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Violette Nozière (11 January 1915 – 26 November 1966) was a French woman who was convicted of murdering her father. Chabrol's 1978 film of the same name was based on this case.[1] During the trial, she accused her father of having sexually abused her, making it one of the first cases of incest to appear in the French modern press.
Life
Nozière was a bright child who gradually became wayward. As a young woman, she was indulged and supplemented her allowance with occasional surreptitious prostitution. As a result, she contracted syphilis and, when she became ill, her doctor felt obliged to tell her parents. Nozière persuaded a doctor to certify that she was a virgin in order to persuade her parents that her disease was hereditary. Her parents believed this and Nozière continued to subsidise her lifestyle.
It is possible she did not have syphilis because the test she received often gave a false positive, especially if the patient had tuberculosis, as she did. The fact that she bore five children tends to support this although the disease can moderate after several years.[citation needed]
Murder
On March 23, 1933, when she was eighteen she bought the sleep-inducing drug Soménal and persuaded her parents to take it by explaining that it was medicine provided by their doctor to cure the family's syphilis. During the night, there was a fire and the parents suffered from smoke inhalation but did not die. On August 21 of the same year she tried to poison them using a much larger dose. Nozière then went out for the evening to stay at a hotel and when she returned to the flat she found her parents inert bodies. She turned on the gas and, when the smell was overpowering, went to a nearby flat where she said that she thought that her parents had tried to commit suicide.[2]
Germaine Nozière and her lawyer M.Hézard giving evidence in 1934
Her father, Jean-Baptiste, who had been an engine driver, died: but his wife, Germaine, who had thrown away half of the dose, recovered. The murder case and Nozière's lifestyle was the main story in the newspapers. The following year she was convicted and sentenced to death but the sentence was gradually reduced, first to hard labour for life in 1934, then to 12 years in 1942. She was released in 1945.[3]
