Everything seems calm in Aunay-sur-Odon (Calvados), Wednesday 3 June 1835, at lunchtime. Suddenly, Pierre Rivière, a 20-year-old farmer, breaks into the family home. He wields a scythe. His paternal grandmother tries to stop him, in vain. He kills his pregnant mother, his 18-year-old sister Victoire, his brother Jules, 7 and a half, and escapes. On the morning of July 2, after weeks of wandering, he was arrested near Caen.
After evoking a divine injunction, he tries to justify his actions with his past. Born of an arranged marriage that allowed his father to avoid being drafted into the army, he suffered from parental conflicts and wanted to avenge his father for his mother’s tyranny.
Since patricide is the culmination of the crime, it is first of all death sentence November 16, 1835. But after a medical report concluding that he was mad, he was pardoned by King Louis Philippe. The sentence of him is commuted to life sentence. He commits suicide in prison four years later.
We are at the end of 1890 in the south-east of France. For several years the country has been terrified of a series of heinous and unsolved crimes. There would be a Jack the Ripper “French? The victims: girls or boys, belonging to the peasant world. Until June 20, 1897, when news attracted the attention of Judge Emile Fourquet, just installed in Belley, Ain. The horribly mutilated body of a (.. .)
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