Matricides

Matricides Jill Forbes MOI, PIERRE RIVIÈRE1 is the second section of René Allio's historical trilogy which includes Les Comisaras (1970) and Un Médecin des lumières (1988), and is based on the book of the same title published by Michel Foucault and his team of researchers.2 Allio's aims can be discerned in a text describing "'Le monde paysan français', project pour un ensemble d'émissions," in which he wrote: "Ce temps lent, cosmique, et religieux est précocement sur le point de disparaître au moment où il s'immortalise : Millet et l'Angélus (et la campagne fait naître ainsi de dernières moissons emblématiques pour ensemencer en rêves sur les mondes perdus les siècles industriels)."3 Like Foucault and his team, but in a visual register, Allio sees Moi, Pierre Rivière as a dramatization of the encounter between the ancient and the modern. The mainspring of the drama is the doomed relationship of Pierre's parents which arose from an attempt to circumvent intrusion of the arm of the state into peasant life: theirs was a "mariage de 1813," one of many contemporary attempts to avoid conscription into Napoleon's army.4 This in itself, though commonplace, was an attempt to hold back change, since the army notoriously functioned as "l'école de la nation," removing peasant boys from their villages and drilling them in a set of values based on discipline and a common language.5 The murder Pierre commits is an act of primitive peasant brutality apparently at odds with his narrative of the crime in which his citation of justificatory examples from erudite or semi-erudite sources is an eloquent testimony to the progress of education among the peasantry. The comings and goings between Pierre Riviere's parents are stimulated by the conflict between what is traditionally due from a wife to a husband in a peasant community , and the exercise of "rights" contained in the legal provisions of their marriage contract, itself the product of the Code civil of 1804. So that although the setting is a relatively backward rural community, the narrative takes on a theatrical quality, as Allio points out, a scenography akin to that of the bourgeois farce—itself no doubt an artistic response to the imposition of a uniform jurisdiction in France—as though, in Pierre's description, his parents are acting out roles which they have acquired.6 On first viewing the film appears committed to a form of antiquarianism. At the time of the film's release, director, scriptwriters, and reviewers all laid 62 Spring 2002 Forbes emphasis on the attempt to achieve an authentic recreation of nineteenth-century Normandy. Allio used non-professional actors with noticeable regional accents to play the peasants, including Rivière himself, while (anachronistically ) he used professional actors with standard French accents to play the notables such as the judges, the curé and the doctor. He filmed more or less in the locations in Normandy where the events recounted actually took place, while, as the reference to Millet suggests, the interiors, the costumes and even the corporeal attitudes of the actors are clearly inspired by the nineteenth-century painterly tradition of representations of peasant life.7 Foucault, when interviewed about the film, stressed how the "paysans du même lieu" were "isomorphes de ceux de l'affaire" (Gauthier 117). In this way the film has multiple points of resonance with the post-1968 cultural and political climate, evoking as it does questions of peasant rights, the popular voice, the struggle against oppression, and the authenticity of the excluded. It is also central to the political project of Cahiers du cinéma at the time which was, in the words of the dossier Cahiers devoted to the film, that of "l'idée d'une prise de parole paysanne" (Cahiers du cinéma 52). In order to consider the treatment of gender in the film, we have to return to the "dossier" published by Foucault and his team in 1973. This contained the document composed by Pierre Rivière while in prison awaiting trial for murder in 1835, consisting of 78 pages surrounded...