Violette Nozière: A Story of Murder in 1930s Paris by Sarah Maza (review)

of the greatest charms of having lived in Paris [...] is the Proustian glamour of being able to claim that one did so” (Rowlands 192). Middlebury College (VT), emeritus Edward C. Knox MAZA, SARAH. Violette Nozière: A Story of Murder in 1930s Paris. Berkeley: UP of California, 2011. ISBN 978-0-520-26070-2. Pp. 336. $29.95. Sarah Maza’s fourth monograph is a detailed inquiry into the crime and trial of Violette Nozière, a young woman accused of poisoning her parents and killing her father on 21 August 1933. The troubling case, which still leaves unanswered questions, fueled patronizing class prejudice in the courtroom, inspired a group of intellectuals, aroused the fascination of the general public, and preempted the front pages of leading newspapers, relegating important international events, like those leading to the Second World War, to places of less importance. Maza probes beyond the facts of the crime to describe the neighborhood and streets of Paris’ twelfth arrondissement in the 1930s, the world in which Nozière was born and lived. Maza’s research reveals a society fractured by the struggles of an emerging working class, a growing urban population with limited access to adequate housing, and a Parisian youth seduced by the café culture and pleasures of a metropolis. A modern female identity was taking shape in this changing city, where women like Nozière were receiving more education and entering the workforce in exponential numbers. But society generally failed to understand this development or see Nozière in its context. Maza’s analysis of the court proceedings underscores this failing and reveals how Judge Lanoir and the prosecution lawyers cracked jokes during the trial in Latin, a language understandable only to the highly educated men in the room, and laughed at Nozière’s expense. Maza also reveals how these men, determined to respect the pater familias, disregarded the accusation of incest made by Nozière against her father. Although the legal establishment along with the press largely avoided this taboo topic, Maza brings to light letters addressed to the judge from women recounting their own personal stories of incest and beseeching the judge to believe Nozière. Ironically, Nozière also received support from the writers and artists associated with the Surrealist movement, a group known for certain misogynistic tendencies. They published a collection of poetry and art just before the trial, immediately banned from distribution, which unequivocally supported Nozière’s accusations against her father and criticized bourgeois society for facilitating and ignoring incest. Other prominent individuals like Superintendent Marcel Guillaume (the model for Georges Simenon’s detective Maigret) believed Nozière’s story of sexual abuse. He was the first to hear her confession of the crime and wrote in his memoirs that he was convinced of her father’s guilt. René de Vésinne-Larue, the young lawyer assigned to the defense, also believed in her story. He helped in having her guillotine sentence commuted and eventually procured her release from prison and became a lifelong personal friend of Nozière, who went on to marry, bear children, and lead a productive life. All of the reactions to Nozière and her crime paint a vivid picture of life for the working class in the French capital between the two World Wars. It is surprising that such a popular and highly publicized case with telling social implications has received minimal scholarly attention. Aside from academic articles, this is the first Reviews 201 book-length project to include archival and other academic references. Maza’s extensive bibliographical notes underscore her meticulous and exhaustive research (she spent a year in Paris researching in the Bibliothèque des littératures policières, the Bibliothèque de l’Ordre des Avocats, and the Archives de la Ville de Paris). The breadth of Maza’s work, which covers historical, sociological, psychological, and literary aspects of Interwar Parisian life, make this book valuable not only to historians, but also to sociologists, literary and women’s studies scholars, and the general reader looking for an enthralling murder mystery. East Carolina University Marylaura Papalas MCQUEEN, ALISON. Empress Eugénie and the Arts: Politics and Visual Culture in the...