Serial Killers: Psychiatry, Criminology, Responsibility 9781136645396, 113664539X

Francesca Biagi-Chai’s book - a translation from the French of Le Cas Landru - tackles the issue of criminal responsibil

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Serial Killers: Psychiatry, Criminology, Responsibility
 9781136645396, 113664539X

Table of contents :
Front Cover
Serial Killers
Copyright Page
Contents
Foreword: Jacqurs-Alain Miller
Introduction: revisiting the question of madness: Véronique Voruz and Suzanne Yang
1. The enigma of serial killers
2. Case study of a serial killer: Henri-Désiré Landru
3. Landru and women: three categories plus one
4. Landru and men: a world divided in two
5. Landru’s psychosis
6. Madness and history: Donato Bilancia and Pierre Rivière
Conclusion: psychosis and criminal responsibilities
Index

Citation preview

Serial Killers

Francesca Biagi-Chai’s book – a translation from the French of Le cas Landru – tackles the issue of criminal responsibility in the case of serial killers and other ‘mad’ people, who are nonetheless deemed to be answerable before the law. The author, a Lacanian psychoanalyst and senior psychiatrist in France, with extensive experience working in institutional settings, analyses the logic informing the crimes of famous serial killers. Addressing the Landru case (which was the inspiration for Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux), as well as those of Pierre Rivière and Donato Bilancia, Biagi-Chai casts light on the confusion that pervades forensic psychiatry and criminal law as to the distinction between mental illness and ‘madness’. She then elaborates the consequences of her argument in a sustained critique of the insanity defence. The book includes a foreword by the renowned psychoanalyst, Jacques-Alain Miller. It also includes an introduction by the editors on the question of insanity before the law in the United States and in the United Kingdom, which considers the pertinence of Biagi-Chai’s argument for forensic psychiatry, criminal law, and the increasing contemporary focus on the assessment of dangerousness and risk-management strategies in crime control practices. Francesca Biagi-Chai is a Psychiatrist in charge of a day care unit at the Paul Guiraud Hospital (Paris), psychoanalyst member of the École de la Cause Freudienne and World Association of Psychoanalysis, lecturer at the Clinical Section of the Psychoanalysis Department (Paris 8) and the Istituto Freudiano di Roma. Véronique Voruz is Senior lecturer in Law and Criminology at the University of Leicester. She is also guest lecturer at the École de Criminologie, Université Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve, psychoanalyst member of the World Association of Psychoanalysis and joint editor of The Later Lacan: An Introduction, 2007, Albany, NY: SUNY. Suzanne Yang is Visiting Instructor in Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Suzanne is a forensic psychiatrist with a research focus on violence risk assessment in adults and clinical interventions for violence prevention.

Serial Killers

Psychiatry, Criminology, Responsibility

Francesca Biagi-Chai With a Foreword by Jacques-Alain Miller and an introduction by Véronique Voruz and Suzanne Yang Translated by Véronique Voruz with Philip Dravers

from

Le cas Landru à la lumière de la psychanalyse Éditions Imago

First published 2012 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 A GlassHouse Book Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2012 Francesca Biagi-Chai. Introduction Véronique Voruz and Suzanne Yang Original text: © Éditions Imago, 2007 The right of Francesca Biagi-Chai to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record has been requested ISBN 13: 978–0–415–56112–9 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978–0–203–80505–3(ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Keystroke, Station Road, Codsall, Wolverhampton

Contents

Foreword

vii

JACQUES-ALAIN MILLER

Introduction: revisiting the question of madness

1

VÉRONIQUE VORUZ AND SUZANNE YANG

1

The enigma of serial killers

16

2

Case study of a serial killer: Henri-Désiré Landru

28

3

Landru and women: three categories plus one

58

4

Landru and men: a world divided in two

100

5

Landru’s psychosis

119

6

Madness and history: Donato Bilancia and Pierre Rivière

147

Conclusion: psychosis and criminal responsibilities

171

Index

190

Foreword

Serial killer: this term is new. It dates from the end of the 1970s, and is American, which stands to reason given that the United States has proven to be, by far, the country where serial killers are most prolific. Its origin is contested (between two Roberts: Ressler, an FBI agent, and Keppel, a medical doctor). It was introduced into language in the context of the considerable media attention and popular interest provoked by the crimes of Ted Bundy.1 He was a smooth talker with charming manners and it is said that he was capable of changing physiognomy like a chameleon. He held degrees in psychology and law, probably started killing at 14 and was arrested at 29. He confessed to 30 victims: all were women, all were white, all middle class, most between 15 and 20 years old, high-school girls in many cases, with long dark hair. He lay for hours beside their corpses, applied makeup to their faces when he had not chopped off their heads and engaged in sexual intercourse with them until they decomposed. An immense literature has since been devoted to serial killers, in which morbid interest has its share, but also the public interest: what relevant traits should be considered when trying to hone in on the identity of an UNSUB (unknown subject of an investigation)? What indicators show that isolated crimes belong to an ongoing series? How do we detect a serial killer before he commits the act? Can one predict that a child will be a serial killer? These are a few of the questions that scientific research has been led to ask over the past decade or so. The experts attempting to answer these questions are law enforcement officers and mental health professionals. More recently, biochemistry, neuroscience and magnetic resonance imaging have also been drawn in. The field of investigation is in rapid development. Without being conclusive, the results are far from being negligible and criminologists are attempting syntheses. Law enforcement officers contribute their knowledge about crime scenes: a serial killer has a modus operandi, an MO which is proper to him, but which evolves over time, and a ‘signature’, a ‘visiting card’, which is fixed. The theories constructed by mental health professionals on the basis of their interviews with criminals expose the contradictions between the different agendas and multiple trends in the field. Their findings are often controversial: thus the work of Helen Morrison, forensic expert and psychiatrist, My Life Among the

viii Foreword

Serial Killers: Inside the Minds of the World’s Most Notorious Murderers,2 based on interviews with 84 such individuals, has been contested ever since its publication in 2004. In contrast, an older discovery, the ‘MacDonald triad’,3 has withstood the test of time: the budding serial killer is supposed to show three associated symptomatic markers in early childhood: bed-wetting, fire-raising and cruelty to animals, especially pets. Hellman and Blackman4 ventured to recommend that any child in whom the notorious triad was present be placed under close monitoring, but they were not heeded. Interviews with a number of cooperative serial killers apprehended since then have nonetheless allowed another element to be brought to light, namely the recurrence of disturbances in the relationship with the mother: a relationship that is often incestuous, marked by sadism, a mother who often deserves to be called monstrous. Biochemical studies in the 1980s emphasised the abnormally low concentration of 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid (5-HIAA) in the cerebrospinal fluid of males considered to be persistently aggressive and antisocial, without being able to clarify a causal link.5 Lastly, the most recent neurological studies identify two faulty cerebral zones: the amygdaloidal complex, implicated in the recognition of emotions – in particular empathy, fear and aggression; and, in a circuit with it, the prefrontal cortex, seat of several higher cognitive functions. The weakening of the former has an effect on the socialisation of behaviour; a reduction of 22.3 per cent of the grey matter in the latter affects criminals considered to be unsuccessful psychopaths, i.e. behind bars,6 and yet the presence of this reduction nevertheless does not allow psychopathy to be confirmed. In fact, the most certain thing that can be said about serial killing is definitional and typological. The assembled knowledge comes above all from law enforcement. It is judicial, descriptive and classificatory, in accordance with the norms of the FBI Academy at Quantico in the State of Virginia, of the NCAVC which it houses (National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime) and of the US Bureau of Justice Statistics. According to the FBI, in order to be recognised as a serial killer, you would have to have killed at least three people in at least three distinct periods of time. The emphasis is on the time lapse that must separate one event from the next. It is clear that the concept of a series requires that the criminal actions in question each constitute what one could call a unit of action, i.e. it must be possible to isolate discrete actantial elements, in the linguistic sense of the term. The temporal interval is supposed to serve as a cooling-off period interrupting the emotional continuum of the act.7 When there is no temporal and emotional discontinuity, there is no serial killing, but a spree killing or mass murder. The difference is spatial here: the spree killer kills in at least two places with hardly any time-break between the murders. The mass murderer properly speaking kills at least four people in the same place, at the same moment, or within a short amount of time, so that the slaughter constitutes one and the same event. Throughout the world, the frequency of these mass murders

Foreword ix

has been constantly on the increase since the 1980s, especially in the United States.8 We can add that the spree killer kills in an indiscriminate and random manner, without any selection criteria, whereas the object-choice of the serial killer, on the other hand, is very determined, as shown by the case of Ted Bundy. As for mass murder, by definition, it relates to a determined zone within which the victims remain indeterminate, except in the case of executions organised by the mafia. The classifications proposed for serial killers are multiple:9 are they organised or disorganised? Are they geographically stable within a given area, or mobile, or then again strictly attached to a given place, their home for example, or their workplace? Is their motive delusional and hallucinatory (visionary), do they want to eliminate a given set of people, prostitutes for example (missionary), do they seek pleasure (hedonistic), or rather power and control over their victims? Are they professional killers or hardened criminals occasionally resorting to murder to accomplish their ends, like drug dealers, or are they rather true amateurs? Only the amateur is, strictly speaking, a serial killer. These classifications are not theoretical constructs: they are meant to be immediately operational. The police use them for profiling a serial killer who has yet to be captured. The idea is to hone in on his or her ‘psychological profile’ as rapidly as possible on the basis of the relevant facts collected about his or her criminal behaviour. The task is entrusted to psychologists or psychiatrists.10 The method was introduced in the mid-1950s thanks to the Sherlock-Holmeslike deductions of a psychiatrist who established a profile that, because of its extreme precision, made it possible to arrest a criminal known by the nickname of the Mad Bomber of New York.11 During a period of approximately eight years, the Mad Bomber had left no fewer than 32 packages of explosives throughout the city, particularly in movie theatres. After studying the file, photographs and letters sent by the individual between 1940 and 1956, Dr James Brussels was in a position to give the following indications to the investigators: ‘Corpulent Man. Middleaged. Born abroad. Roman Catholic. Single person. Lives with his brother or sister’, and to specify that he was paranoid, hated his father, had been the object of his mother’s obsessive love and lived in Connecticut. He added: ‘. . . when you find him, chances are he will be wearing a double-breasted suit. Buttoned.’ All of this turned out to be correct. Dr Brussels distinguished himself again in the case of the Boston Strangler in the 1960s. Starting in 1970, the method was formalised and perfected at the Behavioral Sciences Unit (BSU) of the FBI Academy, and is the most frequently taught in the world. There is, however, an English criminologist by the name of David Canter,12 who has been developing Investigative Psychology since the 1980s, but the role played by the use of statistics therein would restrict its application to the United Kingdom. Finally, a Californian expert, Brent Turvey,13 invented Behavioural Evidence Analysis (BEA), undoubtedly too sophisticated for law enforcement practice. Criminological studies of serial killers remain rather unconvincing. To speculate about the social and cultural circumstances that foster the emergence of the

x Foreword

phenomenon (ambient violence, its historical tradition, its literary and media representation) is undoubtedly to cast too wide a net. When an ‘integrated model’ is put forward, as is the case with the aetiological approach of Edward W. Mitchell14 from the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge, it does not get beyond mere compilation. The latest contribution that came to my attention, an article by Rebecca Taylor15 of Boston College in the journal Brief Treatment and Crisis Intervention in May 2007, promises an account of the aetiology of the psychopathic serial killer. What does this amount to? The article’s sole contribution resides in denouncing the frequent use of ASPD and psychopathy as synonyms in the relevant literature. ASPD (Antisocial Personality Disorder, curiously translated by the World Health Organization as Dyssocial Personality Disorder), is a category introduced by the American Psychiatric Association in the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) that targets subjects who are irresponsible, impulsive, unable to tolerate any frustration, devoid of empathy, emotionless, manipulators, contemptuous and who transgress the rules of communal life, social norms, cultural codes, the rights and feelings of others. Nearly all psychopaths corresponding to the criteria of Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist-Revised16 satisfy criteria for ASPD. Nevertheless, Ms Taylor insists that most people with ASPD are not psychopaths. The promised account of aetiology remains far away. As for treatment, the assessment by Harris, Rice and Cormier17 in 1994 seems to have marked a date of no return: out of 292 violent male offenders, the half who were treated for two years, with an average presence in the programme of five years, presented a rate of violent recidivism higher by one-third in comparison with the half who were not treated, but imprisoned. This disappointing result explains why research subsequently came to pin its hopes on prevention and screening for serial killers in childhood or adolescence.18 But what do we then find? Essentially, the MacDonald triad, which we may recall was recognised 43 years ago. It is true that, more recently, Moffitt19 has established that if the antisocial behaviour is of early onset and persists beyond adolescence the prognosis is poor. We will agree that Monsieur de la Palice, if not Alphonse Allais,20 are not far behind! With regard to offender profiling, referred to above, some heartbroken researchers lament that ‘current methods rely on a naïve and outdated understanding of personality’.21 Serial killing, like spree killing and mass murder, is as yet insufficiently developed in our country for French research to carry much weight here. It is not out of the question that the planned dismantling of the ‘French social model’ and the concomitant adoption of values from the American Way of Life will soon put us in a position to catch up. Already, hate crimes (these ‘crimes of hatred’ targeting members of ethnic, religious, sexual, national or social communities as such, which the sociologist Denis Duclos22 viewed 10 years ago as the ‘symptoms of an American society fragmented’ by the rolling back of the state) are no longer exceptional.

Foreword xi

With the Landru case, we leave the present day, turn our back on the future and climb into the time machine. Forget about America and its monsters.23 You will find yourself in the Belle Époque, during the Great War and the années folles. This was the time of Arsène Lupin (Landru was born in 1869, Lupin in 1875). There is no profiling, no FBI, BSU, DSM, ASPD or MRI. We have the excellent Inspector Belin of the Sûreté Nationale (National Police), who wavers on ‘the signification of the gaze’ of ‘this mystery man’. We have the writer Colette who, observing Landru during his trial, did not mince her words: ‘. . . when he half-lowers his eyelids’, she writes, ‘his gaze takes on this languor, that unfathomable disdain we see in caged beasts’. We have Jules Romains, another writer, who in 1913, before the beginning of that deadly series, met him in his small, red-painted garage at the Porte de Châtillon and later said of him that he was ‘a gentleman’, well groomed, well dressed and courteous, who instead of looking like a mechanic ‘resembled . . . a qualified pharmacist, a doctor, a lawyer’: he called him (this says it all) ‘the gentleman-mechanic’. There is Charles Trenet, who sang cheerfully: ‘Landru, Landru, Landru, a bearded brute / You scare little toddlers / You seduce the mothers / Landru, Landru, your skull and thick hair / Brought down the price of more than one virtue / Landru, Landru, what fire burns inside you?’ Landru inspired Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux. He invented a motorcycle, the Landru: he had hoped that it would make him rich. His mistress kept his framed picture alongside one of her own mother until the day she died. As for the cooking stove, the humorist Laurent Ruquier is convinced that it is in his possession,24 but nothing is less certain. In order to situate the case, let us leave the classification of killer-hunters aside, let us keep it simple, and distinguish crimes of utility and crimes of enjoyment (jouissance). The former have an attributable goal outside of the crime: here, the elimination of others is only ever a means for accomplishing this goal, one that serves a purpose, whether this be private (we always find in these a rational motive, one that is commonly understandable) or public (an authority kills in order to discourage crime). If the crime of enjoyment is at one and the same time disconcerting and enthralling, it is because it carries its goal in itself, delivering the actant a satisfaction that is so singular to him that it cannot be shared: it is unfathomable to anyone else, resisting the universal, definitely silent – no mental health interview could make it speak, no statistics reduce its originality. Crimes for the sake of a public purpose rely upon calculation: this is as true of Beccaria, Bentham, Badinter and reformers as of Joseph de Maistre, whose calculation is conservative. A crime for private purposes mobilises understanding, the relationship between cause and effect, deduction – so many pleasures that play no small role in the lasting success of Sherlock Holmes, Rouletabille, Hercule Poirot and Maigret. But crime for crime’s sake, in other words crime committed for enjoyment, strikes another chord. Rather than the free play of the faculty of reason common to a thinking humanity, it represents the more secretive theatre of

xii Foreword

the drive, ‘of cruelty’, as Antonin Artaud put it, which isolates in each speaking being his or her irreducible share of inhumanity. Here we will not seek to consider murder as one of the Fine Arts, according to Thomas de Quincey’s immortal phrase. It is immortal, but designed to throw one off the scent: in the order of aesthetics isn’t the crime of enjoyment, this murder of pure voluptuousness, rather to be situated on the side of the sublime in Kant’s sense? Here the imagination gives proof of its impotence.25 This is never encountered in products of art, Kant says, but only in nature in its crude state. In fact, his axioms prevented him from perceiving that the sublime is to be encountered in the formlessness of the inhuman constitutive of the speaking being and without which there is no such thing as humanity. Kant was nonetheless able to grasp that amazement here borders ‘on terror, horror and sacred thrill’.26 But how much more insightful was Sade in evoking ‘crimes of nature’? As a general rule, the true serial killer, who is, as we have seen, ‘the amateur’ (not the professional paid by a criminal organisation), only commits crimes for enjoyment. If the exact nature of this enjoyment remains opaque, its serial repetition clearly betrays its presence, which confessions always confirm. It is here that the originality of the Landru case erupts. Here, there is no confession and there are no victims – that is to say no corpses. There is undoubtedly a series. There is an object-choice as well: lonely women, craving love. The profile reminds us of ASPD – why not? We have a small and charming chameleon-like con artist, of a type well identified since Ted Bundy. The crime is organised and place-specific (the country house, in Vernouillet first, then in Gambais). And yet, there are no indices of enjoyment. There is no perceptible perversion in this rough lover, who drew himself puny but with an enormous penis.27 Landru is a paradoxical killer. His serial murders look like highly utilitarian crimes. They would appear to have a rational motive, the most rational and understandable of all, the forced hand par excellence: to provide for the needs of his family. Between the systematic seduction of the feminine object (283 women were contacted), which is suggestive of Don Juan, and the disappearance of the victims, which makes him a small-time precursor of the men of Wannsee rather than another Bluebeard, there is nothing – nothing other than what he himself alleges – which was taken at face value: the family, the well-being of his own kin, the concern of a paterfamilias assuming his mission to the end, be it against the social body. Must we believe this? Must we believe him? The answer is in this book. Francesca Biagi-Chai is a psychiatrist, a psychoanalyst in the Lacanian orientation and a renowned clinician; she was unable to converse with Landru, but she was curious enough to open his court file, kept at the prefecture of police, to consult the departmental archives of the Yvelines and to peruse a good portion of the popular literature devoted to the character. Without ever forgetting that the distance we have from the case unfortunately does not allow us to come to any

Foreword xiii

Figure 0.1 Self-portrait by Landru dedicated to the investigating judge M Bonin: To M. Bonin, friendly regards, Landru

definitive conclusions on the topic, she relates his story with verve, drawing out with the greatest delicacy ‘the small true facts’ that will allow the reader to see him in an unprecedented light. We will henceforth hear his remarks with an ‘accent of singularity’ (Paul Guiraud) not previously detected that casts light upon their true content. Once upon a time there was a gentleman who used to take the ladies on a trip to the country. At the train station, he always bought two one-way tickets, and one return . . . Jacques-Alain Miller 1 October 2007

Notes 1 Wikipédia, Serial killer, Spree killer, Ted Bundy, accessed 1 October 2007, http://fr. wikipedia.org/wiki/. Author’s note: In the limited time I had to write this foreword I was not able to gain first-hand access to all the references mentioned. I nonetheless chose to list them all here, in the interest of further research. 2 Morrison, H, MD and Goldberg, H, My Life Among the Serial Killers, Inside the Minds of the World’s Most Notorious Murderers, 2004, New York: Harper Collins. 3 MacDonald, JM, ‘The Threat to Kill’ (1963) 120 American Journal of Psychiatry 125–130.

xiv Foreword 4 Hellman, D and Blackman, N, ‘Enuresis, Fire-Setting, and Cruelty to Animals’ (1966) 122 American Journal of Psychiatry 1431–1435. 5 Dorfman, A, ‘The Criminal Mind, Body Chemistry and Nutrition May Lie at the Roots of Crime’ (1984) 92 Science Digest 44–49. 6 Yang, Y, Raine, A, Lencz, T, Bihrle, S, LaCasse, L and Colletti, P, ‘Volume Reduction in Prefrontal Gray Matter in Unsuccessful Criminal Psychopaths’ (2005) 57 Biological Psychiatry 1103–1108. 7 Holmes, RM and DeBurger, J, Serial Murder, 1988, Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications; and Egger, S, The Killer among Us: An Examination of Serial Murder and Its Investigation, 1998, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. 8 Holmes, RM and Holmes, ST, ‘Understanding Mass Murder: A Starting Point’ (1992) 56 Federal Probation 53–61. 9 Douglas, JE, Burgess, AW, Burgess, AG and Ressler, RK, Crime Classification Manual: A Standard System for Investigating and Classifying Violent Crimes, 1992, London: Simon and Schuster. 10 Holmes, RM, and Holmes, ST, Profiling Violent Crimes, 2nd edn, 1996, Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications; and Wilson, PR, Lincoln, R and Kocsis, R, ‘Validity, Utility and Ethics of Criminal Profiling for Serial Violent and Sexual Offenders’ (1997) 4–1 Psychiatry, Psychology and the Law 1–12. 11 Petherick, W, ‘Criminal Profiling: How It Got Started and How It Is Used’, Court TV’s Crime Library, accessed 1 October 2007, www.crimelibrary.com/criminology/ criminalprofiling2/. 12 Canter, D, Criminal Shadows: Inside the Mind of the Serial Killer, 1995, London: Harper Collins. 13 Turvey, BE, Criminal Profiling: An Introduction to Behavioural Evidence Analysis, 1999, London: Academic Press. 14 Mitchell, EW, The Aetiology of Serial Murder: Toward An Integrated Model, 1996–1997, University of Cambridge Paper, London: Trinity Hall Nightingale Scholar in Mental Health Law. 15 Taylor LaBrode, R, ‘Aetiology of the Psychopathic Serial Killer: An Analysis of Antisocial Personality Disorder, Psychopathy, and Serial Killer Personality and Crime Scene Characteristics’ (2007) 7–2 Brief Treatment and Crisis Intervention 151–160. 16 Hare, RD, The Hare Psychopathy Checklist – Revised, 1991, Toronto: Multi-Health Systems. 17 Harris, GT, Rice, ME and Cormier, CA, ‘Psychopaths: Is A Therapeutic Community Therapeutic?’ (1994) 15 Therapeutic Communities 283–289. 18 Lynn Scott, S, ‘What Makes Serial Killers Tick?’, Court TV’s Crime Library, accessed 1 October 2007, www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/notorious/tick/victims_1.html. 19 Moffitt, TE, ‘The New Look of Behavioral Genetics on Developmental Psychology: Gene-environment Interplay in Antisocial Behaviors’ (2005) 131 Psychological Bulletin 533–535. 20 M de La Palice was a French historical figure whose name is now synonymous with the enunciation of truisms. Alphonse Allais was a journalist and humorist specialised in the absurd (translation note). 21 Alison, L, Bennell, C, Mokros, A and Ormerod, D, ‘The Personality Paradox in Offender Profiling: A Theoretical Review of the Processes Involved in Deriving Background Characteristics from Crime Scene Actions’ (2002) 8 Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 115–135. 22 Duclos, D, ‘Les ‘crimes de haine’, symptômes d’une société américaine fragmentée’, January 1998, Le Monde diplomatique, 16–17. See also by the same author Le Complexe du loup-garou. La fascination de la violence dans la culture américaine, 1994, Paris: La Découverte.

Foreword xv 23 Ressler, RK and Shachtman, T, Whoever Fights Monsters, 1992, London: Pocket Books. 24 Wikipédia, Landru, accessed 1 October 2007, http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landru. 25 My sense of taste leads me to prefer, in terms of literature, the humoristic treatment of this impotence, that practiced by de Quincey over that of one Jonathan Littel: the latter thinks to remedy impotence by showing an undeniable narrative power, the former assumes the impossible, and turns the short form into currency. I place in between these Truman Capote and his memorable In Cold Blood. 26 Kant, I, Critique of Judgement, 2008 Oxford: Oxford University Press World Classics, § 29. 27 See p. xiii for a reproduction of the image.

Introduction: revisiting the question of madness Véronique Voruz and Suzanne Yang

Serial killers: are they mad – are they monsters? Is there a difference? Is it a difference that matters? Are we of the same species – are they even human? And since they are, of course, human, what can they teach us, precisely, about humanity?

Labels as diagnoses The way in which we construct and answer these questions has far-reaching implications. Today, both forensic psychiatry and popular culture represent the enigma of serial killers through a series of clinical categories that are presumed to serve as explanations for their acts. To say that serial killers are psychopaths, for instance, portrays them as belonging to a class of individuals who get off on harming others, on deceiving the world around them, on feeling superior, preying upon their unsuspecting victims . . . Labels such as Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder imply in their name that the diagnosis should explain the behaviour.1 Although the psychopathy construct correlates with and is often used to assess criminality or the risk of future violence towards others,2 its explanatory power is limited. There is still considerable controversy regarding the extent to which the construct provides an adequate theoretical model of the relationship between personality and the criminal behaviour of the offender.3 Descriptive categories provide limited insight as to the why and the how of criminal acts – as a result, they provide little guidance for clinical interventions that may prevent future crime in any way other than through incapacitation.4 Critics of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) have observed that the very notion of the harmfulness of symptoms and impairment in function are notably difficult to pin down when describing a disorder.5 Are normative judgments to be viewed in society’s terms, or in terms of the individual’s subjectivity? 6 In the current, fourth edition of the DSM, the dividing line that defines pathology differs according to the nature of the disorder.7 Initiatives to revise the DSM have sought to include empirical findings about the causes of disorders, but this effort is acknowledged to be limited given the current state of science.8 Even where neurophysiological, neuroanatomical and genetic correlates provide an estimation of tendencies and

2 Serial Killers: Psychiatry, Criminology, Responsibility

predispositions, they do not explain the specific manifestations of symptoms in a particular case. This is all the more so in very low base-rate behavioural phenomena such as serial homicide, which involve discrete events, an act. Labelling a serial killer a psychopath bypasses the question of aetiology by using a formulation that is tautological: they kill because they are psychopaths (or dangerous persons/ perverts). This belies the fact that individuals who meet criteria for psychopathy do not all become serial killers, and psychopathy alone cannot be used as a predictor of serial homicide.9 Many people who would meet criteria for psychopathy using existing rating instruments may be law-abiding, creating turmoil and chaos without transgressing laws or societal norms.10 Psychopathy may even be highly adaptive when viewed from an evolutionary perspective,11 and violence or serial homicide, although associated with psychopathy, may have other intervening causes. Objectifying offenders with the label of psychopathy may ostensibly be reassuring, but it stops short of advancing our knowledge of how the person came to be an offender in the first place, and what can be done to prevent this from happening in other cases with similar features. Once inscribed within the criminal justice system, the offender tends to behave like an object with a label: the diagnosis provides him with an identity that sidesteps the question of his personal story. Diagnostic labels may reinforce avoidance of the enigma at the core of all subjectivity, whether criminal or law-abiding. Thus, to be told that one suffers from anorexia, compulsive shopping or obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) does not elucidate the ‘choice’ of a symptom within which to express one’s singularity. In the context of criminal behaviour, labelling may also foreclose responsibility. Effective responsibility, in the sense of a responsibility that produces subjective effects within the individual, is first and foremost a response-ability: an ability to account for one’s actions in terms of a personal, specific causality, rather than a generic one. Current research seeks more cogent theoretical tools to get beyond the mask of psychopathy and related constructs, partly to undo the complicity of these labels with the offender’s self-made enigma which premature simplifications tend to reinforce, but also to use prevention and punishment to better effect. Serial killers disturb us. The phenomenology of their madness blinds us to the underlying logic of their acts, a logic which they keep secret. This is the challenge that this book attempts to meet. The author, Francesca Biagi-Chai, is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in France with extensive experience working in institutional settings, and more recently as a court expert. On the basis of her clinical practice she asserts that there is always a logic at play, however senseless the act may seem, and that this logic can be reconstructed and thus possibly modified if detected early. Her work holds out the promise that, in deciphering this logic, violent enactments may be prevented.12 In contrast, when we defer to the opacity of serial killers, our prospects for intervention are confined to strategies of profiling, detection and modes of incapacitation. These are undoubtedly necessary, but unfortunately they are of use only after the commission of a crime or series of crimes.

Introduction: revisiting the question of madness 3

The criminal responsibility of serial killers Serial Killers: Psychiatry, Criminology, Responsibility also addresses the legal issues at stake in findings of criminal responsibility. Serial homicide offenders are often what most people would intuitively consider to be ‘mad’, but they are nonetheless deemed to be answerable before the law in most jurisdictions. This is Biagi-Chai’s starting point for her analysis of the logic informing the crimes of serial killers. Her case studies aim to demonstrate that there are forms of madness not recognised by the law as such. The central problem is that ‘mad’ people who come to the attention of the law tend to pose a risk to others, and addressing their madness is therefore not granted first priority in our justice systems. Madness thus tends to be discursively reconfigured in terms of dangerousness. Foucault historicised the practice of treating criminals in terms of their risk of future crime in his 1978 landmark text ‘About the Concept of the “Dangerous Individual” in 19th Century Legal Psychiatry’.13 He returned to the question at length in his 1981 Louvain lecture series, in which he articulated the criminal responsibility/dangerousness nexus with his observation of the increasing centrality of confession in nineteenth century, European judicial practices. According to Foucault, no sooner was the question of the purpose of punishment asked than the subjectivity of the criminal came to centre stage – the mere imputability of criminal acts no longer satisfied the criminal justice system. An illustration of this evolution can be found in the idea of ‘extenuating circumstances’, a judicial mechanism introduced into most Western penal codes during the nineteenth century, and more generally the introduction of measures for the individualisation of sentences.14 From the moment extenuating or mitigating circumstances are introduced, it is the criminal person who is judged as such, and no longer solely his actions. From then on it becomes crucial to extract a confession from the subject, not only to know the factual truth or vindicate the procedure, but so that he may be judged. And if the criminal cannot confess (auto-veridiction), disciplines such as psychiatry and criminology may take over to produce a truth regarding the subject (hetero-veridiction). Foucault formulated the following hypothesis: ‘The veridiction of the subject introduced a crisis in nineteenth century criminal law from which we have yet to emerge.’15 This crisis was produced by the introduction of the defendant’s subjectivity into the determination of criminal responsibility. Crimes without confession such as those of Landru (i.e. where the criminal has nothing to say about his crime, even regarding the material confirmation of the facts) are problematic for the judicial system, because the subject does not attest to his own subjective state. A crime without confession is thus at the intersection between the factual truth of an act, produced through police investigation, and the subjective truth of the criminal mind, which remains unknown because his motives are unspoken. In order to remedy the absence of a confession, criminal justice must resort to disciplines such as psychiatry, criminology and psychology. However, the development of these forms of knowledge has historically generated a tension

4 Serial Killers: Psychiatry, Criminology, Responsibility

between classical criminal law based on the premise of free will, on the one hand, and on the other, a deterministic view of behaviour within the scientific disciplines that are to provide ‘knowledge of the criminal’ when the criminal himself is not forthcoming. This tension produced the following paradox at the core of the modern concept of criminal responsibility: if a person is completely determined by his environment, then why should he be held liable, since he has no choice in his actions. But if a person acts in a way that cannot be explained by reference to his environment and thus possesses free will, making him fully liable, then paradoxically that person tends to be viewed as beyond reason, or insane. Here we can recall Foucault’s discussion, in his ‘Dangerous Individual’ piece, of the 1817 case of a woman from Sélestat who cut off her child’s leg and cooked the thigh with cabbage, in a soup of sorts. The court case revolved around whether or not she was hungry – if she was, she was not mad. If she was not starving, then she was mad. Using similar examples throughout nineteenth century legal history, Foucault shows that taking the criminal’s subjectivity into account has led to an internal fragmentation of the legal concept of responsibility. At the end of the nineteenth century, this fragmentation is propped up, remedied by borrowing the concept of ‘risk’ from work injuries legislation, insurance and civil law, bringing risk into criminal law under the rubric of dangerousness. This substitution of dangerousness for responsibility as the basis for punishment16 has the effect of objectifying the criminal, on the basis of properties defined as risk-factors (the content of these vary and differ according to time period and locale, ranging from Lombroso’s physical characteristics to attempts within neuroscience to identify criminogenic foci in the brain or contemporary structured rating instruments that include clinical and psychosocial risk items). The concept of dangerousness has served to legitimise the implementation of prevention and protection measures in cases where the person’s subjective acknowledgement of his criminal responsibility is absent. It implies the redefinition of the criminal as a ‘risk of future crime’, therefore a ‘risk to others’, and justifies incapacitation in the name of social defence without attending to the psychical causality of the offending behaviour. Additionally, for Foucault the concept of dangerousness secures the future of disciplines such as criminology and forensic psychiatry, as these disciplines represent the expertise needed for detecting dangerous individuals. The increasing substitution of risk for intent in the establishment of criminal responsibility and the determination of sentences is particularly evident in recent legislation introducing modalities of preventive detention,17 and in sentencing practices based on the individual’s level of risk. The conflation of risk and responsibility also drastically undermines the principle of equality before the law in sentencing practices by leading to a shift in the application of the principle of proportionality: in addition to the legal requirement that the sentence be proportional to the act, the proportionality between risk and sentence has also become key to sentencing.18

Introduction: revisiting the question of madness 5

Humanising the criminal Biagi-Chai offers a way out of the above impasses by proposing to bring subjectivity back into responsibility, but differently, by projecting the possibility of the subject’s own narrative which cannot be actualised at trial. Subjective responsibility cannot be tried in a court of law where the subject is supposed to speak for the sake of a social order that he has rejected or transgressed. The prospect of speech is temporally situated at a later moment, to be discovered, at a time when the offender might speak on his own terms, in his own name, for someone who will not judge him. This would be an opportunity, a potential that cannot be confirmed in advance, for we cannot know for certain what position the subject will take when offered a chance to be heard later as a particular story, one that is specific to him – an unbearable story perhaps, and one within which he may or may not find a solution that qualifies as new, as change. Biagi-Chai’s approach raises the issue of the criminal’s subjective responsibility and how he may be brought to recognise this responsibility when asked to account for his acts. Her analysis does not take the subject’s silence at face value – but asks rather, for whom should he speak, and why? And if he does so, what would we come to know about his acts, and more importantly, about who he is? For Biagi-Chai, responsibility does not arise from a confession, as in admission of guilt during a trial, but rather as a re-construction of the logic of the subject’s acts through the subtle traces that he manifests over time in his life story, and through his words. Given that criminal acts may often appear enigmatic to the offender himself, a sustained elaboration over time during treatment is, according to the author, a process which might produce subjective recognition by the offender of the basis for his acts. Instead of centring her analysis on the blameworthiness of the perpetrator, Biagi-Chai focuses first on the listener and what he should listen for. Her method takes as its starting point the responsibility of practitioners, either in criminal justice or in mental health systems, who act on a case-by-case basis to the best of their ability and judgment. For Biagi-Chai, the prospect of intervention at the level of the person is privileged over psychosocial or demographic factors in the crime. The case of Landru serves as an example to illustrate this clinical method, which Biagi-Chai has practised in her daily work with patients who agree to speak and tell their story. Working retrospectively on the basis of publicly available documents to narrate what she calls a ‘biography elucidated by psychoanalysis’, BiagiChai suggests the importance of performing clinical assessments of serious offenders, particularly at the time of first arrest, and points to an untapped potential for crime prevention through precise case formulation. She tests this admittedly ambitious aim through close readings of society’s most reviled offenders, serial murderers, to point to the crucial junctures, earlier on, where clinical intervention would have been possible. Biagi-Chai illustrates her points through case studies of well-known killers. On the basis of court archives, press reports and psychiatric expert evaluations, she

6 Serial Killers: Psychiatry, Criminology, Responsibility

reopens the cases of Henri-Désiré Landru (France’s best-known serial killer, who inspired Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux), Pierre Rivière (Michel Foucault’s cause célèbre) and Donato Bilancia (a recent Italian serial killer). Biagi-Chai then relies on the conclusions she draws from her case studies to revisit the theoretical dilemma that pervades both forensic psychiatry and criminal law: how do we distinguish between mental illness and insanity in the eyes of the law? And what are the advantages of operating with a more theoretically informed understanding of the workings of ‘criminal minds’? First, Biagi-Chai argues that crime is a contingent response to the specifics of a given historical period. In order to read the logic underlying the serial killer’s trajectory and his actions, the case must be situated within the structure of the social order of its time. By knowing in detail how the serial killer takes in and transforms the social order in a distorted way, we can also learn something of the excesses and impasses of a given societal configuration at a particular historical period. Through case studies that examine the relationship between the individual’s modes of transgression and the contemporary social organisation, the author suggests a method of analysis of the role of cultural representation in the specific manifestations of criminal behaviour. Biagi-Chai highlights the relationship between psychical symptoms and the contemporary social order, and sheds light on the ways in which society is reflected in the offender’s act, understood as an expression of his experience of the social bond and his place within it. Second, Biagi-Chai acknowledges the incomprehensible dimension of serial murder, and yet contends that serial murder and other crimes could be prevented through a lucid formulation of who serial killers are. Is clinical treatment within the legal system an option, and at what point in the individual’s life? How and under what conditions might prevention be successful? How can we decipher the killer – or the potential killer whose acts we seek to prevent – in order to see him as a subject, discern his humanness and come to terms with the apparent inhumanity of his acts? Henri-Desiré Landru, one of France’s most notorious serial killers, was a murderer who gave no confession, whose motives remained unknown, a man with no apparent mental disorder, outwardly normal and seemingly impervious to any rehabilitation. Needless to say, the Landru case is far beyond the usual scope of therapeutic jurisprudence. But the logic of his life is clarified when his story is examined in minute detail.

Madness and ‘psychosis’ in the French tradition Serial Killers: Psychiatry, Criminology, Responsibility juxtaposes the concept of ‘psychosis’ with the judicial handling of madness. ‘Psychosis’ is a term used here to indicate an underlying personality structure. Although severe mental disorders – psychoses such as schizophrenia and delusional disorder – may qualify in criminal cases for a defence of insanity,19 psychosis as understood in the French psychiatric and psychoanalytic tradition to which Biagi-Chai belongs also includes

Introduction: revisiting the question of madness 7

syndromes which are unlikely to be viewed as meeting the legal requirements for an insanity defence.20 The legal and clinical issues surrounding the eligibility of individuals with personality disorders, and in particular psychopathy, for an insanity defence are still subject to ongoing debate.21 Individuals with the form of ‘psychosis’ described in this book are most often viewed as morally reprehensible, retaining knowledge of the wrongfulness of their acts. A crucial argument of the Landru case study involves presenting evidence to challenge the relevance of a diagnostic category frequently employed by forensic psychiatrists in France in cases of serious, repeated violence such as homicide or rape: the diagnosis of ‘narcissistic perversion’, which echoes the term ‘psychopathy’ employed in the English-speaking, clinical community. Both diagnoses are associated with grandiosity, manipulativeness and a lack of empathy. Congruent with the conceptualisations of Cleckley22 and Meloy,23 Biagi-Chai posits that these diagnoses often conceal an underlying psychotic personality structure the mental processes of which are similar to those in the major psychotic disorders. She begins with the stance that psychosis in this sense is not always apparent. In the absence of identifiable forms of delusion, there are instead microdelusions: phenomena of signification personnelle or anomalous, ineffable experiences may be indicators of such micro-delusions. These personal, idiosyncratic significations or anomalous experiences are illogical with reference to ordinary meanings and they can affect any of a number of domains of the subject’s experience: his ways of loving, of hating or his indifference – at work, in his family, in his politics. They are felt as beliefs that are imposed upon the subject as his own personal law within existing societal rules. In order to study a criminal who has been labelled a ‘narcissistic pervert’ or ‘psychopath’, Biagi-Chai suggests that we must distinguish between what French psychiatry calls perversion (where the subject acknowledges the law, but enjoys transgressing it) and this other experience of psychosis, which outwardly resembles normality, but in fact takes the subject into a ‘neo-reality’ (a reality reconfigured according to the subject’s anomalous attribution of meaning). A key term in this distinction is the notion of structure, defined by Henri Ey and others in 1930s France to describe a dynamic integration of mental features – including biological dispositions or constitutions – together with psychological and anamnestic elements specific to the individual case.24 This notion of structure was theorised by psychoanalysts at that time in terms of the Oedipus complex as a social or socialising relation that would allow the individual to live in the world among others.25 In his well-known 1932 case study of the patient he called Aimée,26 Jacques Lacan, drawing upon a long line of work on monomania and paranoia, applied psychoanalytic conceptions of psychopathology to examine how delusions interface dynamically with biographical elements in the personality and may thus be modifiable through treatment. In the 1950s, the psychiatric usage of the term ‘structure’ was further refined in light of Lacan’s reading of the linguistic work of Ferdinand de Saussure, the structural anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss and later, in mathematical terms within psychoanalytic topology.

8 Serial Killers: Psychiatry, Criminology, Responsibility

Psychosis as a structure has more recently been recast by psychoanalysts in the United States, the United Kingdom and in France to indicate an underlying form of the personality with or without obvious and serious manifestations of mental illness. The principal US reference for this conceptualisation is the theory of Otto Kernberg, who defines levels of personality organisation (neurotic, intermediate, borderline and psychotic) from an object–relations and ego-psychology perspective based on Freud’s 1923 structural formulation of ego, superego and Id.27 In Kernberg’s notion of structure, levels of organisation are defined by particular configurations of identity integration, defensive operations and reality testing,28 as well as drives.29 In France over the past 15 years, Jacques-Alain Miller has elaborated the concept of ‘ordinary psychosis’ as a stabilised structure that is nonetheless vulnerable to decompensation and to the advent of transient psychotic phenomena under particular conditions that trigger reactions that are specific to the subject’s life history and intrapsychic coordinates. ‘Ordinary’ in this context indicates that there are no florid symptoms such as hallucinations, a delusion that is bizarre and implausible, or a systematised set of plausible but false ideas. Signifiers that appear in the language of such subjects may indicate areas of mental functioning that are stabilised through carefully wrought solutions found by the person, or they may point to certain dynamic processes that are susceptible to unravelling. In this psychoanalytic orientation, one of the analyst’s initial tasks is to follow the sequence of signifiers that is specific to the person, listen for and identify these areas and perhaps reshape them in the service of the individual’s main goals and wishes, so that he finds solutions that are satisfying to him and which structure meaning and his emotions in a manner that is tolerable and compatible with a life in the social bond. Biagi-Chai brings extensive experience in this latter approach to her reading of the Landru case, and deploys many of the key clinical concepts from this psychoanalytic orientation. As a psychoanalyst and chief of service at the public sector psychiatric hospital, Paul Guiraud-Villejuif, outside of Paris, she has many years of experience applying psychoanalytic case formulation with patients requiring acute involuntary hospitalisation (civil commitment) for dangerousness. Borne of reflections from this work as well as from her private practice of psychoanalysis, she argues that a precise and informed understanding of psychosis defined as a personality structure is central to clarifying the difficult interface between madness, criminality and the law. The author argues that although the process of assigning a diagnosis of psychopathy or narcissistic perversion requires considerable clinical judgment, these diagnoses are ultimately insufficient in that they cannot explain the unique features of the serial offender’s case. They are therefore of limited utility in formulating a clinical strategy for treating the offender during his incarceration, or, if he is eligible for release, in parole decisions and in post-sentence regimes. As noted above, they are also tautological in that they imply an association between the diagnosis and criminal behaviour, thus eliding the dimension of specific cause under particular conditions, always present in a subject’s actions.

Introduction: revisiting the question of madness 9

The explanatory power of ‘narcissistic perversion’ or its counterpart ‘psychopathy’ is thus unfortunately limited, as reflected in recent debates that have called for research to characterise further the clinical construct of psychopathy as distinct from its measurement via existing rating instruments. Although these discussions are complex and merit elaboration that is beyond the scope of this introduction, it is noteworthy that one of the solutions proposed for resolving the question and advancing our knowledge regarding psychopathy has been precisely to return to the clinical basis of the construct and its underlying theoretical framework in the writings of Cleckley30 and Meloy,31 both of whom theorise as noted above that psychopathy may be a form of psychotic personality. Intersecting with these recent debates, Biagi-Chai questions whether criminal behaviour and anti-social tendencies are an inherent feature of the offender’s personality structure. In her reading of the Landru case, Biagi-Chai is careful to point out that mere labelling of Landru’s personality as psychotic does not elucidate the crimes; more is needed in order to decipher the shifts – the specific elements at points in time – that led to increasingly dangerous acts, culminating in serial murder. In this view, crime is conceptualised as a symptom that is situated in the individual’s life story, a symptom which could, in principle, be expressed by other, non-criminal means.

An anamnestic reading of crime If ‘psychosis’ in this sense can designate the pathology of an intelligent and highly organised subject who passes for ‘normal’, Biagi-Chai asks, what is at stake beyond the phenomenology? She makes the bold claim that our ability to trace the subject’s internal reasoning and to find humanness in the subjectivity of offenders is a measure of the very validity and legitimacy of the social order within which the offender lives and acts, and which is reflected back to us through the distorted lens of his crimes. Her close reading of Landru’s case thus highlights the importance of attention to the criminal’s precise biographical details and to the language in his statements as well as to the paradoxical tensions in the criminal’s world view. This attention to detail and idiographic meaning is essential to understanding the killer’s psychopathology, and his motives. Biagi-Chai argues that identifying the internal logic of an offender’s past criminal acts as well as his possible motives for compliance while in prison can pave the way for more extensive study of the relationship between these subtle forms of madness and the risk of future violence. Madness takes on different forms at different historical times, and for the purposes of prevention and treatment it is therefore crucial to understand the articulation between criminal thinking and contemporary social and political discourses, as they are taken up within the individual’s subjective experience. The approach in Biagi-Chai’s book represents the type of in-depth biographical study that is likely to help generate new hypotheses to test empirically, through her appreciation of case-specific factors and the subjective reasoning by which an individual engages in violent action at a particular place and time using a

10 Serial Killers: Psychiatry, Criminology, Responsibility

qualitative approach.32 Her analysis serves as an example of the case-based methods that are needed in order to advance research on violence prevention, by identifying clinical factors that may appear idiosyncratic – but which nonetheless represent mechanisms which may be generalisable across individuals. Although a strong empirical knowledge base regarding criminal behaviour has been developed in social policy, forensic mental health and legal studies, one of the limitations of existing descriptive and taxonomic approaches is that they have not provided an account of who the subject is. Biagi-Chai demonstrates a reading of criminal cases, not as cases of crime, but as clinical cases of individuals whose life stories include the perpetration of the most serious offences. In doing so, she offers invaluable guidance that may be applicable to clinical practice more generally, by showing how the details of a case can be read, and by providing examples of important leads for mental health professionals to follow, carefully and tactfully, when conducting an interview with a criminal defendant or a patient in the correctional setting.

Understanding, explanation and the real In his 1950 paper, ‘A Theoretical Introduction to the Functions of Psychoanalysis in Criminology’,33 Lacan re-affirmed the responsibility of experts in informing judges and jurors of the nuances within the legal concept of responsibility so that they may make their judgments freely without labouring under biases regarding mental disorders, and with awareness of the details and equivocal points of each case. In terms of policy also, experts can inform the public as to what concepts of insanity might be most relevant in legal proceedings, and convey what they have learned through their practice with regard to contemporary symptoms that may be subtle but lead nonetheless to serious crimes. Forensic psychiatric evaluation of criminal responsibility extends beyond the confines of the act itself, seeking to elucidate the individual’s mindset leading up to the crime: does planning or premeditation always mean that there is intent to commit the crime in the sense of the mens rea required by criminal law? To what extent is premeditation compatible with delusional thinking in ‘micro-delusions’? Criteria for the insanity defence were intensely debated in the United States after the acquittal of John Hinckley for his 1981 attempted assassination of the President of the United States. In the years after, both the US Congress and many of the states enacted legislation resulting in limitation of the insanity defence.34 At the present time, as noted above, criteria for insanity at the time of the act exclude syndromes involving only subtle or transient loss of reality testing, such as personality disorders. Although an individual with mental symptoms such as Landru’s would most likely not be eligible for the insanity defence in the United States or France today, Biagi-Chai’s detailed analysis nevertheless raises important issues regarding how criminal acts may flow from these subtle or transient symptoms of loss of reality. Biagi-Chai’s book is focused on biographical and clinical interpretations of the criminal subject, but her analysis also raises crucial policy questions regarding the

Introduction: revisiting the question of madness 11

determination of responsibility for crime in an international context. Should legal decisions regarding criminal non-responsibility encompass a wider range of psychopathology? If it can be determined that a criminal act was the ‘product’ of a mental disorder (see Durham v US 214 F2d 862, 1954; superseded by US v Brawner 471 F2d 969, 1972), and thereby explained, under what conditions would it be feasible for public authorities today to assign the individual to treatment in a hospital setting rather than to prison for punishment? To what extent does the medicalisation of crime depend upon the availability of effective treatments? Biagi-Chai does not offer a programmatic answer to these questions. Her analysis of Landru and other cases of serial killers does not directly lead to a prescriptive policy change of any kind. Instead, she illustrates a use of clinical reasoning that may lead to further reflection on what it would take for such offenders to become, some day, treatable. It is perhaps utopian, and a high benchmark to set, to aim at the possible treatment or prevention of serial homicide. From this vantage, nevertheless, the reader engaged in the treatment of offenders convicted of other crimes may well come to expect more from what precise case formulation can bring to the task of rehabilitation of individuals who appear to be more accessible than Landru. Perhaps it is all the more apt, however, that Biagi-Chai’s approach indicates the difficulties, the questioning and the prudence that would be required to intervene tactfully, support and modify the subjective coordinates of an offender such as Landru.

Translating contexts: psychoanalysis in France, the French judicial system Why ‘psychoanalysis’ in this day and age? The word will perhaps appear to the English-speaking reader as outdated, a discourse that was once prevalent in mental health and is now seemingly antiquated. Biagi-Chai’s work invites the reader to discover a tradition in French psychoanalytic psychopathology that remains active, engaged with its present and acutely relevant to the social questions of its time. Beginning with Marie Bonaparte’s publication of the case of Madame Lefebvre in the first issue of the Revue Française de Psychanalyse35 – developed further in Franz Alexander and Hugo Staub’s The Criminal, the Judge, and the Public36 – to the work of Paul Schiff and Michel Cénac, and the key 1932 case study by Jacques Lacan, On Paranoiac Psychosis and Its Relation to Personality37 – the question of criminal behaviour has been central to psychoanalytic thinking in France. BiagiChai’s book takes its place in this line of clinical theory, and updates it in light of recent developments in applied psychoanalysis from the French context. The English-speaking reader of this book will likely sense familiarity as well as distance from its analysis of the judicial context. The statute on criminal responsibility in effect at the time of the Landru case was the French Penal Code of 1810, Book II, Article 64, which read: ‘There is neither felony nor misdemeanor when the accused was in a state of insanity [démence] at the time of action, or when he was constrained by a force which he was unable to resist.’ The current law, in

12 Serial Killers: Psychiatry, Criminology, Responsibility

effect since March 1994, French Penal Code, Book I, Title II, Chapter II, Article 122-1, reads: ‘A person who was affected, at the time of the act, by a mental or neuropsychiatric disorder having abolished his discernment or the control of his acts is not criminally responsible.’ This is further qualified today by a statute on mitigating circumstances: ‘A person who was affected at the time of the act by a mental or neuropsychiatric disorder having altered his discernment or the control of his acts, remains punishable; however, the Court takes this circumstance into account at the sentencing stage and in setting the terms of the sentence.’ These French statutes closely resemble many of their Anglo-American counterparts, with an emphasis on cognition and awareness of wrongfulness in accordance with M’Naghten rules. The French statutes also include elements that correspond to provisions in the American Law Institute Model Penal Code (1962) allowing for a volitional defence. In France, criminal responsibility is adjudicated at a pre-trial hearing within a judicial system that is inquisitorial, in contradistinction to the adversarial systems in place in common law jurisdictions such as Great Britain and the United States. The French system involves two phases, each with a different judge: the juge d’instruction (translated here as investigating judge) has the task of investigation and indictment, while a presiding judge, called the Président, hears the trial by jury along with two associate judges. Offences punishable by a prison sentence of 10 or more years are tried by jury in a specialised court, the Cour d’Assises. A different judge, the juge d’application des peines, manages the sentence and the long-term follow-up of the case through possible parole proceedings. A number of terms have posed difficulties in translation, and a few of these are concepts that are key to Biagi-Chai’s argument. The French word psychique (psychical) indicates internal subjective experience and is distinct from the words ‘psychological’ or ‘mental’, which also exist in the French language. The term lien social (social bond) indicates the actualised forms of ties within the symbolic order which extend from anthropological conceptualisations of kinship, on the one hand, to the subject’s situation and place within the social order in relation with others as defined by rule systems and law, on the other. The translators have followed conventions in the translation of Lacan’s work in English by rendering vide as ‘void’, although the French word could also be translated as ‘emptiness’ in Anglophone clinical discourse. The term clinique (clinic) indicates the overall clinical approach or method applied by a practitioner when working with patients. Lastly, the expression passage à l’acte (passage to the act) is particularly thorny to translate; the phrase is a concept within French psychiatry which refers to a severe act, often life-threatening, involving potential harm to either self or others. Within Lacan’s psychoanalytic theorisation of the concept, the phrase passage à l’acte has less of a behavioural definition, is characterised by drive-related action that goes beyond the manifestation of any meaning, and is beyond interpretation by another. For Lacan, a passage à l’acte is ‘off the scene of the other’ and indicates a point where meaning is lost in an act that is potentially irreversible or irreparable.38 Although it may later come to be re-inscribed within meaning, the

Introduction: revisiting the question of madness 13

passage à l’acte, to the extent that it identifies a point where the subject becomes disconnected or disjoined from the structure of social exchange, is a last form of representation before a moment of senselessness.

