The Subject of Murder

Gender, Exceptionality, and the Modern KillerBy LISA DOWNING

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2013 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-00340-5

Contents

Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………….viiIntroduction……………………………………………………………………….1PART I. Murder and Gender in the European Nineteenth Century…………………………….33CHAPTER 1. “Real Murderer and False Poet”: Pierre-François Lacenaire…………………35CHAPTER 2. The “Angel of Arsenic”: Marie Lafarge……………………………………….54CHAPTER 3. The Beast in Man: Jack and the Rippers Who Came After…………………………72PART II. The Twentieth-Century Anglo-American Killer……………………………………97CHAPTER 4. “Infanticidal” Femininity: Myra Hindley……………………………………..99CHAPTER 5. “Monochrome Man”: Dennis Nilsen…………………………………………….126CHAPTER 6. Serial Killing and the Dissident Woman: Aileen Wuornos………………………..148CHAPTER 7. Kids Who Kill: Defying the Stereotype of the Murderer…………………………168By Way of Brief Conclusion ………………………………………………………….193Notes……………………………………………………………………………..199Index……………………………………………………………………………..233

Chapter One

“Real Murderer and False Poet”

Pierre-François Lacenaire

    Here’s a gripping and terrible sensation; here’s Lacenaire!
    He carried a lyre and a dagger!
    He was a poet and he killed!

    —(Hippolyte Bonnelier, Autopsie physiologique de Lacenaire, 1836)

    At once soft and ferocious
    Its form holds for the viewer
    I know not what atrocious grace
    The grace of the gladiator!

    Criminal aristocracy,
    Neither plane nor hammer
    Has hardened its skin
    For his instrument was a knife.

    For sacred calluses of honest labor
    One searches in vain the trace.
    Real murderer and false poet
    He was the Manfred of the gutter.

    —(Théophile Gautier, “Etude de mains: Lacenaire,” 1852)

The lines of verse that form the epigraph of this chapter tellingly reveal a characteristic of the discourses that surrounded the case of Pierre-François Lacenaire (1803–1836), a murderer, forger, and thief, a dandy, and a poet, and the figure at the center of an aesthetic, media, and medical circus in the first years of the July Monarchy in France. Into his medical report on the phrenology and physiology of the killer, Hyppolite Bonnelier inserts lines of doggerel attesting sensationally to the qualities of Lacenaire—poet and murderer both. In his poem, which meditates on the severed hand of the infamous poet-murderer, Théophile Gautier meticulously dissects the appearance of the hand to read traces of the murderer’s personality in a passable imitation of the methods of the science of the time. Both writers, then, physician and poet alike, bend and blend their discursive resources in order to draw attention to the extraordinariness of Lacenaire and to celebrate the proximity of his artistry and criminality. These examples of testimonies to Lacenaire’s singularity are only two of many, produced in the discourses of science, politics, the press, medicine, and art. The considerable proliferation of texts inspired by the case, and more specifically by the figure of Lacenaire, who was tried in 1835 and executed in 1836, bears witness to a very specific and long-lasting cultural fantasy of the links between destruction and creation, individuality and society, for which Lacenaire provided the locus in the French nineteenth century.

Lacenaire’s actual crimes were neither particularly numerous nor particularly impressive. He was convicted of a double murder and a bungled attempted third killing. The murder victims were the Widow Chardon, whose body was found in a severely mutilated condition, and her son. The surviving victim was a bank employee, Genevay, whom Lacenaire attempted to kill with his sidekicks, the petty criminals known as “François et Avril” (Victor Avril and François Martin). Lacenaire had previously served prison terms for forgery and theft, and reputedly considered prison to be a “school of crime.” As Edward Baron Turk has put it, Lacenaire “distinguished himself less for his crimes than for his aesthetic attitude toward them.”

