On the “Freudism” Surrounding a Crime: The Violette Nozière Affair, 1933–1934

In Paris in 1933, Violette Noziere, a young woman of eighteen, poisoned her parents, explaining that she had wished to avenge herself on an incestuous father. This criminal case, which was front-page news in 1930s France, gave rise to a huge debate into which psychoanalysis invited itself. This article details the way in which this human interest news story was able to call upon, discuss and test psychoanalysis, by inviting it to account for the motive advanced by the criminal—which was interpreted as a veritable “Freudian novel”—and to conceive of the personality of the parricide and the figure of the “Freudian” woman, an Oedipal young girl emancipated both intellectually and sexually, who crystallized the concerns raised by the dual process of the emancipation of women and young people. In contrast to the classic historical approach, which analyzes the dissemination of psychoanalysis by emphasizing the confrontation between Freudian theory and the world of scholarship, this study documents the mobilization of psychoanalysis for a human-interest news story, by focusing on the favored vehicle of such stories, the press. In doing so it underlines the dissemination of psychoanalysis, in a hackneyed and polemical form, in the social discourse of the 1930s.