It will run through the beginning of the Capetian dynasty to nowadays and will focus on everything related to France and its history.
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Léa et Christine Papin.
Christine and Léa had grown up in villages south of Le Mans. They had an elder sister, Emilia, who became a nun. Both of them spent time in institutions as a result of the breakdown of their parents’ marriage. As they grew older, they worked as maids in various Le Mans homes, preferring, whenever possible, to work together.
From about 1926, they worked as live-in maids in the home of Monsieur René Lancelin, a retired solicitor, in Le Mans. The family was also made up of his wife and adult daughter, who was still living with her parents (another daughter was married). The two maids were extremely quiet and retiring young women, who kept to themselves and appeared to have no interests but each other.
On 2 February 1933, Monsieur Lancelin was supposed to meet his wife and daughter for dinner at the home of a friend. When they did not turn up, he was concerned and went back to their home. He was unable to get into the house because the doors were locked on the inside, but he could see the glow of a candle through the window of the maids’ room. He then went to the police and one of them got into the house by climbing over the back wall. Inside, he found the bodies of Madame Lancelin and her daughter. They had both been beaten to the point of being unrecognisable, and one of the daughter’s eyes was on the floor nearby. Madame Lancelin’s eyes had been gouged out and were found in the folds of the scarf around her neck. The two maids were found in their room upstairs, in bed together. They confessed to killing the two women. The weapons used had been a kitchen knife, a hammer and a pewter pot that had stood at the top of the stairs.
The sisters were placed in prison and separated from each other. Christine became extremely distressed because she could not see Léa, but at one stage the authorities relented and let her see her sister. In July 1933, Christine experienced a kind of “fit”, or episode, in which she tried to gouge her own eyes out and had to be put in a straitjacket. She then made a statement to the investigating magistrate, in which she said that on the day of the murders she had experienced an episode like the one she had just had in prison, and this was what precipitated the murders.
The case had a huge impact on the public and was debated furiously by the intelligentsia. Some people considered that the murders had been the result of “exploitation of the workers”, considering that the maids worked fourteen-hour days, with only half a day off each week.
Gilles de Laval, sire de Rais, compagnon de Jeanne d’Arc, Maréchal de France (1404-1440). Huile sur toile (1835) exposée dans la galerie des maréchaux de France, château de Versailles. (vue d’artiste)
Gilles de Montmorency-Laval (1404–1440), Baron de Rais, was a Breton knight, a leader in the French army and a companion-in-arms of Joan of Arc. He is best known by his reputation and conviction as a prolific serial killer of children.
A member of the House of Montmorency-Laval, Gilles de Rais grew up under the tutelage of his maternal grandfather and increased his fortune by marriage. Following the War of the Breton Succession, he earned the favour of the Duke and was admitted to the French court. From 1427 to 1435, Gilles served as a commander in the Royal Army, and fought alongside Joan of Arc against the English and their Burgundian allies during the Hundred Years’ War, for which he was appointed Marshal of France.
In 1434/1435, he retired from military life, depleted his wealth by staging an extravagant theatrical spectacle of his own composition and dabbled in the occult. After 1432 Gilles engaged in a series of child murders, his victims possibly numbering in the hundreds. The killings came to an end in 1440 when a violent dispute with a clergyman led to an ecclesiastical investigation which brought Gilles’ crimes to light. At his trial the parents of missing children in the surrounding area and Gilles’ own confederates in crime testified against him. Gilles was condemned to death and hanged at Nantes on 26 October 1440.
La michelade à Nîmes en 1567
The Michelade is the name given to the massacre of Catholics, including 24 Catholic priests and monks, by Protestant rioters in Nîmes on Michaelmas (29 September) 1567, following their failure to abduct the king and queen mother in the so-called, Surprise of Meaux the previous day and in retaliation for the suppression of their Huguenot beliefs. With Meaux, it helped trigger the Second War of Religion.
Croisade : les pastoureaux partent en croisade
Vie et miracles de monseigneur Saint Louis Manuscrit enluminé sur parchemin (164 feuillets, 37 x 26,5 cm). Paris, Maître du Cardinal de Bourbon, vers 1482.
@credits
In 1248, Louis IX of France went on the Seventh Crusade, but after the defeat of the crusaders, he was captured near Damietta in Egypt.
A peasant movement arose in northern France to support Louis, led by “the Master of Hungary”, apparently a very old Hungarian monk, who claimed to have been instructed by the Virgin Mary to lead the shepherds of France to the Holy Land to rescue Louis. He led up to 60,000 mostly young peasants to Paris, where he met with Louis IX’s mother, the acting regent.
The group split up after leaving the city and created disturbances in places such as Rouen, Tours and Orléans. In Amiens, and then in Bourges, they also began to attack Jews. The authorities rounded up and excommunicated the crusaders. However a group led by the Master resisted the authorities outside Bourges, resulting in the Master being killed in the ensuing skirmish.
Défilé les travailleurs algériens manifestations CGT Paris 14 juillet 1953 DR-IHS CGT/ Demonstration of Algerian workers on the 14th of July 1953
On the 14th of July 1953, the police shot at the Algerian demonstrating for the MTLD (Mouvement pour le triomphe des libértés - movement of the triumph of liberties) who weren’t leaving place de la Nation at the end of the procession. Six of them got killed.