Notes 1 Beck, JC, ‘Dangerous Severe Personality Disorder: The Controversy Continues’ (2010) 28(2) Behavioural Sciences and the Law 277–288. 2 Leistico, AM, Salekin, RT, DeCoster, J and Rogers, R, ‘A Large-Scale Meta-Analysis Relating the Hare Measures of Psychopathy to Antisocial Conduct’ (2008) 32(1) Law and Human Behaviour 28–45. 3 Skeem, JL and Cooke, DJ, ‘One Measure Does Not a Construct Make: Directions Toward Reinvigorating Psychopathy Research – Reply to Hare and Neumann’ (2010) 22(2) Psychological Assessment 455–459; Hare, RD and Neumann, CS, ‘The Role of Antisociality in the Psychopathy Construct: Comment on Skeem and Cooke’ (2010) 22(2) Psychological Assessment 446–454; Skeem, JL and Cooke, DJ, ‘Is Criminal Behavior a Central Component of Psychopathy? Conceptual Directions for Resolving the Debate’ (2010) 22(2) Psychological Assessment 433–445; Blackburn, R, ‘Personality Disorder and Antisocial Deviance: Comments on the Debate on the Structure of the Psychopathy Checklist – Revised’ (2007) 21(2) Journal of Personality Disorders 142–159; and Kennealy, PJ, Skeem, JL, Walters, GD and Camp, J, ‘Do Core Interpersonal and Affective Traits of PCL-R Psychopathy Interact with Antisocial Behavior and Disinhibition to Predict Violence?’ (2010) 22(3) Psychological Assessment 569–580. 4 Hence the current prevalence of ‘dangerous offender policies’. Thus, for instance, in the UK it has become possible to detain serious offenders indefinitely for purposes of public protection since the Criminal Justice Act 1991. In France, the Loi Dati (2008174) on preventive detention introduces the possibility of detaining offenders who have been sentenced to more than 15 years’ imprisonment for an indeterminate duration after they have served their sentence should they be deemed dangerous by an interdisciplinary commission of experts. 5 Wakefield, JC, ‘Disorder as Harmful Dysfunction: A Conceptual Critique of DSM-IIIR’s Definition of Mental Disorder’ (1992) 99(2) Psychological Review 232–247; Wakefield, JC, ‘The Concept of Mental Disorder: Diagnostic Implications of the Harmful Dysfunction Analysis’ (2007) 6(3) World Psychiatry 149–156; and First, MB and Wakefield, JC, ‘Defining “mental disorder” in DSM-V. A Commentary on: “What Is a Mental/Psychiatric Disorder? From DSM-IV to DSM-V” by Stein et al.’ (2010) 40(11) Psychological Medicine 1779–1782; discussion 931–934. 6 Horwitz, AV and Wakefield, JC, The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder, 2007, New York: Oxford University Press; Widiger, TA and Clark, LA, ‘Toward DSM-V and the Classification of Psychopathology’ (2000) 126(6) Psychological Bulletin 946–963; Wakefield, JC, ‘The Concept of Mental Disorder. On the Boundary between Biological Facts and Social Values’ (1992) 47(3) American Psychologist 373–388; and Lane, C, Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness, 2007, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 7 Widiger, TA and Clark, LA, ‘Toward DSM-V and the Classification of Psychopathology’ (2000) 126(6) Psychological Bulletin 946–963; and Spitzer, RL and Wakefield, JC, ‘DSM-IV Diagnostic Criterion for Clinical Significance: Does It Help Solve the False Positives Problem?’ (1999) 156(12) American Journal of Psychiatry 1856–1864.

14 Serial Killers: Psychiatry, Criminology, Responsibility 8 First et al, ‘Defining “Mental Disorder”’, 2010; Hyman, SE, ‘Can Neuroscience Be Integrated into the DSM-V?’ (2007) 8(9) Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 725–732; and Frances, A, ‘Whither DSM-V?’ (2009) 195(5) British Journal of Psychiatry 391–392. 9 Morton, RJ and Hilts, MA, ‘Serial Murder: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives for Investigators’, 2005, Behavioral Analysis Unit, National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime. Generally speaking, for a critique of actuarial tools in criminal justice, see Harcourt, B, Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age, 2007, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. 10 Babiak, P, Neumann, CS and Hare, RD, ‘Corporate Psychopathy: Talking the Walk’ (2010) 28(2) Behavioral Sciences and Law 174–193. 11 Harris, GT, Rice, ME, Hilton, NZ, Lalumiere, ML and Quinsey, VL, ‘Coercive and Precocious Sexuality as a Fundamental Aspect of Psychopathy’ (2007) 21(1) Journal of Personality Disorders 1–27. 12 Reisner, AD, McGee, M and Noffsinger, SG, ‘The Inpatient Evaluation and Treatment of a Self-Professed Budding Serial Killer’ (2003) 47(1) International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology 58–70; and Stratton, J, ‘Serial Killing and the Transformation of the Social’ (1996) 13 Theory Culture Society 77–98. 13 Foucault, M, ‘About the Concept of the “Dangerous Individual” in 19th Century Legal Psychiatry’ (1978) 1(1) International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 1–18. 14 Saleilles, R, The Individualization of Punishment, Jastrow, RS and Pound, R (eds), 1911/1913, Boston, MA: Little, Brown. 15 Foucault, M, ‘Mal faire, dire vrai. Fonctions de l’aveu (Louvain Seminars)’, 1981, Transcript of Conferences at the UCL, Faculté de Droit, Ecole de Criminologie. 16 Space, LN, ‘Time and Function: Intersecting Principles of Responsibility Across the Terrain of Criminal Justice’ (2007) 1 Criminal Law and Philosophy 233–250. 17 See, e.g. Criminal Justice Act 1991 in the UK and the Loi Dati (2008-174) in France. 18 Player, E, ‘Remanding Women in Custody: Concerns for Human Rights’ (2007) 70(3) Modern Law Review 402–426. 19 Borum, R and Fulero, SM, ‘Empirical Research on the Insanity Defense and Attempted Reforms: Evidence toward Informed Policy’ (1999) 23(3) Law and Human Behaviour 375–393; and Morse, SJ, ‘Craziness and Criminal Responsibility’ (1999) 17(2) Behavioural Sciences and the Law 147–164. 20 Palermo, GB and Knudten, RD, ‘The Insanity Plea in the Case of a Serial Killer’ (1994) 38(3) International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology 3–16; and Slovenko, R, ‘The Mental Disability Requirement in the Insanity Defense’ (1999) 17(2) Behavioural Sciences and the Law 165–180. 21 Bonnie, RJ, ‘Should a Personality Disorder Qualify as a Mental Disease in Insanity Adjudication?’ (2010) 38(4) Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 760–763; Kinscherff, R, ‘Proposition: A Personality Disorder May Nullify Responsibility for a Criminal Act’ (2010) 38(4) Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 745–759; Felthous, AR, ‘Psychopathic Disorders and Criminal Responsibility in the USA’ (2010) 260 European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience Supp 2, S137–S141; Morse, SJ, ‘Psychopathy and Criminal Responsibility’ (2008) 1 Neuroethics 205–212; and Palermo, GB, ‘Editorial: New Vistas on Personality Disorders and Criminal Responsibility’ (2007) 51(2) International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology 127–129. 22 Cleckley, H, The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues About the SoCalled Psychopathic Personality, 1955, 3rd edn, St Louis, MO: CV Mosby Company. 23 Meloy, JR, The Psychopathic Mind: Origins, Dynamics, and Treatment, 1988, Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc. 24 Hesnard, A, ‘Structure’ in Porot, A (ed), Manuel Alphabétique de Psychiatrie clinique, thérapeutique et médico-légale, 1952, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France; and

Introduction: revisiting the question of madness 15

25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38

Lanteri-Laura, G, Essai sur les paradigmes de la psychiatrie moderne, 1998, Paris: Editions du temps. Lacan, J, ‘Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de l’individu: Essai d’analyse d’une fonction en psychologie’ (‘Family Complexes in the Formation of the Individual: Essay on the Analysis of a Function in Psychology’) in Autres Écrits, 1938/2001, Paris: Le Seuil. Lacan, J, De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité; suivi de Premiers écrits sur la paranoïa, 1932/1975, Paris: Le Seuil. Freud, S, ‘The Ego and the Id’ in Strachey, J, Freud, A, Strachey, A and Tyson, A (eds), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 1923/1962/2001, London: Hogarth/Vintage. Kernberg, O, Structural Diagnosis. Severe Personality Disorders: Psychotherapeutic Strategies, 1984, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, pp 3–26. Kernberg, O, Aggression in Personality Disorders and Perversions, 1992, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Cleckley, The Mask of Sanity, 1955. Meloy, The Psychopathic Mind, 1988. Litwack, TR, ‘Some Questions for the Field of Violence Risk Assessment and Forensic Mental Health: Or, “Back to Basics” Revisited’ (2002) 1(2) International Journal of Forensic Mental Health 171–178; and Beasley, JO, 2nd, ‘Serial Murder in America: Case Studies of Seven Offenders’ (2004) 22(3) Behavioural Sciences and the Law 395–414. Lacan, J, ‘A Theoretical Introduction to the Functions of Psychoanalysis in Criminology’ in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, 1951/2006, New York: WW Norton & Co. Miller, RD, ‘Criminal Responsibility’ in Rosner, R (ed.), Principles and Practice of Forensic Psychiatry, 2003, London: Arnold, p 213–232. Bonaparte, M, ‘Le cas de Madame Lefebvre’ (1927) 1(1) Revue Française de Psychanalyse 149–198. Alexander, F and Staub, H (1956), The Criminal, the Judge, and the Public: A Psychological Analysis (rev. edn, Gregory Zilboorg (trans.)), original work published 1929, Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Lacan, De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité, 1932/1975. Miller, JA, ‘Jacques Lacan: Remarque sur son concept de passage à l’acte’ (1988) 1 Actualités Psychiatriques 5–14; and Lacan, J, Le Séminaire, Livre X: L’Angoisse, 1963, Paris: Le Seuil, 2004.

Chapter 1

The enigma of serial killers

Brought to light in 1919 in the immediate aftermath of the war, the Landru case was one of the most resounding criminal cases of the twentieth century. For the first time in history, public opinion was confronted with an unprecedented form of murder. A married man, a father of four, who was in love with a singer whose lover he had been (and who was thus apparently normal in every respect), was to become the killer we still know today who over a four-year period killed 10 women and one young man. Of course, before him, at the end of the nineteenth century, Joseph Vacher, a criminal nicknamed ‘the Ripper of the South-East’, had committed numerous crimes in a state of delusional vagrancy. But he was successively found to be mad, to have recovered, to be not guilty by reason of insanity and finally to be guilty. What is more, his case gave rise to disputes between experts on the question of madness. This was not so with Landru. With his incredible duplicity and his apparent normality, the latter was to introduce the modern enigma of serial killers into French legal history. Through the numerous studies that, to this day, have been dedicated to Landru, posterity only remembers this killer of women as a greedy and wilful murderer. The question of madness has never been the subject of research. Yet, this was the question that was on everyone’s lips and in all newspapers from the day of his arrest until his execution. As all serious authors have come to agree, the case file reveals a certain number of elements destined to remain, it would seem, forever inexplicable, because they do not seem to fit within any comprehensible logic. Why did Landru, who was an inventor in mechanics before becoming a conman and then a murderer, not succeed in marketing his inventions given that they were perfectly fit to be commercialised, as we shall see? Why did Landru, who was supposed to have killed for money, not choose victims who were a little richer, since this would have provided him with the comfort he never truly obtained? Why didn’t he kill his mistress? These are all questions the psychoanalytic reading we propose can offer answers to; answers that will give logical consistency to the personality of the famous criminal, one that people have refused to see and that is none other than that of his madness. Through the study of the Landru case, the question of madness and its relation to apparent normality is broached, and we consider whether the concept of crisis

The enigma of serial killers 17

or excess is still sufficient to account for what we know today of madness. I argue that madness can go so far as to model itself on utmost conformity, donning the mask of the banal and everyday. It can take the very real form (not the romanticised one) of what is now of the order of myth: Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde. Madness can account for the figures that we speak so much about on occasion, but which we struggle to perceive and conceive of as truly existing. In this radical duplicity, there is something which is, quite literally, incredible. Yet we confront this incredible (which we call ‘real’, a stumbling block, a rupture, a void of sense, a hole in the common signification of things) daily in our practice as psychoanalysts and psychiatrists. The real is what breaks the thread of subjective stories and the linearity of their discourse. It is what makes our practice something other than a simple, well-meaning understanding or even empathic conversation, for it touches on the register of consequences: namely, whether the subject will be able to occupy a dignified place in the world amongst others, or return to failure and passage to the act? Through this book, I would like to transmit (in other words, make the reader feel) something of the real in its constitution as reality for the subject Landru. The real is not reality; it is a modification of it, a subjective translation. It is an interpretation of the meaning of life, of everything the subject understood through his or her first sensations, through the first words and first looks that accompanied his or her entry into the world: there where the intimate sense of life took hold of him or her and transformed itself into joy or sorrow; there where, in the bond to the parents, something was conveyed of the desiring and loving relation, of the couple and of what it would mean to be a father or mother in his or her turn one day. If the bond to others, the civilising bond, is to be found in the knot of the first identifications, it must be understood that sometimes this knot is not tied. This is what happens in psychosis. In psychosis, the subject is in the social bond, but he is there in his own way, a way which is sometimes strange, fragile, difficult to understand and kind of foreign. But whatever the place occupied by the psychotic subject in this bond (even if it is the most withdrawn, isolated, free or dangerous one it could be), this subject cannot be dissociated from the bond to others, even when he breaks from it in the passage to the act. The latter cannot be understood and interpreted independently of the subject rooted in his familial, cultural and social context. No subject can be excluded from the community of humanity. My study will show how Landru drew from the time in which he lived and how the crimes he committed bear its mark, albeit in a delusional manner. In addition, the Landru case will pave the way for a reading of further case studies, which I briefly introduce here. I will reread the case of Pierre Rivière, a well-known parricide from the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the case of Donato Bilancia, an Italian serial killer from our postmodern era, who has been referred to as a ‘random killer’ and who is currently incarcerated. Considering the real in its relation to the subject modifies the notion of responsibility, without for all that cancelling it out. If the characteristic of the real is to

18 Serial Killers: Psychiatry, Criminology, Responsibility

impose itself as a constraint on the subject, the subject’s response to this constraint remains somehow inalienable, because it is singular and has an identity beyond structure. It is here, in this response, that the articulation of the subject to the reality of his life and also to the real of his criminal acts is laid bare. Degrees of responsibility are measured according to this articulation. This is what I will develop in my conclusion, devoted to the question of criminal responsibility, since the time seems ripe to open a dialogue between psychiatry, insofar as it is oriented by psychoanalysis, and the criminal justice system.

Crime and lack of motive There are crimes that occur without one being able to connect them to a crisis, to a delusional moment, without any detectable motive. We are then confronted with the strange, with the enigma of meaninglessness. If meaning always presents itself as obvious because of the satisfaction it affords and so instantly secures conviction, non-sense, by contrast, provokes and maintains suspense and dissatisfaction. Nonsense is not the opposite of sense – it necessarily gives rise to a call for elucidation, a desire to know, an expectation. And this expectation endures, unchanged, as long as the elements of an explanation do not impose themselves with an irrefutable logical consistency – in other words, as long as the proposed explanations fail to secure an unreserved assent, an ‘effect of truth’. This is why we appeal to specialists, so that they can clarify what cannot be grasped. We ask them if the criminal knew what he was doing at the time of his act and to what extent he is liable to repeat the act. All the more so when it is a question of crimes that are supposed to be groundless as the apparent absence of causality opens up troubling perspectives: whatever their place and circumstances, such crimes appear to be reproducible at any time as acts of pure caprice. More than any other crime, the murder said to be ‘without motive’1 is frightening because it carries a strong potential for repetition. With these inexplicable murders, we thought we had reached the height of the enigma of crime. But with serial killers, an even greater enigma emerged, that of repeated murders where lack of motive and non-sense are reproduced each time. Here, we are confronted with criminals for whom a first crime, a first passage to the act, produces no shock, no retroactive effect. Is this act forgotten? Erased? But how? For these individuals, crime seems to manifest itself like a simple event in the strange psychopathology of everyday life. An ordinary man, a good friend, a father, in no way distinct from his social, domestic and cultural environment, can at the same time be a killer who repeats his murders with the greatest indifference.2 The enigma of serial killers, considered to be a real bane in the United States, occupies a large place in the media and countless films and novels try their hand at producing a psychological explanation for this incomprehensible phenomenon that continues to increase. In Europe, the isolated cases now constitute a series and over the course of a few years, the list has grown considerably. Serial killers make newspaper headlines, supply material for television programmes and for the many

The enigma of serial killers 19

studies that endlessly seek to grasp the psyche of the individual who comes to rend the social fabric, to damage the cohesion of countries that think of themselves as rich and call themselves developed. But what is neglected, because it is not recognised, is the real insofar as it is distinct from reality, although it is the active core of the passage to the act. With serial killers we can no longer imagine a hot-headed act, a crisis, a moment of madness. We have to account for their acts in other ways: either the criminal is a pervert and enjoys his crimes with full conscience and volition (and we have to circumscribe this jouissance, to demonstrate the existence of this perversion and not merely assume it) or the criminal is mad and, in this case, madness shows facets, nuances and a complexity that extends far beyond what is immediately perceptible.

Reconsidering the Landru case To this day the case of Henri-Désiré Landru remains a mystery. My objective is to disentangle madness from perversion without any ambiguity and to render this madness visible and legible to all without resorting to subterfuges or approximations. My approach is to examine madness through the psychoanalytic concepts elaborated by Sigmund Freud and developed by Jacques Lacan and again more recently by Jacques-Alain Miller in his annual seminar, L’orientation lacanienne.3 People have talked and written much about Landru and because of that everyone thinks they know this modern Bluebeard who burnt women in his stove. Yet, the mystery emanating from this famous case continues to perpetuate the dark aura of serial criminals and authorise all manner of lucubration. It refers to an even greater mystery, the one we used to ascribe to fatality, to the arbitrariness of the will of God or of absolute chance, and that we ascribe today – too easily it must be said – to the immediate satisfaction of impulses, to intolerance to frustration or to ‘predatory’ drives. These pseudo-causalities are merely the avatars of ancient fatum. However, this absence of knowledge tends to be elaborated as a legendary story for a spellbound audience in a way that smacks of obscurantism. In order to shatter the blindness that the Landru case carries with it, I decided to reopen the voluminous case file to examine every single piece of evidence, every element. In so doing I have consulted the whole of the archive and assiduously compared it against the numerous press and newspaper articles that reported the investigation and the trial at the time. In this work, I have disregarded nothing and have not considered anything to be irrelevant or impossible to integrate into the account that I will give here. On the contrary, and as the practice of the monograph requires, I took account of all the elements, including those that appeared to be the most insignificant, the most bizarre or the most absurd. It allowed me to find and reconstruct, through every detail and every utterance, the guiding thread of Landru’s life and personality.

20 Serial Killers: Psychiatry, Criminology, Responsibility

A biography elucidated by psychoanalysis The result of my research leads me to suggest the concept of a ‘biography elucidated by psychoanalysis’. Such a biography is not a purely chronological narration, nor is it a ready-made explanation. It is the writing of a monograph that conforms to the structure of the real of the unconscious which it reveals; it is a biography that demonstrates how the real is knotted within the story of someone’s life. It exposes what a subject can be in his development above and beyond appearances: in other words, his presence and even the effects of his rhetoric. ‘A biography elucidated by psychoanalysis’ is inscribed at the juncture of the universal and the particular, insofar as it allows a constant to be discovered in the network formed by the statements and behaviour of a subject. This constant is linked to the primary modality through which the subject entered reality. It is the mark that the signifier leaves upon him, when the speech of the other, diffracted between statement and enunciation, between sayings and ways of saying, is incorporated. The words, strictly speaking, affect him, because they are borne by the love and desire of another before him, of another who addresses him. The subject becomes aware of the other in his first emotions at the same time as he becomes aware of himself. This relation to the other, insofar as he is himself a subject, is founded in the field of speech and language, a field that Lacan calls Other with a capital O. This is why human relations are not pure rivalry, but rivalry mediated by law. There should be no mistaking what the law is. It is not merely what is written in the civil or criminal code: it is also the symbolic pact that unites people and prohibits incest and parricide. The function of the father, as exception, gives sense to the capacity instituted in man that allows him, through the play of identifications, to think of himself, to imagine himself in the place of the other and which we call the Imaginary. The expression ‘the field of the Other’ means that a discourse is made regarding reality through speech, and that an intimate reality, a real, is created and a jouissance felt. After Freud, Lacan would say that a portion of jouissance is definitely lost for man through the fact that he speaks. This is why Lacan, later on, will place a bar on the O, which is to say that the Other is also barred. Indeed, jouissance emerges in the same movement as the limitation of jouissance. In other words, there is no such thing as a total jouissance. This explains Lacan’s double aphorism, which could be understood as contradictory, namely that all speech has jouissance for its consequence and that complete jouissance is forbidden to the speaking being. This is another way of saying that there are no instincts in man, but drives which must go through the ‘defiles of the signifier’; the mechanism of instinct, outside of the signifier, bears no relation to what it means to be human. It is truly because public opinion has this presentiment concerning the drive (namely, that there is of course something ‘biological’, but not without it being articulated to the transcendental function of speech) that it makes it its duty, a kind of duty of humanity, to force the criminal to reveal the secret motivation of his crimes, their cause. It is on this point that we touch upon

The enigma of serial killers 21

a limit where we sometimes encounter the silence, the impassiveness of the accused. From then on, how can we reconcile and, by the same token, understand the absence of words and the necessity that there be some?

The wall of incomprehension Close to a century separates a criminal like Patrice Alègre from Henri-Désiré Landru. Patrice Alègre has been tried and sentenced to life imprisonment for five murders of women and six rapes. Do we know more today than we did at the time of Landru? Have things changed? What developments have there been in psychiatry on criminality and madness? It would seem that nothing has changed. At the time of the Alègre trial, newspaper headlines read as follows: ‘Patrice Alègre, mysteries remain.’4 The papers of Landru’s time said: ‘In the Versailles jail, Landru remains enigmatic and mysterious.’5 Questions remain: ‘Still, nine days of trial will not be enough for us either to understand the personality and motives of this unusual assassin, [Patrice Alègre], or to know whether he is involved in other crimes or not.’6 ‘I believe we would never understand anything about Landru, even if he hadn’t killed.’7 ‘Why did Patrice Alègre commit five murders, coupled with acts of barbarism? How did he become a serial killer?’8 ‘Why did the accused Landru, intelligent, endowed with a good scientific education, become the most awful criminal?’9 Silence and muteness accompany these questions. Patrice Alègre, walled up in an unbearable silence, repeats: ‘I don’t know.’ Landru’s leitmotif was: ‘The wall is closed, Mr President, I won’t say anything else.’ A wall, indeed, acts as resistance to the words that go from the criminal towards others, his judges, his lawyers, the families of the victims. A wall stops, annihilates the words that others address to him. This wall captures all of the words, even those that, heavy with consequences, sentence the criminal. Does it not seem that the wall annuls all significations, isolates him from all ties? ‘Sentenced to the maximum term of imprisonment, in the dock, Patrice Alègre listened to the verdict without flinching.’10 When the verdict was delivered, ‘the enigmatic character, Landru, didn’t flinch. Not a single muscle in his face moved.’11 Through time, the wall of silence always seems to have the same structure, that of an ungraspable modality of the impossible which inhabits the human and eludes understanding. It is from this impenetrable wall, or its flip side, the bottomless abyss, that the general fascination for criminals is born. This fascination obstructs the path to knowledge. My wager is that this fascination can be overcome and that there will be those (whether they be members of the public, journalists, lawyers, judges, police inspectors, psychologists or psychiatrists) who, by choosing to reject it, will follow the path of a true desire for elucidation. This desire begins with astonishment, the one that we find, for example, under the pen of Inspector Belin, the man who arrested Landru. He held on to his astonishment throughout his whole life, transmitted it in his memoirs, and we come across it today. He wrote: ‘I hesitate over the signification of his gaze.

22 Serial Killers: Psychiatry, Criminology, Responsibility

Sometimes, it seems to me that I read disquiet in it, and sometimes also it seems to me as if no one will ever get a hold on this mystery man.’12 And he adds: I am not a psychiatrist . . . I always thought, and those of my colleagues who had to deal with Landru thought the same, that this criminal showed all the signs of a dual personality, extraordinary enough and very interesting for a psychologist. But, the most peculiar thing is that when he committed a theft or a crime, he wrote it down just like everything else.13 Landru, like many people, wrote down his expenses and his income, but Inspector Belin was very surprised to realise that through a kind of rigorous dualism, he noted what common sense would have told him to keep secret, or even erase. Inspector Belin is not fooled and clinical fecundity truly lies in the details. In his turn Pierre Alfort, Patrice Alègre’s lawyer, writes how striking his encounter with the criminal was: ‘I expected anything but that: to be immediately struck by his smile . . . I had already met criminals. This time, a striking contrast between the individual and the facts he is accused of astounds me.’14 Pierre Alfort is not fooled: clinical fecundity is also in the paradox. The capacity to be surprised is, for psychoanalysis, the necessary step in initiating any search for truth. Indeed, what is astonishment if not something that, like a symptom, happens to you, disturbs you, shakes you and leaves the trace of its sting in both body and mind? The capacity to be surprised, shared by many, cannot be stymied, it survives from one époque to the next, demands and expects a worthy answer: an answer that will entail a coherent resolution beyond differences of interpretation and discourse.

Psychiatric opinion today The questions raised by Inspector Belin found no echo among the forensic psychiatrists who examined Landru at the time. In 1919, psychiatry dealt with the question of madness and criminality indirectly and, without seeking to define the personality of the criminal, psychiatrists enumerated what the criminal was not: ‘We find no trace of psychosis, of a pathological drive, or of an obsession in Landru. There is no weakening of intellectual capacities; there is no state of confusion.’ They examined what they called Landru’s ‘mentality’ ‘outside of any question of criminality’. From that point of view, it could be ‘found to be normal in every respect’. The conclusion is self-evident: ‘Landru does not suffer from any mental illness.’15 Today, we could no longer write that a criminal was examined outside of ‘any question of criminality’. But what does psychiatry have to offer in answer to the questions asked by the criminal justice system? Does it really want to know who16 the subject responsible for the crime is, or rather, confronted with the necessity of answering the social and legal question of responsibility, is it driven, as it was in

The enigma of serial killers 23

the past, to formulate an always blunt, bastardised answer? Renowned forensic psychiatrists sketch a ‘general model organized around a triad with variable weighting: psychopathic instability, narcissistic perversion and annihilation anxiety’.17 Thus, to account for ‘serial killers’, a new clinical entity, called ‘the clinic of horror’, oscillates ‘between psychosis and narcissistic perversion’.18 They specify that, for such killers, narcissistic perversion predominates. For these clinicians the insignificance of the victim, the indifference towards him or her implies ‘a narcissistic superpower’. Yet what does Patrice Alègre say to the doctors when they question him on his crimes? Not much. He offers the minimal scenario he will use again in court: ‘I wanted to kiss them, they didn’t want to, it annoyed me, I strangled and raped them.’19 Of course, psychiatrists recognise silence and the suspension of speech in these criminals20 (the wall), but it doesn’t prevent them from ascribing ‘a subjugating experience’ to them ‘which accompanies the passage to the act’: quite the contrary. In this ‘experience’ psychiatrists situate ‘the omnipotence, the triumph, the emergence of the chaos, the narcissistic orgy’, without the subject betraying anything of the kind, without a single detectable trace.21 They go so far as to ascribe the omnipotence of a demiurge to these criminals. And, disregarding the fact that Hitler, the greatest criminal in the history of mankind, was so terrifyingly organised, they insist on the jubilation of ‘the Dictator’s scene in which Charlie Chaplin, playing Hitler, juggles with the globe, alone, they say, in a grandiose moment of elation and headiness.’22 Yet, as these practitioners themselves specify, when, after long hours of interviews, Patrice Alègre finally loses control over his speech, what do they find? Emptiness. ‘It is essentially perplexity which is revealed by his answers, his hesitations and his facial expressions’,23 they add. What basis do they have, then, to speak of a demiurge? This hypothesis is no more verified in these few lines from Pierre Alfort’s book than it is in the chapter where he relates the findings of the experts. On the contrary, in the case of Patrice Alègre, lack seems to prevail over excess. What pre-established arsenal do these psychiatrists use? Nothing should be ascribed to a subject who is not capable of assuming in his subjectivity. When this subjectivity is failing, we can closely circumscribe the coordinates of this failure and delimit the place that it doesn’t account for, but we cannot substitute another subjectivity for it. The brand new category of ‘narcissistic pervert’ could therefore be seen to have been created especially for serial killers and to not really have any external point of reference from which to understand the subject. To account for a supposed omnipotence, it unites will with an overstepping of limits. However, under the pretence of making the narcissistic pervert understandable, it merely produces a mode of analogical inquiry that does away with all contradictions and justifies all manner of descriptions and developments in the field of plausibility.

24 Serial Killers: Psychiatry, Criminology, Responsibility

Understanding and causality Omnipotence is not a new concept. A psychotic subject encamped in his megalomania, in his certainty or in his delusional idea, doesn’t owe anything to anyone and doesn’t expect anything from anyone. This is what makes him free. But this freedom can take on 1,001 forms; as many forms as there are subjects. It can be barely perceptible, a mere mild peculiarity, justified as a likeable extravagance, or masked by a very thorough conformism. When these forms are destabilised, the weak ties which unite the subject to the other break and freedom appears. This freedom is not to be taken in the usual sense, but to be heard literally, as a disalienation. Perhaps this is what some call ‘omnipotence’? Then we must account for all of its variations, for this ‘omnipotence’ will take on multiple guises according to each subject. It will range from an agitation that is difficult to master to total prostration, which is no less characteristic. This concept is therefore insufficient in itself to account for a passage to the act, whatever its form, and cannot be put forward as a model for madness, because the real question lies elsewhere. The point is indeed to know how this freedom is articulated in the subject.24 Yet this question is precisely the one that is eliminated, as much through the creation of ready-made categories as through the rise in the media of new professionals in criminology. Instructors trained in law schools, doctors specialising in the history of mentality and behaviour, acquainted with sociology, work side by side with the new profession of profiler, a qualification evidently acquired in brand new profiling institutes! They all study the criminal phenomenon in itself and elaborate on the profile of the serial killer that they define ‘such as he is’, ‘a perverse individual who chooses to commit his acts in full awareness of their consequence. We are not talking about a (psychotic) monster’, they assert in passing, ‘but about a responsible subject who commits monstrous acts out of moral perversion (psychopaths)’.25 This amounts to using a phenomenon to explain itself. In this way they show us the little regard they have for psychosis, identifying the psychotic subject with the ‘monster’. For them there is no doubt: the serial killer is a pervert who perfectly masters his acts. These theoreticians of omnipotence simply suppose a sole and unique causality, that of the neurotic who wants everything to make sense. This is why, in cases of murders without motives, they themselves provide the missing sense: that of omnipotence. Others before them, just as seriously, had already proceeded in the same way in the 1950s. Thus, the psychiatrist and criminologist Angelo Hesnard emphasised, in what he generalised as ‘the morbid universe of the fault’, that the ‘perverse’ act had to constitute a relief for the criminal. In this way he explained the lack of remorse and ‘the kind of dark triumph’ that he thought accompanied any liberation, as paradoxical as it may be. His conception gave a sense of self-punishment to any criminal act. According to his theory, man is necessarily caught between two passions, love and hate, and subjected to the guilt engendered by the latter. Nothing else is thinkable. In particular, Hesnard could not comprehend a clinical

The enigma of serial killers 25

approach for what is outside-of-sense (hors-sens). Such a clinical approach is in fact very difficult to conceptualise because it is completely outside of what is shared and so it is outside of identification. Other disciplines have tried to establish the possible link between personality and crime, but, because they were grounded on a general theory of a causality external to the subject, they could not account for individual causality and, therefore, reconstitute the fabric that led to the crime. Psychology, in its general survey of types and behaviours, does not explore the causal register that it gladly leaves to a so-called instinctual field and, by this token, cannot be questioned according to particular coordinates. But it is with psychology that we can understand the birth of criminology as a constituted discipline, since the latter seeks to broach criminal phenomena through methods of observation, tests, statistics, biological and sociological studies; in other words everything except the constituent function of speech. The multiplication of statistical data, fragmenting the subject into supposedly objective entities, is no more successful in finding what insists in a subject and constitutes the constancy of his being, unlike studies carried out in monographs. Finally, the psychiatrists who took the keenest interest in passages to the act, Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault and Paul Guiraud,26 concerned with answering for the medico-legal clinical approach, highlighted phenomena in which a rupture of meaning occurs, where automatism and a lack of motive emerge. These psychiatric concepts retain their unaltered relevance to this day. However, in approaching these phenomena in such detail, these psychiatrists opted to exclude from their argument everything that concerns causality, which they left in the register of organic dysfunctions. Lacan, very early on, as a young psychiatrist close to a clinic of the subject and more concerned with ethics than morality, necessarily ended up on the side of these theoreticians of non-sense, before he himself, having become a psychoanalyst, questioned it on the basis of new coordinates. Psychoanalysis, since it serves as an initiation to the deciphering of unconscious motives, turned psychical causality into the very object of its research. It is therefore the body of research that can most deepen the question of crime. But it does not allow us to define a personality type or a type of criminal. It does not proceed from the general, but from the particular. Through the particular, psychoanalysis can account for the causal dimension insofar as it is, for a subject, what pushes him to act. No crime, not even the most monstrous, can be explained by a tautology: namely, as pertaining to monstrosity, no more than it can be ascribed to the chromosome of the ‘born-criminal’ or to some murderous drive henceforth conflated with instinct. I will perhaps be reproached for evoking something as evident as the speaking being. But has our society, which dismisses the function of speech in its transcendence as in its poetry, in its reason as in its madness, not gone to sleep on this obvious fact? Speech is evermore reduced to signs, and signs are a trace that condense nature, biology and the unexplained: words simply conceived as instruments of communication. Is it not with such signs that, today, some pretend to

26 Serial Killers: Psychiatry, Criminology, Responsibility

be able to detect, from the earliest infancy, the delinquents and criminals of tomorrow? Is it not, paradoxically, through the conversion of these signs into signifiers of fate, that some enjoin these stigmatised subjects to confirm what ‘the man of science’ has predicted? If we take a closer look, this erosion of the function of speech (a constituent function for man) has already started in relation to serial killers and elsewhere. A semantic slippage paves the way for the dehumanisation of these criminals through the frequent use of signifiers that have become common when people speak of them: thus, ‘hunters’, ‘ogres’ and, especially, the term used most of all, ‘predators’, which refers to any living organism feeding at the expense of another. This transformation of language by the now banal use of the word only serves to stifle any possible question about causality by referring to an innate causality that harks back to ethology. Psychoanalysts can clarify matters for public opinion by unveiling the coherence that, in the personality of a criminal, brought the act about. This unveiling can allow us to resist the fascination that, as I have said, feeds the register of mystery, the occult and the unidentified. It is a fact that the silence, the inaccessibility, the irony and the detachment of numerous serial killers confer an enigmatic brilliance upon them. But brilliance blinds us because in veiling the horror, it traps the gaze. This is what fascinates. And it is up to us to separate the object of knowledge, which emerges out of the logic of a subject’s life, from the object of fascination that obscures knowledge and belongs to rapture.27 Here, let us underline that fascination is therefore the veil of a mystery upon which legends are inscribed at the expense of a knowledge about the real. Yet, knowledge about the criminal links up with knowledge about the whole of humanity.

Notes 1 See Guiraud, P and Cailleux, B, ‘Le meurtre immotivé, réaction libératrice de la maladie chez les hébéphréniques’ (1928) II Annales médico-psychologiques 352–359; and Guiraud, P, ‘Les meurtres immotivés’ in L’Évolution psychiatrique, March 1931, reprinted in Documents de la bibliothèque de l’ECF, February 1996, 1, ‘Le langage’, 96–103. 2 ‘Criminological doctrine calls an individual a serial killer from the third consecutive murder.’ Négrier-Dormont, L and Nossintchouk, R, Tueurs en série: une approche criminologique, 2001, Paris: Flammarion, p 11. But in the psychiatric hospital where I work, we treated many criminals after a first passage to the act (pursuant to Art 121-1, formerly Art 64 of the Code Pénal). And for us the number does not make the serial killer. The potential for recidivism is often already inscribed in the coordinates of the first passage to the act said to be without motive. A sustained treatment by a given psychiatric sector remains the best method of prevention. 3 L’orientation lacanienne is the name of Jacques-Alain Miller’s weekly seminar, ongoing since 1981 and delivered under the auspices of the Department of Psychoanalysis at Paris-VIII University. 4 Le Parisien, 22 February 2002. 5 Le Matin, 6 November 1921. 6 Le Parisien, 22 February 2002. 7 Le Matin, 8 November 1921, article by Colette.

The enigma of serial killers 27 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27

Le Parisien, 22 February 2002. Le Petit Journal, 31 May 1919. Le Parisien, 22 February 2002. Le Matin, 1 December 1921. Jules (known as Jean) Belin, Commissaire Belin. Trente ans de sûreté nationale, 1950, Paris: Société d’éditions et de publications en exclusivité, Bibliothèque France-Soir, p 98. Belin, Commissaire Belin, 1950, p 106. Alfort, P and Durand-Souffland, S, J’ai défendu Patrice Alègre, 2005, Paris: Le Seuil, p 21. Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box III, Opinions of Drs Vallon, Roubinovitch and Roques de Fursac. Lacan writes who in italics to emphasise the dimension of the subject insofar as it is not superposed to the individual but includes an unknown share, before naming it with the term ‘speaking’ being [parlêtre] at the end of his teaching, in ‘A Theoretical Introduction to the Functions of Psychoanalysis in Criminology’ in Écrits, 2006, New York and London: WW Norton, p 114. Zagury, D, ‘Les serials killers sont-ils des tueurs sadiques?’ in Revue française de psychanalyse, ‘Sadisme’, 2002, t LXVI, no 4, p 1202. Zagury, D, ‘Entre psychose et perversion narcissique. Une clinique de l’horreur: les tueurs en série’ (1996) 61(1) L’Évolution psychiatrique 87–112. Alfort and Durand-Souffland, J’ai défendu Patrice Alègre, 2005, p 72. During Patrice Alègre’s trial, Daniel Zagury stressed that ‘we should perhaps not ask him what he is incapable of saying’ (quoted by Acacio Pereira, ‘Perpétuité avec 22 ans de sûreté requise contre Patrice Alègre’, Le Monde, 22 February 2002). Zagury, ‘Les serials killers sont-ils des tueurs sadiques?’, 2002, p 1203. Zagury, ‘Les serials killers sont-ils des tueurs sadiques?’, 2002, quoted in Rankl, U, Patrice Alègre, L’Homme qui tuait les femmes, 2004, Paris: Nicolas Philippe, p 204; and in Pereira, ‘Perpétuité avec 22 ans de sûreté requise contre Patrice Alègre’, 2002. Alfort and Durand-Souffland, J’ai défendu Patrice Alègre, 2005, p 72. ‘And far from being an “insult” to freedom, madness is freedom’s most faithful companion, following its every move like a shadow. Not only can man’s being not be understood without madness, but it would not be man’s being if it did not bear madness within itself as the limit of his freedom.’ (Lacan, J, ‘Presentation on Psychical Causality’, 1946, Écrits, 2006, p 144.) Négrier-Dormont and Nossintchouk, Tueurs en série, 2001, p 6. Two prominent figures of French psychiatry between the First and Second World Wars. In the way that Sigmund Freud talks about it in his paper ‘On Narcissism’, Standard Edition XIV. Cf also Lacan, J, ‘Hommage fait à Marguerite Duras du Ravissement de Lol V. Stein’, 1965, in Autres Écrits, 2001, Paris: Le Seuil, pp 191–197.

Chapter 2

Case study of a serial killer: Henri-Désiré Landru

The Landru case exploded in 1919. Henri-Désiré Landru, then age 50, was accused of murdering 10 women and one young man, whose bodies he disposed of by burning them in his stove. The case brought to light the scams and murders of the one the press came to name, in turn, ‘the Bluebeard of Gambais’, ‘the Sire of Gambais’ and ‘the Lady Vanisher’. The crimes, which started with a century full of the promises of its second industrial revolution, ended in the wake of the most deadly war France had ever known. Was it madness or perversion? The Landru enigma intrigued all levels of society and all were aware that the case would leave an indelible mark upon history. To attend this resounding trial journalists, writers, artists, comedians, songwriters and sketch artists jostled in the ‘Landru train’, described in great detail in L’illustration: The ‘Landru train’ leaves the Invalides station at 11h40 . . . It carries the stream of magistrates, lawyers, witnesses, court journalists, photographers . . . and people moved by mere curiosity who, every day, go to the palace of justice at Versailles. People talk of the case. They debate the articles published in the morning.1 Everyone speculated about the personality of the ‘mystery man’. Was he a sadistic killer or a madman? The question was on everyone’s lips. Landru’s wife and children, in shock, also tried to understand and remember the husband and father they had always known. Shortly after his arrest, they independently recounted an identical and moving tale. These stories were hastily told, with emotion and pain. They are precious, because they interweave biographic details with subjective elements that never surfaced in Landru’s own accounts. In the pages of the daily Le Journal, we can read ‘The confession of Madame Landru’,2 in which she repeated what she had just recounted in front of the investigating judge. She was heard as a witness, but the question had also been raised as to whether she could have been an accomplice of her husband. However, this hypothesis was completely invalidated in the course of a long and very detailed questioning. She took the unique opportunity, with this journalist, to retrace her painful story:

Case study of a serial killer: Henri Désiré Landru 29

So, people want me to defend myself, they accuse me, or so I’ve heard, people show no mercy for a woman whose life was constant anxiety, they want my poor children to be hounded everywhere because they bear his name. This is a confession I am going to make, I am the great guilty one, Landru’s wife is going to tell you about her life. People can judge for themselves. I saw my husband for the first time in the old church of Saint-Louis-en-l’Ile. Like me, his family brought him up religiously. He studied with the Brothers in Rue Le Regrattier. His parents lived on the other side of the bridge, in Rue du Cloître Notre-Dame, and mine lived in Rue Saint-Louis, on the island itself. He was sub-deacon of the Saint-Louis church and was at the masses I attended regularly. His good manners and discreet bearing had led me to notice him. I was 19 and he was 18. He told me his life story, his father worked for a big publisher on the Left Bank, as for him, he was a clerk for an architect, he had an aunt who was a governess with the Prince of X, whose mansion was at the heart of the Saint-Louis island.3 In short, it was not so much love at first sight, but the fact of belonging to the same milieu that brought them together. Landru’s good manners and good education had impressed the young laundress and the acquaintance with a prince, by making her dream, conquered her completely. We were very close to each other. We saw each other often. And on 7 October 1893 we were married in the church Saint-Étienne-du-Mont. Our first years were happy, we liked each other. He was a perfect husband, I never saw him smoke or drink, he was considerate, gentle, he never raised his voice, I was very happy.4 But with family life, Landru had to take on new responsibilities. Even though he did not shy away from the thought of taking these on and giving his family a good life, he turned out to be incapable of succeeding and the ‘good life’ was altered. Little by little his character changed; he was always thinking, he invented machines, he no longer slept. Everything we had put aside was spent making trials; he told me: ‘You will see, we will be rich, we will be happy.’ He invented a bicycle with a gasoline engine, he exhibited it, took out a patent but others took his idea. Once again, he was exploited, tricked, ripped off.5 This remark, made in passing by Madame Landru, informs us of the ambition that her husband had to take his place in the series of talented inventors who create companies, make a fortune and leave their names in history. We know that this invention really existed; we can find a record of it in a work dedicated to the history of the motorcycle.6 The project would even appear to have commanded a degree of success in professional circles. But it seems that people were always stealing his ideas, his discoveries. Was this fantasy, delusion or reality? Whatever the case,

30 Serial Killers: Psychiatry, Criminology, Responsibility

Landru did not lose heart. And what he did not manage to achieve, he spoke of as if he had. Just as he had once pretended to be the nephew of a prince’s governess, he described to his family the big projects of national importance that he said he contributed to. Madame Landru continued her tale as follows: He became a cartographer, drew the map of suburban communes for a big publisher. He drafted the project of a railway for Chevreuse, he was on the road from morning to night on business. He always said: ‘You’ll see, we will be rich.’ But he spent everything he earned, because he was exploited. He was running around morning and evening, moving from one idea to the next. Sometimes he asked me for money and repeated: ‘You’ll see, we will be rich!’ He always had another invention taking the place of the previous one and not succeeding.7 Ideas abounded, failures endured and were always justified by the malevolence of some other who tried to take advantage of him. Madame Landru did not see any improvement in the situation, quite the contrary: one day, she was surprised to see the police coming to her home. A rupture occurred in the gentle and serene family life that had followed her marriage, marking the division between a before and an after, very different from each other. Suddenly he changed his way of life, he disappeared and soon the police came to the house. He had stolen and been a swindler. Doctor Vallon, who had examined him, said to me that my husband was ill and he added: ‘I cannot say that your husband is mad, my conscience would not allow me do so; but I cannot vouch for his future actions!’ So I was in danger of having a mad husband. What was I to do? Should I completely abandon the poor wretch? He was the father of my children. The infernal life began. We moved suddenly, all the time. He was truly changed with me, he no longer lived in his home, he didn’t say where he was, he came by every three or four days, stayed for a quarter of an hour and disappeared.8 Answering the questions of Le Journal, Charles Landru, his son, also gave an account that matched his mother’s. And we can easily picture his father as a rather agitated character, always on the move and everywhere at the same time. The newspapers are cruel for those who are overwhelmed with pain. People speak; they almost accuse us. But look, how can one suspect one’s own father? How could we have suspected any of this? My father was always on the go; he took care of inventions, of negotiations; he was always busy with initiatives and projects. My father was good to his children, he never gave bad advice; he never approved or excused a small mistake. He was strict. This man, who had big problems, who had been convicted, consistently imparted advice inspired by integrity and rectitude. He didn’t smoke, he didn’t drink,

Case study of a serial killer: Henri Désiré Landru 31

he didn’t gamble. His life seemed to us to be fully dedicated to work. He was someone who worked a lot. He had a vast quantity of diplomas. His first profession was that of architect; but he knew a lot about mechanics, he was the first to invent the rational motorcycle. It can be verified, the patent is at the Arts et Métiers. He also created a model of motor car that he patented in 1899. Then the pace of the description quickened, and we can hear an echo of the tales Landru regularly fed his family: He worked in the copper mines of Charrère, in the silver-bearing lead mines of Marvejols. My father drafted the preliminary plans for Perche’s light railway and the tramway of the city of Chevreuse. He worked on the installation of the electricity plant at Montmorency, he was employed at the building site of Le Havre harbour, he had medals, he was commended. As an architect, he drew up the plans for the Monge nursery, and this is what got him the palmes académiques. This is what my father did, he is a wretch; undoubtedly a madman. I think he’s like two people rolled into one; he is split in two. This man, who was gentle, patient, agreeable, sometimes had sudden, terrifying outbursts, for nothing, for a misplaced tool; he became enraged.9 In his subtle observation, Charles paid less attention to the severity, the anger or even the fury of his father, than to the triviality of the cause that triggered them – as if these well-meaning principles had something incongruous and improvised about them that distorted them completely. This was, amongst other things, what surprised him about his father, worried him and made him raise the question of madness. Let us take up the question raised by Charles and Madame Landru. It shows us that Landru had been an enigma for his family, for his loved ones, from very early on and this already signals what the enigma was to become, in a much more terrifying guise, for others. On 25 February 1922, Henri-Désiré Landru was taken to the guillotine to be executed. He was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. The trial lasted for a month, after three years of investigation. The trial attracted considerable media coverage. In Le Journal, which covered the four-week trial, we can read the following: For three long hours, Landru listened to the litany of murders the prosecution accused him of, motionless, without a shudder, with a respectful and cold look on his face, breathing evenly. The conclusion, voluntary homicide, fell like drops of vitriol on Landru’s bald head but he didn’t seem to notice. Succinctly, without dramatic excess, without harshness, with a certain affectation of propriety and even, it has to be said, of courtesy towards his accusers, he reiterated his protestations of innocence while entrusting his fate to the good faith of the jury and president, affirming that the proceedings would undoubtedly clear him

32 Serial Killers: Psychiatry, Criminology, Responsibility

of all charges, seeking above all, in this first contact, to make a ‘good impression’. Standing up, in his putty-grey overcoat, his arms at his sides, his gaze tempered, speaking in a slightly muted tone, he could have been taken for a man of good education applying for a job, not for someone having to defend himself against the most crushing accusation ever levelled against a man. The strange and lugubrious halo of romanticism forged around the name of Landru by popular imagination was not to be seen around his face.10 This image never changed. On the contrary, it became richer, due to Landru’s surprising attitude. His facial expressions, witticisms, irony, gesticulations and invectives, in short, his entire way of posing, of positioning himself, intensified and expanded during the investigation and the trial, as if the reality of death were not the outcome of the hearings. Even on the very morning of the execution, everyone was perturbed except Landru himself. At six o’clock on the morning of 25 February 1922, the assistant public prosecutor opened Landru’s cell, uttering these words: ‘Landru, take courage, your pardon has been denied. Do you have revelations to make?’ Landru answered: ‘I’ve already been asked a similar question on several occasions.’ Then, with the same calm he had already demonstrated during the investigation and the trial, he added: ‘But to whom do I have the honour of speaking?’ ‘To the assistant public prosecutor’, replied Mr Béguin. ‘In this case,’ Landru continued, ‘I am surprised that at such a time you should insult me by still asking this question.’ These are the only words the convict pronounced regarding his case.11 ‘Courage? Have I not shown that I had some? Gentlemen, I am at your service. Please hand me my clothes.’12 Landru had not at first wanted a pardon, his lawyers applied on his behalf, but he had let it happen. A man such as himself, he specified, ‘asks for no mercy nor pity’. But after all, if people wanted to save him, let them. He thanked his lawyer, Maître de Moro-Giafferi, with a polite formulation such as one finds at the end of an official letter, with the courtesy instilled by a good education, mixed with a conspicuous detachment: ‘Maître, I thank you, I have given you a lot of trouble! I entrusted you with a very difficult case, let’s be blunt, a desperate one!’ He did not answer him when the latter pressed him to tell the truth, but turned quietly to Maître Navières du Treuil, the young assistant to the famous lawyer: ‘It would make me happy if you were, later, in your spare time, to look after my little interests!’13 We will in good time reveal the motives behind this strange request, and the content of a document concerned with it. At this point, Landru’s life ceased – a life that did not seem that extraordinary to him. What twist had he given it? Landru started out very ordinarily in life, but he soon crossed the limits. Very early on, he proved incapable of securing an honest income through work. How? Why? This is where the first enigma resides, since according to everyone, he was well able to do so. But he resorted to swindling people in order best to solve his financial difficulties. Was Landru merely a cunning layabout? Or did this passage to illegality indicate a particular way of being? Was it the consequence of a radical

Case study of a serial killer: Henri Désiré Landru 33

impossibility or a commonplace difficulty in finding one’s place? He does not seem to have hesitated very much over the question of what was and was not legal, or been seized by doubt or worry in passing from one to the other. Of course, the very absence of uneasiness or suffering at this time draws our attention; especially since he does not go in for any old swindle. Being a man of his time, he elected to swindle through a security scheme at the time of the development of banks and through marriage at the time of the liberation of women. Both landed him promptly in prison. Landru was at this point in his life when World War I exploded. With the war, the murders began. Did the death which accompanied this sinister period for everyone influence his murders? How did Landru switch from his frantic quest for work to swindling, and from swindling to murder?

An ordinary life Landru was born on 12 April 1869, in a modest family of the nineteenth district in Paris. At the time his father was a driver for ‘Forges de Vulcain’ and his mother was a seamstress. It is difficult to classify his parents as part of the newborn proletariat, but it is also difficult to situate them as being part of the established bourgeoisie of the time. They probably belonged to the lower middle class, eager for social success. The aspirations of the Landru family seem to go in this direction: they had children at an unusual age for their class. They were both approaching 30 when their daughter Florentine was born. Five years later, a son was born who was, if we believe the name ‘Henri-Désiré’, long desired – perhaps all the more so as before his arrival the couple had had a boy who had died at birth. The Landru family were reputable and well liked by all. They had the esteem of their employers and neighbours. The testimonies of the latter regarding Landru’s parents were complimentary. The family was well respected and the couple wanted to give their children the best possible education. The studies undertaken by the young Henri-Désiré were rather unusual in his social environment and attest to his parents’ aspirations regarding their child. Some of their neighbours’ comments allude to the spoiled childhood of the young Landru. At the time the child was about to start school, Jules Ferry had already implemented his great school and social reform, which consisted in taking account of ‘the problem of the education of the people’.14 He extolled education as the hope of humanity and dreamed of seeing this, the mother of all reforms, through to completion. He thought that if they were trained at schools of science and reason, young citizens would have a taste for personal achievement and democracy, and would only want happiness and the good. Jules Ferry acted on the idealism that consisted in thinking that by instructing men they could be made better. We have known, since Freud, that knowledge does not take hold of the whole of the subject. A part remains opaque; the subject is not completely transparent to himself. Landru is exemplary in this respect. If we stick to the virtues expected from education, the ideal moral and material conditions in which he was raised did not predispose him to criminality.

34 Serial Killers: Psychiatry, Criminology, Responsibility

The young Henri-Désiré completed his studies with the Brothers. We learn from them that he was one of the most precocious pupils in his year. And, according to a classmate, ‘he was a good little friend, good-humoured, he liked to play but was also intelligent’.15 At the age of 11, he obtained his certificat d’études primaires. This was not enough for his education. He extended his studies, and continued to go to school for another five or six years. He is thought to have successfully passed the entry exam to the school of Arts et Métiers. It is believed that being schooled by the Brothers led him to develop a taste for religion. During his adolescence, he attended the church of Saint-Louis-en-l’Ile, where he was subdeacon. The greatest satisfaction derived by Landru from this function was that it gave him the opportunity to wear ‘the ecclesiastical ornament’ and ‘to feature in all the solemnities’.16 At the time of this apparently devout activity, he also worked as a clerk for an architectural firm, a path he took after leaving school and on which he stayed until he left for the army at the age of 21. There was a discordant note in this picture. The pride he exhibited concerning his supposed profession as architect contrasted starkly with his inability to hold a position for any length of time, to stay there and improve. All things considered, it also contrasted with the function he occupied: namely that of clerk. In three years, he changed firms three times. He was not sacked by his employers: quite the contrary, and on his first work references, which have been retrieved, we can read: ‘He is capable of rendering services in an architect’s office; we can but sing his praises in every way.’17 These jobs, with a good social standing, allowed him above all to display some self-importance with his former classmates. One of them testified to this: At that time [Landru] was no longer the good little friend we’d known at school. When he came back to the area of the Saint-Louis Island, he looked haughty and indifferent to his former classmates and friends, he avoided speaking to them and when he did condescend to speak to them, it was to let it be known that he worked for an architect.18 This megalomaniacal cloaking of a defective consistency reveals, very early on, one of Landru’s modalities of being. It is a constant feature, which puts in perspective a very clean separation between his aspirations and his actions and leaves the subject in a fragile equilibrium. In this period of post-adolescence, the encounter with his future wife took place between attempts to work and pseudo-religion. Henri-Désiré had known MarieCatherine Rémy for some time already: she was a neighbour. She was older than him, lived with her mother and was a laundress by profession. The meetings between the two young people multiplied and a liaison occurred. Landru left for his military service, where he was successively corporal, quartermaster sergeant and then sergeant. He came home three years later, with a certificate of good conduct, although he was de-conscripted a few months early because of his fragile health. In the meantime, Marie-Catherine had given birth to their first child.

Case study of a serial killer: Henri Désiré Landru 35

Wanting to start a family, Henri-Désiré, then 24, married Marie-Catherine and in so doing recognised their daughter Henriette. Three other children were to be born in the following years: Maurice, Suzanne and Charles. A life was taking shape, modelled on that of his parents, but it wasn’t to be. The progressive disintegration of this ready-made path fissured this harmony. It initially combined a frantic, hyperactive search for success with mediocre and inconsistent results, before descending into criminal monstrosity. Now that Landru was a father, husband and head of his family, against all expectations, the disjunction between fanciful reality and actual reality intensified. A rift had opened which would only get worse, as the testimonies of Madame Landru and his son Charles have allowed us to glimpse.

