Michel Foucault. Foreword to "I, Pierre Riviere,
having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother..." 1973.
We
had in mind a study of the practical aspects of the relations between
psychiatry and criminal justice. In the course of our research we came across
Pierre Riviere's case.
It
was reported in the Annales d'hygične publique et de médecine légale
in 1836. Like all other reports published in that journal, this comprised a
summary of the facts and the medico-legal experts' reports. There were,
however, a number of unusual features about it.
A
series of three medical reports which did not reach similar conclusions and did
not use exactly the same kind of analysis, each coming from a different source
and each with a different status within the medical institution: a report by a
country general practitioner, a report by an urban physician in charge of a
large asylum, and a report signed by the leading figures in contemporary
psychiatry and forensic medicine (Esquirol, Marc, Orfila, etc.). A fairly large collection of court exhibits
including statements by witnesses - all of them from a small village in
Almost
certainly not to the sensation caused by the case itself. Cases of parricide
were fairly common inn the assize courts in that
period (ten to fifteen yearly, sometimes more). Moreover, Fieschi's
attempted assassination of the king and his trial and his sentencing and
execution of Lacenaire and the publication of his
memoirs practically monopolized the space devoted to criminal cases in the
press at the time. The Gazette des Tribunaux
never gave the Riviere case more than a brief
mention, in the main producing the Pilote
du Calvados, the Riviere case never became a
classic of criminal psychiatry like those of Henriette
Cornier, Papavoine, or Leger. Apart from the article
in the Annales d'hygične,
we have found practically no references to Riviere.
And Riviere's counsel, Berthauld,
who was later to become fairly well known, seems never to have alluded to his
former client in his writings.
Riviere's
case was not, then, a "notable crime." The unusually full treatment
in the Annales may be accounted for by a combination
of chance circumstances and general considerations. Probably a doctor or some
local notable in the
Over
and above these circumstances, however, a more general debate emerges, in which
the publication of this dossier by Esquirol and his
colleagues was to have its effect. In 1836 they were in the very midst of the
debate on the use of psychiatric concepts in criminal justice. To be more
precise, they were at a specific point in this debate, for lawyers such as
Collard de Montigny, doctors such as Urbain Coste, and more especially
the judges and the courts had been very strongly resisting (especially since
1827) the concept of "monomania" advanced by Esquirol
(in 1808). So much so that medical experts and counsel for the defense hesitated to use a concept which had somewhat
dubious connotation of "materialism" in the minds of the courts and
some juries. Around 1835 it looks as if doctors rather tended to produce
medical reports based less directly on the concept of monomania, as if they
wished to show simultaneously that reluctance to use it might lead ro serious miscarriages of justices and that mental illness
could be manifested through a far wider symptomatology.
In any case, the Riviere dossier as published by the Annales is extremely discreet in its references to
"monomania"; on the other hand, it makes very considerable use of
signs, symptoms, and the despositions of witnesses,
and very diverse types of evidence.
There
is, however, one fact about all this that is truly surprising, that while
"local" or general circumstances led to the publication of a
remarkably full documentation, full not only for that period, but even our own,
on it and on the unique document that is Riviere's
memoir, an immediate and complete silence ensued. What could have disconcerted
the doctors and their knowledge after so strongly eliciting their attention?
To
be frank, however, it was not this, perhaps, that led us to spend more than a
year on these documents. It was simply the beauty of Riviere's
memoir. The utter astonishment it produced in us was the starting point.
But
we were still faced with the question of publication. I think that what
committed us to the work, despite our differences of interests and approaches,
was that it was a "dossier", that is to say, a case, an affair, an
event that provided the intersection of discourses that differed in origin,
form, organization and function - the discourses of the cantonal judge, the
prosecutor, the presiding judge of the assize court, and the Minister of
Justice; those too of the country general
practitioner and of Esquirol; and those of the
villagers, with their mayor and parish priest; and, last but not least, that of
the murderer himself. All of them speak, or appear to be speaking, of one and
the same thing; at any rate, the burden of all these discourses is the
occurrence on June 3. But in their totality and their variety they form neither a composite work nor an exemplary text, but rather a
strange contest, a confrontation, a power relation, a battle among discourses
and through discourses. And yet, it cannot simply be described as a
single battle; for several separate combats were being fought out at the same
time and intersected each other: The doctors were engaged in a combat, among
themselves, with the judges and prosecution, and with Riviere
himself (who had trapped them by saying that he had feigned madness); the crown
lawyers had their own separate combat as regards the testimony of the medical
experts, the comparatively novel use of extenuating circumstances, and a range
of cases of parricide that had been coupled with regicide (Fieschi
and Louis-Philippe stand in the wings); the villagers of Aunay
had their own combat to diffuse the terror of a crime committed in their midst
and to "preserve the honor of a family" by
ascribing the crime to bizarre behavior or
singularity; and, lastly, at the very center, there
was Pierre Riviere, with his innumerable and
complicated engines of war; his crime, made to be written and talked about and
thereby to secure him glory in death, his narrative , prepared in advance and
for the purpose of leading on to the crime, his oral explanations to obtain
credence for his madness, his text, written to dispel this lie, to explain, and
to summon death, a text in whose beauty some were to see as a proof of
rationality (and hence grounds for condemning him to death) and others a sign
of madness (and hence grounds for shutting him up for life).