If the case of Lacenaire excited a disproportionate wealth of reactions and opinions from a variety of ideological and political factions, this is perhaps due to his status as an educated, creative, and bourgeois killer—a “new” type of criminal subject. Foucault calls Lacenaire the “symbolic figure of an illegality kept within the bounds of delinquency and transformed into discourse—that is to say, made doubly inoffensive; the bourgeoisie had invented for itself a new pleasure, which it has still far from outgrown.” The idea that criminality might issue from, and appeal to, the bourgeoisie was seen as a different kind of danger than the one delinquency had previously been seen to pose. As Chevalier’s influential book on crime in nineteenth-century France demonstrates, criminality became a paranoid obsession of the nineteenth-century imaginary owing to the assumption that delinquency was a product of workingclass insubordination, and that, like the “masses,” its threat was plural and anonymous. Balzac summed up this idea that criminals constituted a subterranean group, operating secretly to destabilize society, when he described, in 1825, “a nation apart, in the middle of the nation.” In contrast to this perception, Lacenaire embodied dissidence from within the ranks of the artistic elite. The cult of personality that blossomed around Lacenaire announced the underside of the rise of the individual associated with post-Revolutionary society. For, in Lacenaire, crime had both a single name and a single face, and it articulated its reason in articles sent from prison to the newspapers and promptly published, and in rhyme.

Gautier famously termed Lacenaire “vrai meurtrier et faux poète” (real murderer and false poet), a formula about which I will have more to say later with regard to the discourses of subjective authenticity to which it appeals, while Lacenaire, in his own memoirs, had identified himself more simply (and flatteringly) as a “poète-né” (“born poet”), endowed with “a veritable natural gift.” The myth of Lacenaire as both murderer and poet is indeed extraordinary in its ability to extend beyond his own personal history and immediate cultural context. Not only did the case and trial of Lacenaire set the tongues of 1830s Paris wagging, but the figure of Lacenaire would go on to be associated with the creation of a particular kind of murderer in the European cultural imaginary—the artistic creator of the murderous act, who produced poems in addition to corpses, and both with the same attention to artistry and flair. While the figure of the criminal artist has a genealogy that extends back beyond the nineteenth century—Sade being its most obvious exemplar—I will be arguing that the specificity of this discourse in Romantic and postRomantic French culture lies in giving rise to a recognizable (fantasy) identity for the murderer, an ontology that would cross seas and continents and endure for centuries, in order to give Western society an archetype of gentlemanly murderous subjectivity.

Lacenaire has been immortalized in works of literature and on celluloid by names as diverse as Victor Hugo, Théophile Gautier, Rachilde, Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Marcel Carné, and Francis Girod. Charles Baudelaire named him “one of the heroes of modern life” (“un des héros de la vie moderne”). It will be the task of this chapter to explore the precise filiations between commentaries on the murderer (both autobiographical texts and those authored by others) and the traces he left on the cultural imagination. By so doing, I hope to articulate the ways in which the figure of the aesthete murderer became a prized locus of debates about subjectivity, class, gender, sexuality, and creativity in the 1830s in France and beyond.

Lacenaire in Context: The Most Frenetic of All the Romantics

The “popularity” of Lacenaire in the 1830s was not a phenomenon that emerged ex nihilo, but rather the symptom of a cultural trend. The facts of Lacenaire’s case, as they were conveyed by a fascinated media, appeared to dramatize several of the philosophical, aesthetic, and political obsessions of the zeitgeist. For the group of young Romantic and republican writers of the 1830s, known as the Bouzingos or Jeunes France, among them Pétrus Borel, Alexandre Dumas, Gérard de Nerval, and Théophile Gautier, Lacenaire fulfilled the role of a talismanic hero, a symbol of the transgression of artistic and lawful limits. This group, which pledged to fight against the philistinism associated with the new order of Louis Philippe, was personally familiar with Lacenaire, who, like them, frequented the workshop of the sculptor Duseigneur in the early 1830s. During Lacenaire’s incarceration, members of the group, including Dumas and Gautier, would visit him in prison, while their mentor, Victor Hugo, dedicated his first person narrative “Le Dernier jour d’un condamné” (“The Final Day of a Condemned Man”) to Pierre-François. Following Lacenaire’s execution, in a very literal and material, if somewhat gruesome, gesture, Maxime du Camp allegedly acquired the severed hand of the murderer, freshly cut from the gallows, inspiring Gautier to pen “Étude de mains: Lacenaire.”