The disintegration The young couple settled down and things gathered pace. Landru, confronted with his role as head of the family, launched into an incessant marathon, from one place of residence to the next, from one job to another, a marathon that the historian Pierre Darmon so justly called an ‘ambulatory delusion’.19 Between 1893 and 1900, he practiced about ten professions and changed his place of work about fifteen times. He was successively an accountant, a building-site manager, an entrepreneur in roofing and plumbing, an employee to La Garantie immobilière, a cartographer, a manufacturer, a toy-maker and a bicycle-maker. At the same time, he moved houses eight times, dragging wife, children and luggage in his peregrinations.20 While these movements profoundly disarticulated the course of his family’s life, the references from his employers came to constitute a social mask for it. ‘Very satisfied with him in every respect, they could only praise his services.’21 But the mask crumbled, pulverized by the multitude of jobs, which little by little destroyed any stable relation to time and to the world. Any real progression in professional life was annulled. We can note that the pugnacity and strength of the initial desire got lost in instability and increasing agitation. A malaise exhausted the subject, sucked away all his energy and progressively came to disrupt the personal and domestic equilibrium. These people of flesh and blood, a wife and children, cannot live and sustain themselves solely on tall tales and make-believe. Yet, this is what was continually fed to them by Landru, whose inability to sustain a job we have noted here. Therefore, reality itself fell apart while he kept up a formal and very articulate discourse about grand moral principles with his family. For his children, he expounded the rules of a good education and for his wife, with high-sounding words, he extolled the virtues of a full professional life. This disintegration of ordinary life testifies to a stumbling block, an impossibility in Landru to respond to his domestic duties, if we take respond in its etymological sense, that of

36 Serial Killers: Psychiatry, Criminology, Responsibility

fulfilling a commitment, answering a call, rising to the challenge of one’s task and of producing something of oneself in so doing. Everything occurred as if the function of the father had had no hold on him, had not been able to affect him. And when speech is without consequences, outside of any pact, everything becomes possible – saying and doing everything. So the very concept of responsibility fell apart and an actual irresponsibility came to substitute itself for the fantasised hyper-responsibility. Landru had a very particular way of understanding the duties of a paterfamilias. From then on, this singular understanding would drag him beyond the social bond and its laws and the limit between working and swindling would disappear.

The other side of ordinary life: the swindler Jobs multiplied, and so did the references praising the merits of this employee who was only ever there in passing. The references became more and more vague. There was not much to say about someone who spent so little time in one place. A given employer could acknowledge being satisfied with Landru’s services, but could not praise his merits regarding a thorough undertaking of specific tasks. So, from 1897, after four years of this unstable life, no longer having a sustained relation to the world of work, Landru began to write false references focusing on his qualities as an ‘engineer’ and his talent for technique and mechanics. In these references, he didn’t hesitate to put forward the ‘inventions’ and ‘improvements’ that he introduced for the good running of a workshop. He always highlighted invention in the mechanical domain to sustain his faltering social identity. These false attestations constituted the first passage to the other side of ordinary life. Questioned on this point during the investigation, Landru acknowledged that he made this shift out of a kind of ‘natural’ necessity, without the slightest subjective quandary. When these forgeries were evoked during the trial, he enunciated, with an obvious tranquillity, the dogma of his personal law: ‘Mr. President, unfortunately I have a rather particular conception of the law. I consider that a forgery doesn’t exist as long as it doesn’t harm anyone. I thought I merely committed a small fault.’22 What was the world for Landru, if not a set of personal laws, a kind of jungle in which everything was allowed? This freedom, the autonomy he claimed, were the names of his de-socialisation and the subject, here, was nothing but an element in a mirror where multiple counterparts were reflected, counterparts who, in his image, had for their only law: ‘each to their own and their kin’. There was no difference, for Landru, between a forgery and an authentic piece of writing. Was there a difference for him between working honestly and swindling? At the beginning of the century, economic science and industry were developing. From a young age, Landru had absorbed these new things and had fixed his interest on invention and mechanics. In 1900, fully mature, at the age of 30, at the same time as the social bond was beginning to disintegrate for him, he undertook

Case study of a serial killer: Henri Désiré Landru 37

personal research: he envisaged the motorisation of the bicycle. Landru wanted to be an engineer and embarked on the creation of prototypes.23 At that time, the family had grown: the fourth and last child was born. Although his inventions in this cutting-edge domain had interesting features as far as novelty was concerned, Landru would not succeed in commercialising them; it was at this point that his life as a swindler began. Quickly grasping the potential of a nascent advertising industry, he published appetising adverts in the press and, in this way, recruited the buyers and employees of his future factories for the manufacture of engines and bicycles. To launch his business, he organized a national advertisement campaign, specifying that every order had to come with a money order made out for a third of the price. The orders flew in, but Landru disappeared. The bicycles were never delivered!24 The organisation and expansion of his scams correspond to the innovations of his time, with its industrial and banking development. Alongside industry, Landru also took an interest in economic innovations – the circulation of money, loans, deeds and financial instruments. To raise money, he inserted himself in this nascent movement. Landru launched an appeal for funds, a system relatively widespread at the time for the guaranteeing of companies, and then withdrew these funds by committing forgeries. Of course we know that no business created by Landru ever saw the light of day. Another of his most frequent practices consisted in opening bank accounts in the name of the depositories the day before funds were paid in, then withdrawing them a few days later using forged signatures. These swindles cost him numerous stays in prison. In 1904, caught in the act, he was arrested for the first time and was sentenced to a two-year term of imprisonment. He was arrested again in 1906, shortly after his release, 11 complaints having been filed in the meantime. In 1909, he was sentenced to a five-year term of imprisonment in absentia. At a time when women were starting to choose their destiny and their spouses for themselves, the marriage swindle became possible and broadened his field of action. Still informed of the growth of advertising through the regular reading of newspapers and with as little humility as ever, Landru published an advert in the newspaper L’Écho du Nord under the name of Paul Morel, an industrialist from Amiens, celebrating his engagement to Madame Isoré, a widow whom he met through these same adverts. He had this lady’s deeds and bonds handed over to him, but at the moment of signing the wedding contract at the solicitor’s, Landru (also known as Morel) disappeared. Madame Isoré filed a complaint and Landru was arrested on 21 December 1909. He was tried and sentenced by the Lille tribunal to three years’ imprisonment and was released on 18 October 1912. As we will see, his parents died that year. The same year, he bought a garage just outside Paris, but he did not manage either to work there or turn a profit out of his new business, and his parallel, illegal activities continued. On 20 July 1914, he was sentenced in absentia.

38 Serial Killers: Psychiatry, Criminology, Responsibility

Between 1900 and 1914, he spent half of his time moving houses and the other half in prison; then the war covered his tracks. The swindles multiplied and so did the convictions. Landru was no better at swindling than he was at working. While he knew so well how to lie to his family, inventing all kinds of stories, he was incapable of concealing his misdeeds. People thought him intelligent, but he was not cunning; this is why he was regularly caught in the act. His swindling was so badly organised it was ludicrous: it seems it had less to do with an attempt to defraud than with a support derived from megalomaniacal fabrication. Let us remember the arrogance he displayed in front of his friends when pretending to be an architect and the innumerable and unlikely professions he bragged about to his wife and children. He certainly was not involved in all the public works he spoke about (railway lines, nurseries), nor was he ever employed to work underground in the mines of Marvejols. If he dreamed of receiving the palmes académiques, he didn’t do anything to deserve it. A void seems to separate two realities that didn’t come together: that of his statements, where his life unfolded in the abstraction of fantastic tales, and that of his acts, which were fragmented, destitute and chaotic. And this does not indicate perversion, but psychosis. Being a fabulist swindler, he could, at this point in his life, fit the description of those constantly drifting, roaming subjects, described by the German psychiatrist Emile Kraepelin: actively lying mythomaniacs, whose whole life was a tissue of irregularities and mysteries, characters with no civil identity and no hold on morality.25 He could also serve to illustrate the morbid fabrication that psychiatrist Ernest Dupré named mythomania and described as a ‘phenomenon without – or with insufficient – motivation, enduring in its length and disproportionate in its intensity [characterized] by its lack of a logical finality, by its abnormal duration, by its disharmonic nature . . . and which has become starkly foreign or harmful to the interests of its author; as such [it] appears morbid’.26 Landru’s swindles were badly concealed. What, then, is a con which lacks cunning? It is not without morbidity and it encompassed his victims as much as himself. For him, his swindles and frauds circulated in a kind of parallel market where, according to the law that he claimed as his own, he considered that he was not harming anyone. Landru was alone in knowing what was serious and what was not, what was harmful and what was not. Did the people he swindled exist for him? A swarming world opened up, made of individualities devoid of reciprocity, devoid, for him, of the possibility of putting himself in the place of the other. Here the imaginary remained in the register of the image; it was not mediated by the Other. For Landru, personal success only had to do with the person himself; in other words, the autonomous subject we have been describing here did not owe anything to the father’s law, to his desire, did not owe anything to the other. From then on success took on an unregulated signification, a signification which was hardly symbolised. It follows that a person who fails can only blame his individual laws, the laws which, like Landru, he was supposed to have for himself. In this system, the dimension of a unifying law, a symbolic law, disappeared and with it the

Case study of a serial killer: Henri Désiré Landru 39

dimension of a superior authority and the allegiance that it can command. Only figures of sameness remained as so many proliferating doubles. What was deficient was less the law in its legal form – because the subject did not ignore the existence of a positive law – than the law insofar as it limits and civilises the jouissance of each and everyone, delineating an ideal. Heir of the Name-of-the-Father, the law is what situates, for each subject, a share of himself beyond himself. But did Landru have a beyond? Yet, Landru’s world was not devoid of laws or even an attempt to make an ideal exist. We know that he constituted a world for himself around a word, a key word, a word we call a master-signifier. For a subject, a master-signifier is one of those words that have become significant to him as a sign of the other’s love, as a sign of the other’s desire and around which he built his language, his representations, his desire, his jouissance and his fantasies. The master-signifier, for Landru, was the family. But in what manner did it operate for him? If the language of the unconscious is revealed in neurotic subjects by symptoms that can be deciphered and understood, for the psychotic subject it imposes itself in a non-dialectical certainty, without subjective division: a certainty that occupies the place of the subject. This certainty is often difficult to understand, and yet it is the only pivot at the disposal of the psychotic subject, since he does not have the Name-of-the-Father or, more precisely, belief in the Other. What, then, was the family ideal for Landru? It seems that the family was at the same time a part of him and a whole that sustained him. Yet, the family did not keep him on the right path. From that point of view it was, for Landru, like ‘work’, a signifier devoid of the function of the ideal, deprived of its reality. Such signifiers have the characteristic of operating in a completely independent way, outside of any pre-existing discourse and any social bond, since they do not enable the subject to accept the inescapable constraints and compromises of life. The key word ‘family’ defined a duty for Landru, but a strangely singular one, a duty with a private signification. Because duty, this other word, was for him just as neologistic and all his illicit activity converged towards a raison d’être which inscribed him, not in the Other of the pact, as one amongst others, but as one alone next to others. His conception of duty, which was merely a theory of duty, developed itself through a paralogical process to an extreme point, and all of his acts can be referred to it. We must therefore question this idea of duty in relation to the sense commonly ascribed to it. The signifier ‘duty’ held singular echoes for Landru which had nothing to do with the commonly understood meaning that psychiatrists, police officers and judges conferred upon it during the trial, in recognising that Landru had ‘a sense of the family’. In the absence of the symbolic law that would define its ethical and moral coordinates, Henri-Désiré Landru took the principle of ‘doing everything for one’s family’ literally. ‘To do everything for one’s family’ was therefore an absolute postulate and as such nothing could stand in its way. This dogma led him to become a swindler, since, understood in this way, for him swindling was included in this ‘everything’ and thus did not contradict principles of humanity such as

40 Serial Killers: Psychiatry, Criminology, Responsibility

honesty, honour and morality – it trumped them all. Landru seems to have acted less to provoke and challenge the social other than to try to answer the imperative of ‘his’ familial duty in ‘his’ strange, foreign manner. This imperative, like his notion of responsibility, was diffracted into supreme necessity and the abolition of any critical faculty. The personal law, which organised the whole of the subject’s conduct, can be said to be delusional. His conception of actualisation was just as delusional. It did not include any nuance (to be more or less successful, in one domain and not in another, for example). On the contrary, it took hold of the totality of the subject. He was what he actualised and he actualised himself only in this way. The actualisation is equivalent to the subject himself, here the engineer and the money that the industries must procure, even though there is no link between the two, nothing of consequence. Having to actualise something by means of this determination, which is both rigid and hollow, destined him to be unique, his own cause, and this is not without relation to creation and invention. The psychotic subject is condemned to be a megalomaniac or not to be. In order to be someone and to be a paterfamilias, it was necessary for Landru to be at the origin of something, of an invention. Since he could not be recognised as a subject, he had to occupy a visible place, accounted for in the collective. This place can only exist insofar as it is mediated by the invention, there where the absence of the father’s function left a hole. This is what we call a supplementation (suppléance) in psychosis. It is what happens when the subject identifies his being with an object that he produces in the world and through which he is recognised in a successful social bond. From then on, he is what he proposes to the other: here, the father of the family and the engineer are two figures that fit this logic perfectly. But no sooner had Landru started out on the path of invention than he failed to give it consistency. It was in the domain of mechanics, for which he was gifted, that he took this path, by linking it with this other master-signifier: engineer. For Landru, ‘engineer’ certainly existed as a master-signifier, but it was not full of promise. Like that of ‘family’, it had, almost from the outset, the dual characteristic of being greatly idealised in his speech, but only leading to unfinished, even nonexistent productions – being an empty signifier. At the time of his trial, Landru evoked his beginnings in life thus: It did not suit my abilities to remain an employee; I never had a taste for paperwork. Industry, on the other hand, always attracted me. I improved myself in this sector and, to start out, I built a small machine that the former president of the Pontoise Chamber of Trade declared to be a marvel, a masterpiece.27 And in a flash of lucidity, he delivered this statement: ‘excellent projects, but illrealized’.28 It is surprising that, in everything that has been said about Landru, this aspect of his life has always been underestimated, disregarded. Yet it illuminates a facet of his personality that is not negligible.

Case study of a serial killer: Henri Désiré Landru 41

Landru engineer To set up his frauds, Landru resorted to many pseudonyms: he was known under the names of Diard, Frémyet, Dupont, Cuchet, Morel, Petit, Forest de Barzieux, Guillet . . . Each of these names came with a title and an always prestigious profession: architect, industrialist, consul, etc. Among these professions, one came back regularly, insistently: it was of course that of engineer. In his forged references, in his forgeries in general, in the adverts he took out in the newspapers, Landru referred to himself most frequently as an engineer. He had neither the training nor the diplomas, but in this domain he did not lack ability and he wanted to be an inventor. Invention and mechanics had always been the mainstays of his existence. We can say that, through them, he was a man of his time; he placed himself firmly there from a young age. Landru was an autodidact engineer. In this, he exerted himself and invented a motorcycle which was put on show at the Tuileries and which carried his name, his real name, La Landru. At that time he was not yet a swindler; being recognised for his inventions could have given him a social grounding and, without too much trouble, brought him enough money to provide for his family. Might La Landru have been able to suture the discordant realities? In this way, his megalomaniacal need to be a primary and universal man, a self-made man (to be understood literally) as we say, could have been satisfied. In short, Landru could have succeeded in his supplementation29 by making a name for himself in industry and in doing so become someone, someone who had managed to extract himself from the play of pure reflection of the multiple mirrors. However, success does not always depend on the will of the subject: he must also have within himself the necessary resources for his invention to succeed, so that an object really produced, recognised, may confer a glow upon the name of its inventor, a glow that fixes him and installs him in the world in the right way. But for a few years already, as we know, the disintegration of ordinary life and the disorganised wandering which immediately followed his marriage had come to disturb Landru’s life, and marketing his invention was no longer possible for him. In his childhood, the keen interest he had for the bicycle had already seemed rather strange. This passion was certainly odd and everyone we hear from in the testimonies had noticed the extreme attention he accorded to it. The precious care with which he used it – in the manner of an object of worship, ‘he only touched it with gloves’30 – had struck people’s imagination. Once he had become an adult, Landru undertook to improve the quality of bicycles and especially their performance. A first model of La Landru was patented in February 1899. There is a reproduction of it in a book on the motorcycle.31 The commentary that went with it is as follows: Before becoming universally famous for the reasons that we know, HenriDésiré Landru was a news item for specialized gazettes with this motorcycle (which could be transformed into a tricycle). The frame of La Landru is a robust double-cradle with horizontal reinforcing struts. The vaporizing

42 Serial Killers: Psychiatry, Criminology, Responsibility

Figure 2.1 La Landru, with Landru’s stamp and signature, as it was displayed in the Salon des Machines of the Tuileries Source: Fonds Labitte

carburettor is situated behind the cylinder. Underneath are the battery and the silencer.32 La Landru was modified and patented again one year later. Another page reproduces this new model, with the following comment: In the claims made in his patent application, Henri-Désiré Landru underlined the irrational character of other gasoline bicycles, which all seek to retain ‘the ordinary shape of the bicycle’ whereas, according to him, it is necessary ‘to focus on giving the frame a shape fitting its use.’ The machine that emerged from these reflections was the model above (June 1900). It was a lot simpler than the first patented one, the rigidity of which left much to be desired, as he admitted himself. It now has a carburettor with a fuel atomizer, but the frame is still a double-cradle. Another innovation: the chain transmission on the sprocket that acted as a demultiplier.33 This is how La Landru, ‘as it was displayed in the Salon des Machines of the Tuileries’,34 was presented. Landru was exactly 30 years old when he produced

Case study of a serial killer: Henri Désiré Landru 43

the second modified prototype, which he named ‘the rational bicycle’. The rational bicycle would have no future. The industrial development of La Landru never took place. What happened? The world of invention recognised his project as valid. Besides, what seems to have always been his ambition had found a way of being accomplished. The historical moment was favourable to the marketing of big and small inventions alike, but at this time, contrary to what he believed, Landru was not the only innovator in the field. The first commercialisation of a motorised two-wheeler had taken place in Germany as early as 1894. Two years later, the first race of motorcycles took place in France. We learn, from the history of the motorcycle, that its invention caused a fever of excitement: The advent of the motorized two-wheeler blew a wind of madness on the brilliant handymen of all countries. The conceptual simplicity of this machine, a bicycle equipped with a motor, gave rise to a multitude of different designs. If more than one thousand brands of motorcycles have existed since the creation of these contraptions, eighty percent of them were born and died between 1890 and 1930. Nearly all current models had already been invented by the pioneers but, in a lot of cases, the designs did not go beyond the prototype stage and some didn’t even get off the drawing board.35 Prototypes and inventions flooded the industrial field of the time. Ideas and projects abounded. Landru, isolated, lacking a solid foundation and the necessary fighting spirit to face the market, superbly ignorant of this reality, complained that people were stealing his ideas. His wife and son sympathised with him in this regard. Both alluded to it in their testimonies, hinting that this may have been the cause of his successive failures. The disjunction between Landru’s ambitions and his real capacities, redoubled by his detachment from reality, rendered him incapable of measuring up to the competition. But be that as it may, he nevertheless made a discovery here. We have invention on the one hand, and marketing on the other. For him, these two realities had nothing to do with each other and were not tied to anything of consequence: the real here detached itself from reality, which it overshadowed. It is in this context that his first great swindle was born: the mail order of bicycles, the one for which he launched his advertising campaign on a national scale. So in the most anarchical, inconsequent and spoof-like guises, the signifier ‘engineer’ continued to pave his way. In the court file, a certain number of occurrences refer to it. ‘Introducing himself as a civil engineer, he rented a boutique then a store on Boulevard Pereire, an office in rue Drouot and an empty building in Tournay in which he set up a few out-of-order machines and showed as his factory.’36 When the occasion demanded, he introduced himself as ‘an industrialist from Amiens, trained at the Arts et Métiers and the École Normale’.37 This function of the signifier ‘engineer’, which justifies its insistence, allows us to clarify a fact about Landru which is always reported as an unresolved enigma.

44 Serial Killers: Psychiatry, Criminology, Responsibility

During the searches carried out some time after his arrest for murder, the police discovered various documents (family records, military records, etc.) belonging to the missing women in a garage that Landru had rented in Clichy. The police knew that Landru regularly used pseudonyms to conceal his swindles and to attract his future victims. Most of the time, he took the diverse identities of the women that he was supposed to marry and who then disappeared. He only had to use their documents; there was nothing to add or take out. He had a great number of civil status documents and false official stamps. In this context, one particular document intrigued the investigators. On the family record of one of his victims, a Madame Guillin, the police noticed that something had been altered: the Guillin name had been forged into Guillet. I observed this myself in the court file, and Le Petit Parisien reported the fact as follows: ‘While attentively examining the first page of the record, Inspector Dautel realized that the name Guillet was made up. The initial name Guillin had clearly been scratched out.’38 Lucien Guillet was a pseudonym assumed and kept by Landru for a long time, between 1915 and his arrest in 1919, and which was most often associated with the profession of engineer – although, of course, he also used others according to his needs. This name also remained connected to a relatively permanent address – 76, Rue de Rochechouart – and to a woman – Mademoiselle Fernande Segret – who was spared the fate of the others and with whom, all agree, he had a lasting, loving relationship. Why that name, why this obliteration? In 1914, the French state called on numerous engineers to rationalise and standardise the productions of weapons. The engineers used Taylor’s ideas to establish a scientific organisation of work.39 The newspapers spoke about it at length. One of these engineers connected with the project of ‘rationalisation’ was called Léon Guillet. It was the same Léon Guillet, who, in 1915, drew up the plans for André Citroën’s factories at Javel.40 How could Landru have been ignorant of this conjunction between rationality and car factories, when he was so interested in the topic and never failed to read all of the newspapers? Could the name Guillin not offer him, through semantic proximity, the possibility of including the residue of a long-shattered ideal in a fictitious identity? Let us remember his beginnings as a self-educated engineer, his attempts at being an inventor and in particular his rational motorcycle. My hypothesis is that Landru falsified the family record by changing Guillin into Guillet in order to inscribe in the social, in a direct and derisory manner, something of his identity which is but a parody. In fact, what intimate necessity other than that of his delusion did Landru, for whom reality was so unreal, have really to modify the record? Who did he want, at this precise moment, to recognise him as an engineer through this forgery in the fake document? Who did he expect legitimacy from? The childishness of this falsification, and its pointlessness, bring us back to his lack of symbolisation: Landru wanted to be the engineer that he was on paper. This is not, therefore, some staging intended to provoke recognition of the truth of the subject, but a delusional moment, a blind spot that attests to the absence of self-reflection through which the subject would see himself act. So this

Case study of a serial killer: Henri Désiré Landru 45

is a blind spot in the social bond. Without obvious motivation, this falsification inscribes a real which never came to pass for the subject. In a collaborative work written as early as 1924, L’Affaire Landru,41 I found a lapsus calami that came to support my deduction. In this text, it says that: ‘A certain Léon Guillet, claiming to be an engineer, was travelling by car, whose description: short beard, strange eyes, short, corresponded to that of the Sire of Gambais.’42 Without realising the slip he was making, the person who wrote these lines established a connection between the phantom engineer, Lucien Guillet, and the engineer of the André Citroën factories, Léon Guillet. Engineer is the profession that accompanied many of Landru’s other assumed names, but a maximum of ideal identity seems to be concentrated, for him, in this formulation: ‘Lucien Guillet, engineer’. Yet, the signifier engineer, which has received so much emphasis, has proven, from the outset, to be without content. It proved to be a mere empty envelope, a remarkable signifier no doubt, which Landru borrowed from the collective ideal, but he could not give any consistency to it. Did his interest in mechanics not come from the fact that he was in tune with his century? Since he was not his father’s son (because the ego-ideal, as heir to the Name-of-the-Father, had not come together with its structuring function for him), he leaned on the master-signifiers of the culture of the time. He could have been the son of his century, an inventor recognised for centuries to come, but for him the supplementation failed. And even though his inventions were dead-ends, he continued on his track, tirelessly endeavouring to give the signifier ‘engineer’ some consistency. Landru ended up opening a garage at the Porte de Châtillon. This is the garage in which the writer Jules Romains met him, when he wasn’t yet Landru. The artist always precedes the psychoanalyst in speaking about the world he lives in,43 and Jules Romains’ talent for grasping the most prominent element of a person’s truth meant that this encounter was not missed. It became the subject of a story: ‘My friend Landru’.44 The author shares his memories, beyond a simple description. He renders palpable the bizarre atmosphere that reigned in the Landru garage and translates the manifest discrepancy between what was on display and what was actually done very well. In this garage everything is surprising, but let us leave it to the writer to make us relive this encounter which chance had placed in his path. I met him at the end of the summer of 1913. I had just bought a small secondhand car (the first I owned). And as my resources were very limited at the time, one of my preoccupations was to make sure that this car had as little impact on my budget as possible. In particular, I wanted to find a very inexpensive garage.45 Is it then truly chance that drove Jules Romains to the Landru garage? As we know, the lack of reality of that garage must have placed it, indisputably, beyond all competition, including its financial aspect. Looking for a cheap garage, the writer was bound to encounter the Landru garage.

46 Serial Killers: Psychiatry, Criminology, Responsibility

One day I crossed the Porte de Châtillon and started exploring the avenue that follows it. Very near the fortifications, I noticed a garage painted red, with the sign: ‘Garage de la Porte de Châtillon.’ I went in. It was a small enough place and it was more or less empty, except for an old car in a corner; the ground and walls were very clean. I saw a gentleman rise from behind a small desk and approach me. For it was truly a ‘gentleman.’ He wore a black jacket, striped trousers, a white detachable collar, and a sober tie. He had a black beard; tidy, a vast and hairless forehead, black eyes, very sharp but softened by kindness; ears slightly sticking out and pointed. ‘Hello Sir, how can I be of service?’ The voice itself was evidence of a good education and the habits of courtesy. In short, he was nothing like a mechanic of the suburbs. He rather resembled a qualified pharmacist, a doctor, or a lawyer. Almost fearing I was making a mistake, I told him I was looking for a place to park a small car by the month. – ‘Unfortunately,’ he replied apologetically, ‘here we are hardly equipped for such things. We take care of the mechanical side . . .’ And, with a broad and polite gesture, he showed me the whole place. In fact it was difficult to discover the traces of any specialization. First, there was the look of the garage itself. It was always well kept, but there was virtually no sign of any activity at all: no car being repaired; no second-hand car for sale; hardly a chance customer stopping by to get his car washed or, even more simply, for one or two cans of gasoline.46 On the advice of the one he calls ‘the gentleman-mechanic’, a little further away Jules Romains found an inexpensive place for his car and thanked Landru by becoming his customer for gas and maintenance, in spite of everything. A long time after Jules Romains, a neighbour, in his turn, gave us an idea of the mechanical activity in Landru’s garage. He remembers watching his only employee at work, his son Charles. ‘He spent his time building a small motor car. He never finished building it. The father made the son undo whatever he did under the pretext that it was not to his liking.’47 A Mr Munier, whom Landru had recruited as an ‘employee’ and, in truth, as a future victim of a security swindle, brought us a similar testimony: ‘He asked me to look for a location to set up our factory. I found many, but Guillet was never satisfied and always had a ready criticism for any given point in the place.’48 As if he were trying to keep a sinking boat afloat, where it is necessary to keep bailing constantly, Landru never stopped undoing and redoing everything he began. Only a kind of outline remained, a skeletal form devoid of all reality, but which he nonetheless devoted himself to sustaining. For whom did Landru make the garage, the mechanic and the car exist? Who were his audience? For his family, perhaps, but his family had no access to the accounts of what went on at the garage. What his family knew is what Landru told them and they always took him at his word. Did he not possess, to the highest degree, like a chameleon, the art of adapting to circumstance and constructing a plausible response, shaping his made-to-measure answers to the questions he was asked? At no point was he embarrassed by the question of truth.

Case study of a serial killer: Henri Désiré Landru 47

This astonishing plasticity prevented him from confronting the economic realities which are the ordinary concern of the head of a family. It betrays what we have recognised as Landru’s fundamental impossibility to face the smallest situation, even the most ordinary one in life. It reveals the fracture, the rupture which inscribed a void at the very heart of the subject. This is what we must ascribe the disintegration of the ordinary life to, a disintegration that cannot be reduced to an unhappy childhood or an insufficient education at home and school. This disintegration looked more like an absolute subtraction of the possibility of realising his ambitions, a foreclosing subtraction. We must oppose this absolute subtraction, which is the mark of the impossible, to the inhibition which, in neurosis, is the mark of impotence. Because we cannot say that Landru did not act, that is all he ever did. He did not lack energy; on the contrary, he busied himself to the utmost degree in ventures that all remained sterile, without the merest shred of stability. In his closing statement, the public prosecutor illustrated this well: We see, as we sometimes do, the proud man, endowed with a limited intelligence which is nonetheless above average for his situation in life, disdainful of stable but modest jobs, incapable of succeeding in others, sink little by little into misery then resort to all possible means of procuring money.49 Here the prosecutor is referring to the forced choice of this psychotic subject, which could be expressed as follows: either successful megalomania or dissociation and delusion. Landru could not make a living out of a profession and, through a metonymic slippage, swindling came to answer the question of income, with the same mediocre result, which is hardly surprising. Did the idea come about spontaneously or did he model it on the security swindle of which he was a victim? His wife tells how, in 1894, as he was looking for a job, Landru met a Mr. Raimbault in Passy who, under the pretence of finding him a job, swindled him out of 1,800 francs as so-called security. To say that this misadventure was a tipping point between legality and illegality for him would only provide a vague psychological explanation. In spite of everything, because of the very personal conception he had of duty, responsibility and law, Landru was able to take hold of the idea because of the easy way out it suddenly offered after the failure of his inventions. This failure acted as a stumbling block and brutally sent him back to the structure of his proliferating imaginary: like a jungle in which there is no guarantee. In the play of mirrors that characterised him, he occupied all positions, the position of the one whose ideas are stolen and also that of the one who steals the ideas of others. Whatever the case, swindling appeared to him as a logical development, prolonging his hyperactivity in the most natural way. With his fraudulent activities, he linked his meagre real income to a signifier without signification: the engineer. This tinkering fed the illusion that he was head of a family who brought money

48 Serial Killers: Psychiatry, Criminology, Responsibility

home. The illusion was sustained by the fact that the Landru family lived correctly, but we can rectify this by revealing that this was essentially due to Madame Landru’s regular work. Landru was very often away from the family home, because most of the time he was on the look-out for good deals, but he was also mostly in prison because of these same good deals. Fifteen years after his marriage, in 1912, he was already a repeat offender. During this same year, his mother died. Deeply affected by his wife’s death and, according to the statements of people who knew him, by the shame his son had inflicted upon him, his father committed suicide a few months later: he hanged himself in the Bois de Boulogne. At this point, all ties with the past were broken. Landru immediately spent his father’s inheritance, probably by purchasing the garage, and continued and even increased his swindling. Charges and convictions came one after the other. His last conviction, in which he was sentenced to a term of four years in prison for a security swindle carried out at the expense of numerous claimants, was pronounced in absentia on 20 July 1914. Still the owner of his garage in Malakoff, this time he was sentenced to relegation. We were on the eve of World War I. Landru, with his numerous identities, with the constant and obvious way he had of escaping the law, took advantage of the turmoil caused by the war to disappear. He escaped exile and forced labour. The murders were about to start. The first year of the war was particularly lethal. Men who were fit for service were gradually drafted. He was called up on 10 December 1915, but as he did not come forward, he was declared AWOL.

Landru the ‘furniture dealer’ 50 La Belle Époque was over, as were the peaceful pre-war days; the war thoroughly reorganised society. Industry turned to weapons manufacturing, men went to the front and women entered the factories and were mobilised to keep the country going. Industrialists stopped inventing to dedicate themselves to the war economy; for Landru, there was no more room for securities scams. But the possibility of marriage swindles was more present than ever, since men were at the front. In these times of war, a new limit was crossed, driving him to murder. The war therefore provided him, as he said, with his new commercial idea. I realized that there was a very special category of war victims in Paris: these were the single and middle-aged women whose incomes had suddenly decreased. I met several who, for cash in hand, parted with their furniture at a low price. I thought that by buying this furniture and selling it later to the disaster victims of the North who no longer had any, it should be possible to make a good profit. But I knew that these old women took pride in not showing their distress. So, to get to them, I resorted to the very innocent ruse of the marriage ad. It caused no harm to anyone, and it allowed me to overcome their scruples. This is how I ended up being in relation with two hundred and

Case study of a serial killer: Henri Désiré Landru 49

eighty-three women; my marriage ads were commercial publicity! Any flexible advertising system which is not immoral is legal!51 Between 1914 and 1919, dates that frame the war, Landru left the engineer aside and turned to his new idea, a commercial idea, which, it would seem, conformed to what today we would call a market survey. He combined this survey with what he called a ‘psychological survey’ of women, which he boasted about during his trial. He said that he noticed ‘how a financially constrained woman is embarrassed to confess that her situation is difficult. To justify the sale to her neighbours and friends, she can on occasion pretend to get married.’52 A new identity took shape for Landru: he posed as a furniture dealer and offered himself as future husband to his ‘customers’. His activity as a ‘furniture dealer’ was the new social mask that sustained him; it was his war economy. From this moment, a wide variety of signifiers emerge relating to commercial activity: market survey, customer approach, advertising and book-keeping. However, in a purely rational equivalence, these signifiers would come to be equated with the disappearance and murder of women. First, Landru fleeced the women he had selected as much as he could while they were still alive: single women, without a family and with a modest income. Then he murdered them in order to ‘recuperate’ all of their possessions, right down to the smallest and most intimate of objects such as dentures or false hair. The bodies, serving no purpose, would be destroyed, burnt without a trace. As a ‘furniture dealer’, first he had to advertise. So Landru launched his campaign of matrimonial adverts. As his numerous drafts show, he took care to adjust and target his adverts according to the requirements of the ‘market’. His adverts all looked alike and reproduced clichés standardised for commercial ends – give or take a few variations. After a polite beginning – ‘rest assured of my absolute discretion’ and ‘I will make it my duty to return your letters the day it will please you to ask them of me’ – a few words of introduction described him as being without a family, a refugee, having been able to rescue some linen, furniture, silverware and enough equipment to create a small business. It was a precise mirror of what he expected of the person he was writing to. Once he had advertised, having ‘sold himself’ well as we would say today, he cast his commercial bait: I wish for true love, feelings that will ensure a lasting happiness. I am sufficiently independent to tell you from the outset that for my part financial conditions will not be a consideration in my choice of a spouse; above all I want a good-hearted woman, a good housekeeper, a homemaker, truly worthy of that name, offering sincere affection, a charming friendship at the same time as an attractive tenderness.53 To prove the sincerity of his statements, to make them believable, and to thereby remove all distrust in those he was going to dupe, he associated these qualities with

50 Serial Killers: Psychiatry, Criminology, Responsibility

a woman, his mother: ‘For I lived with a tender-hearted mother who has, I believe, shaped my heart to her sensitivity.’54 Hundreds of answers flooded in, and it forced Landru, to keep track of it all, to adopt order and method in his classification. Not all women were going to hold his attention. In the manner of an entomologist and out of a concern for rationality, he sorted out the answers and transcribed them into alphabetical notebooks, with all sorts of observations attached. The classified letters were stored in files made of newspaper (to save money!) bearing the following remarks: ‘Answered PO Box – Answer further – Archives – Write straight away – No answer – Interesting, (no information), R. (Refused) – no follow-up, simply record – Reserve, to see soon – Suspicion of F.’ What did the letter F represent here? It has always been interpreted as the first letter of the word ‘Fortune’, but I prefer the word ‘Family’: it is, of course, the family that worries Landru and warrants the term ‘suspicion’. Other details appeared in the notebook when clarifications proved necessary: ‘has used up her inheritance’ – ‘takes care of her mother’ – ‘home badly kept and unclean’, etc. Finally, information about the physical and moral qualities and flaws of a certain number of women was specified: ‘Brunette, plump, rigid, vulgar, squeaky voice’, etc. The numerous letter drafts, very carefully worked on, which he sent to the women who answered him following his adverts, were contained, along with draft adverts, in a notebook with comments like ‘Press Insertion’ or ‘Publicity’ attached to them, together with prices. This notebook was entitled ‘Library’.55 In peacetime, the swindler had substituted himself for the faltering engineer, in times of war, the murderer would replace the furniture dealer, by adapting his personal law to the new laws of society, the laws of exception. To carry out his projects, Landru rented a house not far from Paris. The country house where he drove his victims had to be suitable for his purposes. After one year spent in a villa in Vernouillet, he rented a villa in Gambais. When he visited the house, Landru was said to have meticulously explored the cellar and garden, a cellar he immediately found to be perfect: ‘The basement of the villa fully satisfies all my needs.’56 In the centre of the cellar, a hearth was discovered with a system that increased its capacity. The room also had bathroom-like features; the ground was cemented with a slant. In a corner, there was a washing machine. The court file reports that the cellar was well adapted for the dismembering and incineration of the corpses. Landru specified the reasons for his choice by saying: ‘I changed villas to save money. In Gambais, it was less expensive and also better suited to industrial uses.’57 The development of this terrifying enterprise followed a serial protocol that can be termed industrious and industrial; a mass industry. The targeted women had to be single, widowed or unmarried, isolated from their family. Without being extremely rich, they nevertheless had to own a sufficient quantity of goods, shares, bonds and revenues. He became the lover of some of them, hinting at the prospect of a legal union.

Case study of a serial killer: Henri Désiré Landru 51

Among the hundreds of women he met, 10 would be judged appropriate for ‘commercial use’. Only to them would Landru propose a life in common and have their belongings turned over to him, using and abusing their trust as much as he could. Then he would murder them when the time came, that is, when he needed a significant or urgent sum of money. Then all he had to do was to sell their bonds and furniture, because Landru, as we know thanks to the very meticulous enquiries conducted at the time of the investigation, had no other source of income. It was a question of verifying whether Landru had a normal and sufficiently remunerative occupation to provide acceptable means of existence for himself and his family.58 The investigation concluded that he did not. On the other hand, it brought to light that Landru was selling furniture that he never bought and that he had no other income than that of his victims. At the same time, his actions were explored by establishing his schedule as precisely as possible. It seems that drafting his adverts, reading the answers, keeping up the correspondence and attending the meetings that followed amounted to a full-time occupation. Can we doubt that this was a true commercial enterprise? All of this frantic activity, which was equal to that deployed when he was looking for work at the start of his marriage and then in his scams, unfolded according to a commercial logic, a mad logic from a human perspective, but also from an ‘economic’ one. Landru expended intense and constant energy to become a murderer. Why this energy and what then is the status of this ‘becoming’? How can we understand the lack of proportionality between the preparation of the crimes and the little financial profit he gets out of it? A solidly prepared, villainous crime motivated solely by financial gain could have allowed him to obtain a more significant profit. In other words, these crimes have nothing to do with a drive elaborated in the register of a libidinal satisfaction close to perversion, nor with a precise calculation which aims to get as much money as possible. They pertain to morbid rationalisation in a psychotic register. All of Landru’s life seems to have revolved around the attempt to grasp what eluded him through reason and logic: the meaning of life. His family and those around him believed he worked as a furniture dealer. Landru was always away on business and he owned a vehicle for the removals. He gave it credence himself, through some elements indispensable to the panoply of a furniture dealer: account books, notes referring to bookings with removal, car and storage companies, drafts for adverts with statements like: ‘I pay cash at a good price for bicycles, sewing machines, other furniture and leather from individuals and manufacturers.’ Or: ‘Will buy clothes, shoes, lace, furs, home collection.’59 To ply his trade, Landru needed warehouses. He rented a second property next to his garage, from the same landlord. He went there from time to time and each time stored furniture, kitchenware and linen, amongst other things, which did not fail to draw the landlord’s attention. As I was surprised to see him trafficking such things, because I knew he claimed to be an engineer, I asked his son who answered that his father was

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indeed an engineer but, given the state of war and the stoppage of business, he was selling and purchasing furniture as well as being a travelling salesman.60 Being a travelling salesman justified Landru’s comings and goings, as he crisscrossed Paris and the Parisian region. He was, in everyone’s eyes, a furniture dealer. He could be seen transporting furniture with his van and, accompanied by his son, presenting himself to the managers of various buildings to pick up various sets of furniture. Many witnesses said they had seen Landru loading or unloading furniture: ‘The gentleman moved in for at least three weeks, bringing in large quantities of linen with a hand-cart mounted on the wheels of an automobile.’61 He kept notebooks for his activities. In one of his notebooks there was a long list of furniture items with corresponding prices. For example, one of the lists was preceded with the following annotation: ‘Furniture bought at the Hotel des Ventes auction house, room 1, Wednesday 25 January 1915.’ However, the investigation showed that no sale had taken place in the Hotel des Ventes in room number 1 from 23 to 28 January 1915, and even that 25 January was not a Wednesday, but a Monday. There is no concern for veracity here. Here, the question of who this writing was destined to arise once more. To each price appearing on the list was added a sum that represented 10 per cent of the value of these objects for expenses, plus 20 centimes for delivery. These were precisely the tariffs of the Hotel des Ventes, although Landru never purchased anything there. What strange necessity led him to keep a ledger that was both believable and odd, and to establish long lists of furniture items in notebooks? Landru kept accounts that took no notice of credibility. Everything occurred as if, in the same way that he had changed Guillin into Guillet on the record book, the fact of having a list, noting the details of his movements and daily actions, could give Landru a body and an existence, could fabricate a kind of limit to reality by making him believe, in turn, in this reality. The investigation concluded that he had no more been a furniture dealer than he had anything else. To which we add, no more than he had been an engineer. It has often been thought that, anticipating his arrest and conviction, Landru was cleverly preparing his defence through the facade of a furniture dealer, since this is how he introduced himself at the trial: ‘I am a furniture dealer, don’t make me leave my job!’62 But his defence was clumsy and derisory, the ruses were immediately exposed, their naivety and transparency manifest. Numerous crossreferences immediately undid these constructions and to this one need only add the fact that all of the personal effects of the victims and their families, including identity papers, were recovered in his garage. Everything was written down in his notebooks, where income and outgoings were carefully listed, in particular expenses for cakes, flowers, theatre outings, etc – so many ‘investments’ necessary for the seduction of his fiancées. In yet other notebooks, he wrote down the revenue that he got in different ways according to three distinct registers. The investigators noted that the income from swindling was underlined in blue, the return from ‘normal’ sources was not underlined, and

Case study of a serial killer: Henri Désiré Landru 53

the revenue coming from murders was, for its part, underlined in red. Here again, why make this visible? We glimpse the extent to which Landru’s punctured, altered reality was sustained through the parody-like characteristics and actions of a furniture dealer, both realistic and unrealistic at the same time without it ever causing him the slightest problem of contradiction. This construction was not a clever preparation of incontestable proofs designed to camouflage his crimes, but the real that returned through this strange accounting of the quotidian that these incredible notebooks constitute. The apparent mastery and will are shown to be simulacra and both return to the status of an empty envelope. There is no sign of perversion in any of this. Yet again in the register of accounting, six files numbered from one to six were found at Landru’s. Each number corresponded to a family member, including himself. He figured as number two, number one being reserved for his wife. In these files are listed the expenses he made for each member of his family, the money he gave them. Number seven would come as a later addition: it represented his mistress Fernande Segret. Finally, and above all, there was a notebook kept by Landru at all times on his person; in it was a list of the missing persons. This is the list: ‘a. Cuchet, J. id, Brésil, Crozatier, Havre, Cél. Buissson, a. Colomb, André Babelay, M. Louis Jaume, A. Pascal, M. Thér. Marchadier.’ Questioned about this list on several occasions, Landru exclaimed: The explanation of the notebook is very simple, as you will see. They are the notes that a tradesman takes about his clientele, a kind of memorandum relating to the people I was doing business with. People have attached much too much importance to this list.63 Let us look closely at this list while following the work of the investigators. The investigation showed that it was written from memory, in one go, except for the last name, that of Mademoiselle Marchadier, which was added later. This writing of the list in two different moments is not without its reason; I will reveal the logic that determined it later. Not every name on the list corresponded to the victim’s surnames. Sometimes, with neglect and contempt, Landru inscribed these women under the name of their street, their country or their city of origin. For the most part, in front of these names was the date the person disappeared without a trace and after them came a number indicating an exact time, to the minute, identified as being the time of death. To the question of knowing what these times meant, Landru replied: ‘These hours correspond to absolutely nothing and have no rational significance.’64 If the list of the missing women can again be an attempt to forge the economy of a furniture dealer, noting the time of death with precision is, apparently, Landru’s only irrational inscription, except if we understand it as a rationality pushed to the extreme, where the trace, note or writing acts as a limit point preventing anything from escaping outside of this rationality. Is it possible for this disconcerting rigour to have functioned as a limit, as a delusional limit beyond common boundaries? This limit confines the neo-signification of the

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crime within its instrumentality. Did Landru have a theory of death that would render it equivalent to any other event in life? This would explain the self-assured manner in which he could quietly and indefinitely deny having committed these murders without ever betraying himself and his perfect composure in the face of findings showing him to be the guilty party. We owe all of the details we have about the notebooks to a police detective, Detective Riboulet. During the investigation, he had been given the sole task of casting light on the concordance of the facts, on Landru’s use of time and the keeping of his notebooks. The case of the prosecution rested on his meticulous and methodical work. During the trial, the president of the tribunal questioned Detective Riboulet for each victim. He came at the end of each hearing to bring his precisions and his knowledge of the smallest details. A disturbing fact surfaced in many testimonies and recurred on several occasions in the investigating file: it seemed to be a mere detail and was not given too much significance, but it left a trace. Yet for us this detail has its place in the faultless sequence of Landru’s accounting logic: it is the fact that he used to pick up and, whenever he could, made others pick up dead leaves. In August 1917, Mademoiselle Lacoste, the sister of one of his future victims Madame Buisson, went to Gambais with her. She recounted that they were very surprised by ‘the obsession driving Landru to pick up leaves from morning to night’.65 Madame Jaume, another of Landru’s ‘fiancées’, confided in a friend that her stay in Gambais had not left her with a good impression. She had spent her time with Landru picking up dead leaves and storing them under the hangar. He also assigned this task to Madame Landru and his children. Is this an oddity, an incomprehensible obsession? Perhaps it is not so incomprehensible. In 1919, no one was surprised to find, a long time after the end of autumn, a pile of dead leaves under the hangar in which he had buried the dead bodies of the three small dogs of his last victim, Mademoiselle Marchadier, who had been missing for three months. The mysterious villa naturally attracted journalists who, on a daily basis, wrote their chronicles around the Landru case, so they described it in minute detail. The special envoy of the Matin, who conducted an investigation in Gambais, wrote his editorial for 23 April 1919 in the following terms: The villa is in the middle of fields. The outbuildings take up more space than the villa. There are two small buildings, and on the land enclosed with wire adjacent to the house there is the famous hangar where the dead leaves that Landru had Mrs. Guillin pick up finish decaying.66 A few days later, the digging began in Gambais on the order of Mr Bonin, the investigating judge in Paris. Under the hangar, a pile of ashes and scorched remains was found next to the heap of dead leaves. In this pile, Doctor Paul, a forensics specialist, identified a human molar, while fragments of charred bone were found in the stove.67 The dead leaves probably had their use. Perhaps they hid and preserved the corpses of Landru’s victims? Perhaps they interspersed their

Case study of a serial killer: Henri Désiré Landru 55

own odour with the disturbing, unavoidable smells? We know that Landru, after a murder, sometimes had to return to Paris to take care of something, before returning to Gambais to make the body, probably preserved under the heap of dead leaves, disappear. Between the stove and the pile of ashes, the dead leaves had their place in the chain of this frightening industry. Landru, who was always careful to take his future victims away from their families, had, however, underestimated the domestic ties of two of them. Two families, the family of Madame Buisson and that of Madame Collomb, wanted to know what had become of them. As soon as the war was over, two different investigations commissioned by these families converged on the same commune – Gambais – the same house – the Ermitage – and the same description of a man with multiple civil identities: Landru. Landru was recognised in the street by a sister of Madame Buisson, who immediately alerted the police services, and he was arrested at his home at the Rue de Rochechouart on 12 April 1919.

Notes 1 L’illustration, 19 November 1921. 2 ‘La confession de Madame Landru’, Le Journal, 21 May 1919; Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box III. 3 ‘La confession de Madame Landru’. 4 ‘La confession de Madame Landru’. 5 ‘La confession de Madame Landru’. 6 Cf. Bourdache, J, La Motocyclette en France, 1894–1914. Au temps où l’histoire de la moto s’écrivait en français, 1989, Fontainebleau: Edifree. 7 ‘La confession de Madame Landru’. 8 ‘La confession de Madame Landru’. 9 ‘Charles Landru nous parle de son père’, Le Journal, 21 April 1919. Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box II. 10 Le Journal, 8 November 1921. 11 General archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, General File, Box III. 12 Decaux, A, C’était le XXe siècle, 1996, Paris: Librairie Académique Perrin; and Béraud, H, Bourcier, E and Salmon, A, L’Affaire Landru, 1924, Paris: Albin Michel. 13 Béraud, Bourcier and Salmon, L’Affaire Landru, 1924, p 306. 14 On this point see Mayeur, J-M, Bédarida, F, Prost, A and Monneron, J-L, Histoire du peuple français, vol 5, Cent ans d’esprit républicain (1875–1963), directed by Parias, L-H, 1999, Paris: Nouvelle Librairie de France, p 194. 15 Box III, Information on the Youth and Adolescence of Landru. 16 Box III, Information on the Youth and Adolescence of Landru. 17 Box III, Information on the Youth and Adolescence of Landru. 18 Box III, Information on the Youth and Adolescence of Landru. 19 Darmon, P, Landru, 1994, Paris: Plon, p 127. 20 Darmon, Landru, 1994. 21 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box III, Information on the Youth and Adolescence of Landru. 22 Le Journal, 17 November 1921. 23 His business is listed in Pascal, D, Le Grand Dictionnaire des motos françaises, 1988, Paris: Massin: ‘Landru, Ateliers du Progrès automobile, Montmorency (Seine-et-Oise)’. 24 Sagnier, C, L’Affaire Landru, 1999, Paris: De Vecchi, p 12.

56 Serial Killers: Psychiatry, Criminology, Responsibility 25 Cf. Kraepelin, E, Introduction à la psychiatrie clinique, 1984, Paris: Navarin. 26 Dupré, E, ‘La mythomanie. Étude psychologique et medico-légale du mensonge et de la fabulation morbide’, Bulletin médical 25 March, 1 and 8 April 1905, Paris: Jean Gainche, p 7. 27 Le Journal, 9 November 1921. 28 Le Journal, 9 November 1921. 29 Cf. above, pp. 40–41. 30 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box III, Information on the Youth and Adolescence of Landru. 31 Cf. Bourdache, La Motocyclette en France 1894–1914, 1989. 32 Bourdache, La Motocyclette en France 1894–1914, 1989. 33 Bourdache, La Motocyclette en France 1894–1914, 1989. 34 Bourdache, La Motocyclette en France 1894–1914, 1989. 35 ‘La motocyclette et son histoire’, small encyclopedia of the Edilig youth motorcycle, www.clg-leprinceringuet.ac-aix-marseille.fr/objet_lafare:moto.html, accessed 1 December 2007. 36 Darmon, Landru, 1994, p 130. 37 Darmon, Landru, 1994, p 134. 38 Le Petit Parisien, 21 April 1919; Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box III, File on General House Searches. 39 Thépot, A, L’ingénieur dans la société française, 1985, Paris: Éd Ouvrières. 40 Cf. Schweitzer, S, André Citroën 1878–1935: le risque et le défi, 1992, Paris: Fayard. 41 Cf. Béraud, Bourcier and Salmon, L’Affaire Landru, 1924, Paris: Albin Michel. 42 Bourcier, E, ‘The Sire of Gambais’ in L’Affaire Landru, 1924, p 133. 43 Which Lacan underlined, following Freud. Cf. notably Lacan, J, ‘Hommage fait à Marguerite Duras du Ravissement de Lol V. Stein’, 1965, in Autres Écrits, 2001, Paris: Le Seuil, pp 192–193. 44 Romains, J, ‘Mon ami Landru’, Les Cahiers des Hommes de bonne volonté, p 4. ‘Le crime’, 1950, Paris: Flammarion, reprinted in Amitiés et Rencontres, 1970, Paris: Flammarion, p 68. 45 Romains, ‘Mon ami Landru’, 1950, p 40. 46 Romains, ‘Mon ami Landru’, 1950, p 40. 47 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box III, General File, Testimony of M Gamrat. 48 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box III. 49 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Closing Speech for the Prosecution. 50 Headline of Le Matin, 15 November 1921. 51 Le Journal, 9 November 1921. 52 Le Journal, 11 November 1921. 53 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Appendix 1, adverts published in newspapers in the ‘marriage’ section, several examples: Le Journal, La Presse, L’Écho de Paris. 54 Segret, F, ‘Souvenirs d’une rescapée’, Le Journal, 30 October to 7 November 1921; Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box III. 55 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box III. 56 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box III, General File. 57 Darmon, Landru, 1994, p 265. 58 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box IV, Report of Detective Riboulet. 59 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box VI, General Information. 60 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box III, General File, Testimony of Mr Gamrat. 61 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box V, Testimony of Madame Frix.

Case study of a serial killer: Henri Désiré Landru 57 62 63 64 65 66 67

Le Journal, 11 November 1921. Le Journal, 9 November 1921. Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box III, General Questioning. Darmon, Landru, 1994, p 209. Le Matin, 23 April 1919. These discoveries were not admissible evidence because the seals had not been affixed to the gates of the villa and so anyone could have come in beforehand.

Figure 3.1 Henri-Désiré Landru with Fernande Segret, a mistress who ‘escaped her fate’.

Chapter 3

Landru and women: three categories plus one

How is it possible, in Landru’s chaotic and destructured universe, to understand the places occupied by a lawful spouse and a mistress alongside the other women he killed? Jacques Lacan, talking about Monsieur Verdoux,1 a film inspired by the life of the famous criminal, remarked that Landru completely separated ‘the vital group, constituted by the subject and his family, and the functional group, in which the vital group’s means of subsistence must be found (a fact that we can sufficiently illustrate by saying that it makes M. Verdoux seem plausible)’.2 In his film, Charlie Chaplin portrayed a man who, at the least financial worry, picked up his phone and, from a list of rich fiancées in reserve, chose one to be fleeced and then eliminated so that his trading business could continue. He wanted his paralysed wife and young child to live a happy life in the country, far away from any worry. The film laid no claim to biographical accuracy, but was inspired by the Landru case. It reproduced the structural element, to wit: the separation of human beings between, on the one hand, those that Mr Verdoux liked and protected and on the other, those whom he divested of their humanity, reducing them to objects of need. In the film, the character himself was ‘machine-like’, and this is shown by the ceaseless recurrence, on screen, of the telephone, but also of the axles of a locomotive that perpetually took him from one end of France to the other, like an indefatigable travelling salesman. What Lacan called ‘the vital group’ was subdivided into two categories for Landru: a category relating to duty, in which the lawful spouse and his children were inscribed, and the category of love in which his mistress, Fernande Segret, was inscribed. The missing women, whom we can call women of need, corresponded to the group said to be functional. Duty, love and, evidently, ‘need’ seemed to organise independently the relation – or more precisely the relations – that Landru had with women. I will add another category to these three, which for any man is the primary and initial bond to the other, and to the feminine other, the mother. Lastly, this relation means nothing if we don’t take it together with the bond that unites her to the father and that unites the parental couple, for in this knot the relation to people, the community and the social bond is also determined. For

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Landru, as we saw, this knot was not tied. As a result, his relation to others was destructured, but this doesn’t imply that it didn’t exist. This is why – as we will see in the next chapter – we cannot disregard what men were for him.

