Chabrol and the Execution of the Deed

In January of 1933 the city of Le Mans was seized by the shock and horror of a murder of especial violence and apparent absence of motive. The traumatic effect of this event spread rapidly and far beyond the boundaries of this provincial city of northern France, and its fascination has persisted over the decades as a deeply enigmatic and therefore doubly troubling episode in the annals of crime and of the French judicial system. Two sisters, Christine and Lia Papin, domestics of impeccable service in the employ of the affluent middle-class Lancelin family, attacked their mistress and her daughter, gouging their eyes out with their bare hands, before proceeding to beat them to death with household implements that lay at hand. The subsequent partial butchery of the bodies and disposition of limbs suggested an attack of a somewhat eroticized sadism. The malaise and fascination generated by this episode immediately spread far beyond Le Mans, and the case awakened a strong interest among a wide range of professionals and intellectuals of the day. Both this case and the recent one of Violette Noziere, the young woman who had murdered her parents, attracted the Surrealists' interest and their support of the accused, which was informed by their radical critique of the structure of the bourgeois family. Thus it was that Louis Aragon, Benjamin Pfret, and Paul Eluard, among others, had canonized Violette as a heroine of their time. (It should be noted that Claude Chabrol's filmography includes Violette Noziere [1978], his own fine dramatization of her destiny. Chabrol's contribution to the continuing reflection on these cases, which have sustained a deep disquiet within the social fabric of modern France, surely deserves especial attention within consideration of his oeuvre.) The case of the Papin sisters also attracted, among many others noted below, the attention ofJacques Lacan, who then produced his early text on paranoia. The strangely enigmatic nature of the affair was to stimulate the production of an abundance of analytic texts-legal, medical, psychiatric, and, more recently, sociopolitical. It is now clear that the enigma was largely the result of a system's inability and unwillingness to formulate the proper questions. This view is most convincingly argued by Girard Gourmel in his recent meticulous review of the case (L'Ombre double: Dits et non dits de l'affaire Papin [Paris: Editions Cenomane, 2000]). Nonetheless, it may well be that the

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