The type of attention brought to bear on the case and figure of Lacenaire by his artistic contemporaries can be summarized under two headings: political and aesthetic. In stark definition to the ordered, progressive new bourgeois class, the young Romantics (many of whom were, of course, middle class or aristocratic by birth) cultivated an affectation of bohemian eccentricity. The dandified figure of Lacenaire, producer of a handful of political poems and famed for his insouciance in the face of his own condemnation, was co-opted for their republican political project and made to signify against the society they hated. In “Quel malheur ou Les regrets d’un doctrinaire” (“What misfortune or the regrets of a doctrinarian”), Lacenaire concludes with the following two stanzas:

    In this baneful age,
    Repudiating even his name,
    In this hated Paris
    If he were to reign, despite being a Bourbon,
    I am certain that our king
    Would think today, like me,
    What misfortune!
    I say it with distaste
    Our three glorious days were a waste!

    To reassure the homeland
    About a similar attack
    Against the furious press
    We need a coup d’état.
    Fines and prohibitions
    Have not put us back in surplus
    What misfortune!
    I say it with distaste
    Our three glorious days were a waste!

The poem’s stridently anti–July Monarchy sentiment, marked by its ironic appeal to the even more repressive fallen Bourbon monarch, belies the fact that elsewhere in his writings, Lacenaire declared that he was by no means a committed political activist and confessed himself indifferent to the details of political reality. The availability of this stereotype of the committed rebel, corroborated by well-chosen sections of verse like the one cited above, was useful, however, for the aesthetic and political groups that adopted him as their byword for dissent.

For the press of the government, the politicization of Lacenaire was a dangerous gesture, according a revolutionary power to criminal force and providing a rhetorical weapon for oppositional factions. This explains, perhaps, the attempts to downplay the importance of Lacenaire as a man of his time in the conservative press. One commentator wrote in the Journal de Paris in November 1835:

The press has jumped on the trial of Lacenaire to incriminate either contemporary society or power. Some attack the corruption of the century, others what they call the immorality of the rulers. It would be more reasonable to regard Lacenaire as a terrible exception, of the kind that have appeared under all regimes and in all periods, but, happily for humanity, at rare intervals.

Seeing the murderer as a “terrible exception” and as an ahistorical phenomenon— an aberration of the universal human genus that could occur in any epoch—rather than as the embodiment of the troubled and divided zeitgeist was an attempt to diffuse the power that Lacenaire wielded for his public and to make vanish the specters of the Revolution that discourses surrounding him threatened to evoke. It was, perhaps, precisely for this reason that the dissident writers of the day chose to play up his doubtful political affiliation, making him appear as an avenging angel of the republican and revolutionary spirit rather than as (just) an apolitical artist.

It has been argued that Romanticism presaged a democratization of literature. This obtained to some extent at the levels of both subject matter and profession, and the two were inextricably linked. Romanticism’s turn away from the epic and collective concerns of neoclassicism toward individual and personal introspection was accompanied by the fact that the profession of writer was increasingly potentially open to the bourgeois as well as to the aristocrat. This elicited pessimistic commentaries from antiliberal commentators. In a world in which anyone, regardless of class affiliation, could become a writer, according to Philarète Chasles, critic for La Chronique de Paris: “the story of our literature and of our authors will soon be told in the Gazette des tribuneaux [a popular, often sensationalist, publication giving details of crimes and trials].” Lacenaire, understandably, was seen as the actualized embodiment of this premonition.

The figure of Lacenaire arrived on the Romantic scene as an amalgam of existing archetypes as well as an innovator of a new criminal subject. The figure of the creative outlaw had already made his appearance in English Romantic literature during the 1820s with Byron’s poetic heroes, and some newspaper articles went so far as to suggest that Lacenaire was attempting deliberate imitation of these sublime role models, citing “les ravages du romantisme” (“the ravages of Romanticism”) which encouraged criminals to believe “that by dint of villainy and cynical perversity, they can redeem themselves from the horror they inspire and acquire admirers.” The problem, of course, was that this was exactly the response Lacenaire received from his fellow Romantics and a generation of ardent readers.

