Violette Noziere by Sarah Maza - Paper - University of California Press

About the Book

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.

About the Author

Sarah Maza is Jane Long Professor of Arts and Sciences and Professor of History at Northwestern University. She is the author of many books including award winners Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France (UC Press) and The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750-1850.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. A Neighborhood in Paris
2. Interwar Girlhoods
3. Violette’s Family Romance
4. A Crime in Late Summer
5. The Accusation
6. Letters to the Judge
7. A Culture of Crime
8. A Water Lily on a Heap of Coal
9. The Trial
10. Afterlives

Conclusion

Notes
Index

Reviews

“Maza explains brilliantly how and why Violette’s story—or a culturally acceptable version of her story—grew from being a mere fait divers, or miscellaneous news item, into a nationally staged drama that bound France in schadenfreude-laced fascination near the end of the turbulent and divisive Third Republic. Combining a neatly suspenseful account of Violette’s crime and its consequences with a richly layered cultural history . . . she skillfully analyzes Violette’s transformation from wretched schoolgirl to cultural icon.”
— New York Times Book Review

“Grittily cinematic.”
— Vogue

“An academic history with a pulpy noir heart. . . . Fluently written and thoroughly researched, Maza contains ‘a whole constellation of contemporary experience’ in the wrenching story of the Nozières.”
— Publishers Weekly

“Maza writes for students of French and women's history, but the story itself is so fascinating that general readers interested in crime and mystery will be enthralled by the intersection of sex and class at its heart.”
— Library Journal

“Excellent. . . . Maza gorgeously weaves together social history, crime culture, gender theory, and thorough research.”
— New Books In Biography

“[An] excellent new biography. . . . Maza gorgeously weaves together social history, crime culture, gender theory, and thorough research to present the complexities of the [Nozière case]. Simultaneously, she incorporates small details regarding everyday, inter-war Parisian life, which grounds both Violette and her crime in a concreteness that is often missing in history books.”
— New Books In Biography

“A true-life detective tale set not amid the glamour and romance of a well-touristed Paris but in a secret city that runs thick with the lives of the forgotten and the abandoned.”
— T: The New York Times Style Magazine

“Compelling. . . . A brief review cannot convey the elegance and persuasiveness of Maza’s version of this famous case.”
— Journal Of Modern History

“The trial captivated France, and readers will be just as captivated by Maza’s study of Noziere and the culture of interwar France.”
— Dan’s Hamptons

A well-researched and thoroughly readable account of French culture as revealed in a generally forgotten murder case.”
— Chico News & Review

"Sarah Maza has written a vivid, gripping and clear-eyed account of the celebrated Violette Nozière case, which captivated French society in the 1930s. A bold and imaginative story, Violette Nozière opens an unexpected and revealing window onto interwar Parisian life." — Colin Jones, author of Paris: Biography of a City

“Sarah Maza's absorbing new book on Violette Nozière--flapper, fantasist, and perpetrator of one of the most sordid and sensational French homicides of the 1930s—is a scholarly 'true crime' tale of the most intelligent sort. Why might a seemingly respectable little mademoiselle from a 'nice' bourgeois family want to poison her maman et papa at the breakfast table? Alongside her riveting account of the crime and its aftermath, Maza investigates the various pathologies—familial, social, economic, cultural, psychosexual—that may have figured in the mayhem. (At her trial Nozière claimed, among other things, that her father had sexually abused her for years.) The result is both a fascinating case history—Greek tragedy rewritten as seedy policier—and a chilling glimpse into the less salubrious aspects of French lower middle-class life between the wars.” — Terry Castle, author of The Professor

"One of those rare and sophisticated works that tells a gripping story while evoking a complex historical period. There exist very few cultural histories of the interwar years."—Carolyn Dean, author of Aversion and Erasure: The Fate of the Victim after the Holocaust

“Sarah Maza's book tells an arresting story that deftly combines conventional social history with a subtle analysis of gender and culture. Using all the arts of the best storytellers, she is careful not to give too much away, and it is only with time and a remarkable conclusion that we realize that Violette Nozière is no ordinary tale.” — Ruth Harris, author of Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century