I
think the reason we decided to publish these documents was to draw a map, so to
speak, of those combats, to reconstruct these confrontations and battles, to
rediscover the interaction of those discourses as weapons of attack and defense in the relations of power and knowledge.
More
specifically, we thought that the publication of the dossier might furnish an
example of existing records that are available for potential analysis.
(a)
Since the principle governing their existence and coherence is neither that of
a composite work nor a legal text, the outdated academic methods of textual
analysis and all the concepts which are the appanage
of the dreary and scholastic prestige of writing can very well be eschewed in
studying them.
(b)
Documents like those in the Riviere case should
provide material for a thorough examination of the way in which a particular
kind of knowledge (e.g. medicine, psychiatry, psychology) is formed and acts in
relation to institutions and the roles prescribed in them (e.g., the law with
respect to the expert, the accused, the criminally insane, and so on).
(c)
They give us a key to the relations of power, domination, and conflict within
which discourses emerge and function, and hence provide material for a
potential analysis of discourse (even of scientific discourses) which may be both
tactical and political, and therefore strategic.
(d)
Lastly, they furnish a means for grasping the power of derangement peculiar to
a discourse such as Riviere's and the whole range of
tactics by which we can try to reconstitute it, situate it, and give it its
status as the discourse of either a madman or a criminal.
Our
approach to this publication can be explained as follows:
1.
We tried to discover all the material evidence in the case, and by this we mean
not only the exhibits in evidence (only some were published in the Annales d'hygične publique), but also newspaper articles and especially Riviere's memoir in its entirety. (The Annales
reprinted only the second part of it.) Most of these documents were to be found
in the Departemental Archives at Caen; Jean-Pierre
Peter did most of the research. (with the exception of
a few documents of minor interest, we are therefore publishing everything we
could find written by or about Pierre Riviere,
whether in print or in manuscript.)
2. In presenting the documents, we have refrained from employing a typological method (the court file followed by the medical file). We have rearranged them more or less in chronological order around the events they are bound up with - the crime, the examining judge's investigation, the proceedings in the assize court, and the commutation of the sentence. This throws a good deal of light on the confrontation of various types of discourse and the rules and results of this confrontation.
And, placed as it is at the time of its writing, Riviere's memoir comes to assume a central position which is in its due, as a mechanism which holds the whole together; triggered secretly beforehand, it leads on to all the earlier episodes; then, once it comes into the open, it lays a trap for everyone, including contriver, since it is first taken as proof that Riviere is not mad and then becomes, in the hands of Esquirol, Marc, and Orfila, a means of averting that death penalty which Riviere had gone to such lengths to call down upon himself.
3. As to Riviere's discourse, we decided not to interpret it and not to subject it to any psychiatric or psychoanalytic commentary. In the first place because it was what we used as the zero benchmark to gauge the distance between the other discourses and the relations arising among them. Secondly, because we could hardly speak of it without involving it in one of the discourses (medical, legal, psychological, criminological) which we wished to use as our starting point in talking about it. If we had done so, we should have brought it within the power relation whose reductive effect we wished to show, and we ourselves should have fallen into the trap it set.
Thirdly, and most importantly, owing to a sort of reverence and perhaps, too, terror for a text which was to carry off four corpses along with it, we are unwilling to superimpose our own text on Riviere's memoir. We fell under the spell of the parricide with the reddish-brown eyes.
4. We have assembled a number of notes at the end of the volume, some on the psychiatric knowledge at work in the doctors' reports, others on the legal aspects of the case (extenuating circumstances, the jurisprudence of parricide), yet others on the relations between the documentary levels (depositions, records, expert opinions), and others again on the narrative of the crimes.
We are aware that we have neglected many major aspects. We could have gone into the marvellous document of peasant ethnology provided by the first part of Riviere's narrative. Or we could have brought out the popular knowledge and definition of madness whose outlines emerge through the villager's testimony.
But the main point was for us to have the documents published.
This work is the outcome of a joint research project by a team engaged in a seminar at the College de France. The authors are Blandine Barret-Kriegel, Gilbert Burlet-Tovic, Robert Castel, Jeanne Favret, Alexandre Fontana, Georgette Legee, Patricia Moulin, Jean-Pierre Peter, Philippe Riot, Maryvonne Saison, and myself.
We were aided in our research by Mme. Coisel and M. Bruno at the Bibliotheque Nationale, M. Berce at the Archives Nationales, M. G. Bernard and Mlle. Gral at the Archives departmentales du Calvados, and Mme. Anne Sohier of the Centre de Recherces historiques.
Pierre Riviere's memoir was published in pamphlet form in the same year as the trial. There is no copy in the Bibliotheque Nationale. The pamphlet contains the version published in the Annales d'hygične publique, but published there only in part and with some errors.
The whole file is to be found in the Archives du Calvados, 2 U 907, Assises Calvados, Proces criminels, 4th quarter 1835.
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