Violette Noziere
A Story of Murder in 1930s Paris
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
On an August evening in 1933, in a quiet, working-class neighborhood in Paris, eighteen-year-old Violette Nozière gave her mother and father glasses of barbiturate-laced "medication," which she told them had been prescribed by the family doctor; one of her parents died, the other barely survived. Almost immediately Violette’s act of "double parricide" became the most sensational private crime of the French interwar era—discussed and debated so passionately that it was compared to the Dreyfus Affair. Why would the beloved only child of respectable parents do such a thing? To understand the motives behind this crime and the reasons for its extraordinary impact, Sarah Maza delves into the abundant case records, re-creating the daily existence of Parisians whose lives were touched by the affair. This compulsively readable book brilliantly evokes the texture of life in 1930s Paris. It also makes an important argument about French society and culture while proposing new understandings of crime and social class in the years before World War II.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An academic history with a pulpy noir heart, Maza's account of Violette Nozi re, who at age 19 poisoned her parents and whose case captured Paris's imagination, is also the story of a socially unsettled interwar France. Maza, a professor of history at Northwestern (The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750 1850), uses the Nozi re affair to examine social mobility; working-class Paris neighborhoods like the Nozi res'; department-store fashion that allowed an upwardly aspiring girl like Violette to dress fashionably; crime journalism; surrealism (Andr Breton sympathized with Violette during her trial). Yet the story of the depressed, angry Violette whose father likely molested her, and whose "drama-prone, overbearing" mother survived the poisoning to become her daughter's most vocal opponent keeps the book beating in time. Reminiscent of the O.J. Simpson trial, the Nozi re affair reflected the anxieties of its society: the horror of parricide paired with later accusations of incest presented a "troubling ambiguity" that the public struggled to disentangle. Fluently written and thoroughly researched, Maza contains "a whole constellation of contemporary experience" in the wrenching story of the Nozi res. Photos.