A woman, a family Did Henri-Désiré Landru model himself on his parents in order to found his own family? He was very young when he met, in his immediate environment, the woman who was to become his wife. She was a year older than him; she already worked. His mother was a seamstress; she was a laundress. After the birth of their first child and upon his return from military service, he married her. From then on, Landru took care of his family throughout his whole life, the pathological inflection residing in the way he would provide for their needs. His family followed him in his first ‘business ventures’, which were rapidly destined to fail. Thus, his wife was led to say that he certainly gave her some housekeeping money from time to time, but that it was mostly she who provided for the needs of the household through her own work. However, Landru’s visits to his family, like the contributions of money or objects whose origin is known to us, were always regular and constant. Did he not, as was recognised all the way through the investigation and the trial, have a ‘sense of the family’? During the investigation, he demanded, to everyone’s surprise, that a personal statement affirming that his wife and children knew nothing of his business be recorded: ‘My wife and children were mere instruments in my hands. I take full responsibility for the facts that took place. My wife and children bent to my patriarchal authority. They knew nothing of my life outside the family.’3 The surprise was indeed great, because for the first time people saw Landru let go of his usual irony and really ask for something, something which seemed to matter to him, something which was not empty and which, on the contrary, sounded relevant to his mission in the world. The psychiatric experts who, on several occasions, examined Landru highlighted this ‘authority of the head of the family’ in their findings. They accounted for it in terms that resonate with the clinical approach I am exposing here: ‘Landru is full of the patriarchal principle to the highest degree.’4 As we have seen, for Landru, the signifier of the family was a master-signifier; it seems to have sustained an ideal perspective towards which the subject could aim. But it did not fulfil its function; it was a mere semblance. Being a signifier divested of its symbolic function, it became an imaginary signifier whose signification ran on empty. This was very precisely what made it possible for Landru to swear on his wife and children that he was innocent at the close of the trial. It looked like great cynicism when the time came for him to speak: ‘Yes, Mr. President,’ he stated with emotion. ‘In his implacable indictment, the public prosecutor has laid bare my shortcomings and vices. But he did me justice – and I thank him for it from the bottom of my heart – when he said he

Landru and women: three categories plus one 61

acknowledged at least one good sentiment in me: that of the family, of the love for my wife and children. Well! On this laudable sentiment, I swear that I am innocent of the crimes I am accused of.’5 Does this swearing on a ‘laudable sentiment’, by referring it to its generality, not evidence of the extent to which the effect is detached from the subject, the extent to which his family represents barely more than an idea for him? Again, here we have words, principles, which, since they are detached from bodies, refer to no physical reality. The good sentiments that Nietzsche, Freud or Dostoyevsky demystified are of their time. Landru spoke of ‘patriarchal authority’; in his statements he substituted the patriarch for the father, and rightly so. The patriarch is, indeed, something other than a father. To the father, he added the mythical image of the founder and the tribal leader: he is the absolute and causal origin of everything engendered in the family. In relation to the patriarchal dimension, the father is always deficient, and this is even what confers his symbolic function upon him.6 A father is imperfect and thus desiring. A father that mistakes himself for the patriarch exceeds his function and makes his own law. ‘It should be noted’, says Lacan, ‘that if a man who thinks he is a king is mad, a king who thinks he is a king is no less so.’7 We expect ‘that people put in such situations’ be the great of this world, that they ‘play their parts well’, but are uncomfortable with the idea that they really ‘believe in them’, even if this involves a lofty view of their duty to incarnate a function in the world order, through which they assume rather well the figure of chosen victims. Here, the turning point lies in the mediacy or immediacy of the identification and, to be quite explicit, the subject’s self-infatuation.’8 It is in fact because he could not take on the function of father that Landru took himself for the patriarch. Indifference to the other, tyranny, and Landru’s necessary megalomania are to be found in this place of the patriarch, in this lack of a flaw. The invention of patriarchy could not make up for his paternity disorder. As with industry, on the point of patriarchy, Landru the fabulist spoke his truth: a grimacing caricature, emptiness and death.

The missing fiancées A logic of responsibility, no less delusional than this delusional conception of the family, developed on this basis. It extended beyond the limits that establish a shared law. This is the sense we can give to what, in psychosis, is a mission. This logic exceeded the hallmarks of reason and drove Landru to crime. Everything happened as if there were some master-signifiers on the one hand (although petrified, frozen ones, detached from any common signification) and on the other, a materialised real, without bounds: the real of a need which does without addressing itself to the other, without asking the other, without desire. In other words, any hierarchisation of values is erased to the benefit of the immediate and the useful. This is what reality as a whole is reduced to for the subject.

62 Serial Killers: Psychiatry, Criminology, Responsibility

Landru’s fiancées, the women he murdered to get hold of their possessions, belonged to the so-called category of need and had no other worth for him than a commercial one. Their use was to maintain a living for him and his family. Landru never recognised having murdered these women. He kept repeating that he was a furniture dealer, that meeting women had to do with his business. This is attested to by the intensive work preparing for the encounters and by the encounters themselves, which were studied and classified in great detail. Between 1914 and 1919, 10 women (Madame Cuchet, Madame Laborde-Line, Madame Guillin, Madame Héon, Madame Collomb, the young Andrée Babelay, Madame Buisson, Madame Jaume, Madame Pascal and Mademoiselle Marchadier) were selected on the basis of criteria that matched the ‘customer profile’ devised by Landru: a little wealth, some liquid assets, shares, furniture, little or no family and, in any case, a family easy to keep at a distance. Madame Cuchet, Landru’s first victim, stands out in this respect: she had remained too close to her son André and the young Cuchet was added to the list of the missing victims. He was to remain the sole ‘random’ victim in Landru’s criminal process. These women, all murdered by Landru, constitute a series with invariant modalities. All of these women ‘got engaged’ to him. They all informed those around them that they had met a considerate engineer and that they were going to get married. For all, Landru’s papers, which were necessary for the wedding, were long awaited. They all prepared to move to a house in the country, Vernouillet then Gambais, in order to find the happiness they dreamed of: to leave Paris by car and to live protected on a peaceful property. For each of them, once he decided to do away with them, Landru took them to the train station and bought two singles and only one return, to save money! They all disappeared. All were inscribed in a notebook with dates and times, specified to the minute, always recorded in front of their name, alongside instructions and cabalistic numbers that Landru called mnemonic. For all, Landru used forged papers and other coarse stratagems to make their parents, friends, neighbours or building managers believe that they were still alive after he had made them disappear. For all, Landru appropriated their furniture, liquid assets, deeds and shares, identity papers, certificates, documents of all kinds, clothes and linen: everything that represented a life. Yet all of these missing women left the memory of their story, including the part with Landru, with a parent, a friend, someone in their entourage, their building manager. And in each case, their radical disappearance seemed, in the eyes of those who knew them, to be completely out of character, impossible. Through the moving testimonies of their kin at the trial, we understand how impossible it was for each one of them to disappear without a trace. Every testimony brought the human value of each one of them to the scene of the trial, rather than their commercial worth, making the particularities of each personality resonate. The newspapers relayed this under the title: ‘The novel of the fiancées’. How could the 10 missing fiancées be caught in this deadly machine? There is no doubt that Landru’s psychical plasticity, in the exclusive service of his utilitarian rigour, allowed him to adjust perfectly, to mould himself even, to the

Landru and women: three categories plus one 63

personality and kind of expectation that each woman had. Just as he knew how to use pseudonyms and invent professions, he knew how to slip into the interstices of the desire of the other, since, being a man of morbid rigour, he was not himself, as we know, a man of desire. This is why Landru does not fall under the supposed concept of ‘multiple personalities’.9 His personality was to have none and thus to have them all. His personality was to conform to everything and anything to reach his goal, without contradiction, without intimate conflict, since reality was nothing but a total submission to the stern principle of his personal law: to do everything for his kin. From this perspective, did Landru have a reality for himself? He found it in his conformism, in the sense that he took on the appropriate shape at the required moment according to what was to be obtained in the instant. Landru was a kind of quick-change artist of the mental register. Indeed, ‘Fregoli’ was among the numerous nicknames he was given, after the famous Italian quick-change artist and contortionist,10 his contemporary. Lacan evokes subjects whose life is ‘a series of purely conformist identifications with characters who will give him the feeling for what one has to do to be a man’.11 These subjects lack such a sense and it forces them to copy constantly, to imitate ceaselessly, to look for ‘the instruction manual’ to life and for the appropriate measure of things to palliate the hole left by foreclosure and the absence of the coloration given by the phallus to the world. Landru does not have this measure in him; this is why each of the women he seduced only encountered her own in her fiancé. This is what we will discover in looking at the characteristics, the singularity of each woman’s relation with Landru. Madame Cuchet and her son André Landru made the acquaintance of Madame Cuchet and her son André, who was 17 years old, in February 1914. Madame Cuchet was 39, a young widow who had earned a good living and had some savings. Landru, recently released from prison, was getting ready to resume his activities as a marriage and deposit swindler. At that point, he had certainly not yet planned to murder his victims. The manner of his encounter with Madame Cuchet is not very clear; there are several versions. She claimed to have met Landru in the Luxemburg Gardens; her brother-in-law thought that she had looked for a partner in the matrimonial ads. As for Landru, he gave his own version at the trial. At the beginning of 1914, André Cuchet, cycling by, stopped at the garage of Malakoff, as had Jules Romains. He asked Landru to repair his bicycle. He told him of his taste for mechanics and his desire to volunteer as an apprentice. Some time later, André Cuchet introduced his mother to Landru. Madame Cuchet worked from home for a lingerie company and her son was a salesman in a shirt shop. She was pretty, elegant, pleasant and as she was still young she wanted to remarry. Landru introduced himself to her under the name of Émile Diard and set about seducing her. He visited her on several occasions,

64 Serial Killers: Psychiatry, Criminology, Responsibility

brought her flowers, and then rounded off his success with the gift of an engagement ring. Madame Cuchet fell in love with this charming and considerate man. Here, we recognise his technique from the marriage swindle. Just as with Madame Isoré,12 at this stage Landru was not concerned with the domestic entourage of his new fiancée. This is why he did not seem bothered by the fact that Madame Cuchet had a son. After some time, she announced her marriage to her sister, her brotherin-law and several friends. The date was set. Landru talked Madame Cuchet into quitting her job and living with him as man and wife. The future spouses moved away from Paris to enjoy their perfect love. Landru opened a bank account in his name where he deposited Madame Cuchet’s savings, together with a sum of money he had just swindled out of a supposedly future ‘associate’, from whom he had also stolen . . . his bicycle! This is July 1914. After having squandered Madame Cuchet’s money, Landru vanished. Madame Cuchet, abandoned and concerned, opened the private trunk of her betrothed Émile Diard and found papers in Landru’s name, a military record, a wedding certificate, a driving licence as well as some letters from his children. She shared her discovery with her sister and her brother-in-law, who entreated her to have nothing more to do with this dubious individual: ‘He left, so much the better.’ ‘There is nothing good about this man’, and in the country, they spread the rumour that Mr Diard was a German spy. One month later, on 2 August 1914, war was declared. What impact did it have on Landru’s mind? In any case, he instantly reappeared in Madame Cuchet’s life, in a sort of state of emergency. Why did he not look for other women to swindle? Everything happened as if the war had changed the rules of the game, as if the war had given him an idea, a new conformity. With his usual power of persuasion, Landru justified his lies and absences to Madame Cuchet. He explained to his fiancée that he was waiting to be divorced and even went so far as to introduce her to two small girls as if they were his own daughters in order to add a moving touch to the picture. Landru (who was an assiduous reader of the psychological literature of his time through the Comtesse de Tramar,13 a theoretician of the feminine condition) had forged an idea of which buttons to push to touch a woman’s heart, and he redoubled his attentions. He regained his place by Madame Cuchet’s side. From then on, Landru initiated a process of isolation that he would thereafter use for all ‘selected women’. He succeeded in completely separating his mistress from her sister and brother-in-law. Madame Cuchet refused to receive them and stopped answering their letters. But she remained very attached to her son André. The latter made numerous, long stays in the pretty villa named ‘The Lodge’ rented out by Landru in Vernouillet. And he also ended up quitting his job. Landru returned to Madame Cuchet because the declaration of war had given him an idea for the recovery of transferable assets and real estate and the possible disappearance of Madame Cuchet. So, undoubtedly, his so-called war economy had started to function at this point, but it was not yet planned or ‘rationalised’. And since he was not able to part the mother from her son, he murdered young André Cuchet too. The latter would remain the only man Landru ever murdered.

Landru and women: three categories plus one 65

Despite the isolation put into place by Landru, two very friendly connections of the Cuchets endured. Madame Cuchet was friendly with another woman of her age and her son André was a close friend of Maxime, the woman’s son. André had much admiration for his friend, who has just been mobilised as a Dragoon and, in a letter he sent to him, he expressed the wish that at the next call-up he would be able to join him. He hoped that, later, they would be able to row together on the lake next to the villa. Madame Cuchet, for her part, sent letters and postcards to her friend. She explained that she had not been to see her before leaving Paris because of the rapidity with which the decision had been taken. ‘In three days, everything had been rushed.’14 She assured her of her continued friendship and was thinking about visiting her soon; she hoped they would continue to see each other, especially by having her stay at the villa in the summer. It all came brutally to an end. After 27 January 1915, Madame Cuchet and her son were heard of no more. Landru had moved on to murder. After the deed, he recovered all of the goods belonging to them with the help of forged papers, which were rediscovered and confirmed by expert graphologists to be in ‘Landru’s usual handwriting’. They were signed with the name of Mr Cuchet. One thing remained for him to do: to make the disappearance seem plausible. What was plausible from Landru’s perspective tuned out to be completely implausible to others, in fact to everyone else. What purpose did the kind of scenario Landru devised after the death of Madame Cuchet (a scenario that he also devised for his other victims) serve if we take the time to consider just how incongruous, dubious and blatant it was? In fact, Landru went to Madame Cuchet’s friend to let her know that she and her son had left for England. During this meeting, the missing woman’s friend pointed out to her visitor how unbelievable this story was. Madame Cuchet did not know any English and her son was too much of a patriot to have left France in a state of war. She did not get any answer. Landru declared he did not know their address, provided no other explanation and left. Later, when she recounted this story in Landru’s presence during the investigation, he simply stated that he did not know her. Landru could argue that he did not know her, since he was able to affirm anything without scruples, or refuse to answer an important question, or turn away in the face of evidence. This lack of demeanour was the mere extension of his structural plasticity. How could it be otherwise? He slipped like an eel between discourses, since none supported him. When the investigating judge asked him what he knew of the disappearance of the Cuchets, he affirmed without hesitation that he knew the reasons that had led them to act in this way, that he knew where they were but that he did not want to say without their authorisation. Strange confession, strange irony mixed with the most disconcerting candour, since we are talking about murders and we are in an Assizes Court. Landru pretended they had left with just their travel bags, that they had taken the train together. When he was told that this was not very plausible, because people don’t just leave without money, leaving their watch, hat, identity papers, family records and savings book behind, forsaking the past and all future

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projects, and because they had been searched for everywhere in France and abroad, only for it to turn out that mother and son had not crossed any borders and were nowhere to be found, Landru merely fell into an indifferent silence. When it was pointed out to him that his peculiar statement could lead him straight to the guillotine, he simply answered that he had nothing to say. On occasion, he modified his statements: faced with a book of falsely drawn up accounts, he retorted: ‘I am not disputing anything, I am merely saying that my memories are not precise.’15 When questioned by the police, he allowed us to glimpse the key to his deceitful system of fabulation: reticence, solipsism and vague suppositions of a general order. This is the ultimate defence of someone who has nothing to defend, where all reality is lost: ‘It is quite possible I gave my son any old explanation of my presence in Vernouillet’;16 or: ‘I presumed I was being sought [by the police], it was in the order of things.’17 Or again, the notion that he bought from one of these women what she had been willing to sell. We see him moving around in a system without guarantee, where everything is equivalent. Thus, he did not hesitate to point out that ‘witnesses say whatever they want’ and that, like him, Madame Cuchet ‘was free to act as she saw fit’.18 He answered the remark: ‘She broke off with her family after meeting you’ with: ‘I noticed, but it was not my doing. Like me, Madame Cuchet was sickened by people’s hypocrisy.’ He went on: ‘If one is looking for a guilty party, this will obviously be taken as an indication of guilt.’19 Everything was real for him, because everything was always already interpreted according to the delusion of interpretation organising his world. This amounts just as well to saying that everything was virtual because nothing made sense, nothing quilted the real to reality and nothing stopped the infinite slippage of interpretations. We encounter no knowledge, no guarantee and no truth. Here we catch a glimpse of what the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father means: without the signification of the phallus, there is no stopping point, no quilting point and no signifier of desire. What passed between Landru and Madame Cuchet lasted 11 months. Madame Laborde-Line Distress drove his second fiancée, Madame Laborde-Line, to Landru. She was a 46-year-old widow who had settled in Paris with her son, appointed clerk of the Post Office. Her son soon married and the young wife could not bear to live with her mother-in-law. A quarrel ensued and Madame Laborde-Line ended up on her own. Although her son sent her some funds, she preferred to look for work to secure her future as she did not think she would remarry. She published an advert to solicit a position as office clerk or female companion. Landru, who knew the system of classified ads well, did not answer in writing, but went to the listed address on 27 May 1915. Madame Laborde-Line had modest savings, but she had interesting furniture; in particular an Empire-style secretaire which was later found at Landru’s.

Landru and women: three categories plus one 67

For his part, Landru was living off the sale of Madame Cuchet’s shares, as he had not yet been able to sell her furniture. At the same time, he was frantically writing his matrimonial adverts and, in the space of six months, he selected four other future victims. In this time of febrile activity, Madame Laborde-Line made things easier for him. Very quickly, he took her to Vernouillet. She bade goodbye to her building manager, promising she would write to give him her new address. After two or three days spent in the country, Madame Laborde-Line suddenly disappeared on 24 June 1915. She appeared on the fatal list, after Madame Cuchet, under the name of ‘Brazil’, a vague reference to her birth in South America. Three months later, Landru went to get the furniture which Madame Laborde-Line had put in storage before leaving to live with him. This ‘business’, as he put it, lasted one month. Madame Guillin Landru started his relation with Madame Guillin, a 52-year-old widow, on 15 June 1915. One month before, he had published the following advert in the ‘Marriages’ section of Le Journal: ‘Gentleman, 45, single without fam. Sit. 4000 own home, wants to marry lady in sim. circ. C.T. 45 Beau Journal.’ Madame Guillin replied immediately, which is not surprising, since the advert was designed for it to be so. Her situation and age fitted the similar circumstances requirement, so Landru’s proposal interested her. Madame Guillin met the same lightning fate as Madame Laborde-Line. As she lived in rue Crozatier, Landru troubled himself no further than by designating her under the name of her street. Madame Guillin lived alone, she had a married daughter outside of Paris and she had inherited a relatively substantial patrimony. Some of her character traits must have been to Landru’s taste: she took good care of herself, she had tastes and habits above her status; she was said to be vain and to entertain dreams of greatness. She seemed to be very cheerful and very happy to get married. She freely recounted anecdotes of her life with Landru to those around her. This is how we learn that she peered through the keyhole, like Bluebeard’s seventh wife, to see what there was in the locked, forbidden room. She saw women’s clothes and shoes and told people that on this occasion her fiancé called her ‘cheeky’. Showered with questions by Madame Guillin, Landru dissipated her doubts and concerns by offering this sublime explanation: in this room, he kept all the objects that belonged to his dearly loved mother. This love for his mother only reinforced the feelings that already submerged Madame Guillin. She told her children that she was getting married and, after having withdrawn a significant amount of money from her bank, she left to spend a few days in Vernouillet. She wrote to her daughter, invited a friend and suddenly was no longer heard from again. This was 3 August 1915. The inventory of the jewellery of the third ‘fiancée’ was found in a pocket diary belonging to Landru. A removal van went to collect Madame Guillin’s furniture.

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To the enquiring building manager, Landru specified that he was taking care of the move on his own to spare his future wife pointless exertions. Madame Guillin’s small fortune allowed Landru to give money to his wife and children for their expenses. In these troubled times, he experienced no difficulty in having the lady’s money and valuables handed over to him by using forged papers. As always, Landru took everything: money, valuables, jewellery, tablecloths, napkins, sheets, clothes, family papers and even the hairpiece she wore in her own hair. The hope Madame Guillin entertained with Landru lasted one-and-a-half months. Madame Héon As she was born in Le Havre, Madame Héon, a widow, was listed under the name of ‘Havre’ in fifth position on Landru’s list. He met her on 28 August 1915. Her fortune was not significant, some furniture and some savings, but her desire to remarry was great. She had lost all of her family, first her husband, then the man who had subsequently become her partner, her three children, a son and two daughters, in the course of a few years. Hence she was among the first to reply to the advert of Landru, also known as Petit, engineer, who sought a woman able to go and live with him in Tunisia. Landru introduced the possibility of a departure abroad at the outset, which allowed him to make sure that her emotional and domestic ties were loose enough. Madame Héon had no one in the world. She had no money, but Landru helped her to sell her daughter’s furniture, then her own. The departure was decided. She placed a small bitch she was very fond of in kennels and Landru offered to meet the cost. During a goodbye visit to a friend, Madame Héon asked her whether she would tend her children’s graves and said she was saddened at the thought of staying away for so long, since she would not come back from Tunisia for three years. Upon hearing his fiancée’s remark, Landru, who was not sentimental, dryly interjected that after all one did not live with the dead. Madame Héon and her friend were perplexed for a moment, but they were not overly alarmed. At the time, Landru had just left Vernouillet and was about to take possession of his other ‘professional space’,20 the villa of Gambais. Madame Héon’s disappearance occurred in December 1915. It was the first murder to take place in the house of Gambais. So for the first time, the notes recorded in Landru’s notebook specify the difference in the cost of the tickets: ‘one return ticket: 3,85 francs, one single: 2,40 francs.’21 No one retrieved Madame Héon’s small bitch and her kin’s graves remained untended. All of her personal objects as well as her identity papers were found in Landru’s garage. This ‘idyll’ lasted four months. Madame Collomb Madame Collomb, like many other women, and like Madame Guillin, replied to Landru’s advert published in Le Journal, 1 May 1915, and she also mentioned her ‘similar circumstances’.

Landru and women: three categories plus one 69

Sir, I decided to reply to your ad in today’s paper, I am thirty-nine years old. I am a widow without children and without family to speak of. I earn two hundred and ten francs per month in an office and, being thrifty and rather adept I managed to make some savings which, together with the little I had when my husband died, amount to eight thousand francs. To match Landru’s advert, Madame Collomb lied on two points. On the one hand, she pretended to be younger than she was, she was forty-four and not thirty-nine, on the other, she pretended to be without family, whereas her father, mother, brother and sister were very close to her. Landru and Madame Collomb met on 7 May 1915. Landru was not put off when he discovered that his fiancée had lied to him; he simply would need some time to succeed in removing Madame Collomb from this unexpected family. This undoubtedly postponed her death. First, Landru demanded of his mistress that she keep their engagement secret, and Madame Collomb spoke of him to no one. She regularly fronted money to her fiancé. He put this money towards the upkeep of his family, rewarded his children and repaid some debts. After a year, she ended up confiding in her sister. Landru could not refuse to meet with her on the coming Christmas Eve, but he made it clear that he had absolutely no intention of paying a visit to his future in-laws. On 26 December, Madame Collomb went alone to greet her parents, promising them that they would all celebrate the New Year together. The marriage was planned at this point, she had given notice on her flat, warned her employers that she was leaving her job and was preparing to go and live with her future husband. In an atmosphere in which Madame Collomb’s whole family found her fiancé evasive, bizarre and even disturbing, Landru nonetheless decided to make her disappear. They left for Gambais on 26 December. The following day, Landru came back to Paris alone. He had bought two singles and only one return. Madame Collomb’s assets and liquidities immediately appeared on Landru’s ledger, whereas on Christmas Eve he was completely destitute. The family waited for Madame Collomb and wondered for a while whether she was entirely taken up in her passion. Her sister had described her as passive and subjugated by her fiancé whom she obeyed blindly. However, quickly enough, the family initiated a private investigation, which yielded no results. In mid-January, Landru sent his son to a shopkeeper to pay off, in Madame Collomb’s name, a small debt incurred a few months previously, in order to make believe that the woman everyone thought to be his wife was still alive. The son was asked to add this totally bizarre detail: Madame Collomb was with a gentleman with whom she was having the time of her life. Then, Landru sent lilac, mimosa and roses to Madame Collomb’s family with her business card and a falsified postal label. In Landru’s garage, everything that belonged to Madame Collomb was found. It is undoubtedly because of her emotional and domestic ties that the goings on between Landru and Madame Collomb lasted 20 months.

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Andrée Babelay The case of Mademoiselle Andrée Babelay, sixth in the series, stands out in the succession of the missing fiancées whose cases were evoked in turn during the hearings and which all shared common features. It contradicted the stereotype of the choice of victims: they were widows with sufficient wealth and were recruited through adverts. She was 19 years old, a nanny for a fortune-teller and had no personal wealth. Landru met her in the underground on 10 March 1917 and he specified that he approached her when he saw that she was sad and on the verge of tears. She confided in him that she had no one in the world, having fallen out with her mother. How can we understand the unfolding of Landru’s story with Andrée Babelay? It can only be done in the light of Landru’s relationship with Fernande Segret, whom he also met by chance, whom he liked and who became, as we will see, his mistress. Inspector Belin, who arrested Landru, also drew a parallel between the young Andrée and the woman who would be his official mistress. Speaking of the girl, he wondered: ‘did Landru love this racy brunette as he later loved another mistress, the one he was living with when I arrested him? Why did he kill her after living together for a month?’22 Once again, Inspector Belin was sensitive to what did not fit in an otherwise ready-made trajectory. Who was Andrée Babelay? When Landru approached her, she introduced herself to him as someone who was adrift, without money, angry with her mother. Besides, she had just left a position; she had only recently started with her new employer. As was said of Landru, previously, by his schoolmates, she was also quite arrogant, often scornful. ‘Her demeanour and bearing permitted audacious approaches, she had an insolent gaze, wore eccentric outfits, concealing her real social situation with her ostentatious garb, always up for a passer-by’s banter and some frivolous chatter.’23 Her gaze, her whole manner, were defiant and as she cared little for others she didn’t think twice about taking objects belonging to her sister, her mother and people around her without asking. For example, upon recognising a black leather notebook, her sister, accustomed to Andrée’s personality, said: ‘I never gave it to my sister, but she must have taken it.’ She was said to be ‘unstable, moody, fickle’.24 She was unruly, told tall tales and frequently changed jobs and trades. She successively worked as a florist, with pearls, in a dairy-shop and as a maid in several houses. These ‘short stays in different jobs’ came in such quick succession that it was impossible to list them all during the investigation. It was always her that left, merely because she ‘did not want to go on’, because she tired quickly, but also because she was a bit megalomaniacal: it was never good enough for her. She was already uncomfortable at her current job. The investigating file concluded that she was lost in a ‘world that was fanciful, mythomaniac and maybe a little schizophrenic’.25 Did Landru recognise her as someone who was ‘isolated from everything’, an expression he used later with regard to himself when speaking to Fernande Segret? We can assume so, since money did not seem to be the motive for his interest in her. On the other hand, there were many other features in Andrée Babelay that mirrored his. In a postcard sent by Andrée to her mother, we read: ‘I think my

Landru and women: three categories plus one 71

employer is going to spend fifteen days away in the country, what luck, she’s such a bore!’ The term ‘bore’ was also found in one of Landru’s notebooks, applied to some ‘old women’, belying the precious worship he supposedly had for women. Was it Landru or Andrée who thought of this term? In any case, they shared the word and their contempt for others. Landru expected strength of character from the women who shared his life – probably the strength of character that he himself lacked. His mother protected him a lot, his wife safeguarded the family and we will see that Fernande Segret stood strong by his side. Could Landru discern the strength he was after in Andrée Babelay’s defiant and detached attitude, despite her tears, even though this attitude was probably a mere mask for the young girl’s puerility and instability? In fact, Andrée Babelay was a double of himself, without the character and solidity he would later find in his mistress. So the girl could not shelter him, since she seemed to echo the inconsistency that characterised him. In short, she became useless. She would have quickly become cumbersome, as she fulfilled neither need nor any other expectation. The utilitarian logic at play in Landru was not disproved in any way by the young girl’s disappearance. The young André Cuchet, too close to his mother, was also eliminated merely because he had to be. Other hypotheses, which do not invalidate ours in any way, were formulated during the trial: had there been a mistake as to the person? Andrée Babelay, who was described as ‘very elegant’, could have implied that she possessed some wealth. Another motive that was suggested for her rapid disappearance was the indiscretion she once committed and which Landru recalled in the dock to explain why the personal effects and identity papers of the young woman were found in his home: ‘One day, she was indiscrete enough to open a casket in which I had placed the papers of other people who had entrusted them to me, and this was what gave her the idea of handing me hers’,26 he said with ferocious irony. Let us reverse the pathological projection that can be read in Landru’s statement by returning the subjects to their place: it is of course Landru who had the idea of killing and of ‘taking the papers’. And the idea he imputed to the other surfaced at the appropriate moment like a trigger, a not-too-elaborate push-to-the-act. For him, an idea is the opposite of what an idea really is; it hacks through thought. One month after meeting Landru, on 12 April 1917, Andrée Babelay disappeared. Madame Buisson Madame Buisson’s response to the advert he had published reached Landru in May 1915, at the same time as those of other women, including Madame Guillin and Madame Collomb. He met her straight away. Madame Buisson had introduced herself in the right way: ‘I am a widow, I have 12,000 francs, I am forty-four years old, I have a son at the front, so I am alone and would like to make a fresh start.’ She quickly let him know, in a letter, that her son would not bother them – she preferred Landru: ‘I would prefer to be alone with you, to take care of you and to cherish you always, I like him well enough but you surpass him.’ Landru, on his

72 Serial Killers: Psychiatry, Criminology, Responsibility

side, wrote in his notes: ‘Has a 19-year old son, near Bayonne, one or two sisters, married an hotelier, was a maid, without funds, got the loot and furniture when the old man died, family jealousy.’ The crudeness of the statements found in these notes, like Landru’s violent outbursts of anger occasioned by minimal events (as related by his son) leaves no room for nuance. It evidences the quasi-instantaneous inversion of his mood. It was as if two personalities, themselves opposite, disjointed and unrelated to each other, corresponded to two opposing signifiers, the good or the bad for him. They sometimes emerged in relation to something disturbing, irritating or that did not fit and then ferocity ensued and sometimes in relation to something nourishing, sustaining and pacifying, in which case he was unctuous and mawkish. Unlike the theory of ‘multiple personalities’, the doubling I am talking about accounts for the subject’s foreclosed relation to himself, i.e. an impossibility of grasping, thinking, seeing oneself – a subject deprived of his reflexivity, whose states relate, point by point, to satisfaction or dissatisfaction. As such, as he was utterly occupied by his activities, or more precisely by his activism, he was deprived of any encounter with the other. And indeed, Landru was wholly dedicated to Madame Buisson while he was with her. Everyone said he had her under his thumb, he knew he could rely on her in all circumstances. One month after their meeting, Landru disappeared for six months, without having to fear that Madame Buisson would forget him. When he came back to her, he ascribed his prolonged absence to urgent business he had to attend to in Tunisia, and stepped back into his place as fiancé. In the meantime, three women who had nothing left to offer him had disappeared: Mesdames Laborde-Line, Guillin and Héon. Like Madame Collomb, Madame Buisson, who was very much in love, participated in the financing of Landru’s life and that of his family during the years 1916 and 1917. In Madame Buisson’s immediate entourage, there were only two sisters and her son who was away from Paris at the time. Landru got involved in the lives of these three women and helped one of them, Madame Paulet, who died of illness in hospital. This solicitude did not prevent Madame Lacoste, the other sister, from mistrusting him. She did not appreciate the fact that her sister, Madame Buisson, asked her to take in her son when he came back to Paris because she wanted to stay alone with Landru. She could not stand the fact that he was a kept man. She worried about his habit of interfering in family business. In July 1917, Landru was once more short of money and Madame Buisson did not have much more herself. In August, he left for Gambais with her, taking two singles and only one return. To alleviate Madame Lacoste’s suspicions, Landru stayed a while in Gambais with Madame Buisson, long enough to photograph her on a bicycle and send the photograph to her sister, then to write a few postcards in her name. On 1 September, at 10.15, Madame Buisson was murdered. The night before, there were only 88 francs left in Landru’s account. The following day, the amount went up to 1,125 francs. Landru paid back his creditors, gave money to his wife and a bonus to his son, made different purchases, sold some furniture and, using

Landru and women: three categories plus one 73

forged signatures, recovered all of Madame Buisson’s possessions. Of course, all of this was recorded and ciphered in his ledgers. Landru’s engagement with Madame Buisson lasted two years. There is no doubt that Landru was provided for by his mistress during the whole of this time. He even once said he would find it difficult to replace her, since she was a model woman. Some time after Madame Buisson’s disappearance, he gave notice on the flat she rented and gave the building manager a bag of apples she was supposed to have sent him from the country. Knowing that the building manager had always been very wary of him, Landru prepared a letter for her, which he wrote but presented as having been written to him by Madame Buisson. In this missive, she asked him to take care of a number of things, such as giving notice on her flat, moving her furniture and all of her possessions. In this forged letter27 we can read Madame Buisson’s love for him as well as the impossibility of being by his side: ‘I definitely won’t be able to spare even a day to come and help you, my poor darling.’ While he was at it, he gave himself carte blanche concerning her possessions: ‘everything you decide will be fine’, before concluding: ‘come back to me soon, work is piling up’. These two sentences justified Landru’s scheming; he could have left it at that. However, this conclusion was followed by an eminently enigmatic addition, enigmatic in its pointlessness and the queerness of its formulation: ‘The last two wagons of steel have arrived and the Director is impatiently awaiting the coal.’ This strange and oppressing sentence was linked to nothing, except an industry of sorts, whose director was waiting for the coal. Here again, who was this supreme and gratuitous irony addressed to? There was nothing useful here, the deceiving forgery was already well written, would such a sentence not, by contrast, risk drawing attention? But who was the Director, which Landru wrote with a capital D? It was he himself. And was this not the coal he needed? Here, just as with the alteration of the name Guillin into that of the engineer Guillet, we find something of the transparency of a subject manifesting itself against the grain of, or even at cross-purposes with, the goal supposedly being pursued of deceiving the other. This sentence seems to be written like an axiom, an original truth, outside of any context and outside of any discourse. What reality did it belong to? Madame Jaume Perhaps Landru met Madame Jaume through the system of the classified ads, or through the intermediary of a marriage broker. However it came about, Madame Jaume was trying to change the course of her destiny as fortune had yet to favour her; in fact, on the contrary, her destiny had been bitterly disappointing. Madame Jaume had married against her family’s wishes. She had not seen them since. Her parents were practising Catholics, standing hard and fast by their high principles and they had refused to see her. Then, her husband had left her. He moved to Italy, taking her dowry and squandering it. Courageously, Madame Jaume had set up as a dressmaker. She had saved a little money by the time she met Landru, in March 1917.

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Madame Jaume was considered a ‘woman with a blameless past, a discerning mind, a young and pleasant appearance and particularly distinguished’.28 Above all, she was a devout Catholic. The idea that divorce was forbidden by religion tormented her. How could she hope for a fresh start? Landru, appealing to ‘attractive tenderness’, specifying that he wanted to make a ‘marriage of the heart, where no question of interest interfered’, was able to touch her. Of course, in his ledger he recorded the donations he made to the Church of the Sacred-Heart. His time as a sub-deacon must have helped him to conform to what Madame Jaume expected of a good Catholic. Madame Jaume is a paradigmatic example of how little Landru cared for his victims; in his notes he referred to her variously, at the whim of his thoughts as: Barthélémy, her maiden name; Lyanes, the name of the street where she lived; and Chine, the name of the street where she worked. It took him a while to convince this very devout woman to become his mistress. During her first stay in Gambais, she had refused to spend the night there. Once she had surrendered to Landru’s eagerness, she only survived eight days. On 25 November 1917, Landru took Madame Jaume to Gambais, with two singles in his pocket and only one return. On 26 November, Madame Jaume disappeared. On the ledger, we can read: ‘Recuperation Lyanes: 274 francs.’ Then: ‘Sale of bonds: 1383 francs.’ Their story lasted eight months. Madame Pascal Landru met Madame Pascal in September 1916. She was a young, divorced woman of 36, from Toulon. She was pleasant and light. In the course of the investigation she was described as a loose, neurotic woman, who had had several liaisons. Unlike Madame Jaume, Madame Pascal did not trouble herself with religious scruples and it seems she became Landru’s mistress quite rapidly. She ran a small sewing workshop and she was noted for her elegance. Her impending marriage with a most suitable gentleman was the talk of the workshop. Since little was known of him he was even nicknamed the ‘mysteryman’. Madame Pascal was docile, undemanding and hard working. She ran her workshop but did not make a huge profit. Although he was acquainted with her for nearly two years and even though she was an avid and passionate lover, we cannot say that it was a real liaison for Landru. He hardly ever saw her; on the other hand, they exchanged burning letters. She wrote often, he sometimes replied. Landru’s ardour, and this is particularly true in this case, was not so much amorous ardour as an ardour directly proportional to the financial interests at stake. Four more profitable, or more urgent, affairs postponed Madame Pascal’s fateful hour. On 5 April 1918, Madame Pascal disappeared. There is a time next to her name on Landru’s notebook: 5h15. On the ledger, we can read the habitual mention of the two singles and the one return ticket. In the following days, he sold furniture and objects that belonged to Madame Pascal and even noted: ‘Received balance on account. Cash Pascal: 8,85 francs’.29 This sum corresponded, it would seem, to

Landru and women: three categories plus one 75

the money she had in her pocket when she died. Then Madame Pascal’s family in Toulon received a series of forged letters. During their relationship, Madame Pascal was surprised by a troubling aspect of Landru’s behaviour. She confided in a friend. She evoked a scene in which Landru, having made her sit in an armchair and loosen her hair, gazed at her with such fixity that she lost track of events. The hypothesis that Landru was a hypnotist was of course raised, but it was never established, nor taken seriously. Madame Pascal was passionate; Landru had no need to hypnotise her to get what he wanted from her. In her letters, she was the one who implored him to come and kiss her, reproaching him for being too distant. Did Landru’s strange behaviour aim to calm ‘the excessive temperament, the unhealthy and constantly unsatisfied passion’30 Madame Pascal was known for, or did he want to conduct an experiment to advance his ‘psychological study’ of women? Mademoiselle Marchadier On 25 December 1918, one month after the end of the war, Landru met Mademoiselle Marchadier, who was to be his last victim. They did not meet through classified ads, but through the intermediary of an agent. When questioning Landru, Judge Bonin spoke to him in the following terms: ‘It was M. Moret, a clerk you had dealings with since April 1918, who put you in touch with Mademoiselle Marchadier and who, on several occasions, acted on your behalf, at your request, to initiate matrimonial projects and deal with various affairs.’ Mademoiselle Marchadier was a former prostitute who had mended her ways in order to fulfil her dream of getting married. She rented out furnished lodgings, but her business was not going well. This is why she wanted to sell her business and furniture. The murder of Mademoiselle Marchadier is an enigma within the enigma. The case file and the numerous books dedicated to Landru show that the search for women through classified ads had stopped after Madame Pascal’s murder. It is very clear that, as soon as the war ended, Landru once again started to take interest in mechanics and industry and abandoned the recruitment of women. As I pointed out, Landru’s first murder had taken place shortly after the beginning of the war. Would Landru put a stop to his criminal acts now that the war had ended? Would the return to peace give him new ideas? Mademoiselle Marchadier’s murder, on 13 January 1919 in Gambais, disproved this hypothesis and more. The scenario unfolding between the encounter and Mademoiselle Marchadier’s disappearance took the least time and required the least energy possible from Landru, in a kind of ‘stripping bare’ of the real. Everything happened over three weeks. Is there something to understand here, in this double movement – on the one hand, a suspension of the search for women (which could have prefigured the end of the murders) and on the other, the haste of this last passage to the act?

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In the chapter dedicated to the passage to the act (p. 141ff) I will show how this last crime responded to its own logic. Nevertheless, Landru’s rationalisation, which constituted his personality and was the name of his madness, was still present in it, because it had to do with necessity and not contingency for him. Mademoiselle Marchadier’s murder occupied a specific place in the series, which is why I account for it later. We will see that this place can only be understood in the light of another encounter, between Landru and Madame Falque, a woman who occupied neither Fernande Segret’s place, nor that of a victim, but who, in the manner of a developing solution in photography, will expose what in Landru is ‘outside-discourse’. To conclude, we have to say that we do not know anything about the way in which Landru killed his victims. During the investigation, a letter signed with only the first name Alberte was sent to the Public Prosecutor. This woman wrote that she allowed herself to be seduced and taken to Gambais by ‘the abominable Landru’. She supposedly discovered ‘under the bolster of the bed a rope tied as a lasso’; Landru felt her neck several times with his fingers, saying laughingly: ‘When I think that all it would take to send you in another world is to squeeze a little harder, what a little thing a human life is!’31 We leave it to the reader to judge the value of this testimony, in view of the fact that this letter is short, states nothing else and does not seem to fit with Landru’s way of speaking. The person added that if she had to conceal her identity, it was because she had since married a very ‘honourable man’. Out of all the numerous anonymous letters they received, the investigators seem to have given some credit to this one. All the more so since, during the house searches, they had found spools of saddler’s twine in Gambais, a twine dipped in pitch used by saddlers to sew thick leather. We can add that, during the trial, Landru admitted having strangled Mademoiselle Marchadier’s small dogs and that, according to him, this was ‘the gentlest and most humane of deaths’.32 And long before he became Landru the murderer, when he was incarcerated for the first time for his swindling, a prison guard found him tying a rope into a slipknot to hang himself. Finally, his father, as I mentioned earlier, had hung himself in the Bois de Boulogne.

An impossible dehumanisation The story and salient features of each of the women murdered by Landru left an indelible impression on their friends and families, an outline of their personality, a memory. The absurd ignorance of any such impression confirms, if need be, Landru’s madness. His sterile fabrications to make people believe that these women simply left him one morning, for no reason and without luggage, have to do with this dis-alienation which manifests itself as a freedom detached from any social bond, from any sharing in the register of the understanding and signification of exchange. Such freedom uncovers a subject for whom the texture of life tends to vanish, like the weight of reason.

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Landru’s explanations, which aimed to make people think that these women were still alive after their trip to Gambais, relied on no fact, no daily habit, no way of behaving that would have been specific to them – quite the contrary. Landru’s fabrications always stood alone, disconnected from the people in question: they were a kind of hypothetical tinkering, badly put together, most often dissonant with each person’s life. By contrast with the purely formal truism which Landru ceaselessly reiterated during the trial (that they left as they had come and that everyone is free to behave as they see fit), none of these women could have left the picture without ever giving any news. Landru’s inventions did not withstand the testimonies of the parents, friends and neighbours who knew them and who came to the witness box to restore the sensitive, singular and human dimension of a mother, a sister, a friend . . . According to her employer, ‘Madame Cuchet had never shown the desire to expatriate herself’. Her sister and brother-in-law, with whom she had fallen out a little because of Landru, continued: ‘If my sister was alive, I would certainly have heard from her. She could never have lived abroad; she liked Paris too much. And then she had a good heart, my sister would not let this man stand accused. And her furniture, would she have left it behind? She was so organized!’33 Madame Laborde-Line said goodbye to her building manager as she left to live with her fiancé. She asked him to hold her mail and to open it: ‘Later, you will come to see me.’34 Her caretaker never saw her again. About Madame Guillin, we learned that she could not have left her furniture behind, she liked it so much. The only plausible reason would have been her leaving for Australia, as her fiancé had promised: she would have had to get rid of it then. But this departure never took place and the fiancé was standing in the dock. Madame Collomb’s sister told, with great emotion, of her surprise at the fact that she did not see in the New Year with her, as was her custom. Instead, she received a bouquet of flowers delivered by Landru’s son. This bouquet, instead of reassuring her, made her feel uneasy and concerned. ‘There was no reason, indeed, for my sister to have left us without news, as we had the tenderest relations.’35 During the trial, the particular subjectivities of every woman were thus successively reconstituted in testimony after testimony. Madame Pascal left for Gambais with a small cat she was very fond of. She sent a postcard to her building manager: ‘My cat and I are both disorientated in Gambais.’36 The body of this cat, killed by Landru, was found buried in the garden. Speaking of the loving animal that his fiancée was so fond of, Landru said casually: ‘I see what you’re driving at, I killed a small cat, male or female, I don’t really know; the animal was lost, mangy, it probably had rabies, I simply buried it in the garden.’37 Landru could express his contemptuous ferocity at the cat, since it was just a cat and it showed what an object reduced to the level of useless waste could be for him, an object that had to be got rid of without any further ado. The audience picked up on the antiphrasis, the extrapolation to women travelled through the courtroom and whispers attesting to a frisson of horror rippled through the public gallery. There was such a big gap between Landru’s way of speaking

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and the tender feeling that Madame Pascal had for her pet. This feeling was foreign to Landru and he was not able to keep up appearances, to maintain semblance, when speaking of it. Mademoiselle Marchadier left for Gambais with three small dogs. The bodies of her animals, so dear to her, were recovered, as we know, under a heap of dead leaves. Causing general stupefaction, because she profoundly loved the little dogs she never parted from, Landru affirmed: ‘Mademoiselle Marchadier gave me a direct order to kill these animals because the cost in food and taxes was too high.’38 Although there was astonishment among all those who listened to Landru, the relation between the true and the probable was never examined by the experts. Everyone in the Assize Court had grown accustomed to Landru’s way of answering subtle questions and did not know how to make him speak truthfully. He, who always replied with scathing detachment and irony, would certainly have answered any question about Mademoiselle Marchadier’s supposed request with a pure sophism. Namely, that reasons belonged to each person and that if the person was not present, then nothing could be known of what she did or did not say. Clearly, for him, and beyond the usual mockery, the evocative power of words did not mean much and seemed deprived of its function of historicisation. But did Landru have a history? When Landru was questioned about the missing women, his story never referred to the recent or more distant past; quite the contrary, his story always stopped on a word, the secret, and on private life as an ‘impassable wall’. This wall emerged as the ultimate signifier of an impossible confession, a signifier he opposed to any attempt to know, like a wall indeed, protecting one against intrusion. So these words, the secret, the wall of private life, repeated like a refrain, lost their meaning and only served in their use-value: as protective walls. These words were not linked with any other; they bore no knowledge and captured no signification. They were without dialectic. So they were like small pieces of ‘equivalents of being’. Behind the insurmountable wall of private life, there was nothing to know. Thus, Landru’s last protection, the only possible one, was that of the subject of law, the formal law of a subject who did not have to justify himself, whatever the circumstances. Landru could only resort to a subject who, in the name of the right to self-determination, could say everything, anything, a subject not divided by shame. It was this subject of pure independence that he projected onto his victims, certifying and maintaining to the whole world that they could decide to vanish at a given time without a trace, all of a sudden, without explanation, without justifying themselves to anyone, a subject entirely separated from a bond to the other; a subject who did not exist. In so doing Landru projected onto his victims, as in a mirror, his own de-socialisation, which led him to act independently of any moral law. His inhumanity had to do with the fact that he enacted the extremism of a delusional maxim, because he heard it without metaphor: one has the right to do anything to provide for one’s own. In relation to this maxim, he appeared as a subject devoid of any critical recourse,39 as a dead subject.40 A subject of

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abnegation, as Lacan characterises him when speaking of Monsieur Verdoux and whose ‘error . . . deserves to be dealt with severely, since a little lesson from the Critique, which does not cost much, would have helped him avoid it. No one doubts but that the practice of Reason would have been both more economical and more legal, even if his family would have had to go hungry now and then.’41 In this text Lacan referred to the character of the film and notes: ‘. . . “But what’s with all these metaphors”, you will say, and why . . .?’42 In so doing he left room for a more precise and more documented reading of the Landru case. But he also showed that the human bond, strictly speaking, has to do with what fails, what does not go smoothly and is part of a collective calculation, a collective economy understood in the broad sense of a civilisation. Beyond that, no autonomous stance set up as a way of life, no mathematical or accounting rigour is tenable. With Landru, we are faced with the rigour of a principle of acting that is not without an echo of the maxim of the Kantian subject, however far we may be from it. For Kant, the subject’s maxim must rid itself of its particular content, to accede to a universal form: ‘So act that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle in a giving of universal law.’43 By contrast, for Landru there was only a particular maxim, which was not in a process of becoming and which already pretended to equal the universal, namely: ‘Act in such a way as to provide, by any means, for the needs of your kin.’ This maxim could indeed not accede to the universal, not only because it did not strive to, but also because it contained in itself, through simple logical deduction, the possibility of the destruction of humanity. In this sense, Landru was not Kantian: his implacable personal law opposed the universal, it was independent of any common sense,44 it was there ab initio and developed without flaw, without lack and above all without horizon. It is good to be charitable. But to whom? That is the question. A certain Monsieur Verdoux answered this question every day.45 The fractionated ideal thereby became a commandment from a new order, from a discriminating, separating order. The law of the isolated syntagm, breaking the associating chains of knowledge, was not developed by way of a subject, but rather the law included the subject himself as an object of its progression. Landru indeed advanced in a kind of mad abnegation; he himself was instrumentalised, turned into a machine in his own industry. I have already evoked, with regard to Mr Verdoux, the automation that Chaplin shows us through the recurrent image of the locomotive and the rhythmic turning of the axles. In fact, Landru appears to be a subject centred on a psychical deathliness. His maximalist rigour was a psychotic rigidity. In Landru, a theory is elaborated where the pure subject of rigour serves as a substitute for an impure subject of a misrecognised jouissance. Yet it is the latter that confers upon the subject his uncertain, faltering, indecisive and divided

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share, in short his humanity. In this theory, a portion of human beings fall prey to dehumanisation, under the mark of mass phenomena, and fall, literally, to the level of material objects, in other words, without metaphor, to the level of objects of need. This is very far from neurotic or perverse renditions in which the woman is construed as an object of fantasy. The object of need is, on the contrary, a delibidinalised object and belongs to a dimension in which animate and inanimate objects follow one another in succession, in a perfect and absolute material equivalence. In short, this other dimension specific to modernity is the rule of quantity. Even though women were involved, for Landru, the other person serves not so much as sexual enjoyment, but rather as enjoyment of a commodity reduced to its numerical worth (valeur comptable). In so doing, he is disinscribed from the symbolic order. An indication of this destitution can be found even in his notebooks. Under the name of André Cuchet, the first name on the fatal list, we read: ‘J id’, which means: J idem, namely Jeanne, who bore the same name as her son, Cuchet. The disappearance of the proper name behind the term idem reveals, with regard to Jeanne Cuchet amongst others, the way in which Landru dis-inscribed people from the category of the human. As we know, some other women were listed under the name of the street in which they lived – Crozatier, Lyanes – or under the name of their country of origin – Havre, Brazil. In the ledgers – expenses and income – Landru the accountant wrote numbers instead of people. The words that escaped him during the trial are of the same order and confirmed the destitution of the other: ‘What is indeed surprising is that not one of my supposed victims was found. That they were not all found does not surprise me, but that not one, not half of one was found, then I no longer understand!’46 Does Landru’s treatment of the other have a Sadean dimension? The Sadean subject must abide by some rules in order to enjoy, to extract the other’s modesty from him, the very secret of his jouissance. The Sadean pervert does not misrecognise the limit, since he makes it exist permanently as the cause of his will to jouissance. Without this limit, the signification and the pleasure that he gets out of ceaselessly pushing it further, thereby verifying its existence, would be lost. In a Sadean scenario, a master of ceremony arranges the libidinal relations and defines postures of jouissance for the bodies, postures which tend to the extreme of what is bearable before breaking up, in order to reform, identically. These figures then create infinitude beyond finitude: that of the return of the same subjected to the will and desire to push the limit always a little bit further. However, the master does not take his victims beyond the limit of the living, because deadening belongs to a scenario. His immobility has to do with the death drive, but it is not death. The master enjoys by aiming for the limit in the other, the limit of his modesty, the limit of his pain, the limit of his subjective division. To target it, the other must be alive, what is to be extracted is knowledge about being, knowledge about jouissance but not the flesh of a corpse. There is no doubt that the Sadean subject perversely seeks knowledge about himself: this is why he is not without limit. Jouissance binds itself to the other, to the divine detail which fetishises him,

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but it certainly does not attach itself to either his material goods or his money, which deliver no knowledge about the jouissance of being and the body. Landru is not Sadean. Landru is not a sexual pervert. Landru is not a pervert.

Landru in love In Landru’s life, a relation to one woman, Fernande Segret, resembled a love story, a love story between a man and his mistress. They lived together and Fernande was by his side when he was arrested. Fernande Segret occupied a particular place for him and it did not fail to also intrigue the investigators. Landru lavished gifts and attention upon her and wrote her love letters. During the investigation, a question quickly imposed itself: ‘Should one consider Fernande Segret as a future victim of the accused?’ And it was answered in the following way: It does not seem so. First, because this individual had nothing to gain by her disappearance: she lived at her mother’s, owned no furniture, had no wealth except for a few small pieces of jewellery of little value. It would therefore seem that he was attracted to her for an entirely different reason once he knew her situation. The motive would be the passion that Miss Segret was able to inspire in this man.47 Fernande Segret did not immediately appear as Landru’s only mistress. The investigation revealed that other sustained liaisons could pretend to the privileged status of lover and mistress. He had relatively long affairs with, amongst others, Mesdames Pon, Rouget and Leroi. But the file specified: These liaisons are different again from the one the accused had with Mademoiselle Segret. If he sent flowers from time to time to these three women, if he conceded to go for a walk or an evening show, he gave no consequent sums of money to any one of them, although they asked for it.48 Were they fiancées in reserve? This is the most likely hypothesis. This was not the case for Fernande Segret, who received considerable sums of money from him, who was the only one to appear in Landru’s so-called ‘familial’ ledger, in which, under numbers one to six, his wife (number one), he himself (number two) and his four children by order of birth where inscribed. Fernande Segret was number seven. So she was the only woman who, next to the lawful wife, entered the familial absolutism. Landru started to give her money and buy her presents only a few months after they met. What is more, he bought a fur for Madame Segret, her mother, writing down in his notebook: ‘For mother’s fur’. He referred to her as number seven bis, an extension of number seven. He did not individualise his mother-in-law, who was nothing else than Fernande’s mother and could therefore not have a full and whole number.

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Landru’s rigour, because it is entirely subordinated to his logic, cannot be faulted. It surfaces, infallibly, in the inventorying of minute details which comes to situate the other where Landru does not succeed in recognising it. Such elements are what confer the strange, bizarre nature upon this character, but this peculiarity extends well beyond what could make us smile. His fundamental peculiarity is close to something disturbing and uncanny. In his numbering, for example, we saw that Landru did not bother to register Fernande’s mother under a number representing her, simply with the number eight which would follow number seven, her daughter’s number. He designated her with the notation of a bis. Was he not, in so doing, inscribing only the natural and consubstantial bond between mother and daughter, thereby erasing the register of nomination by the proper name, a cultural arbitrariness specific to the symbolic order? Here again, accountancy annulled humanity and organised new laws in a ciphered, quantified world. In that world, as we saw about his first victim Jeanne Cuchet, he did not repeat her proper name, but ‘id.’, idem thus, to signal that she bore the same name as her son. In the same way, he said, speaking to no one in particular: ‘Me, a murderer of twelve people, eleven of whom were women!’ ‘And I burned ten or twelve women with not even fifty kilos of coal, this is laughable!’49 The inventorying is the sign where the trace of the imaginary is condensed, reduced. So a ‘new imaginary’50 emerges which, as we see, did not enable the subject to put himself in the place of the other: an imaginary without substance, without a scenario, which in this case is merely the pure real of what cannot be signified and which nonetheless persists in the number. It was undoubtedly because of Fernande’s place of exception in Landru’s life that the investigators thought that he could experience a feeling, a comprehensible feeling – love. They noticed that Landru modified his usual behaviour for Fernande Segret. Thus, they noted: ‘Such attention from this individual to his mistress’s mother, nearly at the beginning of their relation, already lends credence to the emergence of an affectionate feeling which Landru had never shown in similar circumstances before.’51 Looking closely at Landru and Fernande’s story only confirmed their suppositions. Landru showered Fernande with attentions, offering her gloves and shoes, spending evenings with her at the Opera-Comique – a treat he was particularly fond of and which he undoubtedly shared with her, an opera singer. But this is nothing yet in comparison to the sums of money she received from him, even before they lived together. When they did, these expenses appeared, unsurprisingly, under the name of ‘domestic expenses’ in his accounting. Their liaison lasted two years. It was only interrupted by Landru’s arrest. A few months before, they had moved in together and lived as man and wife. The file established that during their liaison Landru gave Fernande the significant amount of 3,667 francs. The investigation concluded that Fernande Segret ‘occupied in Landru’s life a place that no other woman had occupied’.52 In the week before the beginning of the trial, Fernande told her love story through a tale in several episodes – ‘Memories of a survivor’53 – published in Le Journal. Let us ask ourselves what this love was made of.

