Chabrol's film, appearing 45 years after the crime, satirized the self-righteous moralism of the press and the blatant sensationalizing of the case, but also coolly depicted French reactions to Noziere as divided and diverse. The Surrealists, on the other hand, reacting in the heat of the event, perceived the venomous public reaction as a unified assault on a pathetic victim of a corrupt social order. The press and commentators of every political position had seemingly all joined together in their hostility to Noziere. The entire French public regarded her as a threat to family, society and church; they attacked her as "the woman who had killed her father and then sullied his memory." Her act of poisoning was thus "a double parricide, committed by a heartless hedonist seeking a premature inheritance, a 'flapper from hell' who had destroyed a unionized railway worker."
For their part, the Surrealists were outraged by French society's condemnation of Violette. They saw her crime as hypocritically juxtaposed against some idealized bourgeois notion of family life, whereas the young woman had actually come from a dysfunctional family, one within which she had been oppressed, abused and raped. The Surrealists presented their defense in a collective publication containing work by eight writers (Breton, Peret, Char and Eluard among them) and nine artists (Arp, Bellmer, Dali, Ernst, Giacometti, Magritte, Man Ray and Tanguy). They cited suppressed evidence in the case (a sperm-soaked rag and the father's pornographic drawings) and denounced the legal judgement against Violette as "a patriarchal conspiracy masquerading as justice." The pamphlet was published in 1933 in Belgium and promptly thereafter banned in France, where it was considered almost as scandalous as the parricide itself.
The Surrealists exploited the subjects of crime and criminals, and their representation in the media, as a means of addressing social and aesthetic problems. Noziere was only one of a group of murderers who elicited their interest and sympathy. Others were Henri Desire Landru, the notorious serial killer who displayed a "witty insolence" in court (and was, incidentally, the subject of ano
ther Chabrol film); Germaine Berton, the militant anarchist who murdered the anti-Semitic royalist Marius Plateau of the reactionary Action francaise (though she'd planned to assassinate either Charles Maurras or Leon Daudet); the Papin sisters, oppressed domestic servants who blinded and murdered their employer and her daughter (and inspired Jean Genet's play The Maids).In mock-serious defense of the killer Landru, Surrealist Benjamin Peret solemnly asserted that criminals should be judged according to the degree of their creativity, the amount of imagination they deployed, the "artfulness" of their crimes. Those displaying sufficient subtlety and sophistication, as opposed to "everyday barbarity," were the kind that deserved approval. Read characterizes Peret's argument as "ostensibly irresponsible" but "perversely subversive in its opposition to the predominant journalistic modes of voyeuristic sensationalism and moralism."
Less ironically, the Surrealists defended certain crimes as powerful psychological reactions against a corrupt social order and bourgeois hypocrisy. Noziere's poisoning of a father who had molested her since she was twelve years old was an explicable outburst of rage against abuse-- and a legitimate form of self-defense. But cases like Noziere's also revealed "a deeply oppressive social malady," dark underground fissures in society's fabric; Noziere's crime, along with others, thus had political as well as psychological ramifications. Such anti-social acts were already (in the late 1920s and early 1930s) seen by the Surrealists as critiques of the mores of fascism. The underlying social conditions they revealed were predictive of events to come, incipient symptoms of disease that would later fully mature "when the Vichy regime enacted its own vicious version of normative, anti-Semitic and patriarchal values."
Enlarging on this idea, Read suggests a broader political context for the Surrealist attitude towards criminals and crime. His essay begins and ends with seemingly inapposite but in fact relevant references to an important event in turn-of-the-century French history-- the Dreyfus Affair. He finds that harrowing case relevant here because of its long-lasting aftereffect. The wrongly condemned Dreyfus was, of course, finally freed and "justice was served, but the affair left the reputation of the French judiciary and other institutions seriously damaged." French society after Dreyfus remained "split down the middle." On one side, the patriotic, conservative anti-Dreyfusards, who represented rigid, anti-Semitic, patriarchal standards. On the other side were those disaffected members of society, among them French intellectuals and the Surrealists, who had a growing sympathy for "anarchists, renegades and outlaws" and who were inclined to systematically reverse society's judgements. "It would then be more apparent," concludes Read, "that the Vichy regime, whose values the Surrealists were already contesting in the 1920s and 30s, constituted a return to power of the anti-Dreyfusards, who during the Occupation achieved a late and effective revenge over their historic adversaries."
Chabrol does not make that political leap between Violette's case and the Vichy regime's morality, but he does make explicit reference to perverted Petainist values in a subsequent film, the 1988 Une Affaire des Femmes, in which Isabelle Huppert is again his heroine-- this time not as a parricide, but as an illegal abortionist who is guillotined for her "crimes" against family, church and state.
No comments:
Post a Comment