Suzanne Landgard
When Paul and Louise Landy met in 1911 in Paris, they instantly fell in love and soon married. When the war broke out in August 1914, Paul was finishing his military service; he was sent to the front and injured just a few weeks later. After a second injury, in November 1914, he was falsely accused of self-mutilation. He was soon found not guilty and six months later told to return to his unit.
Paul chose instead to become a deserter. Since the sight of a healthy young man in civilian clothes would have looked suspicious on the streets of Paris, Paul changed his identity and became Suzanne Landgard, his wife’s lesbian partner. Although Paul had never before attempted to be a transvestite, he loved his new identity and reveled in the new sexual experiences that came with it.
In 1925, the French state declared a general amnesty for deserters, making it possible for Paul, as Suzanne, to resume his previous identity. His story made national headlines and his life was followed closely by the press. For Paul, the hardest part was becoming a man again. He started to drink heavily, and when drunk he often beat his wife and menaced their infant son. One night, Louise seized a gun, shot, and killed Paul. Following one of the most talked-about trials of the time, Louise was acquitted; she lived until 1981.
L’Humanité - Jaurès assassiné, 31 juillet 1914
On 31 July 1914 Jaurès was assassinated in a Parisian café, Le Croissant, 146 rue Montmartre, by Raoul Villain, a 29-year-old French nationalist. Jaurès had been due to attend a conference of the International on 9 August, in an attempt to dissuade the belligerents from going ahead with the war
Crimes de la Commune : assassinat des otages dans la prison de la Roquette. (photomontage ; série photographique : “Les crimes de la Commune”), par Appert, 1871 © Musée d’histoire vivante de Montreuil
© RMN / René-Gabriel Ojéda
Assassinat d’Henri IV et arrestation de Ravaillac le 14 mai 1610, par Charles-Gustave Housez, XIXe s. Musée national du Château de Pau
King Henry IV was assassinated in Paris on 14 May 1610 by a Catholic fanatic, François Ravaillac, who stabbed the king to death in Rue de la Ferronnerie.
Cover of Le Petite Journal, May 12, 1907, a painting of Jeanne Weber
“Jeanne Weber was a French serial killer. She strangled 10 children, including her own. She was convicted of murder in 1908, and declared insane. She hanged herself two years later.
Born in a small fishing village in northern France, Weber left home for Paris at age 14, working various menial jobs until her marriage in 1893. Her husband was an alcoholic, and two of their three children died in 1905. By then, Weber was also drinking heavily, residing in a seedy Paris tenement with her spouse and a seven-year-old son. On 2 March 1905, Weber was babysitting for her sister-in-law, when one of the woman’s two daughters — 18-month-old Georgette — suddenly “fell ill” and died. Strange bruises on her neck were ignored by the examining physician, and Weber was welcomed back to babysit on 11 March. Two-year-old Suzanne did not survive the visit, but a doctor blamed the second death on unexplained “convulsions.”
Weber was babysitting for her brother, on 25 March, when his daughter, seven-year-old Germaine, suffered a sudden attack of “choking,” complete with red marks on her throat. The child survived that episode, but she was less fortunate the following day, when Weber returned.Diphtheria was blamed for her death, and for that of Weber’s son, Marcel, just four days later. Once again, the tell-tale marks of strangulation were ignored.
On 5 April 1905, Weber invited two of her sisters-in-law to dinner, remaining home with 10-year-old nephew Maurice while the other women went out shopping. They returned prematurely, to find Maurice gasping on the bed, his throat mottled with bruises, Jeanne standing over him with a crazed expression on her face. Charges were filed, and Weber’s trial opened on 29 January 1906, with the prosecution alleging eight murders, including all three of Weber’s own children and two others — Lucie Aleandre and Marcel Poyatos — who had died while in her care. It was alleged that Weber killed her son in March to throw suspicion off, but Weber was being defended by the brilliant defense lawyer Henri-Robert, and jurors were reluctant to believe the worst about a grieving mother. She was acquitted on 6 February.
Fourteen months later, on 7 April 1907, a physician from the town of Villedieu was summoned to the home of a peasant named Bavouzet. He was greeted at the door by a babysitter, “Madame Moulinet,” who led him to the cot where nine-year-old Auguste Bavouzet lay dead, his throat badly bruised. The cause of death was listed as “convulsions,” but the doctor changed his opinion on 4 May, when “Madame Moulinet” was identified as Jeanne Weber. Weber engaged the lawyer Henri-Robert once more. Held over for trial, Weber was released in December, after a second autopsy blamed the boy’s death on typhoid.
Weber quickly dropped from sight, surfacing next as an orderly at a children’s hospital in Faucombault, moving on from there to the Children’s Home in Orgeville, run by friends who sought to “make up for the wrongs that justice has inflicted upon an innocent woman.” Working as “Marie Lemoine,” Weber had been on the job for less than a week when she was caught strangling a child in the home. The owners quietly dismissed her and the incident was covered up.
Back in Paris, Weber was arrested for vagrancy and briefly confined to the asylum at Nantere, but doctors there pronounced her sane and set her free. She drifted into prostitution, picking up a common-law husband along the way. On 8 May 1908, the couple settled at an inn in Commercy. A short time later, Weber was found strangling the innkeeper’s son, 10-year-old Marcel Poirot, with a bloody handkerchief. The father had to punch her three times in the face before she would release the lifeless body.
Held for trial on murder charges, Weber was declared insane on 25 October 1908, packed off to the asylum at Mareville. Credited with at least ten murders, she survived two years in captivity before manually strangling herself in 1910.”
