The women sentenced to death in France (1906-1981)
Résumé
In the XXth century, few women were sentenced to the capital punishment for criminal or political reasons in France, compared to men. Only 13 out of 77 were executed. However the publicity given to such cases was tremendous. In fact, female crime and its repression were not perceived in the same way as male crime, because of the representations of the female nature. The gradual emancipation of women throughout the XXth century overturned those traditional views. Naturally, the patriarchal criminal justice system tried to control this change. This paper is based on a study of pardon files (presidential archives and archives of the Ministry of Justice), trial records, criminology journals, newspaper articles, lawyers’, officials’ and executioners’ accounts. Seen as the evil antithesis of a model wife, mother or daughter, the criminal woman was often described as perverse and manipulative. She sometimes was a parricide, an infanticide or a husband’s poisoner ‒ her fault was to attack the family home which she should have been naturally inclined to protect. Consequently, the criminal justice system treated her as a monster. The death penalty was an exclusion of the human community. But however revolting the crime could be, a woman’s gender protected her against actual death. Being regarded as weak, easily influenced, and unable to control her impulses, the criminal woman was never completely responsible for herself. Moreover, she symbolized life. Before the WWII, women sentenced to death were always pardoned. The way to consider the youngest and most beautiful condemned women evolved in the 1920s and 1930s. They became as famous, and sometimes as desired as movie stars. The surrealistic movement found a symbol of emancipation against the bourgeois family oppression in Violette Nozières or Christine Papin. But the ones who neglected their femininity and displayed a sexless body, were still stigmatized as unnatural. The unofficial abolition of the death penalty for women came to an end in the 1940s. The Vichy government wanted to enforce its “Révolution nationale”. The number of capital crimes increased in order to protect patriarchal family values. Several women, like the abortionist Marie-Louise Giraud, were considered as guilty not only for their crimes but also for their emancipated way of life ‒ they were sent to the executioner. The Liberation and the collaboration trials didn’t put an end to women’s executions. Some had played the male game of war ‒ judges and politicians considered they should be executed just like men. Political rights were granted to women in 1944 and came with a change in mentalities. Several jurists thought that since women lived the same way as men, they shouldn’t be denied the “privilege” to be guillotined. But the low level of death penalty sentences in the 1960s and 1970s, before its abolition in 1981, prevented them from facing the national razor.