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Having obtained a few days off, in the month of May 1917, Fernande Segret went out with a friend to run some errands. She had barely sat in the tram when she noticed a man looking at her. In front of me, a gentleman of about forty, looking very proper, even tidy, watched me fixedly while unctuously stroking his opulent black beard; I had never felt a gaze so searching and of such daring fixity bear down upon me before.54 Landru smiled at her seductively then saluted her in a charming voice. He asked whether he could accompany her a short way. Fernande resisted the invitation. He had to battle for a while and, faced with the categorical refusal she opposed him with, ‘he tried a supreme resource: pity’. By dint of insistence, he obtained an appointment for the following day. Intrigued by this strange man, Fernande Segret went with the intention of turning him away. To this end, she extolled the merits and qualities of her fiancé who was at the front. However, little by little, Landru gained her friendship by telling her of his lonely childhood, between an adored mother and a selfish, stern father. He continued by telling her the story of a life interspersed with misfortunes and disruptions: a refugee from the North because of the war, having lost his factory and his goods, a widower, overwhelmed by the death of his parents and especially of his mother so dear to him, he begged to be her confidant. He offered her a friendship he put at her service so that she could confide in him and dispel any concerns she might have. As he had previously wearied his mother with his relentless caresses, he soon gave Fernande no respite. From the first meetings, the young woman felt this insistence she could not extricate herself from: ‘In short, he talks, talks, talks.’55 He was always in her way, showering her with affectionate words, even going so far as writing her letters full of pathos. He ended up becoming agreeable and familiar to her. He then tried to ask her to marry him: Fernande refused. From the outset Fernande proved to have a strong personality. She was not expecting, like others, the providential man, a husband to lean on. Had she not dismissed him firmly at the time of the first encounter? He had answered her then: ‘the clarity of your attitude is to my liking’.56 In a letter to her, he wrote: To you, who are smart enough not to ask too much of me at once . . . A greater feeling, I fear, than affection attracts me to you and grows every day as I discover in you the so precious treasures of heart and mind, a rare thing and unfortunately held in little regard nowadays. Where will I go, my very dear friend, in your pretty wake and where are you taking me? What will I be for you?57 For her part, Fernande was also very close to her mother. The two women could offer Landru a strong and stable familial anchoring in which he could find shelter. Her strength could have placed Fernande in the position of a masterful woman for

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Landru, who then returned to a place he knew, that of the child clinging to his mother’s skirts. The responsibilities of marriage and especially of the family had somewhat ousted him from that place and from then on without a compass, he had started looking in the world for a stability he did not succeed in finding, since he lacked a guarantee in the Other. Is the strength he found in Fernande the precious thing she possessed? A possession he would be able to enjoy, on which he tried to lean, a possession just as real, just as concrete, but which was not material. It was an object of a different order from the goods to be extracted from the women of need. This possession required Fernande to be alive so she would continue to lavish it upon him. Fernande indisputably had maternal fibre. We can discern this in the answer she gave to those who asked whether Landru happened to have, perchance, agitated nights, filled with nightmares? ‘He rested like a child’, she says, ‘lying next to him, I have watched him sleep countless times. All women are mothers and worry even about the sleep of those they love. His sleep was quiet, he breathed quite regularly. It was the breath of a healthy man, who takes his rest without a care in the world.’58 The maternal place which Fernande occupied by caring for him, without expecting a reward in return, without demanding anything, without asking him for what he could not give, raised her to the rank of an adored woman whose servant knight he would be and he told her that, along with his mother, she was the person he loved the most in the world. He claimed that she would therefore no longer have to work and he told her about his big industrial projects. Here we can hear the muffled echo of what he ceaselessly repeated to his wife at the beginning of their marriage: ‘You will see, we will be rich.’ Fernande was conquered; Landru then set out to seduce her mother and family. He succeeded, and an engagement date sealed the promise of marriage in reality. But this promise, which cloaked the wish to settle next to Fernande, this strong and benevolent other next to whom he could rest, must face reality and it did not survive it any more than the rest. For the logic of the real is stronger than reality; it dictates its law. We know that Landru’s lies are not lies but a mythomania that carried him away. Could love have, for him, another structure than the one of empty signifiers that we have encountered thus far? On the engagement day, as the family gathered together waiting for him, mother and daughter each received a letter from Landru in which he apologised for not being able to be there. The letter was evasive; to explain his absence, he vaguely evoked events in connection with the war. He especially expected Fernande to understand him and he relied on the ‘reason and strength of character’ he appreciated in her to help her bear ‘this small bother among so many others generated by this war in an appropriate way and without after-thought’.59 As always, his morbid projection made him reverse the roles: it is he who, now, tells Fernande: ‘Prove once again that you can be a woman of action.’60 Was he not asking her for what was missing in him, the proof of love through a commitment in reality, the

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unconditional support he himself could not give? Something that counts in a way that is not simply in numbers; something that counts through the metaphor of love. For, as far as he was concerned, irony had resumed its hold. Landru answered Fernande’s disappointment at not having seen him on their engagement day with a series of obvious observations. He pointed out to her, in passing, that on the occasion of her engagement her two brothers were themselves absent (they were at the front), that the moment was ill-chosen and that the time was not right for family celebrations. He pointed this out to Fernande, who had not asked for anything, as the idea of the engagement was his. Fernande’s mother, more cautious than her daughter, worried about this enigmatic defaulting and commissioned an investigation in the Northern city where he supposedly lost all his possessions and, in particular, his factory. It had never existed and no one knew him over there. Mrs Segret henceforth wanted to oppose the relation and the two women quarrelled. Landru, in order to win over both mother and daughter, increased his attentions and assiduity. He rented a small apartment very near them, Rue de Rochechouart, in order for Fernande to come and live there, and he offered them a reconciliation evening by inviting them to the opera. At the end, he drove them home where a sumptuous supper, striking in its excess, awaited them. The spectacle he gave of himself that evening was indeed unusual. It was not an apartment we entered, but a veritable greenhouse, the dining room was nothing less than an immense basket of flowers. All the furniture was decorated with flowers. I have never seen such a profusion of colours and various essences. He had, as if with jealous care, known how to mix humble violets with the rarest gardenias. Everything was arranged with such a skilful harmony of hues, such an art in the disposition of the bouquets, that my mother and I looked at each other utterly dumbfounded. To which he added: ‘there was still one flower lacking, little Fernande, the most exquisite of all, and you know exactly what I mean.’61 Curiously, this allusion disturbs the clarity of the metaphor. Was Landru only adding to the compliment he had just paid her: ‘you are a flower amongst flowers’, or was he asking her to come and live with him? Was he expecting something else, something more? Fernande, who was certainly used to his elliptical manner of speaking, made no comment: she kept silent. There was something disconcerting in all of this. But Fernande was never disconcerted by Landru and thanks to her kindness and docility, she gave him credit, she gave weight to his speech, she moulded herself over the cracks of the subject, his extravagances, his delusions she espoused out of love. In this way she could sustain the man she loved in all circumstances, without fail and – as Lacan says of Nora, James Joyce’s wife – it seems that she fit him like a glove. The choice of flowers was not a random one for Landru. Flowers are everywhere: at the least opportunity, he sent enormous bouquets to the fiancées, to seduce them,

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to conquer them anew or to make them wait. The expense was carefully noted in the ‘investments’ section of his notebooks. He had used them to make Fernande’s mother accept him. Before meeting her, he had a superb bunch of flowers delivered: ‘a few minutes before, a courier from one of Paris’s biggest florists had brought a magnificent basket garnished with white roses from him’.62 Where Landru lacks as subject, he is represented by flowers. However, if we can believe for one moment that Landru’s feeling of love went through these flowers, we notice very quickly through Fernande’s tales that the feeling in question was a dead feeling, a ‘dead love’.63 The dead feeling corresponds to the empty signifier. As he decorated their future apartment, Landru asked Fernande to give him a portrait of her. What the portrait was to become did not surprise Fernande, but it leaves us perplexed: He placed it in his room, at the best place. And every day, he filled a vase, which he had placed very close to my picture for this purpose, with my favourite flowers. Not a day passed in which he did not renew the bouquet destined to honour the thought of me in this way.64 In honouring the thought of her, Landru venerated the iconified Fernande as one venerates the memory of the dead by decorating their tomb with flowers or by changing the bouquet in front of the portrait of the dear departed every day. Here we could think of Auguste Comte who built a real religion (complete with altar and chapel) around his love for Clotilde de Vaux. But while Auguste Comte celebrated the memory of his beloved after her death, Landru lived in a crepuscular and deadened reality. In spite of Landru’s repeated homage and displays, Fernande still waited for the promised wedding. A serious argument erupted between them on this subject and they stopped seeing each other for a while. However, Fernande, knowing ‘him to be so bizarre and so complex’, fearing that without her, distraught, he would commit some ‘irreversible act’, walked one evening under his windows. Seeing a light and seized by a loving impulse, she went up to the apartment. She found the door open, came in and arrived, anguished, at the threshold of the room. A real macabre production had been prepared there. In its usual place, I found my portrait, all veiled in crepe and immediately in front of it, a chair placed like a pew led one to think that he had meditated there as one does before an idol or a holy picture. The floor was strewn with wilted roses, thrown there willy-nilly! On a piece of paper these words were written, taken from Faust’s libretto: ‘Vain echoes of human joy, pass, be on your way.’65 Fernande was undoubtedly an object of veneration, but this veneration reduced her to being no more than a petrified idol, which Landru honoured constantly and without respite, with or without black crepe on the portrait, depending on the circumstances. Landru certainly wanted to love this woman, but his love was caught, like the rest, in a specific conception which annulled its signification.

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What took its place? Fernande described Landru as always fussing around her. He talked constantly, read enormously, wrote ceaselessly, words flooded his mind. She depicted him, during the life they shared, as a man with a frantic intellectual activity, devouring the classics – Alexandre Dumas, Alfred de Musset, Victor Hugo – but also the psychological novels of his time. Paul Bourget’s Le Disciple was his bedside book, next to L’amour obligatoire (Obligatory Love) by the Comtesse de Tramar, or the stories of the Grandes empoisonneuses (The Great Poisoners). ‘When he wasn’t reading to me, he told me his life story’,66 Fernande Segret continued, and we know that he had infinite versions. When there was nothing to do they went to the cinema. Finally, even the meals were taken in song – their daily refrain was: ‘Here is Manon’s little table’. Here again, excesses and overflowing emotions characterised Landru. The subject was but a proliferation of signifiers at the limit of consistency, because sense did not matter: what did matter above all was to fill the void. Words were the supports of fabrication and acted more in the manner of an enjoying substance than as constituent power, it would seem. So nothing came to punctuate this unlimited jouissance, this all-invasive jouissance. His dialogues with Fernande were but a long monologue. The words of love, the tales and the readings he bestowed upon her asked for nothing, expected no answer, the Other of love was inexistent, Landru’s autism took up all of the space. It was a parody of love playing itself out and the veneration Landru had for Fernande annulled them both as subjects. ‘So the days went by, quietly and without clashes.’67 Yet, this happiness was peppered with Landru’s irregular comings and goings, his sudden absences, repeated and unexplained. Solemnly, on 1 January 1919, he finally justified his behaviour to her. Finally, as always, he found an explanation: Driven by the necessities of life, during the war, I had to accept to be part of the Sûreté. And if this morning, you find me at the ready, it is because I am obliged to find information on some questions of inheritance and on various shady trade agencies. He then left again and, upon his return, declared: I received an order from the prefecture enjoining me to go out of Paris to settle some urgent business and, as you can see, I have not wasted any time. I had to run for more than an hour in the middle of the countryside in order not to miss the train that brought me back to you.68 Fernande Segret noticed he must have exerted himself greatly, as his features were drawn and his face pale. During dinner, he continued: I am very happy, I have just made an excellent deal, for 3,000 francs I bought furniture worth a lot more. If you hear of someone in the area who wants to buy furniture, let me know. Anyway, I am keeping the bedroom furniture for us.69

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Fernande Segret did not trouble herself with the discordance between a mission for the Sûreté Générale and furniture dealing. Between Landru’s departure and his return, Mademoiselle Marchadier had disappeared. Fernande Segret was no more able to pin Landru down to what he said and confront him with it than the investigators and the lawyers. Landru did not speak truly, not to Fernande nor to anyone else. Contrary to what one might think, to what one might expect from an amorous discourse, Fernande Segret was no exception; she did not escape this absence of dialectics. This only makes the dissociation in Landru between words and effect all the more striking. It is, in itself, an immense disorder of language: a disorder in which Landru circulated; it hollowed out meaning and replaced it with a jouissance close to mania. But what was certainly true in this union, and which gave Landru’s behaviour its tinge of sincerity, lies in the fact that, in accordance with his mode of jouissance, Landru held on (literally speaking) to Fernande as the bark holds onto the tree. He wrote to her: ‘I am by nature, by my life, by my material and moral solitude, a loner, closed up on myself, on everything . . . Everything is barren without you.’ And he told her: ‘My darling, you will see how much I will love and adore you, but swear you won’t leave me again, for you would then sign my death warrant.’70 In a later chapter dedicated to Landru’s madness, we will read and comment very closely on another letter that Landru wrote to Fernande. There, we will see the extent to which the distortion of language and syntax destroyed any poetic metaphor for him, any metaphor of love, and evidences a confusion of subjectivities. For Landru, everything points to the fact that if there is no other to sustain him, no social other, no other of love, death is at the core of the subject. Landru and Fernande were not brought together during the pre-trial investigation. At the trial, Fernande Segret testified, distressed, she struggled and fainted twice, while Landru remained impassive and immobile, his eyes shut.

The mother Landru often talked about his mother, his first love object. Did he say something more about her, something sincere, something true? It is the investigation file that tells us what we know here, not Landru’s own tale or memories. We know very little about her, except that her life was full of painful events. Her father died in the lunatic asylum of Clermont, in the Oise; her brother committed suicide at the age of 20. One of her sisters was considered a neuropath and another of her brothers died of meningitis at the age of 18. From what time had Madame Landru been the woman described as an emotional and impressionable person? We do not know, but the dramas that punctuated her youth could not allow her to blossom or be carefree. Her life as a woman, a wife and a mother was not spared either. After having had a daughter, she gave birth to a second child and lost it almost immediately. She remained ‘mentally ill’ during the two years that followed the death

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of this child. She was henceforth liable to crises of ‘cerebral congestion’, one of which resulted in hemiplegia. She was still psychologically fragile when expecting her third child, Henri-Désiré. The signifiers of death and madness accompanied the maternal family history and hovered over Landru’s birth. Of Landru’s childhood, of the affection that he had for his parents, we learn, through a neighbour’s tale, that he was above all an affectionate child with his mother. He covered her with kisses and bothered her with his relentless caresses. In his childhood, Landru wove a unique bond with his mother, but a particularly one-sided one that did not include the father and his function, the father and his relation to his wife. She was his first and only point of support. He could thus only sustain himself with an image (as we will see in the next section dedicated to the father) which was not inscribed in any triangular dialectics, but whose function as model, as specular double, nonetheless gave the subject an anchoring point. This is the matrix of an imaginary identification in psychosis which Lacan speaks of and that we evoked earlier: The subject will have to bear the weight of this real, primitive dispossession of the signifier and adopt compensation for it, at length, over the course of his life, through a series of purely conformist identifications with characters who will give him the feeling for what one has to do to be a man.71 And these identifications, which are barely anchored in the symbolic, can be infinite. In Landru’s case, the mother seems to have occupied the place of a model, a safeguarding double, a real and faultless support he grew up alongside, a place which he may well have found once again next to his wife and Fernande. And indeed he made his way in a feminine world, in the face of which any element endowed with a phallic coloration, any masculine element, was perceived as intrusive and threatening. The mother was a shelter who allowed him to hold on, to grow, to learn. In adult life, when he moved away from his mother, Landru remained linked to the signifier of the mother, a totemic figure, a figure to whom he referred every question, as if she carried within herself the whole causality of the subject. We have already evoked Landru’s answer to Madame Guillin who, spotting a heap of clothes, shoes and trinkets through the keyhole of a locked room in the Vernouillet house, asked him: ‘So are you seeing other women?’ To which he responded ‘it’s my poor mother’s bedroom, my mother whom I lost.’72 He added that he sometimes went there on his own to collect himself and, being the good son he was, to think of her who no longer was. So he truly worshipped his mother and in this way he softened his future victims. In the innumerable form-letters he wrote to recruit his fiancées, he never forgot to mention his mother: ‘Until now, I have lived alone with my mother in the house where my father founded a small business which I took on upon his death. My mother, who died at the end of 1913, left me alone and without any family.’73

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There is no doubt that this was a cynical use, furthering the objective we know. But still, this evocation was systematically the one he used to phrase his argument. We can also read: ‘The only affection of my life was worshipping my mother and now I will wholly belong to the woman able to bring together elevated feelings and a loving and gentle nature.’74 The lack of agreement between tenses and people show that he did not necessarily look for the features of the mother in a woman, not the essential features that characterise her, but the mother in her totality and in her eternity, as timeless and trans-substantial. Here again, everything blends together, as in the letters he sent to Fernande. As we mentioned above, it was not about his mother, but the mother as a signifying image or as imaginary signifier, a spectral, evanescent figure as well as a concrete support for the subject. This is why we can wonder whether Landru had a history. Here, history is reduced to a topography. The signifier ‘mother’ remained what he referred to as the origin of all things. To be clear, Landru never said what his mother really was for him or what he thought he was for her. Instead, the mother was a primary and ultimate signifier that condensed all of the answers. ‘My mother’ was therefore a privileged signifier, a frozen signifier, a buffer signifier which in itself revealed what the son’s relation to the mother was, a holophrased,75 inextricable, inseparable (un-séparable) relation, a bis-signifier in a way. Landru’s being stuck to his mother was something of the order of a non-differentiation of subjects,76 far removed from the Oedipal question. His bond with Fernande Segret shows to what extent he aspired to disappear in this other made for him. The same bond resulted in a letter to the public prosecutor Godefroy, because it was constitutive of the subject himself and it is this constitution that we wanted the reader to grasp. The relation to the mother was a mad modality of love in Landru, but it was precious to him. It allowed him to speak of love, because the subject was not ignorant of the fact that everyone loves his mother. The proverbial form included him in its generality, while allowing a specific, private meaning, of the nature of this bond to be constituted and preserved there. Indeed, the ‘hole’ in the symbolic by no means prevents a psychotic subject from resorting to universal symbolism, archetypes, proverbs, general ideas, commonplace statements, to the point of view of an ‘it is said that . . .’ and thus to the master-signifiers that surround him in order to give sense to his specular identifications – quite the contrary. Through them, he retrieves something of the body, the colour,77 the texture of the jouissance of life. In this way, he tries ‘to place the reality of the body in the idea that constitutes him’.78 This is what can counter psychotic dissociation, the void left by affect, and this is what often confers upon some subjects a way of being completely conventional and, let us say it, ordinary.79 ‘My mother’ was at once a commonplace signifier and an all-purpose signifier, answering for everything, for sense as well as for non-sense. It had the value of punctuation. Through the stop it introduced, the subject Landru fended off the questions with which the other tried to extract a little subjectivity from him, beyond his irony. ‘My mother’ was the answer the subject opposed to the other’s

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demand for an explanation, which he always considered a forced entry. The function of this signifier, the subject’s minimal defence, served him as a rampart, a wall. The wall is the other all-purpose signifier that Landru repeated throughout the trial, especially when he was asked questions that were too specific: ‘Private life is an impassable wall.’ This commonplace statement became such a leitmotif that, in a striking short-cut, it happened regularly during the trial that, when he refused to answer, the president of the chambre d’accusation80 at the indictment hearing told him: ‘So Landru, that’s the wall!’ As the trial unfolded, people no longer expected any answer or explanation from the accused. The wall of incomprehension, of incommunicability, thickened. It became increasingly perceptible. This is what a journalist of Le Matin expressed in his editorial: What will he [Landru] be able to say that is unexpected, given that he has built himself, with stones from the ‘wall of private life’, I will say, to use his style, the worst and most hermetic of cells. It was also a thick wall that the prosecutor [Advocate General Godefroy] built yesterday, with words as heavy as stones, great stones bound to one another by a powerful concrete, a wall that isolates Landru the hypocrite, Landru the professional liar and lowly seducer of unfortunate creatures begging for a little tenderness, a wall that, from its great height, cuts the wretched man off from the world in which conscience makes the law.81 The mother, the wall of private life, secrecy – for Landru these were signifiers with a double polarity. On the one hand, they constituted a boundary for the subject; on the other hand, in their a-semantic dimension they were the stones in the wall of the fortress which made the other inaccessible to him. In this sense, they only had use-value. They came in the place of the void, in the place of the libidinal knot. The social knot effectuated by the Name-of-theFather came undone for him, barring him from accessing a father, his father and desire. Here we have what in psychosis can be a unilateralised modality of the Oedipus, a non-phallic modality of jouissance. These signifiers warded off what might otherwise have destabilised the subject and created an enigma for him, opening the field of perplexity, while causing delusion and confusion to come in its place. Landru presented himself as an autonomous being, but autonomy took on the sense of a moral and social isolation. This isolation defined private life for him and gave the adjective ‘private’ a superior power of signification, conferring the value of a neo-semanteme upon it.82 ‘I have my conscience on my side’,83 he confided to the experts. His conscience was the locus in which his delusional theory of life, of the other and of law was inscribed, outside of any bond. His conscience was the place of certainty, the place of a megalomaniacal jouissance. It was heir to the only libidinal bond the subject could recognise, the one that united him to his mother, as singular, as strange as it

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may be, since it took no account of the libidinal bond that united his parents and presided over his birth. We can indeed not say that love was at stake in the naive materialism or the glaring cynicism that ran through Landru’s life. He gave Fernande his victims’ jewels with this sentence that told part of his truth: ‘These jewels come from my mother and I would be infinitely grateful to you if you would accept them, because you are the person that, with her, I have loved the most in the world.’84

The father and the theory of love Landru does not seem to have been preoccupied by his father, but we know on the other hand that the father had been preoccupied by the son. He complained to a friend that his son caused him trouble, that he spent money and had served time; then that his son had stopped seeing him. We know few things about Landru’s father: he was greatly appreciated by his employers, who were complimentary about him, referring to him as someone who was ‘temperate, punctual, assiduous in his work, even-tempered and who knew how to earn the esteem of his colleagues and superiors alike’.85 Nearing the age of 80, after a long life of labour, Landru’s parents had thought about taking a little rest and had gone to live in Agen, close to their daughter. This is where Madame Landru died at the beginning of 1912. A short time after this loss, which affected him deeply, Mr Landru came back to Paris and settled into his son’s home. He was welcomed at the time by his daughter-in-law, because Landru had been indicted and was being detained at the remand prison in Loos. Which one of the two parents had wanted to settle in Agen, at the eldest daughter’s? Why did Mr Landru return to his son’s once he was alone? These questions have no answers, but they show the complexity of the bonds which, deep down, define the characteristics of a family. Did Mr Landru prefer his son to his daughter? Did he prefer Paris to Agen? Was he more comfortable at his daughter-in-law’s? Or was he, in moving, trying to appease the anguish that submerged him and drove him to suicide? He hanged himself in the woods at Boulogne, a few months after his wife’s death, in August 1912. In relation to this suicide, let us underline a particularity that seems to add to the will to die the desire to disappear in anonymity, to fade away. The police recovered the body of Landru’s father, but could not identify it. They found on him a case for his spectacles as well as a leather wallet, but the latter was empty. A description was circulated to different police forces while the body was displayed at the morgue until someone came to identify it. The description made of Mr Landru stated that he was a white-haired man, with a frontal baldness and a white beard. He was elegantly dressed, his shirt and handkerchief were embroidered with the initial ‘L’. He was identified by Landru’s wife four days later. Landru hardly spoke of his father. He barely uttered the word to account, in all situations where it was required, for a vague inheritance concerning a factory or a

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garage. He made no comments about him except for a memory tinged with perplexed incomprehension, which he recounted to Fernande Segret – although this may also be the aggressive haughtiness that signals a relationship of unmediated rivalry with the one that disrupted his feminine universe, namely the One-father (Un-père): ‘My father, a very stern and very private man, had always kept my mother away from his occupations. I suffered a lot from it, because I had a boundless affection for my mother, a kind of worship.’ To back up his statements as to the intransigence of the paternal temper, he recounted several anecdotes to Fernande. She remembered one that made a strong impression on her; she could repeat it, she said, precisely as Landru told it to her: The day I turned eighteen, my father, rather solemnly, kissed me and said to me: ‘Come, let’s go out together, I have a surprise for you.’ Somewhat astonished by this unaccustomed familiarity, I followed my father in the secret hope that, to celebrate my birthday, he was going to offer me some gift for which I had shown a desire, in a spirit of generosity I didn’t think him capable of. We walked without a word and, upon arriving at the area’s recruiting office, he whispered to me in a somewhat dramatic tone these simple words: ‘My son, you are eighteen today, this is the age at which one must think about fully entering life, you have become a man, prove it, go and enlist.’86 Did Landru’s father, at that moment, try to take his son away from his place as a spoiled child, clinging to his mother as we have seen? Did Landru’s father try to make good for what had not occurred on the symbolic level? It was a vain attempt, because no standard operation, such as military service for example, could produce the subjective mutation he hoped for. Can we read, in this memory, a distorted address by Landru to his father and the need for the latter, like the mother, to fulfil all his desires? In this way, the access to the father as help, rather than as enemy, could have opened up. But this would have entailed an absolute condition: that the father be feminised, that the father be for him a second mother, that the father therefore not be a father. Because Landru cannot accept anything that could come from a third party, from the One-father. His father was therefore a discounted father, confined to the position of a genitor where what we could have taken for a wish, an address in Landru, was annulled. This annulment confronted Landru with a man, any man, coming to threaten him. What did this ‘man’ want, why was he suddenly here, this intruder? The persecutory inflection emerges precisely in the non-internalised, non-assimilated place of the father who, in becoming a persecutor, paves the way for this mode of relating to men. Landru’s father did not hold any authority for his son. The child first discerns this authority as natural, the direct outcome of the bond that unites a man to his wife. But we know nothing of what governed the encounter between Mr Landru and his wife. We know nothing of what she was for him in her femininity and how one day this woman caused his desire. Landru did not perceive

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anything of this desire, he did not grasp or, more precisely, he was not taken up in the relation of desire that united his parents, a relation that allows the child to get hold of himself in the desire of the other and to catch a glimpse of the place that he occupies there. The father’s law, which was indecipherable for Landru, opened up into a gap: the father held no power, no truth, no law and no knowledge. This failing produced his unilateral relation to women, a relation that organised his whole world. Clinging to his mother, Landru entered a world without men, and as we have seen, his relation to women’s mystery, to love, is an unmediated relation. Women, in his eyes, seem to harbour the full and ultimate sense of life. He built and maintained this conception through the reading of works dedicated to women, especially his favourite, L’amour obligatoire,87 a very famous book at the time, written by a woman. One cannot doubt, when reading this book, that the Comtesse de Tramar was a decided feminist of the first hour, because of the general tone of this work and the titles of some of her other books – La Pourriture (Decay), Le Termite (The Termite), Le Tribun (The Tribune), La Mangeuse de Cerveaux (The Brain Eater), La Flétrissure (The Stain). However, we can wonder to what extent feminism was for her a modern militant position or a supplementation for the foreclosure of the difference between the sexes with a resulting hatred for men. L’amour obligatoire talked about love and marriage at a time when a reform of the civil code was under way. The reform planned to inscribe love in the social contract, namely in marriage, next to the mutual assistance which spouses owe to each other.88 The Comtesse de Tramar was delighted with this reform, while being very sceptical as to what would happen within a couple, even if they married out of love. She doubted that men, who had so far shown brutality, would change so quickly: The conjugal duty itself used to be ferociously demanded by the husband, synthesizing in its brutal formula the whole poetry, the ideal nature of ‘love’ in marriage. The wife used to be subjected to this act of possession, like a violated territory witnessing the settlement of a stranger on conquered ground, manu militari. As for love, the house door often stayed inexorably closed to it and the antagonists made their way down life’s path like two convicts holding no other hope than the liberation of death.89 ‘And now,’ she wrote, ‘since love is to be embedded in law, let us take a look at this subtle feeling.’ To answer the question ‘what is love?’, the Comtesse de Tramar immediately referred her reader to a catalogue, a ‘special document’ consisting entirely of quotes. She singled out as an absolutely true definition of love this quote by Madame de Staël: ‘Love, which is but an episode in a man’s life, is the entire history of the life of a woman.’ For the Comtesse de Tramar, love extended well beyond a feeling, it was a kind of religion, close to mystical delusion. She described love in the nascent twentieth century in the following terms:

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The temple is deserted, the cult overthrown and when perchance some naive soul sends towards the god the perfume of pure incense, when he or she lights the lamp of the sanctuary, incredulity, vice and treason blow with violence, dispersing the scented clouds, extinguishing the flame of love, laughing at the feeling, inflicting mockery, contempt and pain upon it, so outmoded and ridiculous does such sincerity seem. Dishevelled revelry surrounds him or her, trying to drag him or her in this wild merry-go-round made of human links and if he or she resists, if he or she wants to remain faithful to his or her dream, to the feeling that makes all his or her life, he or she is ground, crushed, bruised.90 Between the pure feeling and its incarnation, there only seemed to be, for her, a gaping hole and chaos: it was her theory of the relation between men and women. Reading her work, we discover that although she was able to think of an ideal encounter, it was on condition that it be deferred endlessly, for the present was impossible. In this respect, we can speak of a theory of love in which the pivotal point is the trauma experienced by women in the first sexual encounter on which everything rests. The wedding night, which girls approach with ‘fright’, is a terrifying night; it is the same for husbands. It is the starting point of a whole life and, according to the skill or clumsiness of the spouse, either happiness or ‘annihilation’ will ensue. In the last case, ‘an indestructible wall will rise eternally between him and his young wife’.91 Most often alas, men brutally exercise their right, ‘the executioner, the sacrificer, does not tend to expect much tenderness from his victim’.92 According to the Comtesse, love is a painful necessity between two worlds that confront one another and which everything opposes. Men, whom Landru evidently does not identify with, are responsible for the misfortunes of women. He often had long conversations with Fernande Segret on this point. Every time he had the opportunity, he took her to the theatre to listen to a play with a psychological theme, so he could speak of it for hours afterwards. One evening, recalls Fernande, when the conversation turned to women and the temptations that too often tarnish their virtue, he gave me a whole speech on the subject, proclaiming that indeed women in Paris were offered too little protection, that people took advantage of them, and that before judging them one should not disregard the real reasons for their downfall, which, he said, were mostly attributable to the disappointments and misfortunes they had endured. And he concluded that in order to explain it it would also be necessary to find the initial author: the first lover. He insisted: ‘That’s the starting point, you understand.’93 Like him, women had no history, no childhood. For Landru, L’amour obligatoire was the reference work to go by. In it he found an unprecedented ‘theory’ of the sexual relation and love, which accounted for what he himself projected in the

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relation between his parents and which accounted for his own place. The place of exclusion and of being set aside that Landru ascribed to his mother also designated Landru’s own place, cut off from others, isolated, in a mirror-like identification. ‘Dropped’ by the father, he shared the fate of his mother. Hence his being was profoundly feminised. The subject was integral to his mother. This is what Lacan defines as ‘a sexual relation’. It is not an incestuous passage to the act between child and mother, far from it, but, as the Comtesse de Tramar would have it, it is a little like a total psychical rapport, a complete fusion in delusional jouissance; a relation à deux without lack or anything left over, a relation where one is a perfect match for the other.94 But such relations are impossible for speaking beings and they necessarily fail. The failure manifests itself in language disorders, delusion and loss of reality. As a consequence, the father took the place of a persecutory other. He came to prevent this relation with the mother, from the outside, without cause and without reason. This was construed as pure whim by the subject, and so as the pure will to interfere. We should therefore be cautious in our reference to the myth of Oedipus, which is so often misinterpreted. If the Oedipus is a nodal moment in which the child grasps something of the bond between the father and mother, it can also account for the variations which, in psychosis, correspond to an untied knot.95 The absence of knotting is what, for Landru, radically separated father and mother and had repercussions in the life of the subject. Landru, in his personal law, was the new man, in a feminine universe, the absolute man, the man of exception, since he blended in and confused himself with this universe. The mission that drove him to his mad self-abnegation to meet the needs of his family at any cost originated in this universe. Men could therefore only resent this manwoman, they were jealous and menacing. A sly, covert war was constantly being waged. Men were persecutors, and his father was no exception to the rule. For Landru, all men were persecutors; more precisely their phallic dimension was persecutory, their desire, their conquests, their competition, their challenge.

Notes 1 Cf. Monsieur Verdoux, Charlie Chaplin, 1946. 2 Lacan, J, ‘A Theoretical Introduction to the Functions of Psychoanalysis in Criminology’ in Écrits, 2006, New York and London: WW Norton, p 119. 3 Le Matin, 6 November 1921; Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, statements made by Landru as he learned of the arrest of his wife and son Maurice, Box III. 4 Le Matin, 6 November 1921; Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box III, Opinions of Drs Vallon, Roubinovitch and Roques de Fursac. 5 Sagnier, C, L’Affaire Landru, 1999, Paris: De Vecchi, p 103. 6 Cf. Biagi-Chai, F, ‘Le père du mythe et le père du drame’ (2006) 64 La Cause freudienne 95–107. 7 Lacan, ‘Presentation on Psychical Causality’ in Écrits, 2006, p 139. 8 Lacan, ‘Presentation on Psychical Causality’ in Écrits, 2006, pp 139–140. 9 In the 1980s the concept of ‘multiple personality disorder’ was developed in North America to account for the existence of independent and clearly distinct personalities

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10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

in the same subject. The DSM has substituted ‘dissociative identity disorder’ in its place (cf. American Psychiatric Association (APA), Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edn, Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR), 2000, Washington, DC: APA). Leopoldo Fregoli (1867–1936). This protean (quick change) artist was very successful, but time seems to have erased him from our memories. Yet he was remarkable because he was excessive: more than 100 characters per night, 1,200 costumes, 650 different theatres for 6,000 shows. Lacan, J, The Seminar Book III, The Psychoses 1955–1956, 1993, London: Routledge, p 205. Cf. Chapter 2, ‘The other side of ordinary life: the swindler’, p. 36ff. Madame Isoré was the first woman to fall prey to the marriage swindle of Landru (also known as Morel). Comtesse de Tramar, L’Amour obligatoire, 1913, Paris: Librairie universelle. Darmon, P, Landru, 1994, Paris: Plon, p 183. Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Questioning of Landru, Box III. Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, General File, Box VI. Departmental Archives of Yvelines. Departmental Archives of Yvelines. Departmental Archives of Yvelines. Darmon, Landru, 1994, p 198. Cohen, S, Landru, l’assassin bien-aimé, 1975, Paris: Presses de la Cité, p 94. Belin, J, Commissaire Belin, trente ans de Sûreté nationale, 1950, Paris: Société d’éditions et de publications en exclusivité, Bibliothèque France-Soir, p 115. Cohen, Landru, l’assassin bien-aimé, 1975, p 119. Darmon, Landru, 1994, p 203. Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, General File, Box VI. Le Journal, 16 November 1921. Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box IV, Buisson case. Cohen, Landru, l’assassin bien-aimé, 1975, p 145. Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box IV, General Considerations on the Missing Women. Cohen, Landru, l’assassin bien-aimé, 1975, p 150. Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Investigation File; Bernède, A, Landru, 1931, Paris: Tallandier, p 157. Le Journal, 20 November 1921. Le Journal, 10 November 1921. Le Journal, 11 November 1921. Le Journal, 15 November 1921. Le Journal, 19 November 1921. Le Journal, 19 November 1921. Le Journal, 20 November 1921. Cf. Lacan, J, ‘Kant with Sade’ (1963) in Écrits, 2006, p 658. Cf. Miller, J-A, ‘Jacques Lacan: remarques sur son concept de passage à l’acte’ (1986), Actualités psychiatriques No 1, 1988, Les problèmes des passages à l’acte, Journée de Bonneval, 4 octobre 1986, p 50. Lacan, ‘Kant with Sade’ (1963) in Écrits, 2006, p 658. Lacan, ‘Kant with Sade’ (1963) in Écrits, 2006, p 658. Kant, I, Critique of Practical Reason, 1997, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p 28. Kant defines common sense as thinking by putting oneself in the place of any other. Lacan, ‘Kant with Sade’ (1963) in Écrits, 2006, p 658.

98 Serial Killers: Psychiatry, Criminology, Responsibility 46 Le Journal, 24 November 1921. 47 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box IV, Analysis of the Relations with Fernande Segret. 48 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box IV, Analysis of the Relations with Fernande Segret. 49 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box III. 50 Lacan, J, Le Séminaire, Livre XXIII, Le sinthome 1975–1976, 2005, Paris: Le Seuil, p 121. 51 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box IV, Analysis of the Relations with Fernande Segret. 52 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box IV, Analysis of the Relations with Fernande Segret. 53 Segret, F, ‘Souvenirs d’une rescapée’, Le Journal, 30 October to 7 November 1921. 54 Segret, ‘Souvenirs d’une rescapée’, 1921. 55 Segret, ‘Souvenirs d’une rescapée’, 1921. 56 Segret, ‘Souvenirs d’une rescapée’, 1921. 57 Segret, ‘Souvenirs d’une rescapée’, 1921. 58 Le Journal, 28 April 1919; Deposition of Mademoiselle Segret Fernande, Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box III. 59 Segret, ‘Souvenirs d’une rescapée’, 1921. 60 Segret, ‘Souvenirs d’une rescapée’, 1921. 61 Segret, ‘Souvenirs d’une rescapée’, 1921. 62 Segret, ‘Souvenirs d’une rescapée’, 1921. 63 Lacan, The Seminar Book III The Psychoses, 1993, p 253. 64 Segret, ‘Souvenirs d’une rescapée’, 1921. 65 Segret, ‘Souvenirs d’une rescapée’, 1921. 66 Segret, ‘Souvenirs d’une rescapée’, 1921. 67 Segret, ‘Souvenirs d’une rescapée’, 1921. 68 Segret, ‘Souvenirs d’une rescapée’, 1921. 69 Segret, ‘Souvenirs d’une rescapée’, 1921. 70 Segret, ‘Souvenirs d’une rescapée’, 1921. 71 Lacan, The Seminar Book III The Psychoses, 1993, p 205. 72 Le Journal, 8 November 1921. 73 Darmon, Landru, 1994, p 150. 74 Departmental Archives of Yvelines. 75 Holophrase: a reference to holophrastic languages in which an entire sentence is expressed by one single word or word-phrase. It indexes psychotic certainty: Lacan, J, The Seminar Book XI The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1991, London: Penguin, p 237. 76 Lacan, The Seminar Book III The Psychoses, 1993, pp 189 and 193; and ‘Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis’ (1948) in Écrits, 2006, p 92. 77 Lacan, J, Le Séminaire Livre XXIII Le sinthome, (1975–1976), 2005, Paris : Le Seuil, p 116. 78 Lacan, J, ‘Joyce le symptôme’ (1979) in Autres Écrits, 2001, Paris: Le Seuil, p 67. 79 For the discreet signs of psychosis in their relation to the conformist image and the body, I refer the reader to the teaching of J-A Miller as well as to numerous publications of the École de la Cause Freudienne and the Institute of the Freudian field where this clinic is being developed, theorised and elucidated. Cf. inter alia La Conversation d’Arcachon. Cas rares, les inclassables de la clinique, 1997, Paris: Agalma/Le Seuil; La Convention d’Antibes. La psychose ordinaire, 1999, Paris: Agalma/Le Seuil; and Institut du Champ Freudien/Uforca, La Stylistique des psychoses, documents préparatoires à la Rencontre des Sections et Antennes cliniques du Champ freudien du 3 juillet 1999, Paris.

Landru and women: three categories plus one 99 80 A jurisdiction in charge of overseeing the judicial part of the investigation before the actual trial [translation note]. 81 Le Matin, 29 November 1921. 82 This term was suggested by J-A Miller, La Conversation d’Arcachon, 1997, p 205. 83 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box III, Mental Examination of Landru, Opinions of Drs Vallon, Roubinovitch and Roques de Fursac. 84 Segret, ‘Souvenirs d’une rescapée’, 1921. 85 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box III, Information on the Youth and Teenage of Landru. 86 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box III, Information on the Youth and Teenage of Landru. 87 Comtesse de Tramar, L’Amour obligatoire, 1913. 88 Comtesse de Tramar, L’Amour obligatoire, 1913, p 2. 89 Comtesse de Tramar, L’Amour obligatoire, 1913, p 2. 90 Comtesse de Tramar, L’Amour obligatoire, 1913, p 90. 91 Comtesse de Tramar, L’Amour obligatoire, 1913, p 243. 92 Comtesse de Tramar, L’Amour obligatoire, 1913, p 243. 93 Segret, ‘Souvenirs d’une rescapée’, 1921. 94 A sexual relation obviously takes place exclusively on the psychical level. Here it can be linked to what I said of the immixing of subjects. In reality, indeed, according to Lacan, ‘there is no sexual relation’, because in this relation the fantasy of each of the partners disrupts, perturbs the perfect match. This is of course not the sexual relation of common parlance. The sexual relation is not sexual intercourse. 95 The ‘untied knot’ is the subtitle of a book by Pierre Naveau, Les Psychoses et le Lien social. Le noeud défait, 2004, Paris: Anthropos.

Chapter 4

Landru and men: a world divided in two

For Landru, men incarnated a threat expressed in terms of intrusion and persecution, but this rule was not without its exceptions. A few rare men were accepted by his side. His world without nuance, intermediary and colour was divided in two: what was favourable to him and what was not.

The police For a killer, the police represent a well-known threat: that of being caught. This is commonplace. But for Landru this threat was something completely different. It bore the mark of the symbolic disorganisation and non-relation to the father which ran throughout his whole life. Because of this, the police took on an unusual status for Landru. First of all, what he reproached them with was at the very least unexpected. The police were, according to him, inconsistent, authoritarian, capricious and inadequate. They did not know what they were doing and failed to provide individuals with a guarantee. Thus, he said the strangest things about them: ‘You will notice, he said, that I have always been arrested following individual complaints and never due solely to the perspicacity of the police.’1 For him, the police should be in ‘natural’ conformity with their role in society and so should know everything without it being necessary for people to go to them, file complaints or inform them. A true police force should be omniscient: the police were wholly identified with a gaze that could see and find everything without needing to resort to anyone or anything. In order for everything to be for the best in the best of all possible worlds, the police should personify the maternal principle, maternal power. And citizens should be transparent to the police. The Other of the police2 (since Landru was truly in a world of his own, revolving around his personal conception) should, in order to protect citizens, embody the all-seeing power usually attributed to a god. Like a god, the police would, using their own personal judgment, have the right to condemn or absolve. This neologistic conception of the police was certainly delusional, but it bears the same structure as an already well-known matrix. And in his derealisation, Landru made the following proposition to a police emptied of legitimacy; it was a proposition that would, ultimately, do away with ‘all complications’: ‘Why not drop these

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investigations in a world where there have been so many disappearances?’3 He later repeated this demand: ‘These are hypotheses . . . always hypotheses, would it not be simpler to suppose that I haven’t killed anybody?’4 These disorders of signification confirm Landru’s aspiration for a mythical, feminised father: a father-mother. The non-existence of this mythical father was the tipping point, which made the police persecutory in the strong sense of the word. If the police did not act in the interest of the subject, it was because they did not want to and if they did not want to, it was entirely up to them: so what they wanted was the destruction of the subject. This was the intention he attributed to his father, whom he found so un-‘familiar’. We can also discern the supposed retaliation of the other against him when Landru was told of the list of the women recorded in his notebook: People have attached way too much importance to this list, always the police! For them, it was like a gospel. I’m said to have murdered all the women whose real or supposed name is on this list! Yet other women came to Gambais.5 Without the pathological context demonstrated by this study, this statement could be mistaken for provocation or bad faith. But everything contributes to and participates in bringing to light the radical gap at the heart of the most primordial act of faith towards the other. Towards others. At the trial, he vehemently denounced Inspector Belin: ‘I accuse this man of having arrested me illegally, without a warrant, having entered my home through a subterfuge.’6 The position of total autonomy occupied by the police can only be understood in light of the subject’s autistic world. He expected, as if from a mirror, a peculiar guarantee from the police, a guarantee aspiring to something before language, before what is humanly possible. Between him and the other, there was either indifferentiation or the wall. Thus, he was alone in a stand-off with the police, justice, the law and, we can say, the whole of humanity, since he did not consent to the symbolic structures which organise it. When the investigating magistrate asked Landru what he had done since he left the prison in Loos, where seven years previously he had served a sentence for embezzlement, Landru answered: ‘What did I do? This is none of your business. Did society take care of me when I left prison with my paltry savings, when I had nothing, no resources, no means of subsistence?’ The journalist who quoted these words went on to say: ‘We felt a terrible hatred for the social order in the man who uttered these words.’7 We know that before becoming a conman Landru had himself fallen prey to a security scam and the person responsible for it was never found. This fact was recounted during the trial. Landru picked up on it and his rancour and contempt for the police was visible once again: ‘This example proves the inadequacy of police investigations. I filed a complaint about this theft. I am surprised that this complaint was not found. But are the police able to find anything?’8

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Since the police did not protect the subject, in the maternal sense that we have given to this protection, Landru’s landmarks disappeared. Spite and hatred were a response to ‘being let down’. There was a fundamental disappointment here, one which found its coordinates in relation to maternal love, tinged with a delusional erotomania. As we have seen, it was not about love, but a pathological projection. This was not a subject who liked the other: he was ‘caught’ in the other, entirely without fail. Then, when the other takes distance, everything became threatening and ferocity and aggressiveness emerged as a defence and ultimate barrier. In the courtroom, as the trial unfolded, everything became confused, one could wonder who the guilty party was; the roles were inverted, displaced. Landru overtly refuted the investigating judge on the basis of electoral rivalry: The investigating judge and I didn’t agree. I apologize for going into confidential details here. In 1919, Monsieur Bonin ran for election. During the polls, a few practical jokers substituted my name for his so that I ended up in the bizarre situation of being an accused man who has been the electoral competitor of his investigating judge.9 And in fact, 4,000 protesting voters had voted for Landru that year. Landru made people laugh, as if, for a brief space of time he managed to erase place, context, time and space in the public’s mind – creating a zone outside history. Is this not what fascination is? The judges, and the lawyers for all parties of the case, sternly reminded the public that this was an Assize trial, dealing with life or death, life and death. If we abandon this fascination, we will instead be able to grasp, through Landru’s repartees, that his irony is to be included in the clinic of the subject and his infallible real. As he was once again denouncing the police, the President of the Assize court tried to initiate a dialogue: ‘Landru, for the police to succeed in their investigations in matters concerning you, it may be necessary for you to help them, which you have never done.’ Mirroring, he replied: ‘I beg to differ. The justice system blames me for certain crimes: it is up to them to prove their contention. As far as I am concerned, my conscience is clear. So?’10 This position endured and marked his speech with the indelible imprint of his real: ‘Mr. President, I only have one thing to say, for the three years that the pretrial investigation has lasted I have asked to be shown proofs. I was answered only with ambiguous words.’11 The proof, a demand for an impossible object, is what Landru was ceaselessly asking the other for. But the proof is also an empty signifier, since nothing in the register of statements, including the incriminating convergence, the patent juxtaposition and the obvious corroboration of facts, could amount, for him, to a demonstration of the real and even less have an effect of truth. Nothing existed outside the realm of immediate experience, outside materialism. The signifier was always deficient for him; the ultimate signification was lacking: the proof. The proof was eternally insufficient, because his demand shifted constantly with each proof he was given. And yet people were hard at work, leaving no stone unturned.

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The witnesses were listened to at length, people tried to reconstruct his meticulous schedules, to highlight contradictions. Excavations were organised in the villa, but also in the surrounding area, in lakes and forests, and inquiries were made at all border checkpoints. During the investigation, fragments of human bones and teeth were discovered in the stove at Gambais. All were charred and bore traces of a careful dissection, with no break or fragmentation. The long bones had been cut with a saw, the cranial bones with a cleaver or an axe. In his accounts, next to the very large quantity of coal that he had bought (in a region where everyone used wood), Landru noted the purchase of numerous saws of all kinds. Between 1916 and 1918, he procured 84 saws for metal, saws for logs and circular saws. The forensic experts12 testified with certainty that the bone fragments came from three distinct bodies, aged between 25 and 50, and that at least one of them belonged to a woman. They contributed to the constitution of a damning whole.13 But the results of these reports could not be used at the trial because the front door of the Gambais villa had only been sealed off about 10 days after the house had first been searched. In the meantime, some excavations had taken place there. The lawyers denounced two irregularities: first, that neither Landru nor his representatives had attended the excavations; and second that, since the door was open, anyone could have come in and left anything they wanted in the villa. Certainty had just been transformed into doubt, at least officially. However, even if the proofs had been authenticated or the bodies recovered, we cannot be sure that Landru would not have refuted them. In fact, our clinical approach leads us to think that this would have been most likely. In that case, what may still have been missing for Landru, whose metonymic cursor never stopped sliding, may then have been the manner in which things happened and precise details concerning the moment of execution. What if he had been caught in the act? It is not certain that he would have recognised the signifier ‘crime’ or ‘murder’ as applicable to account for what he was doing. We speak of crime, but what did he, for his part, speak about? What obscure agreement was he referring to when he confided to the forensic psychiatrists: ‘We have, they and I, a secret that I don’t have the right to unveil and I will not unveil it.’14 Or when he considered that he was the keeper of a ‘sacred trust’ that these women had placed in him? For Landru, things, facts, accompany statements experientially, otherwise they don’t exist. When the proof is incriminating or material, it is the signifier, the bearer of meaning, which is erratic and always inadequate, and when the signifier expresses a fact caught in a coherent discourse, then the proof is always lacking, by definition. At the time of his very first marriage swindle, he was formally identified by the plaintiff, Madame Isoré. When he was confronted with her at the time of his arrest, he merely said: ‘It is possible that it is I. I am not saying anything else.’15 Landru, who was arrested under the name of Lucien Guillet and held in the offices of the Brigade mobile, was exposed through records held on file that revealed his real identity. Inspector Belin then looked him in the eye and exclaimed: ‘Landru!’ And to the latter’s astonishment, he went on to say: ‘Yes, I’ve got you, Landru and I have your police records. The comedy is over, my

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friend. You must speak.’ ‘So I am Landru. Perfect,’ Landru whispered in an emotionless voice. He added: ‘You’ve done your job, but you must understand that, since I’m a recidivist, I couldn’t do anything other than hide. Now you accuse me of murder, but you must know that a conman is never a murderer. I have said everything that I have to say, prove your case, Mr. Belin, prove it!’16 The perfect knowledge that the police had of Landru’s movements and actions concerning the disappearance of his last victim, Mademoiselle Marchadier, provided, amongst other things, sufficient consistency in the search for proof to answer the accused. The reconstruction of facts was precise enough to be irrefutable: on 3 January 1919, at 15.00, Mademoiselle Marchadier left for Gambais with her little dogs. Landru had 15 kilos of coal in his bag. He left alone on 14 January. On 18 January, he returned alone to Gambais, he left alone the following day. He stayed in the villa. On the night of the 18 to 19 January, around 21.00, a bright glow illuminated the kitchen. No one saw Mademoiselle Marchadier after 14 January, neither in Gambais nor in the stations accessible from this vicinity, nor in any city of France, nor at any border crossing. From the day of Mademoiselle Marchadier’s disappearance, Landru made purchases and settled his bills – even though he had been without means for some time. All of the identity papers and some of Mademoiselle Marchadier’s furniture were found at his place and the bodies of her three little dogs were found under the heap of dead leaves in the villa’s garden. Faced with the precise nature of the argument against him, Landru did not answer and did not seem preoccupied in the least. It would appear that for him, these elements were far from belonging to the register of proof. He was indifferent, withdrawn from the relation to others and could continue to talk endlessly about everything that came up, through a pure association of ideas approaching what we call verbal mentism. He went on: ‘You constructed a hypothesis from scratch and you distort all my acts, all my words with your suspicion. But the proof, Mr. President, the proof, you know very well that you don’t have it.’17 He contested the testimony of witnesses and the construction of the facts. Landru’s tendency always to leave the place of an at least plausible truth empty was very subtly developed in the closing speech of the prosecution: The accused does not specify in what ways the charges against him would be deficient, he does not volunteer any facts that might contribute to the search for truth; he is content to say that this search has not revealed the means by which the homicides he stands accused of were committed.18 Landru argued: ‘It is not up to me to prove my innocence; it is up to you to prove my guilt.’19 And the public prosecutor noted that, although legally accurate, such an argument is particularly dangerous when the prosecution is able to develop an irrefutable argument and is entitled to consider the silence of the accused as the most eloquent of confessions. The childishness of his defence foretold his conviction. He was in possession of all of the objects belonging to his victims, their

Landru and men: a world divided in two 105

papers and their most intimate souvenirs. He was faced with terrible accusations, the failings of which he had to demonstrate. As we know, Landru reacted with a pirouette, a pun, or said nothing. He was not looking for extenuating circumstances, not even from psychiatry. On the contrary, he offered his head and, during the trial, clamoured from the accused stand: ‘I regret, Gentlemen, to only have the one head to offer you.’20 For Landru, proof belongs to the register of buffer signifiers, beyond which there is no subject. The judicial investigation, then the trial, followed on from the police investigation. After Inspector Belin and the investigating judge Bonin, Landru met the president of the Assize Court, Gilbert, and the public prosecutor, Godefroy. He chose to be represented by the famous lawyer, Maître de Moro-Giafferi, seconded by his collaborator, Maître Navières du Treuil. The many men in whose company Landru played his part were all men who shared the ability to silence their personal feelings for the dignity of their function. The smooth running of the trial and the succession of exchanges allow us to continue making Landru’s personality legible.

The judges Président Gilbert’s personality marked the style and evolution of the trial. With his presence and the pertinence of his questions he allowed exchanges of words to take place. He contained the excesses of the public who came in droves to attend the hearings. In spite of the monstrous character of the charges levelled against the accused, he gave the proceedings exemplary gravity and propriety. If he did not fail to address Landru directly, he never did so head-on, in a peremptory manner, but treated him with consideration. In the 1924 collective work dedicated to the Landru case, the journalist Henri Béraud described him in the following terms: The judge prefers an affirmative approach to any other, which readily leads him to monologue. He does so, it is fair to say, with a rigorous impartiality. M. Gilbert is known for being a formidable man, the world of the courthouse knew it and didn’t conceal it; but it is during the Landru trial that it became abruptly clear. The audience, mute with astonishment saw, little by little, what was hidden behind the good-natured, old school magistrate. Underneath the consistent affability of the worldly man, a trapper’s soul moves nimbly. He has not forgotten that he was once an investigating judge; the ‘curious’ part of him is not dead. And he knows the enormous file by heart. He questions his man without taking his eyes off him, elbows on the tribunal, hands joined at the fingertips.21 He was presiding over the hearings during which the Landru described by the journalists as a cynic, a sophist, ironic, finicky, meticulous, circumspect, reticent and enigmatic was revealed.

