Writing History from a Crime: The Violette Nozière Case

*Talk in French with English translation

In the summer of 1933, in Paris, an 18-year old woman poisoned her parents and the crime became a great cause célèbre of the interwar era. This talk will present a new interpretation of a famous French patricide and further explore the writing of history from a judicial case: the social imaginary and its mechanisms as revealed through micro-history.

Anne-Emmanuelle Demartini is Professor of History at University of Paris 13 and the author of Violette Nozière, la fleur du mal: Une histoire des années trente (2017). Her areas of research interest include the social imagination and the history of emotion, and the history of crime and its representations. Stéphane Gerson is Professor of French and French Studies and the Director of the Institute of French Studies at NYU.

Event made possible with support from the Institut Français.

From La Maison Francaise