As well as the Byronic hero, acknowledged predecessors of Lacenaire include the figure of the dandified criminal Robert Macaire, eponymous hero of Antier, Lacoste, and Lemaître’s play (1834). About the links between the hero of the melodrama and the figure at the center of the public trial of the decade, Jules Janin wrote:

At least in the past, before Robert Macaire, vice was understood to be sullied and filthy; it inspired fear on sight; today Robert Macaire is dressed like the most elegant of men … what’s more, crime on trial in the magistrate’s court is quoting lines from Horace the epicurean poet. Robert Macaire, to be sure, is the father of Lacenaire.

Lacenaire himself refuted this link, writing, “I’ve seen Robert-Macaire and L’Auberge des Adrets; these two ignoble works could have turned me off crime, given Robert’s ostentation and the other one’s stupidity.” Lacenaire’s negative review of the production and its protagonist notwithstanding, significant parallels can be drawn between the theatre where the popular exploits of Robert Macaire were dramatized and the theatre of the courtroom, where Lacenaire kept the audience enrapt as they watched the drama of his trial unfold. His wider public consisted of the readers who followed its progress in the pages of the Gazette des tribuneaux which, as Foucault has pointed out, dedicated maximum column space to Lacenaire between 1835 and 1836, to the detriment of covering other murder cases such as that of his exact contemporary Pierre Rivière. Moreover, the association of Lacenaire with theatrical melodrama was a strong one, and one which would resonate in the cinematic incarnation of Lacenaire in Carné’s iconic film Les Enfants du Paradis (1945). Carné’s Lacenaire, as well as being the archetype of the dandy-killer, is also a master of words: a public letter-writer and an author of melodrama, highlighting the performative and attention-seeking aspects of Lacenaire’s persona, which the press of the time was also keen to point out.

Melodramatic rhetoric and exaggeration for poetic effect characterized the Frenetic Romantic style and are amply visible in Lacenaire’s poetry. Frenetic Romanticism was famously described by Charles Nodier as the mode of writing that conforms “to the needs of a blasé generation demanding sensationalism at any cost.” Murder as both an attack on despised society and a stimulant for the nerves of a wearied population was prized subject matter for its literature. In his morbid and cynical “Champavert: le lycanthrope” (“Champavert: the werewolf”) (1833), Pétrus Borel employs the trope of violent death—enacted against self and other— as a purer alternative to bourgeois society’s hypocritical and pious self-righteousness. The figure of the unmarried woman, Flava, who kills her child rather than bear the stigma of its illegitimacy, is the symbolic victim of a destructive society, annihilating with conformity. The hero of “Champavert,” the eponymous “lycanthrope,” murders the grief-stricken infanticidal woman in turn in order to end her guilt and suffering, and then turns a spirited attack on the society that forced this outcome:

Infanticide. So many apparently shy virgins are already on their third, so many virtuous girls count their springs off by the murders they have committed … Barbaric law! Ferocious prejudice! Infamous horror! Men! Society! Take her! Take your prey. I give her to you!!!

The writing is hyperbolic in the extreme, but the idea that the murderer is the figure most fit to critique the complacency and moral turpitude of society is a conceit which carried over to the treatment of Lacenaire. The murderer himself wrote of moralistic (and therefore implicitly hypocritical) writers: “I prefer the blood that I have on my hands to the unclean mud that entirely covers theirs.” Here, having blood on ones hands stands as a mark of authenticity, of getting ones hands dirty, in contradistinction to theoretical pontificating. In both Lacenaire’s statement and Borel’s short story, an attack on hypocritical society goes hand in hand with a glorification of extreme act and sensation.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from The Subject of Murderby LISA DOWNING Copyright © 2013 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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