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We listen to the dialogue between Mr. Gilbert and Landru; we smile when we hear these patient, interminable exchanges of courtesy. The questions follow on from one another and are asked in an invariable tone, with the same, vaguely approving attitude. We thought these questions, ‘to be lining up one after the other’ but, all of a sudden, we perceive that their network forms a circle. Landru flounders under the gaze of the judge, who always nods his head and, more than ever, seems to say: ‘That’s good!’ Sometimes, Landru balks, then the judge ties another loop and Landru shuts up.22 He took shelter behind his frozen syntagms, and his usual aphorism: ‘Private life is an impassable wall.’ The wall, always the wall. The surprising dialogue which took place in the hearing room unfolded against a background of dignity and respect for mankind. As soon as the second hearing, during Landru’s general cross-examination, Président Gilbert asked him, calmly and authoritatively, in what was obviously a strategy, to give details of the scam that he had previously been the victim of: Your employer requested a security bond of 1600 francs from you. Didn’t he take it for himself? It would be interesting to settle this point, because it is perhaps this theft, of which you were a victim, that gave you the idea to commit security bond fraud in your turn?23 The judge, Président Gilbert, did not fail to provide Landru with opportunities to explain himself, to speak of himself or even to attempt a defence. He regularly silenced the loud and mocking crowd who laughed as if they were at a show. It was he who never forgot to recall that a man was playing for his head, even as this man, advancing between two deaths,24 seemed only to defend his life out of pure principle, and so clumsily too. Président Gilbert, with his calculated affability, occupied the place of a non-malevolent third party for the subject, the place of the fair man, to which Landru was not insensitive. Thanks to this man’s kindly manners, his discreet, encircling manoeuvre imposed a certain respect for the rules on Landru and sometimes even drew some developments out of him, without making the persecutory dimension appear. Another man occupied the same place. Paradoxically, this was the public prosecutor Godefroy. It was also this man who, indignant at the crowd’s attitude at the time of the deliberation, cast these irate words at those disrupting the proceedings: ‘Have you no heart! This man is going to be sentenced to death! Who brought you here? Be quiet, you cowards, you scoundrels!’25 This man, in charge of incriminating Landru, was also the one who retraced the history of his life with scrupulous fidelity. In his final summing-up for the prosecution, he narrated the succession of events of Landru’s life in a balanced way and, where appropriate and with accuracy, evoked the sentences pronounced by the accused himself. The indictment was forceful, precise and deductive. The prosecutor’s subtlety consisted in conceding a few points to the defence. Amongst others, in passing, Maître

Landru and men: a world divided in two 107

Godefroy pointed out that Landru was not devoid of good sentiment: he may have been an unfaithful husband, but he nonetheless loved his wife and when she was about to be incriminated as his accomplice he had defended her ardently. Although the place of the public prosecutor is that of the accuser and although he firmly requested the death penalty, the manner in which he occupied this place also put him in a particular position which constitutes the place of someone who is neither hostile, nor evanescent, nor ghostly for Landru. It was to him that Landru, after the verdict, sent a last letter from his prison: We met for the first time three months ago at the arraignment. In a few hours, I will no longer exist. I may well ask you, Mr. public prosecutor, to review with me the beginnings of a process the outcome of which would be my death, requested by you in the name of justice. You came marvellously prepared. Astonished at first (a rare thing for a prosecutor) before the clarity of my answers, you had a doubt, an awful doubt for you, since you were in charge of the prosecution. I saw this doubt being born and you, who hardly took your eyes off me, felt that I understood you. As you tried to get a confession, a word, you became anxious, because you had too much sense not to know the dubious worth of the gossip of building managers. You had hopes for the second part of the proceedings. The stove was one of your expectations. But when you saw it, puny, designed more to cook the tea of a small household, as you must have done as a child with your young sister, you must have understood that the horrendous atrocities you wanted to accuse me of could not have taken place in there. Is it not true that it scared you, my little stove, standing there all alone, in your big court? You blamed me for being hard. Was I hard that day? I could have asked that its hearth be shown, which is no bigger than a poilu’s mess kit, where you would have me to have burnt so many victims; everyone would have smiled. You knew it well, and those oddly interwoven strings wrapped around it, majestically sealed with red, how fragile they must have seemed! When I entered the room, after I heard their decision, I looked for you. It pleased me to know your mute drama till the end. Why did you avoid my gaze? Why, more agitated than ever, did you curse the crowd? ‘Cowards! Scoundrels!’ It could well insult me, this crowd, since you had me found guilty. I, who was innocent, took no offence . . . Farewell, sir, our common history will end tomorrow, without doubt. I will die with an innocent and calm soul, may yours be the same.26 With this letter, and especially the last words, Landru threw down a challenge for all eternity to the prosecutor Godefroy. Is it possible that, at this point, Landru turned to the father, that a father was there for him? Did he not seem to recognise its universal value in this ultimate confrontation in the manner of a ‘son towards a father?’ Did the function of the limit appear? Does this challenge to the father indicate a perversion? If we look more closely, this père-version, as Lacan writes it, disappears in the clinical structure of psychosis. The accents of erotomanic spite are unmistakable

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here; Landru’s challenge is steeped in a feminisation arising from the failing of the Name-of-the-Father. Landru situated in the prosecutor Godefroy the certainty that he ‘liked’ him or its equivalent, a kind of metalanguage of being ‘understood’ by him. He who ‘hardly took his eyes off him’, he who had ‘felt’, as in a suprasensory communion, that they understood each other. This is not the anxious or questioning look addressed to another who requested his head, but an interpenetration of the gaze, where minds and sensations blend, in a kind of telepathic communication where the positions of each are confused. Who knew ‘the dubious worth of the gossip of building managers’ – Landru or prosecutor Godefroy? Who hoped for what ‘in the second part of the proceedings’? The rest of the letter confirms the non-separation of the subjects where, this time inextricably, Landru occupies the place of the prosecutor and affirms peremptorily: ‘I could have asked that the hearth of the stove be shown.’ This development is not without reminding us of the dead love bond, neo-signified, which we showed to govern the relation of Landru to Fernande Segret. Here the erotomania seems to be born out of the noble demeanour of the magistrate who, in spite of his place as prosecutor, had by all accounts managed to pull the accused out of his affectation of indifference, which looked like a strength. This noble attitude appeared when Maître Godefroy silenced the crowd, but also when he had the generosity, in his indictment, to depict Landru as a good father and a good spouse, anxious to clear his family of the suspicion of complicity. The erotomania shows that there is no absolute value for the subject other than himself. A delusional narcissism was again exposed in the psychotic form of the failure of love. This form drives love back onto specularity, the deadening gap in the mirror and transitivism.27

The defenders Maître de Moro-Giafferi: the plea For his defence, Landru chose the most famous barrister of the time, Maître de Moro-Giafferi, whose advocacy successes were regularly recounted in the press. When Landru was arrested in 1919, Georges Clémenceau was initiating the examination and indictment of all cases of treason and contact with the enemy that had occurred during the war. The case of adventurer-spy Bolo-Pacha had just ended with his death sentence and execution. The case had exposed a scandal: that of the daily newspaper, Le Journal, the director of which was Senator Charles Humbert. He had bought this organ of the press with German funds and had been in contact with Bolo. Maître de Moro-Giafferi was his lawyer; Charles Humbert was acquitted. Landru, who was a regular reader of the press and a megalomaniac, could only choose Maître de Moro-Giafferi. However, Landru, for his part, had not yet entered the ‘famous cases’ of French criminology and so it was an associate of the great lawyer, Maître Navières du Treuil, who took charge of the case. A few days later, the Landru case was all over the newspapers and Maître de Moro-Giafferi accepted the challenge of his defence, even though his client was not wealthy.

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Maître de Moro-Giafferi was a tenor of the bar. He was known for his oratory, grandstanding and talents as an actor. The journalist Henri Béraud evoked the famous lawyer in these terms: He has been called a romantic lawyer and this captures him well, it is a beautiful compliment especially at a time where pride of place is given to the eloquence of numbers. A generous flame, a dark ardour, pathetic airs, and stormy movements – all these can be found in the oratorical manner of Maître de Moro-Giafferi. He is an artist of speech.28 Henri Béraud went on, mitigating the infatuation of the Parisian milieu for this lawyer, whose name had been on the front page of newspapers for a long time: Certainly, there are other lawyers who are more austere, more virile and, to utter the word burning the lips of colleagues, more serious. He can be reproached for confusing the Bar with the stage. But is it his fault, if he is a born actor, if he possesses the physical influence, the clear and moving voice which are properly speaking theatrical qualities?29 In the Landru case, if the pleading was certainly brilliant, its substance was somewhat disconcerting. The defence consisted in evoking the implausible spectre of a miscarriage of justice. It privileged the rhetorical aspect, and totally disregarded Landru the man for an idea. For the defender, the convergence of facts was never a proof, nor were the elements of the investigation. The crimes had not been proven, but the grounds available to the defence to move for a mistrial remained very slim, or rather non-existent. Maître de Moro-Giafferi then resorted to purely legal arguments: ‘The law is so made, he said, that death may only be pronounced after the body has been seen. Disappearance is not death. Where are the bodies here? And if you don’t have them, how can Landru be found guilty?’30 He made the jurors afraid of convicting an innocent man, referring to ‘the dogmatic madness of which Montaigne spoke’. He did not trust the experts and illustrated this mistrust with a striking example: Experts identified a body found in 1900 in a small sea resort as being that of a two-year old little girl. They added that the poor child had first been soiled before being killed. The remains were given solemn funerals: however, two days later, the painter Aimé Morot informed the authorities that the body was that of a young female monkey belonging to him.31 This example helped Maître de Moro-Giafferi contest the deductions of the experts which asserted that the bones were human. Like Landru, he thus evoked a hypothetical departure of the missing women for faraway destinations. But was the black notebook, with its fatal list, not damning? Well, no, not according to Maître de Moro-Giafferi, who claimed that ‘to a certain extent it

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contains the proof of Landru’s innocence’. His reasoning, rather approximate and at times contradictory, was the following: ‘The notebook demonstrates that Landru was in the habit of never staying more than twenty-four hours in Gambais, hence the return ticket each time. He only spent one hour in his villa; whatever the hypothesis on the manner of murder, he didn’t have the material time to kill.’ On the other hand, the lawyer tried to prove that the alleged victims were still alive at the supposed date of their death. It is astonishing that for this he relied on Landru’s notebooks, where he kept a record of the implausible steps he took to lead the friends and family of his victims to believe that they were still alive after they went missing – steps which were all rapidly exposed for what they really were. What could be said of the missing women’s silence and the fact that their papers and furniture were found at Landru’s? Would Landru have left this terrible proof in his home? Maître de Moro-Giafferi went on: Is he mad, then? We know that he is not. Is he a fool? We know that he is not. So you see the dilemma: either he is mad or he didn’t kill. He kept these family papers because he needed them for I don’t know what profession. The psychiatric experts, for their part, did not enlighten the defence much in refuting madness. Maître de Moro-Giafferi then formulated this hypothesis: ‘These women are no longer young, people say, do you know that in these faraway Americas, often referred to in the notebook, the question of age isn’t so important as in old Europe.’ ‘This is abominable,’ interrupts a lawyer for the plaintiffs. ‘Yes,’ Maître de Moro-Giafferi retorts, ‘it is abominable in terms of pure morality, but do I have the right to keep quiet? Do I not, rather, have the right to consider all hypotheses, even the most insulting ones for the missing women, since I am defending a head? The prosecution,’ he declared, addressing the jurors, ‘have told you: there is a hypothesis. I have the right to tell you: there is another one.’32 Maître de Moro-Giafferi provided an explanation that took no account of the development of the judicial investigation and could be called pure legal dogma. However, it is true, he had a head to save, a ‘curiously formed’ head, as Dr Dubuisson said in his time.33 Faced with the criminal’s strange personality, Maître de Moro-Giafferi, who had chosen not to plead diminished responsibility, argued his suppositions, always fed by his client’s precisions: All the missing women had fallen out with their family, they all wanted to leave! They all dreamed of long journeys! They may have gone with the belief they would have an honest job, but they were destined for a degrading profession! They may have been persuaded that, leaving France, they had to leave their identity papers behind because they had to change their name.34 Maître de Moro-Giafferi’s plea did not save Landru from the guillotine, but it created an astonishing precedent. At 21.25, on the evening of 30 November 1921, at the end of the deliberation, Landru was sentenced to death. Half an hour later,

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at 21.50, people learned that the jurors had unanimously signed a pardon request proposed by Maître de Moro-Giafferi and that Madame Fauchet, sister of Madame Pascal and a civil party to the trial, had come, almost fainting, to add her name to theirs. Maître de Moro-Giafferi had concluded in these intimidating terms: Your mission, members of the jury, is not to throw light. My mission has been to denounce obscurity to you and this is what I have done. From the bottom of my heart, I tell you: don’t do anything definitive. What if, tomorrow, even a single one of these women were to re-appear. Tell me what pride would be robust enough to allow you to face the icy ghost haunting you at night, telling you: ‘I did not kill, yet you killed me.’ If History were one day to write: ‘They dealt death and they were wrong,’ it won’t be on my conscience. Examine yours.35 It is likely that with this conclusion, Maître de Moro-Giafferi had, if not sown doubt as to Landru’s guilt, at least made the consciences of each signatory falter. Landru’s surprising attitude had certainly contributed to this, in spite of the psychiatric reports. Maître de Moro-Giafferi bet everything on uncertainty. The plea cannot be evoked without mentioning the most famous anecdote, the one where the lawyer produced ‘an effect’ of doubt. He affirmed that the missing women were there behind the door and that they were about to come in. Everyone turned around, so everyone believed that it was possible, except for the accused. To defend Landru, his lawyer exclusively deployed his rhetorical oratory. Landru, in a mirror-effect, wrote him this poem, an offering in verse about his present circumstances: It is here that, exiled from my rustic shelter, Of ancient wisdom a calm admirer, Of the mobile universe questioning the voices, I was able to interrogate the laws of justice. By what destiny is her sword above me suspended, Threatening the innocence in my bewildered heart. What arm guides the judges, through which fierce orders Does a harmful genius abridge my years? What sign in a faraway port will give me back forever My thatched cottage and my heart left behind in Gambais.36 The barrister, at the time of the execution, wanted to draw a cry of sincerity from Landru, who never confessed: ‘Tell me the truth. Don’t leave with your secret.’ ‘My secret, Maître, is my baggage. I take it away with me.’37 Is this the navel of the utilitarian delusion? Did the new man of the feminised world have the right, being the equal of an ‘obscure god’,38 to eliminate ‘old, useless and single women’ for his and his family’s good so that the ‘cult’ to which he had ‘dedicated’ himself could continue to carry him! This may be one pirouette more, solely intended for the renowned barrister. And indeed, it remained his secret.

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Maître Navières du Treuil: the support The celebrity of Maître de Moro-Giafferi and the numerous cases he was in charge of meant that, in the Landru case, the lawyer’s function was split into two. The famous and experienced lawyer prepared the trial, but only had a few interviews with the accused, whereas his colleague and associate Maître Navières du Treuil accompanied Landru in every daily procedure. Landru’s bond with Maître de Moro-Giafferi, who pleaded in his defence, was formal; his bond with Maître Navières du Treuil was denser, more real, but the latter played a secondary part in the defence. Here, we must add that Landru took care of his own defence in his paradoxical way. During the trial, he silenced Maître de Moro-Giafferi by interrupting him: ‘I have just said this’ or ‘Let me speak’. At other times, he intervened directly in the proceedings and Maître de Moro-Giafferi joined with the court in reprimanding his client for his impertinence. For Landru, everything happened in conformity with the lines of force of his personality, the ones that marked his destiny with the seal of isolation and social solitude. The flipside of the subject’s solitude and emptiness was that he could not allow himself to be represented by another. His pomposity, rhetoric and formalism led him to successive digressions that confused the few elements that could help his case. For Landru, the support he derived from his defender was, like the rest, an empty semblant, detached from the desire to save his head. With Maître Navières du Treuil, things happened differently: the relationship was of quite a different order. He spoke at length with Landru in his cell and accompanied him every time the investigating judge summoned him. He drafted the letters and requests addressed by Landru to the presidents and judges of the chambre d’accusation.39 He assisted him in the full and serious sense of the term. He accomplished this task with his youth, modesty and certainly the kindness and attention that seemed to characterise him. This place is close to the one that, in Lacan’s work on psychosis, designates the analyst as secretary to the insane.40 This place transforms the analyst into someone who accompanies the psychotic subject. He does not open the way to infinite and deadening interpretations. On the contrary, he makes it possible for a too invasive jouissance to be limited. The analyst welcomes the psychotic subject’s inventions, inventions which help him to stay alive and contribute to maintaining a pacified social bond, whereas the very structure of psychosis, when it is weakened, tends to take the subject to an outsidediscourse, an outside-bond.41 This is what happened with Maître Navières du Treuil and it allowed Landru to have a little trust in a man, in this man. This is how we can explain the different relations Landru had with each of his lawyers. He was often irritated by Maître de Moro-Giafferi, but he was more relaxed, more at ease with Maître Navières du Treuil. This gap manifested itself distinctly, shortly before his execution. Landru did not answer Maître de Moro-Giafferi, who pressed him to tell the truth before dying. He merely thanked him politely: ‘Maître, I thank you. I have given you a lot of trouble! I entrusted you with a very difficult case,

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let’s face it, a desperate one! Well . . . it is not the first time that an innocent man has been convicted!’42 Turning to Maître Navières du Treuil, he voiced the strange request we have already mentioned, a proof of the trust he had in him: ‘It would make me happy if you were, later, in your spare time, to look after my little interests!’43 If we consider that Landru was equivalent to his ‘little interests’, was he not asking him to continue thinking about his case and maybe to promote his cause so that it remained famous? Since he had failed to experience existence for himself, maybe he wanted to be an infinite object of research, as always, he wanted the other to give him the proof he so longed for – in this case, that there had been something of a subject, that he had himself been a subject. So it was to Maître Navières du Treuil and to him alone that he gave, for posterity and for further elucidation, a significant document that was sold at an auction on 3 July 1985 by the lawyer’s daughter, long after his death in 1967. This is what it says in the Drouot sales catalogue: ‘Original quill-drawing, captioned Landru draws his stove and makes his confessions, autographed declaration signed with a pencil, 24 cm x 31 cm.’ The drawing represented the kitchen of his Gambais house with, in perfect alignment, a sink, the stove, and a coal storage unit. This is not a scribbled sketch, here again the rationality that characterised Landru shows through; the lines have been drawn with a ruler as an industrial designer might have done. He wrote the following titles in capital letters: FAMOUS CASES / THE MYSTERY OF GAMBAIS. Underneath, he quoted one of the case documents: ‘3 658 – where a witness testifies: To prepare the meal, the stove was lit, it seemed very small to me but he declared worked [sic] very well, that one could burn [sic] everything that one wanted in it.’ This sentence quoted by Landru referred to Madame Falque’s testimony. On the top left corner, Landru autographed his drawing for his lawyer: ‘To my eminent and devoted defender. Grateful souvenir. October 1921. Landru.’44

Behind the wall: the posthumous confession For Maître Navières du Treuil, Landru erased the wall of private life, the wall of isolation and incommunicability that had always separated him from others, and this gives the document that he handed to him the value of a confession. On the back of the drawing, an enigmatic sentence was written in black pencil: My dear Maître. Allow me to give you this modest souvenir, drawn during the preparation of the proceedings and whose theme was inspired by a witness’s deposition; incontestable and indisputable proof of the immeasurable stupidity of mankind, it is not the wall behind which something happens, but the stove in which one burned [underlined three times by him] something.45 With this sentence Landru, perhaps for the first time, revealed a little of the truth, while retaining his characteristic duplicity of enunciation. This document perpetuates the Landru enigma, because, obliged by his rigour, he presented himself

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Figure 4.1 Drawing of the stove by Landru with the following caption: ‘The witness testifies: “To prepare the meal, the stove was lit, it seemed very small to me but he declared worked [sic] very well, that one could burn [sic] everything that one wanted in it.”’ On the top left corner, Landru autographed his drawing for his lawyer: ‘To my eminent and devoted defender. Grateful souvenir. October 1921. Landru.’ Source: National Archives, Paris (picture by Atelier photographique du Centre historique des Archives nationales).

time and again in an allusive guise. The form of this ‘confession’ matches the subject’s overall logic. We know why this confession was addressed to Maître Navières du Treuil. In this confession, Landru’s megalomaniacal position with regard to the witnesses and more generally to mankind is blindingly obvious. Landru nonetheless ascribed his inspiration for making this captioned drawing, a drawing he made before the opening of the trial since it was dated October 1921, to a specific witness, Madame Falque. At this time, Landru, with his defender, went regularly to the judge in order to be updated on the contents of the investigation file. It seems appropriate to add Fernande Segret’s testimony to that of

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Madame Falque. These two testimonies, indeed, were given with a very short interval between them and say more or less the same thing. These two women had stayed in Gambais on occasion and lived to tell the tale. Fernande Segret occupied the place we know for Landru. As for Madame Falque, although she had been a ‘fiancée’, she had also been able to resist his usual manoeuvres. She had even managed to obtain the repayment of money she had lent him. Because of this, she occupied a specific place. She impressed him. He was like a child in front of her. When they saw him bustling around his stove, they both made a similar comment on the question. Fernande Segret, in her deposition, recalled: ‘Not only did we burn wood and coal in the stove, but Landru threw potato peels, eggshells into the hearth and when I pointed this out to him, he answered: ‘everything burns’.46 As for Madame Falque, she recalled this memory: The point of the Gambais visit was to show me the property, we ate lunch in the garden – a cold meal we had brought with us – and he made coffee on the stove. On this point, I remember having told him that the appliance seemed a little small by comparison with the kitchen, which is rather big. To this he answered: ‘Yes, but it works so well, one burns everything that one wants in it.’47 These two women made a remark to Landru, and he did not appreciate these remarks. They touched on an essential rigidity. They threatened his integrity and instantaneously triggered a scornful irritability in him, because everything that disturbed him was intrusive. So, these remarks subtly made the one who voiced them shift from a friendly to a hostile place. And all the more so since they came from people on whom he relied for support. They appeared as a cut, a lack of empathy equivalent to ‘being dropped’, ‘let down’. In Landru’s world, whoever did not ‘understand’ him, in his way – that is to say, in his ‘language’ crammed full of personal significations – whoever did not understand him in this way was thus automatically and necessarily subsumed within ‘the immeasurable stupidity of mankind’ – a buffer syntagm. Then we are on the terrain of a deadening which must be distributed between the other and him: when the other did not understand him, it was he who was struck with disappearance. All of his linguistic system was a defence and only existed to line what for him was an enigmatic void as far as human motives were concerned. As we have seen, the other ought to ‘understand’ him in the full sense of the term, completely, through an impossible form of divination of thought and transparency. It means that understanding for Landru had the sense of an understanding without veil and without mystery, that of a subject completely caught in the other, as his neo-conception of the police, his relation to the prosecutor Godefroy and his love for Fernande Segret indicated. He was then caught between two alternatives: either this union existed, or it was the wall. This was how the world was structured for him. When this did not happen, what did people want from him, why was he being asked all of these questions ‘stupidly’? Because everything was there, visible and

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legible, for anyone who knew how to see, for anyone who was on his side. Without that, the world from which he was separated by the wall was a world swarming with disconcerting individualities, which he could not count on. As for Landru, he only had one landmark: it was to submit everything to the binary of the useful and the useless without discriminating between the inanimate and the animate, between things and humans. Everything is object and everything burns in the stove: he rationalised everything through the category of the thing, of waste. After this detour via ‘the stupidity of mankind’, Landru seemed to allow, beyond his limits and for the one who constantly helped him, a glimpse at something of the order of an explanation: ‘. . . it is not the wall behind which something happens, but the stove in which one burned something’. This sentence has been the object of numerous attempts at interpretation which converge towards a single explanation: ‘It did not happen outside, it happened in the house.’ We propose another reading of this sentence by taking into consideration its grammatical construction, which exposed Landru. Landru did not write ‘it is not behind the wall’, but ‘it is not the wall behind which’. In so doing, he put the wall in the foreground and thus raised it to the dignity of an object: ‘. . . it is not the wall . . .’. To this object that faded away for Maître Navières du Treuil, Landru substituted another, very visible, object: the stove. Thus, he wrote: ‘. . . it is not the wall . . . but the stove’. But what wall are we talking about? We know that Landru systematically used this phrase, which became proverbial for him, to oppose interventions that were too precise and disturbing: ‘Private life is an impassable wall.’ The wall at stake, in his comment, was not the wall of the house, but that of private life. In the world of transparency, should people not have known, understood what he did to feed his family? This is what the ‘immeasurable stupidity of mankind’ did not see or ‘understand’. However, what the wall and the buffer signifiers show is precisely that there was no private life, the wall is not the veil of any shame, remorse or repression, it hid no object of desire. Behind the wall, there was nothing, except for the void left by the non-advent of the subject. Here, the object stuck to the individual as the object of reality; here the object was the stove. The subject, reduced to the state of a machine, is identified with the stove: this was his private life. Let us recall the letter sent by Landru to the prosecutor Godefroy. In this letter, the stove, ‘puny’, so small and all alone in the court, made the audience tremble. Can we, in this sequence, read Landru’s identification with the ‘small stove’ that, in the big court of the Other, represented him, a fragile, isolated object, subjected to looks and judgments and yet himself a terrifying object, threatening with his mere presence judges, jurors, the police and beyond? It is not behind this wall that something happens; the wall cannot metaphorise the secret here. It is really in the stove as Landru’s real that ‘something’ happened; more precisely, that ‘something’ was burned. Here the real is made present, so reality occupies its place, a raw, brutal and ferocious reality and Landru discloses the signified of his criminal trajectory, the stove, forever bound to his name.

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This text could be taken for a confession, if it were not for the kaleidoscope of formalism and imprecision, affirmation and allusion from which the subject is always absent. How strange is the confession of a subject who cannot accept it in the first person! And the question posed by madness is truly that of knowing how the subject knows something of himself there, without for all that recognising himself in it.48 The indefinite pronoun ‘one’ comes at this place, ‘one burned something’. This indefinite pronoun seems to indicate the dissolution of the ego and the crepuscular state in which the individual, in his act, becomes the monstrous object through which he accomplishes, in a rationality just as monstrous, what he designates as being his ‘work’.

Notes 1 Le Journal, 9 November 1921. 2 On the Other, see above, ‘A biography elucidated by psychoanalysis’. The Other, because of its incompletion, can be declined in small universes having their own imaginary consistencies: thus we may speak of the social Other, the Other of law, the Other of love . . . 3 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Investigation File; Le Journal, 24 November 1921. 4 Le Journal, 24 November 1921. 5 Le Journal, 9 November 1921. 6 Le Journal, 9 November 1921. 7 Le Petit Journal, 31 May 1919. 8 Le Journal, 9 November 1921. 9 Le Journal, 11 November 1921. 10 Le Journal, 9 November 1921. 11 Le Journal and Le Matin, 8 November 1921. 12 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Investigation File. Forensic opinions of Dr Paul, pathologist, Dr Anthony, anthropology professor at the Museum of the Jardin des Plantes, and of Professor Sauvèze of the Paris Dental School. 13 The experts did not have enough elements to determine the person’s gender. 14 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box III, Opinions of Drs Vallon, Roubinovitch and Roques de Fursac. 15 Darmon, P, Landru, 1994, Paris: Plon, p 135. 16 Belin, J, Commissaire Belin, trente ans de Sûreté nationale, 1950, Paris: Société d’éditions et de publications en exclusivité, Bibliothèque France-Soir, p 95. 17 Le Journal, 9 November 1921. 18 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Closing Speech of the Prosecution. 19 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Closing Speech of the Prosecution. 20 Le Journal, 10 November 1921. 21 Béraud, H, ‘Le procès’ in Béraud, H, Bourcier, E and Salmon, A, L’Affaire Landru, 1924, Paris: Albin Michel, p 229. 22 Béraud, ‘Le procès’, 1924, p 230. 23 Le Journal, 9 November 1921. 24 Lacan, J, ‘The Paradoxes of Ethics’ in The Seminar Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1999, London: Routledge, pp 311 ff. 25 Le Journal, 1 December 1921. 26 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris; Belin, J, Commissaire Belin, trente ans de Sûreté nationale, 1950, Paris: Société d’éditions et de publications en exclusivité, Bibliothèque France-Soir, p 123.

118 Serial Killers: Psychiatry, Criminology, Responsibility 27 Lacan, J, The Seminar Book III: The Psychoses 1955–1956, 1993, London: Routledge, pp 145–146; and ‘The Mirror-Stage as formative of the I function as revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’ (1949) in Écrits, 2006, New York and London: WW Norton, p 79. 28 Béraud, ‘Le procès’, 1924, p 289. 29 Béraud, ‘Le procès’, 1924, p 291. 30 Le Journal, 1 December 1921; Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Investigation File. 31 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Investigation File. 32 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Investigation File. 33 Dr Dubuisson, forensic expert to the courts, had examined Landru in 1906, during his second incarceration. 34 Le Journal, 1 December 1921. 35 Le Journal, 1 December 1921. 36 Sagnier, C, L’Affaire Landru, 1999, Paris: De Vecchi, p 28. 37 Darmon, Landru, 1994, p 288. 38 Lacan, J, The Seminar Book XI The four fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1991, London: Penguin. 39 A jurisdiction in charge of overseeing the judicial part of the investigation before the actual trial [trans. note]. 40 Lacan, The Seminar Book III, 1993, p 206. 41 On modalities of treatment for psychosis, the reader is referred to the works and publications of the École de la Cause Freudienne. 42 Salmon, A, ‘L’exécution’ in Béraud, Bourcier and Salmon, L’Affaire Landru, 1924, p 306. 43 Salmon, ‘L’exécution’, 1924, p 306. 44 Document held by the National Archives, Museum of the History of France. 45 Document held by the National Archives, Museum of the History of France. 46 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box III, Testimony of Fernande Segret. 47 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box III, Testimony of Madame Falque. 48 Lacan, ‘Presentation on Psychical Causality’ in Écrits, 2006, p 135.

Chapter 5

Landru’s psychosis

Psychiatric forensic assessment In 1919, the post-war period in which all institutions began to resurface, new reflections on man and madness were coming to the fore. They took up the 1905 propositions of the Chaumié 1 circular on criminal responsibility and in particular the responsibility of the mentally ill. Seeking a middle ground between the criminal non-responsibility of the insane and their full responsibility, this circular of the Minister of Justice made it a requirement that an ‘expert witness be summoned to indicate with the greatest possible clarity the extent to which the accused was, at the time of the offence, responsible for the act that has been imputed to him’.2 This question would arise for the Landru case. Landru underwent a psychiatric forensic assessment in 1904, when he was incarcerated for the first time for his swindling. Dr Vallon, a physician at SaintAnne hospital and a court expert, had carried out the assessment. The same expert would be part of the commission appointed to assess him when he was charged with the murders in 1919. When Dr Vallon was called in to assess Landru in 1904, the latter had just sunk into a state of sadness described by the physician as close to lypemania, what we would call melancholia today. When he saw him, he noted that Landru ‘was still depressed, dejected, sad, sickly’, but specified that ‘although this combination is of a nature as to diminish his responsibility, he could not be considered to have committed his swindling unconsciously and could not therefore be nonresponsible’.3 From then on, psychiatry took no further interest in Landru. His depressive phenomena were not interpreted, or if they were, they were interpreted in a positivist perspective, which only takes account of the will and lucidity of individuals. The phenomena as well as the subject’s statements were pre-interpreted and the actual clinical dimension faded away. Thus, the experts did not look back to an event that occurred during the first incarceration: a guard caught Landru making a slipknot with the intention of hanging himself. Psychiatrists immediately reduced this fact, which has hardly been studied, to manipulation on the part of this fraudster, considered to be

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intelligent. Yet this act takes on quite another dimension when we take it together with Dr Vallon’s observations on Landru’s melancholic state. Landru’s first arrest constituted his first tangible separation from the world. The social isolation concretely represented by prison redoubled in reality the moral withdrawal we know to be his. The structure of the psychic defect characterising his unconscious, which for him took the form of the hollow thickness of the ‘wall’, encountered its social equivalent: isolation by the wall of the jail. Two cuts superimposed themselves. The subject, removed from the world, was in the same movement separated from the master-signifiers that sustained him. This disunion brutally plunged Landru into the twilight of a world without landmarks, without a reason to be, or more precisely to act. This moment of a double cut, where the subject does not answer for the world and the world does not answer for the subject, constitutes what we recognise as the coordinates of a passage to the act, a suicidal one here: an attempt to rejoin his being that drops, anchorless, and that nothing can hold back. Two years later, Landru was arrested again. This time he was a recidivist. During his second prison term, he was examined by Dr Dubuisson, a court expert and member of the Positivist Society. This physician was well-known for his interest in the relationship between madness and crime and gave open lectures in forensic medicine at the Paris Law School. He actively participated in debates between doctors and lawyers. He was close to Lacassagne and a member of the editorial committee of the Archives d’anthroplogie criminelle.4 According to him: Landru is unbalanced, with a serious personal history and hereditary background. For several years, following intellectual exhaustion and prolonged moral torments, he has been in a morbid mental state which, without amounting to madness, is nonetheless not a normal state. While it is difficult to say that he doesn’t know what he is doing, that he doesn’t understand the significance of his acts, that he cannot foresee their consequences, that he is therefore non-responsible, it is nevertheless only fair to consider him most deserving of leniency.5 For this physician – who was in the habit of considering all men responsible for their actions, despite the fact that they had inherited the intellectual and moral dispositions determining them – the use of the term ‘leniency’ for Landru sounds all the more like an indication of pathology. Indeed, it was Dr Dubuisson who warned Madame Landru: ‘Keep a close eye on him, this man has bad things in store for you.’6 Madame Landru’s sister remembered him saying even more precisely: ‘The crisis of madness he has just had is nothing in comparison with the one that he will have later. His brain is curiously formed.’7 Fifteen years later, before his assises trial, Landru was subjected to a commission of three expert witnesses appointed to assess him: Drs Vallon, Roubinovitch and Roques de Fursac. In the newspapers, the question of madness was clearly posed: ‘But why this frightful succession of crimes? Is he a maniac, a

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sadist, does he act under the influence of a morbid state? Like some madmen, does he strangle the woman that he has in his possession?’8 Landru repeatedly formulated this question himself. In a letter he sent to the judge in 1919 after a few months of detention, as he stood accused of murder, he writes: I am mad and you hide it from me; why this lack of confidence in me? I read the newspapers, in spite of everything; jails are no longer as closed as they once were and I saw that the certificates of Drs. Vallon and Dubuisson, who previously represented me as non-responsible, were used. Am I mad or not? Certainly, torments, persecutions overwhelm me; I stand accused of frightful crimes, of having murdered women, I, whose whole life can attest to the delicate reverence I have always had for women, these beings endowed with exquisite sensitivity and perfect grace. I beg of you, your Honour, and it is also my right that I am asserting here, I want a medical commission to certify that my mental state is well balanced. I am not mad, I protest this machination, I want to justify myself in broad daylight.9 The experts answered by first looking at the familial environment and childhood of the subject. However, in Landru’s childhood, they found no social or familial factor capable of auguring such a destiny – yet we know that death and madness had marked his birth. With a passing reference to the method of free association, these experts gave an important place to the writings and free statements of the subject. They also carried out an in-depth physical examination as was the custom at that time. Landru, then age 51, looked well. The experts described him as a wellpreserved man for his age. He was balding and presented no physical signs of hereditary degeneration. They found no trace of paretic or paralytic events. They observed his demeanour and described him as calm, walking in slow steps, slightly bent, with an ample and attentive look. He gave them the impression of a little clerk with eyes full of intelligence, good manners, tidily dressed, with well-kept hair and beard. ‘Looking at him, we would not take him for an excitable man, nor a depressed or a confused one,’10 they said, which recalls something of the portrait of the ‘pencil pushing’ car mechanic painted by Jules Romains. Landru cooperated, but the only things he complained about had to do with his physical state: he said he had headaches two to three times a year, localised at the top of his skull, associated with black-outs and visual disorders. He described seeing a multitude of stars, like ‘a burst of fireworks’, he said.11 They gave significant space to Landru’s narration of his past. But his tendency towards long developments, interminable digressions, his fanciful verve, in short his language disorders, concealed as always the key moments, events and disruptions which marked his life. In order to be able to mention them, he would have to have recognised them as such. Landru certainly talked a lot, but he did not really speak – his speech slid.

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The experts were very attentive to Landru’s linguistic mannerism, but they ascribed it to his intelligence and good education. They said: He evokes his childhood memories. His ability to chat, narrate and expound puts him well above the usual average in his social environment. He knows how to evoke distant and recent facts; he knows how to group them in a demonstrative and often picturesque way. He is endowed with a faculty of ideation which makes his conversation interesting by virtue of its fullness and variety and this proves his intelligence.12 So the experts noticed the stylistic formalisation, but neglected the accents of enunciation. Yet at that time, Bleuler was paying attention to enunciation in the speech of psychotic patients.13 He described, amongst other things, the jargon with which the subject accorded a disproportionate importance to very small things, while he remained silent about more important elements. For Landru, a certain preciousness, a taste for circumlocution, the drawing out of a detail at the expense of the real, revealed an aimless, diffluent speech lacking the final representation, the one that leads to intentionality, to a wanting-to-say. Like the snake-like figures of mannerist art, his speech forced the interlocutor to circle around the void. What one calls verbose reticence is created in this way. Speech can develop endlessly, it will never reveal what is not there to reveal, since everything is included in what is said. For the psychoanalyst, as we know, the enunciation is worth as much as the statement.14 Something of enjoyment can be read in the choice of words, the tone of voice, the shine of the gaze, the body accompanying the statements. And we can discover an accent of truth there, some uneasiness, a subjective division, a passion, but also the greatest discordance. The relation of the statement to the enunciation indicates the way in which imaginary, symbolic and real are tied together for a subject. This knotting between subject, body and language (langage) constitutes the language (la langue) of the subject, which Lacan wrote in a single word: lalangue,15 to distinguish it from what one calls a language (une langue). The lalangue is the set of elements that specify the manner in which a subject has incorporated common language. It grounds his singularity, namely the relation of the subject to his mode of enjoyment. This implies that, in order to know who the subject of this language is, we grasp his or her formulas, axioms, insistences, punctuations, barriers, suspensions, silences, circumlocutions, ambiguities, inconsistencies, etc. This is precisely what the experts disregarded. Were they duped by the reticence manifested in Landru’s docility and his plasticity to the speech of the other? This reticence allowed the subject to respond in the way that was expected of him while erasing himself from the enunciation. Whatever the case, in seeking to discover the cause for his passages to the act, they were only looking for standard causes and not the relation of the subject to the truth of his being – a relation that could be revealed by his enunciation.

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They mistook Landru’s mythomania and the fact that he spoke so readily for wit, whereas he said nothing and seemed to attest, on the contrary, to an invasion of language. He was submerged by it, but the experts were not looking for the sign of his madness in a clinical semiology of speech. Yet, he was in the habit of giving thousands of explanations to Fernande Segret about his many trips, laying particular emphasis upon superficial observations, making picturesque descriptions of the countries he had supposedly visited and enjoying recounting in detail the customs of people he had never met.16 These excessive details did not in any way converge towards a full speech, towards an intention to say something, towards having something to say. To this we can add that Landru was a graphomaniac: he wrote his ideas, his poems such as the one he sent to his lawyer, he kept files on everything and noted everything as if recording everything that had taken place in his history. But he was hardly questioned on his notebooks. Finally, everyone agreed that Landru was a keen reader and his physical agitation was only paralleled by his psychic hyperactivity. If the forensic examination did not resort to the semiology of language and enjoyment, it nonetheless proceeded in meticulous detail: In the moral sphere, Landru adopts the attitude of a man who would never have anything to feel guilty about, in any respect. If we listen to him, he never felt the desire to experience sexual excesses, even less genital perversions: he claims he knows nothing of them and that he has never been interested in such things, at any time in his life. On several occasions, we looked, in particular, for impulses of a sadistic order in him. ‘To feel pleasure in that,’ he answered, ‘I would have to have experienced it at least once: however, I don’t know what it is and I have never experienced it.’17 Was Landru, who used this argument during the judicial investigation, being ironic or helpless? Here, his answer was clear, precise and divested of any rhetorical effect. His accounting universe, which took the place of felt experience and which left him adrift when Inspector Belin challenged him on this point, shows how much the answer was again situated in this same register where knowledge had been removed. His words verged on the perplexity of the ignorant. And, according to Landru’s rationality, to be ignorant is to have not ‘felt’ what one is speaking about before speaking about it. Landru thus attested to the fact that, for him, the signifier could not be detached from concrete experience. The conceptual power of words was foreclosed. The subject did not succeed any more in projecting himself into the future than in thinking about the other in terms of reciprocity. The signifier not being, in this case, the murder of the thing,18 it had no other function than to accompany the experience, naming it after the fact. It can happen that when a psychotic subject experiences an unprecedented sensation, unknown in the register of identified events, he then has to name it and, with this act of nomination, he succeeds in making it his.

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After questions about sexuality came those about his role as a father. The experts continue: ‘Landru manifests affective feelings for his wife and children; he repeatedly exposed his ideas on the rights and duties of the father with the obvious intention of proving to us that he was fully imbued with the patriarchal principle.’19 This patriarchal principle, as we have seen,20 was not the father, but its grimacing caricature. What was, in the event, the status of paternal love in Landru’s relation to his family? It was not that of a gift of speech in any case, but a fabricated mode of behaviour in which Landru strove to juxtapose, to keep together great moral principles and the necessity of providing for his family’s needs – two positions which were not tied together. This necessity was understood in absolute terms and this was what drove him, without any effect of discontinuity, out of the social bond. The family was the initial premise from which he created a strictly utilitarian and therefore totalitarian universe of duty. The experts also noted that the devout tendencies of Landru’s youth seemed to have evaporated. Henceforth, his scepticism towards ministers of the Christian religion was matched only by that demonstrated towards the police. We could now say that the subject, misrecognising his ‘illness’, wholly situated the pain, ‘the kakon of his own being’, in the other and this was what he ‘tries to get at in the [other he despises or in the other] that he strikes’.21 With unshakable superiority, Landru considered that the eight convictions adorning his police record, which made him deportable in July 1914, were imposed on him without his deserving them: ‘his lawful commercial acts were misinterpreted, portrayed as swindles or embezzlements’.22 So the issue was only a difference of interpretation. For Landru, only the personal, private, incommunicable experience was univocal; everything else was equivocal. So it was very precisely at that point that the social bond dissolved, not imaginarily but actually, and that the liberty of this psychotic subject became manifest: a generalised individualism in the literal sense of the term. The interviews continued and the experts diversified their approaches to try to catch this elusive chameleon. They then questioned him about present-day facts, the ones he was being charged with: the numerous murders of women and the young Cuchet, and the theft and handling of stolen goods belonging to the victims. Cleverly, they chose to let him speak so that he could explain himself for as long as he wanted and they recounted most of his arguments as faithfully as possible. In so doing, they trusted free speech and its power, the one that leads the subject to expose himself, to say more than he would like to. Without being psychoanalysts, they knew of this nascent discipline, which at the time was relatively new in France. In his tale, Landru unfolded a vast tautological system, articulated according to accomplished sophist rhetoric: I am indicted with something phenomenal. I am accused of having murdered I don’t know how many people. Among others, I am accused of having killed Madame Cuchet. Let us talk about it. Here is a lady who, six months before she met me, made plans to leave France. She gave notice on her lodgings and

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came to spend some time with me in Vernouillet . . . Then she left where she was . . . just as she had left her previous lodgings . . . This is not a disappearance, it is a move, yet I am being asked where Madame Cuchet is?23 After the assessment, and for the duration of the judicial investigation and trial, hour after hour, Landru held on to his solipsistic system. We cannot say that he mastered this system, since he could never get out of it – since Landru did not have the nodal point that would make him a master of his creation. This is what makes us say that he did not protect his system as a perverse subject would, but that he is24 his system as a psychotic subject is.25 He is the system’s machinery. His speech looped back upon itself and always bore the mark of the void of signification. I am supposed to have killed while in a state of ‘furious anger’? But all the same, one doesn’t get angry twelve times in a row. You ask me if I didn’t murder them out of sadism? I don’t know what taste that has. I am told that the name of twelve missing people are inscribed in the same notebook . . .26 Sometimes, his speech ran on and on to the point where it got stuck in an aggressive reticence: ‘After all, I only answer to my conscience.’27 While the subject was on the threshold of a delusional reality, the presence of another who expected something from him rendered persecution apparent. It was a tipping point where Landru shifted from a defensive to an offensive position. From then on, the psychiatric experts were identified with the police and were on the verge of becoming persecutory. With the demeanour and bearing of an arrogant and scornful man, he continued: ‘If I am guilty, prove my guilt to me. If I have murdered, prove it. It is said that charred bones were found in Gambais, I only burned cutlets and pig bones there.’28 There was a brief moment of wavering, which he dealt with by derision: ‘And I think about the paper crisis every time I see the formidable file put together against me by the judicial investigation.’29 Faced with a subject who developed his arguments ‘to the end’, the conclusion of the experts was unanimous: there was no ‘trace of psychosis, of a pathological impulse or an obsession, of a weakening of intellectual faculties or a confusional state.’30 Dr Vallon placed him at the border of madness without having crossed it.31 Dr Roques de Fursac found no trace of psychosis in the accused. As for Dr Roubinovitch, he saw Landru as ‘a temperate individual, free of any secret illness’.32 ‘Notwithstanding any question of criminality’, the experts affirmed they found him ‘normal in every respect’.33 But does the fact of approaching Landru notwithstanding any question of criminality make any sense? How can we separate the crime from the criminal? Their findings, developed during the trial, were categorical and crystal clear: ‘Landru is fully responsible.’34 Hearing these declarations, Landru rose to utter this syllogism: I am keen to thank the experts, because the monstrosity of the crimes I am accused of would imply a perversity that could only be explained by

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undeniable madness. Since they found me to be of sound mind, I cannot have committed these crimes.35 His madness was entirely encapsulated by this empty statement, in which he situated a link of pseudo-causality that would secure him in his supposed innocence. Yet there was a man, Inspector Belin, who had the idea of Landru’s madness as soon as he was arrested. This idea, which struck him immediately, persisted for the duration of the trial, despite the experts’ findings. As previously mentioned, 30 years after the case we find this evoked in his memoirs: I did not have the opportunity to study Landru as much as I would have wanted to from a psychological point of view, in order to know if he had undergone a mystical crisis in his youth, as I had been told, or even a crisis of instability. I am not a psychiatrist and the psychiatrists who examined Landru always found him to be ‘normal’. I always thought, and those of my colleagues who had to deal with Landru thought the same, that this criminal showed all the signs of a dual personality, extraordinary enough and very interesting for a psychologist. He himself recognized this faculty of division and he explained it through the fact that he had fallen on his head when he was very young. He certainly manifested peculiar lapses of memory and felt a pressing need to write down all the details of his existence . . . This mystery man, who didn’t confide the secrets of his life to anyone, instead wrote them down for himself, like a pious child collecting his faults in a diary.36 Inspector Belin noticed that after having been an audacious, enterprising and imprudent man, Landru changed suddenly, diving headlong ‘into illegality with a madman’s will’. On this point, he noted that Landru had already been subjected to a psychiatric assessment when he was first arrested in 1904, at a time where it was not common practice. Inspector Belin’s remark is pertinent indeed: Marc Renneville’s documented investigation in Crime et Folie37 tells us that there were very few requests for mental assessments in criminal matters between 1900 and 1917. So the request for an assessment of Landru, who was only imprisoned for swindling, was all the more surprising. Inspector Belin was also looking for something in the history of the subject, he was not after a ‘profile’, he wanted to probe the case and, as we will see shortly, he did not lack clinical sensibility.

The body of the rubber man The rational cynicism of his murders, a cynicism in which the body of the other did not exist, corresponded to Landru’s systematic irony. But what could ‘having a body’ mean for him? According to the testimonies that have helped us to paint his biographical portrait, Landru could do what he wanted with his body: one moment it was stiffened, frozen in the attitude that suited the requirement of the

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moment, and in the next it was flexible and disarticulated. His acrobatic tricks astonished everyone he met; his contortions and gesticulations were such that he was nicknamed the ‘rubber man’. For Landru, when his feelings faltered, there was a logical deduction or massive adaptation to the ambience of the moment. Here again this splitting between seriousness, stiffness and the clownish position was total. Everything happened as if his identifications became ‘imprinted’ with the ambience around him, embodying it without reserving a point where his own interiority escaped it, a blind, opaque point, the knot of the subject’s being. During an interrogation session, Judge Bonin, as if aiming to draw out ‘the echo in the body of the fact that there is speech’,38 had the idea of not using ready-made formulas and of trying to arouse a feeling in Landru, an effect of his own speech on him: ‘Do you not feel that such a childish answer could serve to support the accusation of murder that hangs over you?’ Calmly, Landru replied to him: ‘It depends on how one interprets it.’39 The subject’s indifference to these questions is disconcerting. Words do not seem to have substance or echo in him.40 It would seem that the bond that joined speech to Landru’s body was a rather loose one. At the time of the assessment, Landru handed ‘a small plea that he had written himself in the form of autobiographical notes’41 to the psychiatrists. This plea confirmed the emptiness of speech. The only elements he mentioned concerned precisely the physical dimension: the body. His parents recounted these events to him: he did not remember. In his early childhood, he had been sickly; furthermore, this period was punctuated by several accidents. At around the time when I first went to school, I suffered a shock to the head caused by knocking it against the angle of a fireplace so violently that, I have been told, my life hung in the balance for quite a long time. Although the wound healed, I have always experienced a rather vivid pain at quite irregular intervals. Landru specified that he did not remember anything of note about his adolescence. He recounted that, shortly before the end of his military service, he had passed out after a forced march and again could have died. He was thought to have been between life and death. He did not remember anything: ‘Daily concerns and moral suffering ensued.’ If he certainly referred to moral suffering, it was only to make it seem banal next to the daily concerns and physical accidents, which presented an indisputable degree of seriousness. We also learn that he had had an attack of partial paralysis on the left side, without his being able to specify the date or even the period. This attack, which reminded him that his maternal grandmother had died of this same accident, had acutely worried him: ‘I did not fear for myself, I was already hardened to suffering, but because my children were far from being raised, I thought I would be a new burden for the family. This would not have done and I would not have been able to bear it.’42

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Let us note the logical inversion in this last sentence: to be able to bear something, it must first have existed. This inversion: there being first this ‘it would not have happened’ and then, secondarily, the question of having to bear it, also reflected an inversion of the subject’s position. Something of a disappearance is being announced here through an allusive mechanism. Was he hinting that the only possible alternative would have been death? It is possible. If Landru had been sick, the figure of the handicap, intolerable, inassimilable, would have emerged in the face of, and in symbolic opposition to, the exclusive and isolated signifier ‘responsible’. An unbearable point, a stumbling block was touched. The patriarch excluded the sick father. The power of the syntagm ‘responsible for his family’ which represented him must not be dented. This syntagm, which gave him his law, was also what anchored him in the Other. In this way, he could hope to gain some being, some sense of having a body in the face of the threat of derealisation. He existed, since he was ‘responsible’ for his family, to a terrifying degree. Deprived of this anchor, the body did not count. His body is also what drew the attention of a doctor who treated Landru at the Saint-Martin hospital, following inexplicable paralyses the after-effects of which were also surprising. The experts did not take these after-effects into account. This is what Landru wrote on the subject: The doctor who treated me, as he apparently found my case interesting (not for me), made numerous studies, observations and graphs about walking, and a special report that he wanted to keep for himself. With time, my arm recovered without ever being as flexible as before. As for my head, the lasting effects are only a greater weakness in the left eye and, in one ear, hearing I call ‘hard’ without amounting to deafness. In 1913, I had yet another accident. As I was lying down, repairing a car on blocks from underneath (the wheel having been removed), for who knows what reason, the blocks moved and the car fell on my head, which was caught between the vehicle and the ground. The shock was partly absorbed by car parts but, after I was taken out of there, it took me some time to get over this shock. About these things as well as a lot of others, my memory, every day more rebellious, can only retain rather obscure details: I had reached the point were I was forced to write down everything I needed to remember, even the smallest things. At some points, my life went by as in a dream without it being possible to say whether it was really about me or another person. At other times, details came back to me with a degree of clarity and precision that would lead me to think that they had just happened in the previous hour or that, having lived another existence in other times and places, I had died, and was alive again as another person, while having kept the memory of it.43 Landru’s relation to memory does not have the characteristics of a post-traumatic disorder; although he could use the accidents as an explanation, the dream-like dimension invaded his memories. This way of being in life as though in a sort of

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fog was correlated to a latent depersonalisation, which he described rather well. Much credit is given to this description, because it attests to the precariousness of the feeling of life in Landru, to the fragility of his anchoring in the world and the devitalisation affecting his body. The reader must have sensed, amongst other things, the manner in which he described, meticulously and as if it were a mechanical element, his battered head when the car fell on him. This crepuscular episode came to a close with the erasure of all temporality as well as the erasure of the signifier of death in its common understanding, which includes the loss of one’s life-force. Everything happened as if the subject were eternal, which one classically encounters in melancholia. In melancholia, the individual disappears as subject, delusional culpability reduces him to being nothing more than a being of waste which, like the black hole described by astronomers, consumes all the space and time. He thus becomes the unworthy object, the fallen object in all circumstances, and forever fixed in an eternalised position. This destitution of the subject to an object of opprobrium is nonetheless the other side of his megalomania. The person who could not save the world becomes the object-cause of all of its misfortunes. However, Landru’s melancholic accents cannot conceal that for him there was no delusional guilt. The body was eternalised, certainly, but as if by metempsychosis. In Landru’s case, the figures of depression had other coordinates than those of melancholia and manifested themselves in his body falling and in blows he received here and there, or in a sudden atonia. In his account, he almost seemed to be speaking about a stuffed doll, or a marionette with only one, very tenuous, string attached to the Other. And these falls did not occur at just any moment. Two serious physical accidents punctuated two symbolic passages: the one from the house to school, then the one from the army to working life, to family life. So they occurred when the subject’s relation to the Other changed, when it was necessary to have enough assurance, something of the phallus to go through the stages of life. Landru lacked the necessary response-ability to face difficulties, pitfalls, novelties, a response-ability which metaphorises the signification of separation and that, from then on, allows the latter not to be equivalent to a pure ‘let-down’. In other words, he lacked the signification of lack. Not having it, the dropped body, detached, could no longer sustain itself; the aspects of depression that governed his first incarceration confirm these modalities of ‘being let down’. Like an inanimate puppet, Landru was plunged into silence and stupor as if his body had been brutally devitalised. The same modalities were reproduced at the time of his imprisonment in 1919. A civil servant of the prison service at La Santé remarked on it as follows: For the first few days, Landru, methodical and quiet, washed, organised his things, exchanged a few words with pleasure when he met a guard who was not mercilessly enforcing the rules, ate with appetite, spent his time reading and writing, then he went to bed and fell asleep very quickly. His restful sleep lasted until morning. For the past fortnight, it is no longer the same Landru, he has lost weight and become pasty, his eyes have hollowed out, his forehead

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has become lined, he has aged a lot and his light step has become heavy. He drags his feet, weary and bent; he barely eats; he is gloomy and taciturn. He still answers politely, but the sound of his voice is no longer the same, he is curt, hoarse. He, who perhaps overplayed the slightly sad gentleness of his speech, now speaks abruptly. All he does is write.44 Others described him as spending ‘hours in silence, sitting on his bunk, his head in his hands’.45 His bad general condition became worrying and ended up requiring the intervention of the prison doctor, Dr Paul, on 26 May 1919. He found no physical illness and diagnosed a serious depression and an ‘acute crisis of despondency’.46 The portrait painted by the prison guard showed a man who did not manifest himself, even to complain, who did not ask, who did not claim, who ‘slipped’ towards absence. On 2 December 1921, the day after the verdict which sentenced him to capital punishment – a verdict Landru had heard without flinching and without a ‘muscle on his face moving’47 – he again sank into a very deep ‘nervous breakdown’ according to prison doctor Dr Robert. ‘Landru spent a sleepless night, he seems very depressed and is nearly absolutely silent.’48 The question of knowing whether he would be treated like prisoners sentenced to death did not concern him in the least: he merely answered that it did not matter. He spoke very little, hardly ate anything and had to be reminded that food was next to him. Maître de Moro-Giafferi, who visited him, differentiated this depressive state from Landru’s usual detachment: ‘In spite of his physical depression, Landru is extraordinarily calm. He keeps asserting his innocence while saying: “I cannot say more than I already have”’.49 Finally, we find a trace of the disjunction between the subject and his body in the testimony of the guards of the Palais de Justice with whom Landru exchanged a few words ‘while being tired out’ by the hearings. He told them that the courtroom looked like a pocket-handkerchief and that he would undertake to draft a new plan that would completely transform it as soon as he was acquitted. At the same time, he asked Dr Robert to keep an eye on him at all times, because his health had been deeply unsatisfactory for the past few days.50 This was a euphemism, given what we have just described. Everything happened as if death was inscribing itself in the body of the subject, who continued on his path, indifferent. Even as he formulated megalomaniacal projects, Landru asked his doctor to oversee his body, as if it was going to detach itself, to waste away independently of the subject who lived in it, as if this body was not his. Is this not how we can grasp what his last moments were like? When ‘Landru, impressive in his guileless composure, refused the glass of rum, the cigarette’ and the Mass he was offered and moved, indifferently towards the guillotine, he said: ‘I believe that what truly matters at this point is that it be done quickly. Besides, I don’t want to make these gentlemen wait.’51 The terms of depression and lypemania52 used to describe him could have led one, from a phenomenological perspective, to pose the question of melancholia,

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or even manic-depressive psychosis. This is especially so given that states of elation, racing thoughts and agitation close to mania followed these melancholiform states. In mania, the object disappears in verbal associations, playful and assonant, unburdened from any signification and the subject seems wholly equivalent to the succession of associations of the following type: ‘marabout – bout de ficelle’ (a popular word association game that requires building upon the last syllable by homonym, for example, ‘key card – car door’), etc. But Landru’s apparently pseudo-manic states, while uncoordinated and purely contextual, nonetheless remained underpinned by the master-signifier ‘responsible for his family’, the cause of a delusion of absolute rationality. On the other hand, as we noted, far from there being any delusional guilt, the moments described in terms of depression account more for a ‘disconnection’ between the signifier and the body, characteristic of so-called catatonic episodes in schizophrenic psychosis. This is confirmed by the confusion between real and reality, subject and object, where the body is reduced to an empty bag. When the signifier of work or responsibility disappeared, the body, henceforth ‘useless’, dropped into inertia. Landru’s relation to Fernande Segret also illustrated how little body, emotion and being he had. Landru literally glued his being to Fernande, thus attesting to something of the order of the confusion of subjects. We could interpret this as the self-oblivion and blindness specific to love, but these never imply the collapse of the most elementary forms of grammar, such as the destruction, in language, of the ‘I’ and ‘you’, other and self. In Landru’s case, on the contrary, this confusion shattered language, as we already underlined in the letter sent to prosecutor Godefroy. Landru’s bond with Fernande was made of this ‘immixing’53 of subjects. This is shown in a letter he wrote to her: My pretty girlfriend, I am in a state of grief which leads me to reach for your loving heart to find consolation and forgetfulness for this pain. Rest assured it does not come from you; you are incapable of it, I am certainly its sole author, but I cannot yet account for it. Yesterday I saw your eyes, your beautiful eyes, so deep, so moving, veiled with a small sorrow. There is no doubt for me, since we were alone, that I caused this. Did I say a word, a sentence that shocked you?54 The subjectivity is distributed between two people. We wonder who the subject is that feels pain? Who needs to be comforted? A modality of identification with the other in psychosis, called transitivism, resonates in this letter. Its tipping point here is the word ‘author’. Landru is not pained, he is said to be, by himself, the ‘author’ of the pain. This term renders apparent the weight of the exteriority of the subject to himself. To be the author of this pain is the obvious deduction since ‘they are alone’ – since existence for him can have no other support than presence, especially as this is not the affirmation of a will. If it were, it would not manifest itself in such quaint rhetoric, but in a position, a discourse without words, where the places of each would be well differentiated, distributed. Such places, invisible yet

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very distinct and legible, would have allowed us to glimpse the subject’s perverse enjoyment if there had been one. But we are very far from that, and what we learn from Landru keeps confirming it. The complete exteriority of the ‘symptom’ in relation to the subject is what allowed Freud to separate mourning from melancholia. In psychotic melancholia, the subject does not complain, but he brings charges against himself, outside of all metaphorisation,55 from a place radically Other to himself, foreign. With Fernande perhaps, in the love relation, Landru had wanted to find a symptom, isolation for two, but as we saw, already this relation was only a dead love.56 A question springs to mind. What of Landru’s sexual desire, since it is not rigorously equivalent to love and requires an investment of the body? The detectives, in search of a sexual perversion, did not fail to question Fernande Segret on Landru’s sexuality: ‘In our intimate relations, Landru never seemed abnormal. All I can say is that he was passionate in this respect and that, despite his age; his physical strength was that of a young man. Our relations were frequent.’57 Neither perversion nor impotence can be found in Landru, as Fernande Segret’s testimony confirms. Landru in his feminine universe, far removed from men, not embarrassed by castration, could meet the requirements of the ‘sexual relation’. On this point, he even realised his wish to conform. A disciple of Comtesse de Tramar’s theory, amongst women Landru was like a new species of man, neither torturer nor sadist. He missed no opportunity to put himself forward in speech, writing or drawing, and sent Judge Bonin a self-portrait representing him with a minuscule, shrunken body, but an imposing and therefore disproportionate head, as well as an erect penis. The caption was straightforward: ‘To Mr. Bonin, friendly regards, Landru.’58 One would have expected a more ironic note. It was ambiguous. How far does this picture go towards truly summing him up and encapsulating his formula? Isn’t irony the incomprehensible, non-transmissible effect of structure, the wall? In this creation, via the delusional maxim of a feminised universe, ‘everything’ can be found: neo-love, neo-duty and so-called ‘objects of need’. Beyond that, the world seemed not to exist. A reader who did not know what a delusion or delusional idea was could here take the measure of its weight, power and strength. The delusional idea constitutes ‘a constraint’ in the sense that it becomes the subject’s only landmark. It instates a personal law and thus a new language. This is what specified Landru’s speech disorder and governed his singular enjoyment. From then on, indeed, no one could ask him to account for it. This demand did not cross the barrier where the registers of imaginary, symbolic and real are confused. Non-communicability was total. As we can see, language disorders only take on value through their consequences on the regime of jouissance and conversely. So, sexuality, when it doesn’t contradict the ‘jouissance’ of the subject, may not undergo any apparent disturbance, but be part of a disturbance of another order. Beyond the question of diagnosis, for the psychoanalyst there is the logic of a life that weaves itself between body and language, as between flesh and skin.

