1934, becomes essentially, notwithstanding all the other elements at stake, a family affair that society, faced with its weakening, must defend and safeguard.
Violette Nozière has attacked Father with a capital letter, the keystone of civil society, twice: parricide killed the real father, the accusation of incest the symbolic father. Far from the father in majesty that the Napoleonic Civil Code has traced, Baptiste (Nozière) is a father in pieces, torn between various faces and dethroned.
This is why the judges insisted on the difficult character of the accused: lack of school attendance, reprehensible sexual behavior, frequent arguments with parents. The demonstration is convincing, reinforced by the story of the criminal’s life after her conviction. Pardoned in December, according to the custom of not executing women, her sentence was commuted to forced labor for life. Violette Nozière became a model prisoner, disciplined, diligent, acquiring skills in accounting, to the point of becoming employed in the accounting department of the registry of the Rennes prison where she was transferred. After the rejection of several appeals for clemency, her sentence was reduced to twelve years of forced labor in 1942. She was released in 1945.
Married to the clerk’s son, she began a new life as a model wife and mother, caring devotedly for her elderly mother who had survived the crime, her sick husband and her five children. After three negative requests, she was rehabilitated in 1963 because of her exemplary conduct as a prisoner. Suffering from tuberculosis, she died three years later, having become the heroine of a positive edification, a repentant Mary Magdalene, sublimated by a life of work and self-denial, after having been the heroine of a negative edification, in the guise of a poisoner.
In this work, which focuses on the sum of practices and discourses that have transformed a news item into a “total social fact”, the question of incest, which was passed over in silence at the time because it was inaudible, is taken up again in the light of studies on incest today. This is why “incest considered true sheds light on what once seemed improbable (…). If we accept that Violette Nozière spoke the truth, then it is in incest that we must seek the reasons for parricide. And it is the value of a denial that must be given to the rejection of her words.”
We can only agree with the author’s conclusion:
The story of Violette Nozière requires us to leave the sole perspective of the history of representations to consider not only the reception of the speech on incest, but also the incestuous situation itself and the way in which the victim was able to try to escape it. Violette Nozière replaced the speech with the crime.