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Apprehending this involves following the master-signifiers which govern it, in their capacity for stabilisation as well as in their destructuring effect. It is only to this extent that we may grasp something of the subject’s ‘lalangue’.

Madness: an absolute materialism Landru shows us how the personality of a psychotic subject can fool us. It may seem strong, imposing itself on the world. Some subjects surprise us, paradoxically, with their excessive normality. Their smooth, adaptable personality, exempt from soul searching, strikes the mind, disconcerts and troubles us. Such changeable personalities are clinical realities which descriptive theories assemble, as we said earlier, under the category of ‘multiple personalities’. Moulded by delusional certainty and the necessity to maintain a faultless path, the personalities in question are in fact reduced (démultipliées). The subject can make concessions to the other, submit to what he thinks to be his capricious law so that his own reality holds. This imaginary plasticity can sometimes conceal the foreclosure-induced splitting, which from then on will have a border around it. When, due to life circumstances, the subject is confronted with this border, the real appears and, as we saw for Landru, persecution emerges. These personalities, said to be multiple, are produced by a subject in the service of an unshakable idea, entirely submitted to a paralogical development. Sometimes this idea is absent and at stake is solely the certainty of the void, which is no less imposing. Faced with this idea (the very core of the delusion and thus the sole reality of the subject), all other realities fade away, other values blend, become equal, are levelled. This is why (and it often comes as a surprise) two opposite positions can coexist without paradox. Clérambault had already illustrated and commented upon59 this double relation to reality, this form of lying, which he called mendacity:60 a paralogical idea must be protected at all costs, it thus leads to a lie which, fundamentally isn’t one, since it is dependent on a truth embroiled in certainty. Clérambault examined a woman who tried to kill her daughter and then throw herself out of a window. During the interviews, she was ‘reticent, obstructive’ and ‘in bad faith’. She confessed, retracted her confession, recriminated while denying the facts. Did she want to kill her daughter? No, never. Could she swear to it? She wanted to, then refused and became silent. ‘Pressed with questions, she answered: “I don’t remember.” . . . All her negations were lucid and reasoned, sometimes ardent: she would almost have us doubt our own recollections’, he added.61 Clérambault grasps very well the extent to which what is at stake is not a lie insofar as it would have a relation to truth, but mythomania insofar as it has a relation to the psychotic real. Thus, he wrote: ‘Our patient has two mendacities: mythomaniac mendacity, melancholic mendacity. Blackmail and comedy are her weapons.’ For her, only the idea of suicide exists and everything is submitted to this central idea. The idea of killing her daughter stems from the impossibility of abandoning her, as she is a good mother. Thus, ‘some refinements in her bad faith’ are explained, ‘such as giving

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only false examples . . . of the idea of suicide, while carefully hiding the true ones’. ‘The maternal feeling in our patient,’ Clérambault concluded, ‘is not simply predominant, it is exclusive’.62 The lie, if it can be called one in this case, serves a law within the law, a law not exempt from the matriarchal principle. For Landru, the serial murders were undertaken in a continuous manner in the consistency of a system without fault. So we understand why, against all common sense, they did not seem to require too much of an effort from the subject. This is also what transpired during the trial: to the surprise of all, Landru never wavered; as he was unable to extricate himself from his system. He went forth methodically in a real beyond the symptom. Because the real, here, was without veil, in continuity with the imaginary and the symbolic. As we have already said, rather than being methodical Landru was the method, in other words he was the constant incarnation of his own law. We can say that Landru was schizophrenic to the extent that the schizophrenic subject is ‘characterised by not being caught in any discourse, any social bond’.63 Peculiarity and irony thus lose their usual qualifying dimension and attain a conceptual value, because they account for this actual rupture in schizophrenic psychosis. This is why Landru’s speech could only sustain itself through tautological propositions from which intentionality evaporated. As a schizophrenic subject, he did not succeed in making a symbolic use of the symbolic. He did not succeed in defending himself against the real with the symbolic.64 He did not succeed in transcending it. He did not defend himself against the real with language, since for him, ‘all of the symbolic is real’.65 The irony of the schizophrenic subject does not seek to provoke or connive. Although it makes the other react, it is not Socratic irony, which, leaving aside supposedly obvious facts, asks questions while pretending not to know the answer so that the other surrenders his truth: far from it. This has nothing to do with feigning. Because, as Jacques-Alain Miller specifies in the article quoted previously, this irony is not of the Other, it is of the subject,66 the autonomous subject, the subject cause of himself, therefore outside-bond, it comes from the subject who goes against the bond, who ‘goes against the Other’. He continues by asking what irony says: ‘It says that the Other doesn’t exist, that the social bond is fundamentally a con, that there is no discourse that is not a semblance.’67 Everything is concrete. On this point we hear the echo of Landru’s words when he stated: ‘I consider that forgery does not exist.’68 Socratic irony, which ‘allows the speaker to disappear as guarantor of authenticity, to be no longer localisable in the statement and to avoid being responsible for sense’ either through will, desire or passion for truth, is ‘never completely transparent’.69 For the schizophrenic subject, in this respect, irony is transparent like the subject himself. Passions before which it might otherwise stop are themselves subjected to an ironic treatment. But let us briefly return to how a salutary opacity is born with the subject. For a subject presumed to be normal or neurotic, the Other, although incomplete, nevertheless has consistency. There is in the Other a place where an Other operates, watching him, expecting him, hoping for him: the Name-of-the-Father.

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In this metaphorised, sublimated presence (contradictory, known or unknown), feelings of admiration, fear and the whole range of so many others affects are tied together, in however confused a manner. The gaze is the surplus-value added by the Other to the function of seeing, through which the subject feels implicated in his turn, watched, elected, treasured, hated . . . In short, surplus-value eroticises and separates the subject from the object. Through it, the subject grasps himself as an object for the other in a ‘who am I’ for him – a support for a fantasy that specifies his relation to jouissance. For the subject this place inscribes a reality that no realistic accuracy verifies, but which counts as real; I am the child who is scolded, treasured, beaten, rejected, ignored, watched . . . in any case loved. This is how ‘his’ reality as object for another is constructed and fixed. The screen of the fantasy (to continue on the function of the gaze) intervenes between other and subject, it answers for the hole in the Other without ever being, for all that, adequate. For man, the gaze is thus something other than the sensory function of sight, it brings human beings into the world of omnivoyance: ‘I see only from one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides’,70 it regards me, as we say in French, in other words, I am concerned by the Other, by what I am in his desire. With this question centred on the object of jouissance, the field of the imaginary opens up. If for the schizophrenic subject the word is the thing, the same goes for the constitution of the object: it is not detached from a hypothetical primordial jouissance, untouched, it takes on no libidinal coloration, no value of exchange, it is inseparable from being, and the question of the desire of the other does not arise. It is not constituted as a separate object as such, because its contours are not circumscribed by the gaze of the Other. So in psychotic persecution, omnivoyance is disconnected from the place of the Other and is confused with the field of sight. In this field, the subject is hunted down, targeted, without the help of any metaphor. For schizophrenic Landru, the gaze, not detached from the body, remains imprisoned by sight. His eyes scrutinise the other that he doesn’t understand, that he doesn’t see. His gaze made an impression on all of those who encountered it. Did it not produce, in Fernande Segret, at the time of their first encounter, an ‘uncanny’71 effect? ‘I had never felt a gaze so searching and of such daring fixity bear down upon me before.’72 Let us recall the episode recounted by a friend of Madame Pascal, which lent credence to the hypothesis that Landru was a hypnotist. Similar testimonies abound: ‘This individual looked at me unwaveringly in the eyes. Seeing without doubt that he didn’t impress me, he told me: “You are much too strong for me”.’73 Madame Falque, who lacked neither presence nor common sense, also evoked this look: ‘He insisted on looking at me in the eye, I felt an indefinable uneasiness.’74 Numerous people confirmed that they were very intrigued by his particular way of looking. He frightened them. Colette described it subtly in the daily Le Matin where, at the time of the Landru case, she was a columnist.75 First, Colette saw something familiar in him. She thought he resembled a former deputy and it bothered her for a while. Then, she says, ‘we forget’.

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When we look into Landru’s eyes we forget. It is in vain that I looked for human cruelty in his deeply set eyes, because they are not human. Landru’s eyes are those of a bird, with the same peculiar shine and long fixity when he looks straight ahead. But when he half-lowers his eyelids, his gaze takes on this languor, that unfathomable disdain we see in caged beasts.76 During Landru’s serious depression, which Dr Paul called an ‘acute crisis of despondency’ (so acute that his shoelaces were removed for fear of a suicide attempt), Landru seemed to want to elude the gaze of the other, eluding everyone’s look, as a ‘guilty’ man would. To elude these looks, he drew his soft cap to his eyebrows, and hid his face with his legendary red handkerchief. The only part of the face still visible were the two mobile points of his eyes which, under the slanted lids, darted back and forth, fearfully it would seem, staring at each person with anxiety. He came in with his head down and his eyes on the look-out.77 Could this be an indication of shame or guilt? Certainly not, because it was not the eyes that looked down, but, on the contrary, the face that disappeared and the eyes that persisted.78 Eyes without a gaze. Lastly, among the objects belonging to Landru, a painting representing the Virgin with child was found in Gambais. ‘The Virgin’s face . . . notably the eyes . . . (and Maître de Moro-Giaferri used this to request a mental assessment of his client) had been shot out by Landru.’79 The gaze of the other, which we can situate between religious devotion and worship for his mother, had always been a dead gaze. Did he destroy eyes that were really watching him? What can then come in the place of the non-advent of the gaze? We have already indicated that, in psychosis (and the Landru case confronts us with this), there is something that resists understanding or, more precisely, identification. This is why Lacan invited analysts to ‘familiarise themselves with a new imaginary’.80 To understand psychosis forces us to exit our own mode of thinking in order to speak the language of another, a bit like we were learning a foreign language. Landru’s imaginary was an imaginary without pictures, where real and symbolic are directly connected, more precisely equivalent to one another, without space. In neurosis, master-signifiers (S1) are articulated with some knowledge about jouissance, to the signifiers of this knowledge (S2). The symbolic has a hold on jouissance and the body. Between S1 and S2, between the meshes of the signifying network, the object circulates, detached from the body – the voice which calls and commands, the gaze which catches and envelops, the mouth which devours, etc. Lacan calls this object, cause of desire, object a. He calls this object (this other side of the lack, object of a satisfaction or symptomatic jouissance) object surplusjouissance (plus-de-jouir). It is constructed in the manner of surplus-value, it concentrates, fixes and orients the jouissance of the subject whose driving force it

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is. This object is correlated to lack and desire. Thus, the signifier founds the subject of desire correlated to a mode of jouissance. In psychosis, the symbolic network is pierced, the signification of lack, which answers the desire of the Other, gives way to the enigmatic void. The object does not circulate. This doesn’t mean that the subject is without relation to S1, S2 and the object, quite the contrary, but it does mean that this relation is neither flexible nor articulated with knowledge, and we saw how Landru was linked to the mastersignifier in a fossilised relation. The object is not implicated in the same way, because the holophrased signifiers (internal reference) do not allow it to appear, to be detached between S1 and S2. The desire of the Other does not concern it. Landru’s master-signifiers ‘stick’ to those of his time without being filtered by desire or the screen of a fantasy such as that which we have previously evoked. They have a neo-formed status. They are the signifiers of a maximalist rigour that answers the delusional premise. They form a succession of isolated S1, family, engineer, furniture dealer, which lead him to the absolute necessity of obtaining material goods, including the death of his victims as one act among so many others, more difficult perhaps, but no more memorable. Landru did not manage to be an engineer. A successful invention would probably have conferred real money and the value of a proper name upon him, as symbolic equivalent of such a success. Between the two, there could have been room for the development of an imaginary; the life of an engineer. But the point is not to say what Landru could have been, since for him the ‘disintegration of ordinary life’ had long been at work, undoing his inventions and finds. The mastersignifier operated otherwise: Landru was governed by his delusional idea, without there being a gap between his frozen syntagm (the good for his family) and the murders of women first perpetrated ‘under cover’ of the war before continuing as ‘his’ terrifying find. The congruence of the holophrase came in the place of criticism. As we have said, for him, all of the symbolic was real: does this not amount to saying that, in his schizophrenia, Landru was completely materialistic? Did he not demonstrate this with the extreme cynicism of his passages to the act where he tried to recover, to extract from the feminine other, the part of jouissance missing from his and his family’s survival? As we have demonstrated, reality was flattened and was only sustained by concrete presence. It was constituted only through the metonymic succession of objects of jouissance. However, this jouissance, which went against the social bond, did not pertain to transgression, since there was no limit to cross for the subject. Although the diagnosis of perversion is most often put forward in Landru’s case and in those of other serial killers, because it allows us to give these acts the only sense that is easily and immediately accessible and which, moreover, corresponds to a general characteristic of our time (the will to be famous and to have goods, the will to satisfy our drives and the refusal to sacrifice to the smallest frustration); it is not what is at stake here. Of course, with his witticisms and irony, but also because he wrote ‘Famous Cases’ on the drawing he gave to Maître Navières du Treuil and wanted his lawyer

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to continue taking care of his ‘little interests’ after his death, Landru seemed to lend credence to this thesis. Yet, before that, had he wanted fame, as a killer? We can affirm that he did not. The traces Landru supposedly left in order to ‘be caught’ and so become the famous killer we know today do not stand up to our analysis of his structure. Landru did not want to grab the signifier ‘killer’ to make a name for himself. He did not admit to his crimes, even though it would have made no difference to his conviction. By appropriating it, would he not, on the contrary, have been able to add to his defiance and hatred of the world? For him, his passages to the act were in the register of the recuperation of goods ‘to live’. Since the signifiers organising this consequence were already present, can that of ‘killer’ come to constitute a new identity, a surplus-being (plus d’être)? Let us see what he said on this point: You tell me that I made eleven people disappear . . . Prove it to me. In the meantime, I won’t answer you. You can do as you see fit with me . . . Have my head chopped off even, if you feel like it . . . I couldn’t care less . . . Life, for me, is now over and I no longer expect anything from it . . . but whatever step you may take, it will not demonstrate that I am a killer . . .81 The drawings of the bicycle, the forgery in the assumption of the proper name Guillet, the taking of notes and the book-keeping had the function of confirming that there was a place for him, a place next to the world. The notebook in which he was listed with his family members, with Fernande Segret and, as we have seen, together with her mother as ‘accessory’, inscribed him as responsible for his family, responsible in love. It could be in the register of the mission, which is a name for desire in psychosis and which is oriented towards megalomania and fame. But for Landru the mission has a very particular coloration; it fell back onto daily life: to feed his family. Certainly, here we find the imperative force characterising the mission, but it does not lead to redemption, to an exceptional becoming. This is completely lacking here and this is where the structural irony and cynicism accompanying it reside. Landru was organised tragically in the Other, which he did not understand at all and did not suppose there was anything to understand. Finally, the drawing he made during the hearings, and which he gave to Maître Navières du Treuil, showed the latter a ‘cartography’ of the passages to the act, it was a confession of signification without a signifier: ‘one burned something’: the signifier ‘killer’ is not correct. Landru was probably not looking for fame, but he experienced it. After his arrest, through the judicial investigation, the trial and the immense impact of the case, fame came to him in a way, as if to give him this new signifier, that of an extraordinary killer. In fact we can wonder where he got ‘the idea’ for the caption given to his drawing – perhaps from the journalist of the Petit Journal which, on the day after his arrest, was the first to run this title in capital letters: THE MYSTERY OF THE GAMBAIS VILLA: A NEW BLUE-BEARD. The subtitle must have pleased Landru: ‘Landru the engineer, the man with a hundred names

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suspected.’ Since the judicial investigation and the judgment are part of the social bond, the other thus offered him the possibility of retrieving ‘himself’ in discourse as ‘killer’. In this way, the social other may have given him the ‘idea’ of fame and certainly the ‘taste’ for it, given his grandstanding during the trial. To have an audience, to be surrounded in that way, indisputably carried the subject. Landru the materialist could not help but grasp this surplus-value, which echoed with his timelessness and passed into the future through Maître Navières du Treuil. Landru, it is true, found himself caught in the different discourses that dealt with his irony and cynicism and hardly any, it must be said, with his passages to the act. The world of the media reversed his structural irony while taking his reality away from him. It was no longer about the subject Landru, but about the name Landru, as it was used in the publications, as it circulated in public opinion. To the extent that in 1919 some newspapers – Le canard enchaîné, L’Œuvre, Bonsoir – annoyed by the importance given to the Landru case at the time of the difficult negotiations of the peace treaty, wrote that Landru may be a myth manufactured by politicians to divert the public’s attention. The man of the street foiled Landru’s structural irony with a trivial humour in dubious taste, by speaking of the ‘woman of the hearth’ (femme au foyer) or of the ‘devouring fire’. Some answered with the lampoonist irony which caricatures society. A group of intellectuals published a correspondence82 between a fictional character, the ‘famous’ philosopher Jean-Baptiste Botul, and a supposed HenriDésiré Landru. Did they want to show that, behind the killer, there was a subject, as terrifyingly unthinkable as he may be? It has to be said that in this work expressions are penned by their Landru that coincide with what we know about him. In an exchange of letters, Landru answered Jean-Baptiste Botul, who had taken his side, in these terms: ‘If it is help you offer me, I would very much appreciate receiving some money, government food is detestable.’ ‘This situation is all the more difficult to bear as people are copying me successfully. Mr. Citroën, for example, is in the process of making a fortune with my ideas.’ On the other hand, as this present study clearly shows, even though there is an ironic tone here, Landru could never have said: ‘In particular, I am very attached to religion and I even often feel guilty for having liked women too much.’ And he was even less likely to have continued: ‘Like many sinners I try to flee my responsibilities by telling myself that I always respected them.’83 The refusal of knowing anything about Landru’s ironic madness magnified incomprehension and raised it to the level of an enigma. Landru and other serial killers after him received numerous letters in jail from women interested in them, demonstrating the paramount appeal of mystery. Lastly, beyond fascination, psychoanalysis proves that it knows how to familiarise itself with this irony in order to expose the real at stake in it and throw light on Landru’s passages to the act and crimes. This trans-structural real (which is specific to each subject and defines what we can call his responsibility) is in every case inalienable.

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Landru, killer Why did Landru become a killer? This question was put very well by a journalist of the Petit Journal: ‘why did the accused, an intelligent man, with a good scientific education, with the means of honestly generating resources, become a most frightening criminal? It will have to be explained.’84 How indeed do the murders figure in the picture of psychosis, given that it does not follow that a psychotic subject, whether paranoiac or schizophrenic, will necessarily become a killer? We have explored the circumstances that led Landru to become a criminal. Did the crimes correspond to the particular moment of the triggering of his psychosis? Becoming a husband and father required Landru to care for and support his family. He was called to a place where all that is true and strong in a subject is mobilised, a place in the Other, for others. Until then, Landru had sustained himself in the zone of appearances, of pure semblance, a zone in which, as long as he was not asked anything, it was easy for him to pretend. He moved along the edge of projects which, while defining him, annulled him. A mirror of the world, he reflected its ideals without incorporating them. It was a world, therefore, in which his counterparts faded away as he himself did. Not to have an alter ego was one of the names of his isolation. Giving a signification to being a father, an engineer, was an operation he would have needed to be successful at. But this did not occur: anything that questioned his fragile points of support opened a breach and provoked a decompensation of this ‘being and not-being oneself’. From the beginning of his married life, the disintegration of ordinary life85 surreptitiously set in. His intellectual resources and scientific knowledge failed to promote the commercialisation of the rational bicycle. This impossibility, although it did not reveal madness in its acutest guises, nonetheless signalled a triggering, a disconnection of the subject from the Other. A new reality appeared, a real, which completely separated ‘the vital group, constituted by the subject [Landru] and his family, and the functional group in which the vital group’s means of subsistence must be found’.86 The real of the subject, detached from all social reality, ordered his behaviour in a twilight world. He could not make the choice of friendship, of trust in his relation to his wife; the choice of independence had already imposed itself upon him and that of death would follow. With war, the signifier of death entered the field with his limitless real and came to occupy a place next to the other master-signifiers. Between February 1915 and April 1918, Landru committed his murders in the context of war, which he extended to include generalised, commonplace death. He committed these crimes with the pseudo-authorisation, the scoria of the imaginary that the delusional alibi of the furniture dealer and of the war economy was. According to this logic, Landru’s murders should have stopped with the end of the war. And, indeed, a number of elements undoubtedly support this hypothesis. Through the documents of the judicial investigation, the detectives and the investigating judge thought that Landru’s last crime, the murder of Mademoiselle

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Marchadier, committed after the end of the war, did not occur in the series in the same way. The young woman had been murdered in January 1919 after a time of latency, a suspension, as if there had been some hesitation and an attempt to move on to something else. For the first time there had been a kind of resistance in passing to the act for Landru. This is what gives this last murder its particular place, as we evoked earlier when speaking of the victims, their lives and their encounters with Landru. Although it may appear paradigmatic of all his other murders, what was the logic of this crime? To understand it, we must go back to the post-war period: what was Landru doing then? We note that, like everybody else, in December 1918 Landru was preparing to resume his pre-war activities, namely, for him: marriage and security cons. In the judicial investigation file, we find a classified advert published in a specialist journal, L’intermédiaire des usines. Landru, also known as Guillet, was looking for a partner to start a mechanics business. Landru intended to study the ‘establishment, improvement, patenting and certificates of invention necessary for a new system of car radiator’.87 Of course, he also looked for a partner with securities: the security con was back. Can we not see, in the resumption of these activities, Landru’s intention of leaving murder behind, of leaving it in a time of war? Another surprising fact supporting this interpretation drew the investigators’ attention. The ‘fatal list’ (the list of the victims’ names which Landru copied into his small black notebook) was not written contemporaneously with each disappearance. The investigation established that the ‘fatal list’ had been written in one go, at the end of 1918, with the exception of the last name, that of Mademoiselle Marchadier. This name, written in a different colour ink, purple rather than black, was added later, between January and April 1919. In writing this list at the end of 1918 and especially in writing it in one go, did Landru want to bring his criminal period to a close by leaving it behind, with the alibi-signifier of war? We are led to think so. Landru seemed to look for his means of subsistence elsewhere than in systematic murder. How are we to understand Mademoiselle Marchadier’s murder then? Mr Munier answered the advert in L’intermédiaire des usines. He gave Landru a security deposit worth 1,500 francs to get his industrial projects under way. This ‘new employee’ started to look for a place for the installation of the factory and suggested several to Landru. But none was ever suitable.88 The art of constantly voiding any attempt at realising his possibilities is reminiscent of Landru’s frantic and sterile activity in his garage of Malakoff. Mr Munier, concerned by the project’s lack of progress, demanded that Landru refund his security deposit. Landru gave in, as he did every time someone faced him firmly and did not budge. To repay Mr Munier and start an industrial business requires funds. In his feverishness and activism, Landru, still not looking to women to solve his financial problems, met two mechanics from Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône. They owned a financially sound garage and he managed to elicit their trust. Within a few days, he became part of the business, sold what there was in no time, and persuaded them

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to replace their machines and tools with more modern equipment. In the meantime, he sold their place of business, which he pretended to own, to two other Parisian mechanics, not without having emptied the garage of all its new equipment. At the same time, in September 1918, Landru met Madame Falque through a marriage broker. She was a rich woman, divorced. Landru laid siege to her, less to convince her to marry him than to get her to invest in the commercial business he planned on developing in the immediate post-war period: a car business, garage, etc. She barely entered the category of fiancées; did he not often tell her that one should think twice before getting married? While he was waiting for investments for his factories, he asked for loans. He asked Madame Falque repeatedly and with insistence. Having refused him a loan of 2,500 francs, Madame Falque agreed to front him the sum of 900 francs, repayable in two terms, nearly immediately: one in mid-January, the other at the end of January. With regard to investments, Madame Falque did not object in principle, but she demanded guarantees. She wanted to visit his garage of Clichy and procured information about Landru. Upon learning that he had several identities, she challenged him on the topic. ‘I pointed out that in short I didn’t know by whom, Dupont, Frémyet or Guillet, I was being solicited, that I would only agree to front him some money if I was certain of his identity and he gave a security.’ Landru handled the situation with one of his usual pirouettes and reiterated his demands. Madame Falque did not give up and, still distrustful, cornered him by asking for several identity documents, including his military record, as well as compensation: the car in construction in his garage. Suddenly, then, since he could not complete his con and without any financial means, Landru dropped his request and told her: ‘I was stupid to ask you for this money. I have just phoned someone and will procure it otherwise. I didn’t want to use this means but, since I have no choice . . .’89 A few days previously, on 25 December 1918, he had made the acquaintance of Mademoiselle Marchadier. This time Landru resorted to murder outside any reference to war. On 13 January 1919, three weeks later, the young woman disappeared in Gambais. The day after this disappearance, Landru settled his debts, and paid his rent and that of his garage. On 15 January, he settled the balance of what he owed Madame Falque. Mademoiselle Marchadier was Landru’s last victim. He was arrested three months after this murder. Through a signifying encounter, the war had provided Landru with the sense of a new economy, that of murder. We recall that he had broken up with Madame Cuchet just before the war erupted and that he had suddenly returned to her a few days after the declaration of war. After that there were no more victims of the marriage con, as swindling was replaced by murder. The signifier of death had imposed itself upon Landru, devoid of any poignant dimension, a signifier amongst all others. Like the others, no more and no less, it organised the daily routine of his life. The signifier of war did not enable the crimes to stop with the armistice. Mademoiselle Marchadier’s murder indicated that Landru had gone beyond logic insofar as it used to take a semblance of support from the Other. This was no longer

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the case. The jouissance derived from the object of pure utility, useful for the family, useful in making the subject exist, lost its last ties, which we knew to be empty anyway. It was no longer attached to any other semblance as alibi of its rigour: it was a materialistic jouissance that stripped bare a pure real, the real of object a. The object a here was money, a value in itself, not taken up in the symbolic function of exchanges, and the extraction of this object a90 must be obtained at all cost. Nothing limited either its obtention or the jouissance derived from it, nothing else mattered. This is why Mademoiselle Marchadier’s murder, perpetrated beyond the time of war, was inscribed in the progression of the real that already prevailed over the logic of the signifier. It was this real that had prevented the development of the invention of the bicycle, that had prolonged itself in swindling; it was this real that circulated under the signifier of war, while diverting signification; it was this real that emerged in its purest form in the last crime. Thus, nothing in Landru’s life succeeded in operating as a supplementation. The attempts failed and the successive obsolescence of the semblances with which he sought to limit his jouissance drove him to something worse, first masked by war, then to its trivialisation. It was necessary to find goods and nothing else mattered than their extraction, which implied, with the disappearance of human value, murder and the disappearance of bodies. Bodies burned in his ‘work instrument’, the stove, to which the subject, in his subjective death, was himself metonymically identified. The false limit that the signifier of war seemed to give to death faded away. Landru’s last murder, before his arrest, was inscribed in a congruent continuity with a real without law. This being the case, nothing allows us to think that it could have stopped. For us a biography elucidated by psychoanalysis is a biography elucidated by the real in its relation to the subject and to the singular variations that go, in each case, from the greatest docility to the earliest rebellion. These variations delineate a personality and his or her responsibility. This can render us open to reading other cases, cases to be each taken in their specificity, in their particularity, beyond the point of horror they cause. This biographical clinic allows us to grasp, as early as possible, the discreet signs of psychosis, of a rupture with the Other that can be revealed in minimal acts of delinquency or in inexplicable, discreet asocial forms of behaviour. Identifying the structure, the subject’s relation to the structure and his orientation in the real allows us, if not always then certainly in many cases, to intervene and divert the young psychotic subject from the path that he is taking towards the hole and the passage to the act. We hope that the reader has been able to glimpse between the lines how the analyst intervenes to do so, how trust can be gained, maintained over time through measured support and if necessary in a substantial institutional social bond such as the psychiatric sector, but always in a clinic under transference, a pluralisation of the transference, and through the experience of a bond.

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Notes 1 In 1905, the Justice Minister, Joseph Chaumié, sent a circular to public prosecutors on the criminal responsibility of mentally ill people. 2 In the sense of Art 64 of the Penal Code (it has been amended since). 3 Le Matin, 6 November 1921, Opinion of Dr Vallon 1904. 4 Cf. Muchielli, L (ed.), Histoire de la criminologie française, 1995, Paris: L’Harmattan. 5 Le Matin, 6 November 1921, Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box III, Opinion of Dr Dubuisson, 1906. 6 ‘La confession de Madame Landru’, Le Journal, 21 May 1919. 7 Le Petit Parisien, 19 May 1919. 8 Le Petit Parisien, 31 May 1919. 9 Le Journal, 29 August 1919. 10 Le Journal, 29 August 1919. 11 Le Journal, 29 August 1919. 12 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box III, Mental Examination of Landru, Opinions of Drs Vallon, Roubinovitch and Roques de Fursac. 13 Cf. Bleuler, E, Dementia praecox ou Groupe des Schizophrénies, 1911/1993, Paris: EPEL/GREC. 14 Cf. Lacan, J, Le Séminaire, Livre XVI, D’un Autre à l’autre, 2006, Paris: Le Seuil, p 84. 15 Cf. Lacan, J, The Seminar Book XX Encore 1972–1973, 1998, New York and London: Norton, pp 101 and 137 ff. 16 Cf. Segret, F, ‘Souvenirs d’une rescapée’, Le Journal, 30 October to 7 November 1921. 17 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box III, Mental Examination of Landru, Opinions of Drs Vallon, Roubinovitch and Roques de Fursac. 18 Cf. Lacan, J, ‘The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’ (1956) in Écrits, 2006, New York and London: WW Norton, p 262. 19 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box III, Mental Examination of Landru, Opinions of Drs Vallon, Roubinovitch and Roques de Fursac. 20 Cf. Chapter 3 above. 21 Cf. Lacan, J, ‘Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis’ in Écrits, 2006, p 90; and ‘Presentation on Psychical Causality’ in Écrits, 2006, p 143. The term kakon is used by Paul Guiraud to account for passages to the act, murders said to be without motives (cf. Guiraud, P and Cailleux, B, ‘Le meurtre immotivé, réaction libératrice de la maladie chez les hébéphréniques’ (1928) II Annales médico-psychologiques 352–359. 22 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box III, Mental Examination of Landru, Opinions of Drs Vallon, Roubinovitch and Roques de Fursac. 23 Le Matin, 6 November 1921. 24 Cf. Cottet, S, ‘Je suis un corps d’officier’, Actes de l’ECF, no 13, November 1987, p 11. 25 Cf. Lacan, J, Le Séminaire, Livre XXIII, Le sinthome 1975–1976, 2005, Paris: Le Seuil, p 53: ‘Paranoid psychosis and personality are not related to each other as such, for the simple reason that they are the same thing.’ 26 Le Matin, 6 November 1921. 27 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box III, Mental Evaluation of Landru, Opinion of Drs Vallon, Roubinovitch and Roques de Fursac. 28 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box III, Mental Evaluation of Landru, Opinion of Drs Vallon, Roubinovitch and Roques de Fursac. 29 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box III, Mental Evaluation of Landru, Opinion of Drs Vallon, Roubinovitch and Roques de Fursac. 30 Le Matin, 23 November 1921.

Landru’s psychosis 145 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

Le Matin, 23 November 1921. Le Matin, 6 November 1921. Le Journal, 23 November 1921. Le Journal, 23 November 1921. Cf. Belin, J, Commissaire Belin, trente ans de Sûreté nationale, 1950, Paris: Société d’éditions et de publications en exclusivité, Bibliothèque France-Soir, p 97. Belin, J, Commissaire Belin, 1950, p 106. Cf. Renneville, M, Crime et Folie. Deux siècles d’enquêtes médicales et judiciaires, 2003, Paris: Fayard, p 107. Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre XXIII, 2005, p 17. Departmental Archives of the Yvelines. Here there is something of a disconnection between signifiers and the body with which the subject ceaselessly strives to catch up (cf. on this point IRMA, La Convention d’Antibes. La psychose ordinaire, 1999, Paris: Agalma/Le Seuil) Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box III, Mental Examination of Landru, Opinions of Drs Vallon, Roubinovitch and Roques de Fursac. Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box III, Mental Examination of Landru, Opinions of Drs Vallon, Roubinovitch and Roques de Fursac. Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box III, Mental Examination of Landru, Opinions of Drs Vallon, Roubinovitch and Roques de Fursac. L’Éclair, 22 May 1919. Le Matin, 24 May 1919. Le Matin, 28 May 1919. Le Matin, 1 December 1921. Le Matin, 4 December 1921. Le Matin, 5 December 1921. Le Matin, 14 November 1921. Salmon, A, ‘L’exécution’ in Béraud, H, Bourcier, E and Salmon, A, L’Affaire Landru, 1924, Paris: Albin Michel, pp 307–308. In Esquirol’s nosography of mental illnesses (1817), the term ‘lypemania’ referred to a ‘pathological sadness’, and more broadly to a chronic melancholia or a delusion with a depressive coloration. Cf. Lacan, J, The Seminar Book III The Psychoses 1955–1956, 1993, London: Routledge, pp 193–195. Segret, ‘Souvenirs d’une rescapée’, 1921; and Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box IV. Cf. Freud, S, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1915) in Standard Edition XIV, London: Hogarth Press, pp 246–249. Cf. Chapter 3, ‘Landru in love’, p. 81ff. Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Interview with Mademoiselle Segret Fernande, Box III. Cf. Boudard, A, Les Grands Criminels, 1989, Paris: Belfond/Le-Pré-aux-Clercs. Cf. De Clérambault, G, ‘L’homicide altruiste chez les mélancoliques’, January 1921, Bulletin de la Société clinique de médecine mentale, p 12, reprinted in De Clérambault, G, Oeuvres psychiatriques, 1998, Paris: Éd. Frénésie, pp 671–672. ‘Mendaciousness: lat. 1509, tendency to tell tales, lie’, Grand Robert de la langue française, 2nd edn, 1985, Paris: Le Robert. De Clérambault, ‘L’homicide altruiste chez les mélancoliques’, 1921, p 671. De Clérambault, ‘L’homicide altruiste chez les mélancoliques’, 1921, pp 671–672. Cf. Lacan, J, ‘L’étourdit’ (1972) in Autres Écrits, 2001, Paris: Le Seuil, p 474; and Miller, J-A, ‘Clinique ironique’, La cause freudienne, February 1993, no 23, Paris: Navarin/Le Seuil, p 7. Cf. Miller, ‘Clinique ironique’, 1993.

146 Serial Killers: Psychiatry, Criminology, Responsibility 65 Lacan, J, ‘Response to Jean Hyppolite’s Commentary on Freud’s Verneinung’ (1956) in Écrits, 2006, p 327. 66 Cf. Miller, ‘Clinique ironique’, 1993. 67 Cf. Miller, ‘Clinique ironique’, 1993. 68 Cf. Chapter 2, ‘The other side of ordinary life: the swindler’, p. 36ff. 69 Halperin, DM, Amour et Ironie. Six remarques sur l’eros platonicien, 2005, Paris: Cahiers de l’Unebévue, pp 9 and 11. 70 Lacan, The Seminar Book XI The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1991, London: Penguin, p 72. 71 Cf. Sigmund Freud’s text ‘The Uncanny’ (1919) in Standard Edition XVII, London: Hogarth Press, pp 219–256. 72 Segret, ‘Souvenirs d’une rescapée’, 1921. 73 Darmon, P, Landru, 1994, Paris: Plon, p 237. 74 Departmental Archives of Yvelines, Testimony of Madame Falque. 75 Le Matin, 8 November 1921, article by Colette. 76 Le Matin, 8 November 1921, article by Colette. 77 Le Matin, 28 May 1919. 78 As can be seen on the picture in Le Matin, 28 May 1919. 79 Le Matin, 26 August 1919. 80 Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre XXIII, 2005, p 121. 81 Le Matin, 27 May 1919. 82 Cf. Landru, H-D and Botul, J-P, Landru, précurseur du féminisme. Correspondance inédite 1919–1922, Christophe Clerc and Bertrand Rothé (eds.), 2001, Paris: Mille et une Nuits. 83 Landru and Botul, Landru, précurseur du féminisme, 2001, pp 20, 25 and 31. 84 Le Petit Journal, 31 May 1919. 85 Cf. Chapter 2, ‘The disintegration’, p. 35ff. 86 Lacan, J, ‘A Theoretical Introduction to the Functions of Psychoanalysis in Criminology’ in Écrits, 2006, p 119. 87 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris. 88 Cf. Mr Munier’s testimony in Chapter 2, ‘Landru engineer’, p. 41ff, at 46 for the testimony. 89 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box III, Testimony of Madame Falque. 90 Cf. Miller, J-A’s course, ‘Cause et consentement’ (1988–1989), L’orientation lacanienne, 20 April 1988, unpublished.

Chapter 6

Madness and history: Donato Bilancia and Pierre Rivière

Donato Bilancia, ‘random’ killer The coordinates of Landru’s madness were drawn in the industrial age of great engineers and the beginning of modern economy. With the war, his madness plunged into crime and death. His swindling and then his murders bear the mark of their time; they provided an X-ray of its real. So how can we think of our time as far as madness and crime are concerned? What do psychoanalysts have to say, beyond pointing out the discontents of civilisation, in a real engagement with the question of criminality, or better, criminalities today? In this case the plural restores the subjective and individual dimension, where the rupture of the bond to the other can be grasped. Of course, the rupture does not indicate that there is a dormant serial killer inside every delinquent in whom it is identified. Nevertheless, very early on for the analyst, the important point is to help a drifting psychotic subject orient himself in the creation of a less autonomous life, less mad in its liberty. And no measures aimed at containment can succeed in achieving this, because, as we know, the subject protects this independence, which he thinks is vital. The case of the Italian serial killer, Donato Bilancia, convicted of killing 17 people in less than a year, between 1997 and 1998, is paradigmatic of our time: an era of emptiness and of compartmentalisation between repression and care which is becoming increasingly pronounced, because the question is not the number of medical staff or policemen, but a question of discourse. So Donato Bilancia, before being the greatest and ‘most incomprehensible killer in Europe’, confronting the investigators with the ‘most impenetrable aspects of the human mind’, almost a century after Landru, had a story. And his story is retraced, amongst other places, in a work published by journalist Ilaria Cavo: Seventeen Random Murders.1 Forensic psychiatrists presented Donato Bilancia as a perverse, narcissistic manipulator. They said they encountered ‘a complex structure of personality, specifically marked by dynamics in which narcissistic wounds were predominant’. When they evoked the possibility of psychosis, it was to point out that the picture lacked, amongst other things, associative disorders of speech and thought, that they found no signs of delusional disorders or disturbances of mind or reality. They added that ‘there were never any hallucinations’.

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In the media people spoke of him in the following terms: ‘Donato Bilancia’s story is strange, very strange . . . A different serial killer . . . who did not choose his victims, did not have a sexual motive or any other particular motive . . . he was guided by chance.’ But, for a biography elucidated by psychoanalysis, chance, as erratic and disoriented as it may be, has at least a beginning, a starting point. One day, with his first murder, Donato Bilancia became a killer. This day indicated a rupture in the subject’s history, but not its abolition. So what was the constant point of real for a man described as cultured, with refined manners and the ability to speak several languages? Donato Bilancia was 47 years old when, on 16 October, then on 24 October 1997, he successively killed two organisers of clandestine game rings, Giorgio Centanaro and Maurizio Parenti, who until then had been his friends. These two crimes were not, it seems, devoid of sense. He passed to the act for revenge. What did he say about it? How did he account for this revenge? He spoke profusely: he even exhausted his interlocutors in the end. Shortly after his arrest, he launched into a long ‘confession’. Yet this long speech perplexed the policemen and the investigating judge who questioned him: his motives, like his personality, could not be grasped. Indeed, there is, in Donato Bilancia’s lalangue, an inassimilable void, a nonsymbolised hole in the interpretation of the world. So he spooled out a vague, allusive, disjointed speech and if irony was not perceptible in it, it came out in the lack of dialectic and in his appeal to ‘technicians of the psyche’, which made people think, as they always do, that he was trying to manipulate the situation: I intend, for now, to refer to offences for which I take responsibility solely on the objective level of their chronological succession; I reserve the possibility of explaining my motives at a later time, at present I don’t know what to say and I prefer to be questioned about them. I add that on this point I expect other, technically competent people, psychologists and psychiatrists, to help me.2 In these sentences, the structure of the interlocution brings the cut to the surface, the disjunction between facts and cause, as if the subject could only attest to what happened, without being able to account for it on the subjective level. The subject can only say what he knows, everything is there and the tautological style specific to psychosis already led the detectives to ‘go round in circles’. The truth escaped in an infinite semantic sliding, along a narration rich in details, characterised by a linguistic mannerism and a concern for accuracy which depart from the facts. Donato Bilancia was ‘born in an Italian lower middle class family’. His father worked for social security. His mother did not work and raised her two children: Donato and a brother, eighteen months older than him. We know that Donato was enuretic for a long time, until the age of about 13 or 14, and that his mother placed the sheets or mattress by the window, apparently to dry them, but for Donato, it was to shame him in the eyes of the world. We find an insistent image which nonetheless remains imprecise: his father or mother repeatedly made him undress

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and show his penis to aunts or cousins, so that they could see how small it was. He said this image was traumatic. Finally, supposedly, his parents transmitted nothing to him and cared only about material questions. Was he eating well? Was he sleeping well? And ‘nothing else’. We don’t know if it was him or the forensic psychiatrists who raised the question of trauma, or what that word meant for him. When the journalist, Ilaria Cavo, who conducted six interviews with him in jail, asked him matter-of-factly: ‘does anyone visit you?’ He replied: ‘Yes, my parents.’ And this provided an unexpected opportunity to speak about them and his childhood. He continued: ‘Do you remember what the psychiatrists said, what they said about my childhood?’ He then brought the discussion of his past to a close in an odd way: ‘If such episodes stay in one’s head after forty-five years, I suppose they must mean something.’3 What are memories for Donato Bilancia? Is there any room for reminiscence, regret, remorse or guilt? It does not seem to be the case, and all of his speech, his inexhaustible logorrhoea, confirms this disjunction without fail. From adolescence, Donato Bilancia made his way in life without a compass and without regard for the law. At the age of 14, he found his first name ugly and insignificant and so decided to be called Walter. At the same time, he discovered he had a ‘passion’ for money and began stealing it. As he had abilities, he graduated from high school and registered at the nautical college. A few months later, he left and started work. He often changed jobs: he was a mechanic, a waiter, a baker, a courier. But nothing held together. He was arrested on several occasions for theft; his young age called for leniency. However, at that point he was not referred to any psychiatrist, psychologist or psychoanalyst: for he was nothing else than a repeat offender. Convictions followed one after the other until 1984. He was 33 years old at this point. At this time, he met an expert burglar in prison, a master of sorts, who taught him the tricks of the trade. From that point on he called himself ‘a professional thief’. He had a name, a status. He stole, gambled and slept with prostitutes. There was a place for him somewhere in the criminal underworld. In the following years, a serious event occurred in the Bilancia family. His brother threw himself under a train with his four-year-old child in his arms. Donato Bilancia said nothing further about this event. Life went on. Did he belong to mafia networks? Did he take part in burglaries? How much did he make? We don’t know precisely, but he had an expensive lifestyle. During the year 1997, things acclerated: he had been a confirmed gambler for many years, and had reached an unusual degree of insolvency and debt, even for the regulars of clandestine game rooms. How was he doing he with his job as a ‘professional thief’? How did he hold on to it? Was his ‘asocial’ bond coming apart? Did people refuse to lend him money? Was he asked to settle his debts? One evening in the summer of 1997, everything collapsed. In one of his usual game rooms, Donato Bilancia had just lost a huge sum. As he crossed the room to go to the toilet, he overheard a few words in a dialogue between two of his friends. He heard ‘Walter’, stopped, and then: ‘did you see, we got him!’ There

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was no doubt, his friends were speaking about him, these words were targeted him. Instantaneously, he said, ‘it was “carnage” in my head’.4 He felt a ‘pounding noise’ in his brain. Then, at the same time as having the physical sensation of ‘a rod on his forehead and a strange heat in the nape of his neck’, a sentence imposed itself: ‘These two, I must kill them.’5 With the exception of the investigating judge Enrico Zucca, who must be commended for it, no one wondered whether his friends had really uttered these words. No one tried to establish what psychological and moral state he was in during the months, weeks or days before that evening. Yet, given the effect of rupture, of certainty that these words had in his life, determining a before and an after, the manner in which he accounted for it systematically – ‘it made something explode in me, something happened’ – and the state of perplexity they created in him, we are led to consider that they may well have been hallucinatory. These sentences surprised him at a moment of great persecutory tension. In actual fact, if we take his father’s words into account, Donato Bilancia was always overly interpretative in his relation to the other: he was always being betrayed by every other, including his family. Was this a fantasy or a delusion of interpretation? Let us examine more closely the relation between statements and enunciation, the structure of the sentence that led to the murders. When he heard these fragments of conversation, Donato Bilancia did not think. What he felt in his body was a non-subjectified sensation, a ‘body event’,6 and then an imposed answer cut the associative sequence of thought. He said: ‘These two, I must kill them’, instantaneously answering the perceived words and the heat in his body; they were contiguous with one another, on the same level, that of the intrusion of the Other. It gave this sentence the status of being isolated in the signifying chain, a chain that was thus broken. The sentence then took on the status of a frozen syntagm, which dictated a law within the law, an absolutism of revenge outside the imaginary, a neo-signified sentence. Because he did not say, for example, ‘I thought I would have to kill them.’ The metaphorical nuance disappeared, everything happened as if this sentence, a return of the real, came out on its own, in an automatic manner. If Donato Bilancia and his friends had often won and lost together in their gambling ring, then why, on the evening he heard them speak, was he suddenly certain that he was their object, that they played him like a beginner, that he was caught in a trap? Hearing them uttering his name should not have surprised him, yet this is what he attested to, a primary encounter. If, at this moment, the other really had a signification for him, why did disappointment, a demand for explanation or anger not emerge instead of the ‘answer’?7 We are in presence of a suspended answer, outside the bond, outside speech, in the double disappearance of the temporal dimension and that of the reality of the other. He said that if he had had a weapon on him at the time, he would have acted instantaneously. These words were heard in an already threatening, twilight universe. His ‘friends’ lived well, while he lost ‘mysteriously’ when he played. The real enemies, the

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persecutors, were there. To this day, the hatred endures: ‘I could not care less about Centanaro and Parenti, or their families’, he repeated at the trial. ‘I won’t ask for forgiveness, I don’t care.’ They were marked out that evening. Donato Bilancia’s subsequent statements confirmed the instantaneousness of the subjective rupture. Whomever he speaks or writes to, everything that Donato Bilancia says leads back to this evening where everything collapsed and which he tries to understand himself. Can we deny that this is a stable, real point in his diffluent speech? But his attempt to decipher this moment stumbled on a rationalisation he cannot escape, a morbid rationalisation which engages an infinite metonymic process, often interrupted by blanks: Beyond the disappointments and dramas of past life, there was this obscure collision with objective reality, which one is not . . . It was there. There was this impact. Then after that started a series of . . . I threw away everything that belonged to me, my things, my papers, everything. I threw everything away because these were things that were no longer of use to me on the basis of . . . in relation to this entire trajectory which happened afterwards . . . to the final assessment.8 He tried, as he put it, to narrate the consecutio temporum. He tried to reduce, catch and also cipher, logicise this real: But to go from point A, i.e. the starting point, to point B, i.e. that of the decision, a certain amount of time went by . . . point A, that of the impact of that terrible, terrifying evening, such a thing that, probably, had I had a gun at the time, I would surely have killed them there and then, immediately, both of them, that very evening.9 Here the enunciation is attached to the real, it puts the impact of the moment of collapse of the subject’s life into words, it speaks of the subject’s deadening. When the prosecutor tried to probe the question of the motives that pushed the accused to revenge with the words ‘but in what respect were these two speaking of you?’, Bilancia’s answer stayed invariably allusive. ‘It seems obvious to me that everybody knows who Parenti and Centanaro were. They were boasting as always; they felt sure of themselves and thought they were untouchable.’ This was a transparent answer to the Other, where everything was there, everything was known, but without a precise content that could be expressed. The prosecutor wanted to make the allusion more specific, but he did not manage to do so. And Donato Bilancia looped back upon himself and stumbled on death: From that point, a trajectory of evaluation for a whole series of situations started . . . At that time, I decided to put an end to my life and therefore nothing was of any use to me except for a weapon. From that point to the successive point C I left in search of a weapon.10

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How better to describe the entry into another reality that has no other sense than the subjective death from which a logical sequence unfolded? It unfolded in a temporal plunge where time was no longer chronological, but frozen and subjected to the prevailing idea, immobilised on the edge between life and death. For lack of sense, Donato Bilancia drew the geometry of this reality where death was to be apportioned between him and the Other. He thus got to point C, when he found a weapon, then D where he killed his friends-turned-enemies. After point D, he said ‘it is dark’. In this darkness, there were 14 murders and, for each one of them, he gave a strikingly trivial explanation. Is generalised triviality the consequence of the fact that the signifier shifted to the register of the real? From then on, different levels merged and the hierarchy of significations was annulled; revenge was an empty signifier. We don’t know if Donato Bilancia had a master-signifier ordering this consequence and if, for this gambler, it was precisely about ‘chance’, or something else, a ‘taste’, for example, for murder, always signalled to him systematically by violent headaches coming from the ‘program’. Whatever the case, already in his childhood and during what had been ‘his’ delinquency, the law gave way before his jouissance. The murder of the first three victims, Centanaro, Parenti and the latter’s wife, were the product of the delusional yet articulate construction we have seen. After that, Bilancia started on a series in which thefts were ‘accompanied’ by murders for which there was no longer any logic except for a new possibility of experience. People had told Donato Bilancia about a couple of jewellers who kept valuables in a safe. So ‘the professional thief’ decided to burgle their home. He threatened them with his gun, they exchanged words, then, he said, ‘I no longer controlled the situation’. The theft failed, but the P38 (the gun) was now part of him. Some time later, still to obtain money, he attacked a stockbroker and had him open his safe. Murder had entered the psychopathology of his everyday life and killing the stockbroker was his new way of opening safes. ‘It seems to me’, he said, ‘that I fired the whole clip because he reacted’.11 The weapon responded to the least movement, the least element that disturbed him. As the tale went on, he joked as if all this was natural: ‘. . . and people will tell me next that I am a weapons expert!’ It was another motive (it seemed easy to him) that drove him to kill a night watchman. He could not say anything about his motives, but perhaps they related to a memory of being wounded by a night watchman 25 years ago. He supplied another one: ‘As I already explained, as I will perhaps explain better one day, for me life is no longer worth anything. I haven’t succeeded in killing myself because I hate physical pain.’12 Beyond their obvious cynicism, these lines, when resituated in the whole, bring out the element of disintegration that blurs hierarchies. It is the same stumbling block we find every time Donato Bilancia is led to speak about his motives. If, indeed, the signification of death did disappear for him, what remains for him is what is there, present, what he could feel: the physical dimension, physical pain. It really existed, whereas, in order for someone to kill themselves, there must be a minimum of subjectivity. One of our patients, with the same inability, asked us

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insistently, with irony, but without humour, to put him down. The constancy of some formulations shows us that Donato Bilancia really left matters up to the Other as far as he was concerned and this is something completely different from manipulation. Did he not say to the psychiatrists on more than one occasion: ‘Can we cure this man? If not he must be shot.’13 The investigating judge invited him to continue. Five prostitutes he was in the habit of using were then murdered. Was there a motive in the choice of victims? One might think of a sexual perversion, for example. The motive fell well short of that: ‘I cannot be precise, it was the fruit of a situation of instinctive reaction to facts that upset me and that made me decide to commit the first murder, but I am not sure I will be able to find a key to the choice of victims.’ So he gave a likely explanation: they each had a different nationality – he always asked them what their country of origin was. The victims followed each other, we could almost say that they were consumed from the moment the logic of the real supplanted any signifying limit. The paranoiac dimension of the first murders could have led us to believe in such a limit. Then it was the turn of the two night watchmen who had come to the rescue of a transsexual he was threatening. The perimeter within which Donato Bilancia moved grew: he went from one town to the next, he covered his tracks, he moved constantly. His intelligence is not in question: it had gone awry. He committed his last murders on trains. He said he boarded trains with the intention of killing: the victim had to be a woman. ‘It is part of the program that was triggered inside me after the Parenti-Centanaro murders, murders which came about in a milieu of betting and clandestine game rooms but I don’t know how to say anything more about it.’14 He spoke of these murders as if they were completely detached from him. The idea of killing a stockbroker or a woman imposed itself on him in moments of calmness or when he woke up in the morning. These ideas always came with an intense heat in the nape of his neck and in his forehead. This was how the ‘program’ had started: When I heard those words in a nightclub, a strange, abnormal situation began. The ground was dancing, it moved before my eyes. Incredible things happened to me, a strip of fire here on my forehead and another one, here, on the back of my head. As I said, I wanted to put an end to my life, then it appeared to me that this man didn’t deserve to live, nor this other one and so forth.15 Was the ‘program’ not a triggered automatism, which tried to protect the subject by showing him, in a mirror-effect, the other who did not deserve to live? And this designation was inscribed as a burn in his body. ‘His’ madness is all of that: an acute mode of triggered psychosis. It was from jail that Donato Bilancia wrote his first letter to journalist Ilaria Cavo. He chose this journalist after having heard and seen her in a television show on social facts as she was speaking about his case. He let her know that he wanted to meet her to tell her, it seems, the ‘ultimate truth’, ‘the one that others did not

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want to hear’.16 In his letter, he indicated that she had spoken about him ‘as best she could’, namely according to details that others had provided her with. He wanted to add his own clarifications and reveal who he really was. In addressing himself to the journalist who had shown interest in him in her television shows, Donato Bilancia was looking for a support: ‘You have nothing to fear from the monster. You will be able to see for yourself that probably I am just a man who has had serious problems and that is all.’17 This letter surprised the journalist. She wondered: was it possible that the ‘monster’ had decided to address himself to her? Her astonishment was what drove her quest for the truth of the subject, which will tend, as we will see, towards an endless asymptote, since nothing in him came to quilt the infinite sliding of probabilities. Ilaria Cavo, for her part, expected much from this interview: she expected him to speak of himself, to reveal himself as he seemed to want to do. Yet, she realised very quickly that in this communication there was something of a misunderstanding, something that troubled her. There was irony in Donato Bilancia’s words: ‘I think I should have to write more than Silvio Pellico18 to satisfy in writing not only your request for information but also and especially everything that I have to tell you from the beginning of this sad story.’19 We note that here we no longer know who is asking for something from the other: the journalist or the criminal. Ilaria Cavo accepted this mistake on the person, accepted this initial misunderstanding. And Donato Bilancia, who was already at one with her, in a steady correspondence, let her know his ‘good intentions’, vertiginously, without object: ‘We will wait for the time at which it will be possible to bring to the surface the real truths, which public opinion does not even want to think exist for now.’ Ilaria Cavo waited, and the correspondence kept coming, always hollow: ‘I would like to tell you some things, more things about how I feel inside, how today still I refuse the responsibility for the acts I effectively committed and many other things besides.’20 Always more declarations of intent coming in the place of reality, a reality that he constituted for himself in the ‘epistolary relation’ he kept with the journalist. No hurry. This was what he often wrote to her. Donato Bilancia suggested meeting her on the conditions that there would be no television camera and that she would be alone. She agreed and six interviews followed. The first four meetings served to prepare the interview that was recorded on a tape recorder and distributed in the media. When the first interview took place, Donato Bilancia welcomed Ilaria Cavo in these terms: ‘Finally we have succeeded, take a seat, I can say ‘tu’ to you, can’t I?’ The tone was affirmative, the journalist preferred not to antagonise him. From then on, she pursued, ‘the dialogue begins, or more precisely his monologue’.21 Ilaria Cavo received this monologue, spread episodically over five years, during the time of the assizes and appeal trials. It was after the assizes trials, which he did not attend (because he refused to see the families of the victims) but followed on television, that Donato Bilancia agreed to give an interview. Contesting the elements and progress of these trials, and

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nevertheless still perplexed, he continued to ask psychiatrists for treatment. It was this request that made him look like someone trying to avoid prison at all costs, a simulator, a manipulator. Yet Donato Bilancia’s manipulation was strange because, in coming forward without a mask, he destroyed its sense and annulled its effects: he did not act as if he was mad at all. Instead, he said that perhaps he was mad and waited for another person to confirm what he sensed without being able to name it. He also argued that if he left jail without knowing why, he thought he would do it again. We can substantiate what he said: his unknown share, unknown to him, is radically so, his kakon is lodged in the Other. In a way, he fears the real and it is not to be heard as a metaphor, this real which pushes him to act remains intact. According to him, truth lies with specialists, psychologists, psychiatrists . . . ‘technically competent’ people. How is it possible not to see that his paradoxical discourses, supposedly artful, speak his truth and contradict his request, which was not to leave jail? All that exists is a system going round in circles, except perhaps if his madness were to be heard and treatment thus envisaged. Ilaria Cavo noticed this hollowed system through the questions he asked her, constantly in fact, over the years: ‘But you, do you believe that I am normal or that I am mad?’ It was a logical and in that respect an authentic answer that she received when she managed to return the question to him: ‘For your part, do you think yourself sane or sick?’ ‘But,’ he said, ‘it is a question I cannot answer . . . Like this, point-blank, speaking with you, I feel like the most normal person in the world, but in the light of what happened, I cannot be a normal person.’22 Is this not a true question? Often, indeed, during their interviews, he asked her: If you met me in a bar, would you think I was mad, a normal person or a fool? Anyway, to be honest, I don’t feel good at all. Yes, in short, I think that if I were to leave I would do it all again. I don’t know how, I don’t know why, but I think that I would do it again. This is why I am not asking to be released but treated.23 Prison does not have a real signification for him. It does not have any more signification than his trial, which he rejected in these terms: ‘All the objections I made, no one spoke of them during the trial. And why? Because it was not a trial, but a firing squad, everyone agreed to get it over with and so for me it was a massacre.’24 Under the prism of derealisation which affected him, do we not find here, in the word ‘massacre’, the echo of macello, the ‘carnage’ in his head on the evening when everything collapsed? If he was able to speak to Ilaria Cavo, it was undoubtedly because, for him, she occupied the place of secretary to the insane. As we saw with Landru, when he gave his drawing to Maître Navières du Treuil, this position allows the psychotic subject to speak to someone, to another. However, Donato Bilancia also told her, during the interviews, about his paranoiac relation to the investigating judge Enrico Zucca. In this relation, the

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subject expects everything from others but, if disappointment occurs, the subject perceives himself as prey to others, persecuted, and a lethal hatred surges up in place of this expectation. Indeed, to everyone’s surprise, Donato Bilancia asked Enrico Zucca: ‘Please Sir, don’t you also disappoint me.’ To this, the magistrate had only been able to answer: ‘But how could I help you? Don’t forget that I am your executioner.’25 From then on, for Donato Bilancia, the trial was reduced to a personal attack against him, the attack of the persecutor that Judge Zucca had become, where any symbolic dimension was cancelled out. According to Donato Bilancia, the gravity of the facts only brought half-truths to the surface and in particular it allowed the modification of procedures: ‘. . . it is the investigating judge who appointed my lawyer to guarantee I had the best possible defence . . . And so, if he had guaranteed I had the worse, what would have happened?’26 What is he? Is he normal or not? Ilaria Cavo was disarmed when she heard him candidly ask: ‘What must a man do to make it understood that he has problems and wants to be treated? . . . Must he have horns on his head and the manners of a monster or can he also seem normal?’27 His life does not seem abnormal to him: is this not mad? Did the larcenies of his adolescence, about which he asked nothing, have the same characteristic? This is the truth that Donato Bilancia was looking for without having the symbolic tools to answer: the hole echoed and circulated between the lines of his whole discourse. The void, in moving, created an effect of suspense that grew until the interview. It ran along sibylline, allusive sentences, incomplete and suddenly truncated. Sentences which were there not in order to say anything, but for their use value, their capacity to border the hole in a parody of dialogue: I really would like to make my drama known; I really want people to know who I really am. Of course there are a number of things that must be said and that cannot be postponed. Give me some time and I assure you that your patience will be rewarded.28 One week before the recording, he finally spoke! ‘It is pointless to beat around the bush, what I am going to say I have never said or written to anyone: the truth is that it is not always I who killed.’ Was he going to contend this at the time of the recording, would he give the name of a number of accomplices? Yes, he would repeat the truth; he would repeat it in front of everyone. In the interview, now recorded, everybody can know at last: ‘This is why I now intend to tell the truth so that it may constitute reality in its totality. This truth that never emerged, I can now tell it to you calmly.’ He took a breath and went on: ‘It is not always I who killed. This is the truth, this is the unique truth and it is supported by incontestable proofs whose nature is known only to me. Now, you, I and the whole of Italy know the truth.’29 For, if no one believes him to be mad, he said, the only possible explanation then becomes that he was ‘driven’ to it by others, ‘drugged’ perhaps. Donato

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Bilancia is not strictly speaking a paranoiac. He oscillates between a persecutory crystallisation around enemies and a homicidal roving that comes as an immediate response to the sudden emergence of an imposing idea and bodily phenomena in a moment of emptiness. This is what gives these ‘foggy crimes’, as he called them, the appearance of drive crimes. In a way they are, but here the drive is in a relation of exteriority with regard to the subject: it has the features of foreclosure. Donato Bilancia is a subject of hypermodernity. Let us recall that from the age of 14, his passion for money led him to take it wherever he found it. It is not that he stole because he was a delinquent, but, more precisely, that he helped himself in the world in a way that seemed delinquent to everyone else because he was psychotic. It was also not the desire to satisfy a drive that pushed him to want to leave jail as people thought. He asked not to leave. What follows confirms this. On his way to the interview, he grumbled about the prison director over everyday details concerning the keeping of food in the refrigerator. And when the interview ended, he resumed the thread of his recriminations precisely where he had left off. He was happy to learn English in jail: it would be useful on the outside. Ilaria Cavo had already noticed his conformism to the situation and the absence of any real projection into the future. She herself had been perplexed: ‘On the one hand,’ she wrote, ‘he wants to be treated because he doesn’t think he has overcome his problems, on the other, he already thinks about a life as normal as possible outside prison.’ ‘Good,’ he said, ‘now I return to my cell, there I am alone, but you know, I am a lone wolf at heart.’30 He thanked her for the conversation and asked if she could come to see him once a month. To be normal may be a master-signifier for Donato Bilancia. In a world where everyone wants to satisfy their desires fully, his jouissance spread without limits. The money that procured it for him was part of his being, it was not necessarily earned, it was taken and could not be lacking. The lack of money drove him through persecution to murder without crossing any limits. The Other must know how it happens: what opposes the ‘program’ of well-being triggers the other ‘program’, the one of destruction. There is no doubt that Donato Bilancia was a ‘being for jouissance’. Is this the support he took from the master-signifiers of our time? It is likely. With the twenty-first century, we are no longer in modern times; we are in the so-called postmodern or hypermodern era, where the object of an immediate, generalised jouissance occupies the place of the ideal. This time was anticipated by Lacan as characterised by ‘the rise to the social zenith of the object small a’.31 Today, desire itself is manufactured, by the market, by the acceleration of the production of objects which confers upon them an increasingly ephemeral character. Desire no longer has the time to appear, it becomes an object of the market. The immediate jouissance of goods is one of the fundamental features of our time.32 How each subject appropriates this relation to jouissance and to the world is a question which must be answered on a case-by-case basis. A ‘prevention outcome’ may then be produced.

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Pierre Rivière: saving the father Before getting into a reflection on criminal responsibility, since the Landru case has paved the way for a ‘biography elucidated by the real’ (with the Bilancia case showing further how the real insists through history), it seems pertinent to answer the question raised, regarding Pierre Rivière, by Michel Foucault, whose engagement with Politics – the kind that deals with man, madness and crime without bias, but not without astonishment – is well-known. His astonishment led him to publish the Memoir written in prison by the young parricide who people thought to be idiotic and practically illiterate. Moreover, the memoir whose ‘first project was . . . to surround the murder’33 re-emphasises the importance of the question of premeditation, which today is dealt with hurriedly as amounting only to a lie or something imagined. Yet, with regard to Pierre Rivière, whose psychotic structure seems to be a given, Michel Foucault asked psychiatrists and psychoanalysts the same question I asked about Landru: who is Pierre Rivière? We recognise in the interview he gave to the Revue du Cinéma the same approach that has guided us in our research here. He was asked: ‘did you, who discovered Pierre Rivière, recognize him in René Allio’s film?’ He replied: I would say that it was not a question of recognizing him. He is there, that is all . . . [He] had posed the doctors of the time an enigma that none of them could solve and it so happened that we could access the whole of the court documents and, even better, Rivière’s own Memoir. Publishing the book reopened the Rivière question, it relaunched Rivière again after a hundred and fifty years of psychiatry, the discovery of psychoanalysis, the generalization of forensic medicine, of criminology, it told people: here he is again, what do you have to say about it?34 However, people will say that Pierre Rivière was not a serial killer. In the legal and historic senses, he was indeed not a serial killer. Yet Pierre Rivière successively killed his mother, sister and brother and revealed in his Memoir the logic underpinning this series of crimes, a limited series, but a series all the same: the mother and the sister, who constantly tormented his father, had to be eliminated and, with the abnegation that characterised him, his young brother had to be eliminated so that his father would no longer have any compassion for Pierre himself. In his way, Pierre Rivière thus belongs to the clinic of serial killers, for the series was open to all those who tormented his father. However, this series was contained around the figure of the father, which, let us say, appeared as a master-signifier in his time. In 1835, during the July Monarchy, in a small village of Normandy, the young Pierre Rivière, aged 20, was arrested for the murder of his mother, sister and brother. For those who knew him from an early age, for his father, for the family doctor and for a few psychiatrists who examined him, Pierre Rivière’s madness

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was not in question. Yet it led to debates between experts as soon as the question of judgment posed itself. How can we read Pierre Rivière’s madness with an orientation to the real? When Pierre Rivière committed his act, Louis-Philippe had already been placed on the throne of France by the Deputies together with a few peers of the nation. They declared him ‘King of the French people by the grace of God and the will of the nation.’ The will of the nation thus constituted a signifying point of appeal for the greatest number. In the name of liberty, each person became able to express his will for the nation. So it was with Louis-Philippe that the citizen-king was substituted for the king of ‘divine right’. The Napoleonic time had prepared the ground; it had magnified the picture of the great man, whose authority resulted from individual merit and combative force – not from the arbitrariness of birth. So the figure of a father, a man and not a living god, entered the historical landscape with the figure of the king and his government. It entered the social landscape through the growing importance taken on by the paterfamilias: my father, a hero with so gentle a smile . . . With the birth of industry and the development of cities, the triangular family of the early nineteenth century was coming into place: the father was everywhere in culture, he structured his time, whether he was challenged and hated, or loved and respected, whether he had to be defied or saved. Saving the father was what Pierre Rivière said he was doing: he had to be saved at all costs, the idea imposed itself upon him and made its way in his mind, giving his passage to the act all the appearances of an act that had been carefully thought through and premeditated for a long time. Thus, with the confession of his premeditation, he who in everyone’s eyes had passed for the village idiot became a man of clear judgment, with a decided will, a murderer wholly responsible for his actions. And this occurred without anyone wondering in what field of reality, which we call the real, this premeditation took shape. In a first instance, Pierre Rivière had considered writing a memoir before committing his act, which would be its outcome. Of course this means that he was thinking about his action, that he prepared for it. In the manuscript he wrote in jail, he came back to this preparation. How then can we situate this memoir, between delusional logic and intelligence, between desire and the necessity to write, between delusion and the desire to have his motives recognised? On 2 July 1835 at 05.00, Pierre Rivière, who had been found wandering the streets, was arrested by the gendarmes. The sergeant approached him and ‘asked him where he was from; he replied from everywhere; where are you going? Where God commands me’. Pierre Rivière admitted to having murdered his mother, sister and brother one month earlier because God had commanded him to do so in order to save his father. According to the report, he had struck many blows with such violence that the bodies sustained deep cuts. Witnesses then saw him come out of his house ‘by the glazed door giving on the local road. He held a blood-stained bill in his hand’ and told one of them: ‘I have just delivered my father from all his tribulations. I know that they will put me to death, but no matter.’35

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According to witnesses, he then left quietly and went out of the village without anyone stopping him. From that day, he wandered the woods. He made a bow and some rudimentary arrows, but was unable to catch anything with them, surviving on leaves, herbs and wild fruits until his arrest. The relatives and neighbours who were questioned about him told the story of a stubborn and bizarre child. He was always glued to his father, he went with him each time he went somewhere and helped him in all circumstances. Put simply, his way of helping his father, his way of taking everything his father asked him to do literally, gave rise to scenes in which comic and tragic dimensions were strangely interwoven. A witness remembered a day when Pierre Rivière’s father carted pebbles while ‘his son helped him to put them into a cart. When the father decided the cart was fully enough loaded, he told his son’ to stop. But, too absorbed to obey, he ‘went on as if he had not heard’, to the point that the father ‘had to reach into the cart himself and throw out the pebbles’ onto the ground. The help he gave his father plunged him into automatism and only the father’s physical intervention could divert him from it. Clearly, the devotion he had for his father did not engage the critical faculties necessary to measure and limit his actions. Everything happened as if his father’s speech froze on a command which nothing could then stop or suspend. In other circumstances, in the same repetitive way, he ‘put his horse to the gallop straight across the fields’ without worrying about the animal. Declaring he was going ‘to do like the horned beasts, that he was going to “scamper about” [beuzer]’, he often left suddenly and was only found a long time afterwards. A neighbour testified to seeing him doing ‘senseless and foolish things’ on several occasions. Many people passed him on his own, shouting to himself and when he was asked why he was crying out in that way, he replied: ‘The devil, the devil’, and laughed. One testimony, evoking a surprising splitting of the voice, stands out. Long before Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, a film in which the subject’s voice is split between his own and that of his mother, a farmer of the area, with great clinical acumen, narrated the following fact: I hardly know the accused, and I cannot give you any useful information about his character and past. I remember only that some six or seven years ago, when I was resting in a field beside a road, I heard in the road something like the voices of two men in a fury with one another and saying to the other: ‘You are a rogue,’ ‘I’ll cut your throat’ and other such things; I was frightened and I got up to look through a gap in the hedge. I saw Pierre Rivière all by himself walking quietly by, making the frightful sound I have mentioned.36 When did it all begin for Pierre Rivière? It seems that a change, a discontinuity, appeared in him between the ages of 10 and 12. The village carpenter remembered that as a child Pierre Rivière showed considerable ability in learning to read and write. But ‘when he was ten to twelve years old he did not seem the same any

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more, he appeared to become an idiot’37 and entered a world of obstinacy, solitude and peculiarity. How, in this isolation, did the constraint that pushed him to act take shape, how did it impose itself as a necessity above all laws and, lastly, how did it result in a passage to the act in spite of the subject’s procrastinations and a sort of resistance to committing these crimes? The testimony of Father Suriray, vicar of Aulnay, like Inspector Belin’s for Landru, subtly brought out what we could call a dissociation between Pierre Rivière’s intelligence and what he named a skew in his imagination. Thus, we can read: The accused had always seemed to me a very gentle character, he was held to be an idiot in his village and even throughout the parish, but having talked to him sometimes, I did not think he was. On the contrary, I have always noted in him an aptitude for sciences and a most remarkable memory; but he seemed to have a skew in his imagination.38 What better words could we find to describe the disjunction between what pertains to the psychotic structure and a subject’s intelligence? In other words, how could we say any better that, as Lacan underlined, psychosis is not a deficient structure? Here we find the interest for reading and writing the carpenter had noticed in Pierre Rivière until he was the age of 10 or 12, before he suddenly changed character. From that point, his father’s misfortunes became his own. Dr Vastel, who defended the thesis of madness, concluded that Pierre Rivière had vividly experienced his father’s tribulations and from then on the darkest ideas had assailed him and had given him no peace. What was going on in Pierre Rivière’s life at that time? The ages of 10 to 12 are when a young boy enters adolescence, the period in which the mutations occur that will make him a man, and this indisputably weakened the subject. At the same time, Pierre Rivière’s father was also weakened: he had just lost his brother. It was as if he had been ‘left alone’ through this death. He was very close to his younger brother who went everywhere with him labouring in the fields. Together they cultivated the family land. They had such a good understanding between them that they had been able to borrow the money necessary to purchase jointly new land as well as some property. At the same time, Pierre’s father was all the more fragile in that his wife did not support him. Pierre Rivière’s parents did not live together; they argued often or, more precisely, the mother (who lived with her own parents) often went to the father’s house to insult him. Everyone noticed that the father said nothing back. Pierre’s uncle, more vivacious than his older brother, could not stand this unsuitable behaviour and threatened to hit his sister-in-law if she carried on in that way. He took his brother’s side: he supported and protected him in all circumstances. This strong man, a point of support, would be missed by both Pierre and his father alike. Did the young Pierre feel called to the place of support for the father which his uncle had always occupied, a place that would turn out to be

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impossible to hold for him, that of an alter ego, a presence and support to share the difficulties of everyday life? Could we not hypothesise that Pierre’s psychosis was triggered because of this untenable call? He lacked protection, a landmark and yet, at the same time, he was called to this place and had to become a support himself, a landmark. This was a very difficult conjuncture to bear for the fragile child he was, supported by a father himself assisted by a brother, moreover tossed back and forth between the paternal and maternal families. As his parents were separated, after some movement back and forth, Pierre Rivière moved in with his father for good when he was six years old. Everyone knew that his mother had always tormented her husband. Pierre, in the disorder of his ideas, interpreted this torment like a torture of which his father was the victim, with his mother as torturer, without any possible nuance. He simply neglected that, in her colourful, violent and excessive relation, the mother had nevertheless had five children with this man and that there had never been any talk between them of a real separation. It is true, however, as Dr Vastel also underlined, that Pierre Rivière’s mother had a particular character and it is likely that she was herself affected ‘by mental alienation’: His mother’s disposition was so irritable, her will so obstinate and simultaneously so unstable, she was so continually ill-natured and so extravagant that her husband, could not, despite all the torments she heaped upon him, hold them against her, for he had long realized that her brain was deranged and that she was not capable of controlling her actions.39 It was this critical mindedness that Pierre Rivière’s intelligence lacked and this is attested to in the first part of his Memoir, which he entitled: ‘Summary of the tribulations and afflictions which my father suffered at the hands of my mother from 1813 to 1835’. This precise, detailed tale indeed shows an excellent memory, but not what we could call evocation, reminiscence, the resurgence of memories and thus the involvement of the subject. The tale unfolds like a catalogue, without a subjective viewpoint opening the door to doubts and questions about the part he played in the family romance. Pierre Rivière lacked the return upon himself of the gaze that he laid on the Other. We can suppose that he belonged to the Other, his father, that he included himself blindly in the Other and that individuation was difficult for him. In this first part of the tale, very little space was given over to the story of how his parents met, to Pierre’s feelings for his family or to his family’s feelings for him. We learn in a few lines that his father wanted to get married to escape military service, that he seemed to like his wife in spite of everything and that he thought she loved him, since she had wanted to marry him against her parents’ wishes. As all of this is evoked quickly, the precise details of the terms of the marriage contract drafted by the solicitor slide past and make the text difficult to read, as notarised acts tend to be. Then, Pierre Rivière undertook to explain how his family on his father’s and his mother’s side was composed. We essentially learn what real

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estate each side of the family owned in acres of land, in labour to maintain it, in purchased or inherited furniture, in material goods. Pierre Rivière could not say anything else about it. In his poor, rural universe, possessions were precious and had to remain in the family; they were defended tooth and nail. Along with conflicts about money, they were often the powerful motive behind his parent’s disputes. And Pierre gave us a faithful testimony of this. Between the lines, however, we can read something of Madame Rivière’s madness. After her marriage, she refused to move to her husband’s house and continued to live with her parents. When Pierre Rivière was born, she fell ill. It was the case with every birth. Even if it apparently was a physical illness, it often came with mood swings with a persecutory inflection, sometimes concerning her own mother, sometimes her mother-in-law. Besides, Madame Rivière was ferociously and pathologically jealous of her husband. She accused him of being a ‘wastrel and a lewd person, he kept harlots.’40 All of this happened constantly, but also, and specifically, without restraint, without veil. These reproaches were known to all, because Pierre’s mother told the whole village that she was being done to death and that she had nothing. Pierre Rivière’s testimony showed that his mother lived in a climate of generalised suspicion and persecution that nothing and no one succeeded in attenuating. And this very real universe translated into actions: she hit her husband, defamed him to the village vicar and brought charges against him to the justice of the peace. Her universe was perpetually enacted and lived out for all to see and everyone was party to the intimate details of domestic life. Pierre Rivière heard all of this. He heard his father’s words: ‘though I am not resolute enough to take the way out of all these persecutions, there are some who do it for far less reasons’. And he understood them as a matter of life and death. After all, the situation had been getting worse for some time: Pierre’s mother was having extramarital relations. Pierre Rivière again heard people speak and heard the danger for his father: ‘My faith he is not safe with all these lads she runs around with everywhere.’41 The threat of death hovered over his father, like the signifier of death, and death itself had hovered over his family’s history. Pierre Rivière’s younger brother, Jean, who lived with him at his father’s, fell ill and died. Pierre Rivière’s mother did not fail to tell all and sundry that the father had killed his child. When someone finally said to him: ‘Never leave your father lad, he will not leave you in the lurch’,42 he replied that he had something else in mind. Thus, he, who previously helped his father beyond any demand, in a frantic and delusional monoideism, was faced with the emergency of having to save his life, to save it at all costs. The second part of Pierre Rivière’s tale takes this necessity as its point of departure. Having promised to explain his character and the thoughts he had before and after the act, he then summarised his private life and the thoughts that had preoccupied him until his confinement.43 He told how, for him, it all began when he was seven or eight years old. He was living with his father and his first brother had just been born when, as he puts it: ‘I had a great devotion’ (J’eus une grande

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devotion). The use of the past simple and of the verb ‘to have’ seems to mark a rupture with a past that would have unfolded otherwise, in a linear fashion, if something had not happened. The syntax marks a before and an after in his thoughts and behaviour. He withdrew from the world to pray to God and had the idea of becoming a priest. Did he want to enter another family as his brother’s birth had removed him from a place in his? In any case, his new religion reflected the without-limits, the stubbornness and the excesses of his character: ‘I refused the quarter-of-an-hour’s refreshments during the Rogation processions.’44 This lasted for three or four years, then, a bit like it had started, his ideas changed and Pierre thought he could ‘be as other men’. He was 10 or 12 years old when his uncle’s death surprised him, and left him, we can say, without a shelter in the Other. In its place the real, the bizarre phenomena of ‘his singularities’ appeared. Pierre Rivière described these singularities as facts, like the revelation that had previously fallen on him suddenly and then gone away. He had no hypothesis about them, no memory of his involvement. These singularities seemed to be there and be part of him, like a fact as real and indisputable as the shape of his face or the colour of his eyes. In short, they indexed the subject’s exteriority to himself, which is characteristic of the status of the Other in psychosis. Pierre Rivière was different from others and conscious of this difference. He said his schoolmates ‘noticed this and laughed at me’. And Pierre thought about it. He then supposed there must have been ‘some acts of stupidity’ first, like a causal mark, on the basis of which the world of others distinguished itself, separated itself from his. These acts of stupidity must have ‘discredited’ him forever. Isolated in the social bond, poorly hooked into the Other, he then had to invent his life, his story, to try to be the subject of it. So inventing his story took on a megalomaniac tone. He failed in his childhood to be the son of God, the prophet, and he now found himself in a unique place in his family: that of the liberating son, the saviour. He had to support his father, not metaphorically but in reality, because Pierre was himself the father’s metonymic object, the missing part of the father, the object necessary for him to be held together. Pierre Rivière then looked for an ideal in the Other, as an attempt to sublimate this liberation with glory and money. But the enumeration of indiscriminate possibilities disturbed the lines of perspective orienting him towards his goal, abolishing their vanishing point. On the imaginary side, because it was faulty, Pierre Rivière strove to find a model, he studied others in order to discover how to live in society – a recipe for life in common in order to be able to identify. ‘Two years ago,’ he wrote, ‘I went to Saint Honorine all alone on Sainte Claire’s day to observe the talk which the masters and servants held together and to learn from it and do as much myself if I had the chance.’45 He put it well, it was about trying to copy a model.46 But the solution was fragile and stumbled before the question of desire: ‘I could not,’ he wrote, ‘appear sociable with the young people of my own age, it was above all when I met girls in company that I lacked words to address them.’47

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Faced with this wall, the situation was inverted. In this point of absolute ignorance appeared the persecution and hatred of the Other. He started, he said, to despise those who despised him, to repeat that he could revenge himself ‘on all those people by making writings about’ them, that he ‘could put them to scorn and have them driven out of the district’; he even thought about calling ‘someone out in a duel’. We understand very well why, having reached a buffer-signifier, an enigmatic one, the one of the love relation, the menacing real emerged. It forced him to organise himself next to others and to stay in an exclusive relation to the father, in his shadow. From this place, many indications illustrate that Pierre tried to create a world for himself, for his intimate jouissance, to give it a language, a language that excludes the relation to sexuality, but not to death. In this logic, Pierre Rivière started to create, make instruments of his invention. ‘I resolved first to make a tool to kill birds such as had never been seen, I named it calibene . . . I had also resolved to make an instrument to churn butter all by itself and a carriage to go all by itself with springs, which I wanted to produce only in my imagination.’ A metonymic sliding from symbolic to real then led him to conclude this series in the most ‘natural’ way in the world: ‘I crucified frogs and birds, I had also invented another torture to put them to death. It was to attach them to a tree with three sharp nails through the belly, I called that enceepharating them.’48 An invention amongst others and, like the others, it came with his signifying creation. At the same time, and in conformity with his lalangue, the drive reorganisations of adolescence translated oddly in his case. He had, he said, a horror of incest, but, at the same time, he had a conception of it that was quite personal to him, a private signification in a way. Incest was everywhere: he could not approach the women of his family and if he thought he had come too close to them, he made mystical signs to erase what, according to him, had just taken place. Not approaching the women of his family was a prohibition he took as an absolute and it led him to live under threat and in moral dereliction. The destructuration of his thought made him read and understand the holy Scriptures in his own way. He thought that an invisible fluid could emanate from him and put him in relation with the women or female animals that he passed on his way. How can we fail to read this fear as the materialisation of a non-metaphorised libidinal bond that brings a state of terror to the subject’s everyday life? In this troubling climate, the only pacifying person was his father; and sometimes also his paternal grandmother who did not come into the signification of incest for Pierre as she was situated on the father’s side. Pierre Rivière was, without a doubt, his father’s son, but in a strange way which excluded the symbolic dimension of the mother in a ‘unilateral’ way. So we can say that he was there, stuck to his father, like an appendage. He belonged to his father before belonging to himself and this belonging took on the neo-signification of abnegation. Local gossip, which often cruelly caricatures the features it discovers in fragile people, called him ‘idiot, madman, Rivière’s beast’. In any case, it indicated the son’s adherence to the father, through which he was deprived of his own subjectivity.

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What made Pierre decide to detach himself from his father long enough to take a look at him and come to the conclusion that an unacceptable point had been reached? After all, he could have continued to share his fate by his side. Pierre was intelligent, he thought about things, interpreted, listened and deduced. Some time before the murders, he glimpsed ‘the distress in which [his father] was immersed’. Did he take his father’s suicide threats as a clear declaration of intent? It is likely. The death of his son, Pierre’s brother, a year earlier, his wife’s accusations on the matter and the debts she was constantly running up in his name probably increased and accelerated his torments. He was probably no longer the patient man who could take it: he was a weakened man. The father’s patience was running out; his placidity was crumbling. For Pierre, in saving his father, it was a question of saving himself without knowing it. The pains endured by his father touched him deeply and constituted the axis of his thought, his being and his life: ‘All my ideas were directed toward these things and settled upon them.’ From that point, it was indeed a question of life or death, the subject had entered delusional certainty and it ordered the imperious necessity of reaching the fatal outcome. Here the separation was clear, and this was expressed by Pierre Rivière himself, between the law applicable to all, the value of which he did not fail to appreciate, ‘Thou shalt not kill’, and the one that imposed itself upon him: ‘You must save your father’. It is because the latter was delusional that it did not contradict the first, but supplanted it. The subject then entered the zone of a twilight reality with its own signifying coordinates, but ones which were radically detached from common landmarks. Sometimes, when a few hesitations made their appearance, a little critical sense emerged, but it was immediately reabsorbed by the exceptionality of the subject’s destiny, of his mission. However, in his case the mission lost its sublimating shine, because saving his father meant nothing other than really eliminating within the family the people, mother and sister, who harmed him. The act became possible because the death of the subject was on the horizon: ‘I should immortalize myself by dying for my father.’ From then on, he was inscribed in a very different social bond, that of the hero: a multitude of examples of heroes, dead for glory, came to his mind and took him with them, but his glory was parodic and laughable. There was a discrepancy. Death would not give him existence by ranking him among the immortals, even though for him it was a sacrifice at the level of the history of mankind. History, great history, came to his aid. . . . I conjured up Bonaparte in 1815. I also said to myself: that man sent thousands to their death to satisfy mere caprices, it is not right therefore that I should let a woman live who is disturbing my father’s peace and happiness, I thought that an opportunity had come for me to raise myself, that my name would make some noise in the world, that by my death I should cover myself with glory, and that in time to come my ideas would be adopted and I should be vindicated.49

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Here, the megalomaniacal tone is firmly linked to the duty at hand; the subject is equivalent to his ego and seems to acquire consistency. It was not celebrity itself that he was after, but the mad heroism of the duty at hand. Celebrity would come in addition to this. The project was thus decided. Pierre Rivière would kill his mother and sister, both of whom were conniving to make the father suffer. His logic then led him to think that his father, moved by his action, would suffer because his son had sacrificed himself for him. So the abnegation governing his mission meant he had to make the very idea of sacrifice disappear. He would therefore have to kill his young brother, whom his father loved so dearly, in order to attract his father’s opprobrium. His father would then be completely free of his problems and of his last attachment to Pierre. What the delusion failed to take into account was the dimension of love binding the mother and sister to the father, but also and especially binding the young brother and Pierre himself to the father. In the same way, was Bonaparte anything other than an alter ego for him and a capricious one at that? The delusional logic, in diverting significations, cancelled out Pierre and the others as subjects. Between the decision and the execution, Pierre Rivière moved, cut off from reality, between two deaths. Over this period of time, which lasted a month, we can say that the subject calculated and premeditated his action, provided that we do not forget to specify that there was something completely different from a lucid will at the controls. It was a will inside a system of reference which clouded judgment. In Pierre Rivière’s case, but also in many other cases, if we fail to mark the difference between the levels in which the thoughts and actions of a subject unfold, we can make the most tragic errors of appreciation. These questions extend well beyond the trial of criminals and concern the issue of prevention, the status to be accorded to minor offences and the questions posed by the fear of recidivism: a paralogical universe does not exclude the operation of logic and the persistence of determination. Pierre Rivière was ready: all he needed was something to act as a sign for him and invite him to pass to the act, because his confusion was great in spite of everything and disrupted the linear sequence of the action. From then on, given that this was about heroism, Pierre Rivière had to wear his Sunday clothes to perpetrate this crime. The bill was sharpened, the clothes laid out. Under the astonished eyes of his family a strange scenario began to play itself out, in which Pierre Rivière was seen putting on his best clothes, then taking them off, then putting them back on again. He dressed then undressed when possible opportunities arose, opportunities which were missed because the three future victims were not together, but also because of the difficulties he had in passing to the act. To explain his attitude, Pierre Rivière always had good reasons. He lied, and here the lie was of the order of the mendaciousness spoken of by Clérambault,50 which we have already discussed: it is necessary for the subject to protect this superior imperative towards which everything must converge. Pierre’s little game did not fail to attract the attention of his family, in particular that of his grandmother.

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In this context, the trigger of the passage to the act occurred when she, in the course of a momentous misunderstanding, challenged him about his father. She interpreted his sartorial changes as indicative of Pierre’s secret desire to abandon his father, to leave the house and to go adventuring. So she asked him where he wanted to go and if he regretted not earning enough with his father? Could he not see what kind of state his father was in? Why was he doing all this? The grandmother was concerned. Indeed, for the first time that day, Pierre had not gone to work in the fields with his father; moreover, he let him leave even though he was sick. Should he not have gone in his place? The grandmother insinuated that soon the rumour would be that the children no longer want to stay with their father and that the mother would be in a strong position to add to her recriminations. There is no doubt that the domestic atmosphere was awful and that Pierre’s place next to his father was primordial. The voice of the super-ego resounded in the words of his grandmother and that day she left him no respite until Pierre answered regarding his father: ‘I will explain to him this evening.’ As we know, it was not a matter of explanations. Words failed him and acts would come in their place, acts suddenly precipitated by his grandmother’s words. The passage to the act opened a gap in the delusional reality. Subsequently, once the delusional duty had been accomplished, the laws of men reappeared. Yet, reason did not fully reappear, even though Pierre Rivière told us about his tears and his regrets, because, as he said, ‘my regrets faded somewhat as I walked on’. Thoughts concerning his father assailed him: people were going to think he was an accomplice. Then the other side of his delusion, the idea of killing himself, came to him, but this time, there was no trigger and nothing happened to help him. For a month, he then wandered, haggard, in the woods, feeding off roots and plants. A few months after his arrest, Pierre Rivière was judged, found guilty of parricide and sentenced to death. His father, his confessor and his lawyer had the greatest difficulty in the world in making him sign his appeal because, he said, ‘I am in haste to die’. In fact, he attempted to commit suicide and precautions had to be taken: he was thrown in a prison cell. The appeal was dismissed. Some time later, on 10 February 1836, we learn that he was pardoned and that his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. In a very long and detailed letter, the Minister of Justice drew the king’s attention to Pierre Rivière’s madness, and this madness was recognised. But on 20 October 1840, at 01.30, Pierre Rivière was found hanging in his cell. The guards testified that a state of catatonia and melancholy had preceded this passage to the act: Rivière believed himself to be dead and refused to take any sort of care of his body; he said he wanted his head cut off, which would not hurt him at all because he was dead; and if they would not comply with his wish, he threatened to kill everybody. Because of this threat he had to be isolated from all other prisoners, and he took advantage of this isolation to commit suicide.51

Madness and history: Donato Bilancia and Pierre Rivière 169

It took Pierre Rivière four years to gather his strength and his thoughts enough to finally succeed in enacting his subjective death.

Notes 1 Ilaria Cavo, Diciassetteomicidi per caso. Storia vera di Donato Bilancia, il serial killer dei treni, 2006, Milano: Mondadori. 2 Sentenza completa del caso Bilancia, Corte di Assise di Genova, 12 April 2000, www.penale.it/document/bilancia.htm, accessed 6 April 2011. 3 Cavo, Diciassetteomicidi per caso, 2006, p 121. 4 The Italian word is macello, which means ‘slaughterhouse’ or ‘carnage’. Given the context, this precision matters. 5 Cavo, Diciassetteomicidi per caso, 2006, p 49; and Sentenza completa del caso Bilancia. 6 Cf. Miller, J-A, ‘Biologie lacanienne et événement de corps’, February 2000, La Cause freudienne 44, Paris: Navarin/Le Seuil, pp 7–59. 7 Cf. Lacan, J, ‘On a Question prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis’ in Écrits, 2006, New York and London: WW Norton, p 448. 8 Sentenza completa del caso Bilancia. 9 Sentenza completa del caso Bilancia. 10 Sentenza completa del caso Bilancia. 11 Sentenza completa del caso Bilancia. 12 Sentenza completa del caso Bilancia; and cf. Cavo, Diciassetteomicidi per caso, 2006. 13 Cavo, Diciassetteomicidi per caso, p 114. 14 Sentenza completa del caso Bilancia. 15 Sentenza completa del caso Bilancia. 16 Cavo, Diciassetteomicidi per caso, 2006, p 137. 17 Cavo, Diciassetteomicidi per caso, 2006, pp 76–77. 18 Italian writer of the eighteenth century, Le mie prigioni is a long descriptive text detailing his everyday life in prison. 19 Cavo, Diciassetteomicidi per caso, 2006, p 78. 20 Cavo, Diciassetteomicidi per caso, 2006, p 97. 21 Cavo, Diciassetteomicidi per caso, 2006, p 104. 22 Cavo, Diciassetteomicidi per caso, 2006, p 158. 23 Cavo, Diciassetteomicidi per caso, 2006, p 140. 24 Cavo, Diciassetteomicidi per caso, 2006, p 123. 25 Cavo, Diciassetteomicidi per caso, 2006, p 172. 26 Cavo, Diciassetteomicidi per caso, 2006, p 152. 27 Cavo, Diciassetteomicidi per caso, 2006, p 105. 28 Cavo, Diciassetteomicidi per caso, 2006, pp 135–139. 29 Cavo, Diciassetteomicidi per caso, 2006, p 160. 30 Cavo, Diciassetteomicidi per caso, 2006, p 141. 31 Cf. Lacan, J, ‘Radiophonie’ (1970) in Autres Écrits, 2001, Paris: Le Seuil, p 414; and Miller, J-A, ‘Une fantaisie’, February 2005, Mental 15, p 11. 32 On this topic see Gilles Lipovetsky on the notion of ephemera (cf. L’Empire de l’éphémère. La mode et son destin dans les sociétés modernes, 1991, Paris: Gallimard) ; and Jean-Pierre Durand on just-in-time production flow (cf. La Chaîne invisible. Travailler aujourd’hui: flux tendu et servitude volontaire, 2004, Paris: Le Seuil). 33 Foucault, M (ed.), I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother: A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century, 1982, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, p 201.

170 Serial Killers: Psychiatry, Criminology, Responsibility 34 Cf. Foucault, M, ‘Le retour de Pierre Rivière’, interview with G. Gauthier, La Revue du cinéma, no 312, December 1976, pp 37–42. (On the film Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma sœur et mon frère, by René Allio, 1976) in Foucault, M, Dits et Écrits, t. II (1976–1988), 2001, Paris: Gallimard, pp 114–123. 35 Foucault, I, Pierre Rivière, 1982, p 8. 36 Foucault, I, Pierre Rivière, 1982, p 26. 37 Foucault, I, Pierre Rivière, 1982, pp 26–27. 38 Foucault, I, Pierre Rivière, 1982, pp 25–26. 39 Foucault, I, Pierre Rivière, 1982, p 126. 40 Foucault, I, Pierre Rivière, 1982, p 64. 41 Foucault, I, Pierre Rivière, 1982, pp 91 and 99. 42 Foucault, I, Pierre Rivière, 1982, pp 91 and 99. 43 Foucault, I, Pierre Rivière, 1982, p 101. 44 Foucault, I, Pierre Rivière, 1982, p 101. 45 Foucault, I, Pierre Rivière, 1982, p 104. 46 Lacan, J, The Seminar Book III, The Psychoses 1955–1956, 1993, London: Routledge, p 205. 47 Foucault, I, Pierre Rivière, 1982, p 103. 48 Foucault, I, Pierre Rivière, 1982, pp 103–104; on incest and inventions ‘as answers’, see pp 102–104. 49 Foucault, I, Pierre Rivière, 1982, p 108. 50 Cf. De Clérambault, G, ‘L’homicide altruiste chez les mélancoliques’, January 1921, Bulletin de la Société clinique de médecine mentale, p 671. 51 Foucault, I, Pierre Rivière, 1982, p 170.

Conclusion: psychosis and criminal responsibilities

In its relation to criminality, madness inevitably leads to the question of criminal responsibility. For a long time, there has been only one alternative: psychiatric hospital or prison. Does this disjunction account for what we know and what we have shown of the complexity of these psychotic subjects? Is it still relevant today in light of what a biography elucidated by psychoanalysis can be? Our modern society, which has placed man at the centre of the world since Descartes, has opened the way for the sciences called sciences of man.1 At the very moment when the subject emerged with the affirmation of his ego, the Freudian discovery of the unconscious, that share of man unknown to himself, was taking shape on the horizon. With this discovery, symptoms, failures, impotence and madness were now taken into account with unprecedented consequences. The same is true in the arena of criminal justice. The legislator was not mistaken about this and the judicial system called upon psychiatric experts and psychologists in order to enlighten judges and jurors on the question of responsibility, which in the penal code is inseparable from the imputability that defines criminal responsibility. Psychiatric evaluation, ordered by a judge (most commonly the judge who oversees the indictment, the investigating judge) is now a standard part of judicial proceedings and integral to the modern conception of justice. Although the notion of crime is universal, a given judgment is always relative to the cultural, historical, sociological and individual framework in which the judgment is pronounced. Isn’t this what led Lacan to say: ‘Neither crime nor criminals are objects that can be conceptualised apart from their sociological context’?2 If crime makes an intrusion, produces a trauma within the social bond, in the social fabric, it is nonetheless within this fabric that the criminal will be judged and thereby reintegrated into the community. Thus, in spite of the stupor, horror and incomprehension provoked by certain crimes, isn’t the value of a society, what it transmits to generations to come, measured according to the manner in which this integration of the criminal into the community takes place? In other words, isn’t it measured by the articulation it makes between, on the one hand, an act that strikes and traumatises it and, on the other hand, knowledge that is as precise and just as possible? Isn’t this what experts are asked to seek out, beyond episodes of madness which are always self-evident: the coordinates of the

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real, in the way Lacan understands it (whether they be found in the way in which the subject reacts to a difficult situation if neurosis or perversion are concerned, or whether they arise from a psychotic structure and the flaw that characterises it)? This is what we have been calling a biography elucidated by psychoanalysis. In contrast with the ordeal of earlier times – God’s judgment – criminal responsibility consecrates the advent of the subject and convokes him in person. French law states that: ‘No one is criminally responsible for any but his own doing.’3 And the same legislation specifies: ‘There is no felony or misdemeanour without the intent to commit it.’4 The act consequently implies a subject to whom it can be imputed and who takes responsibility for it. The act therefore always supposes someone at its origin, whereas crime was once conceived as an event, as what had happened, and referred to an empty place. The subject currently occupies this central place. He has become indispensable in the legal domain, but, by the same token, the act is to be taken into consideration not only in its irruption, but also in its articulation with an intention. Indeed, an ‘attempt’ takes on the value of a crime when it is said to be constituted, even if it only manifests itself as the beginning of a plan to be carried out, but not accomplished.5 Fundamentally, today, the act is considered from the vantage point of the subject and of the motives that impelled him. Thus, the full awareness and volition that constitute intention are required for a finding of full responsibility. Criminal responsibility consecrates the solidarity between the human person and his acts. This solidarity makes a person criminally responsible insofar as he or she is the only person liable to take on the signification of punishment. In order to be able to act in accordance with the aims of punishment and avoid arbitrariness, which is henceforth completely out of the question, the judicial system must therefore establish this responsibility.6 Yet a striking paradox remains: the separation between the moment of the act and the personality of the criminal. Criminal responsibility implies the full awareness of the subject at the moment of his act. At this precise moment, responsibility must be complete, or not be at all.7 Thus, when there is a finding of non-responsibility, it is complete non-responsibility because it refers back to the moment of a passage to the act that is isolated and transitory, without a before and an after: ‘A person who was affected, at the time of the act, by a mental or neuropsychiatric disorder having abolished his discernment or the control of his acts is not criminally responsible.’8 The psychiatric expert is called in to point to either a trial or psychiatric treatment. For the act always leads back either to a well-defined motivation which, whether it be passionate or utilitarian, must prove to be understandable, or to a completely inexistent motivation, but one which can be attributed to a moment of crisis, a moment of total rupture of the subject with himself. In our laws, the register of causation must be directly visible and legible or completely absent. Responsibility therefore rests entirely on the act and it is precisely with regard to this moment that a strict binary relation is established: the act is either punishable or non-punishable.

Conclusion: psychosis and criminal responsibilities 173

When total non-responsibility, certified by a psychiatrist, is obvious, it carries the weight of persuasion from the time of the preliminary judicial investigation. Most often, the investigation stops at this point and there is no trial.9 When the subject is found responsible, thus punishable, and must be tried, a dialogue between justice and psychiatry can still be initiated. This dialogue concerns the possible alteration of discernment, but not its abolition: A person who was affected at the time of the act by a mental or neuropsychiatric disorder having altered his discernment or the control of his acts, remains punishable; however, the Court takes this circumstance into account at the sentencing stage and in setting the terms of the sentence.10 Here the expert witness is given the opportunity to develop a more nuanced, more subtle clinical picture beyond the specific questions he was asked at the outset11 and which resulted in a trial. The development of this clinical picture nevertheless has as its horizon and limit the previous section of the penal code (paragraph 1), which refers to the abolition of discernment,12 and therefore to total non-responsibility. What can the real nature of a dialogue between the justice system and psychiatry be, given that experts must refrain from developing a psychotic psychopathology which would cast doubt on punishablility? Indeed, the expert must stop short of the question of madness, since madness would enter into contradiction with full awareness and intentionality. In overly developing a clinical analysis of delusional certainty or lack of motives, the expert would risk reintroducing non-responsibility into the ongoing trial. This reintegration would go against the finding of criminal responsibility, which allowed for a trial in the first place. And challenging full criminal responsibility is no longer an option. It is no longer possible to relate the act to a de-structured mental activity or of showing how the act can be deduced from a hidden logic irrespective of its delusional nuances. It is no longer possible to modify what has already been recognised as the truth of the act, even though it is still this truth which is at stake. The act’s relation to madness has been set once and for all prior to the proceedings. During the trial, since he cannot explicate the passage to the act, the expert sets out to describe what he calls, incidentally, a personality. The ensuing clinical analysis is one that is reduced to description, a minimalist clinic, a clinic of disorder and not of the real. With the latitude that he has left, the expert can no longer engage in an in-depth explanation. He adapts his clinical approach and lends himself to a strange contortion in order to keep intact the responsibility of the criminal on trial, all the while highlighting – man of science that he is – the complexity and elusiveness of the human soul. Was it not said of Landru, as we have seen, that he was ‘in a morbid mental state which, without amounting to madness, no longer was a normal state’?13 Engaging in such gymnastics, the expert contributes, through vague, diverse and contradictory concepts, to aggravating (in cases known to the media at least) the criminal’s responsibility, depicted exclusively as cowardly, manipulative or even cynical and egocentric.

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Anyone can see this, but it doesn’t account for the real. The expert can also acknowledge that he is incapable of dealing with the case, and the case then becomes the exceptional case that has never been seen before and which eludes psychiatry. The expert, on such occasion, will have ‘the feeling of being faced with a psychiatric harlequin borrowing from various pathological personalities’.14 We can note that, based on the request made by the criminal justice system and in his acceptance of a separation between the act and the subject, the expert is led to confine the criminal to a category that he has devised for this purpose.15 Thus, the expert’s concern is to maintain the incomprehensible as still tied to full awareness, to a relationship with present reality at the moment of the act, to a brutal and erupting surge of ‘drives’ which provide, as if they were lacking, overwhelming circumstances for criminals to whom a monstrous will to jouissance is readily attributed. Expert opinions abound and their contradictions exist side by side and follow one after the other. All are driven home in terms of scientific truths which are never demonstrated; but they are in agreement with what has to be established: sometimes the subject presents a pathological personality, but his act was committed in full awareness; sometimes a momentary derealisation occurs, but always against the backdrop of a full awareness of reality. The richness and proliferation of categories used to describe a personality whose subject is absent contrast with the impenetrability, impassiveness and indifference of certain criminals who have, throughout history, provoked astonishment, uneasiness and dismay. This is particularly true for serial murderers, given the seriousness, monstrosity and repetition of their acts. A question returns regularly during trials and in the press: has one ever seen ‘a serial killer feel sincere emotions during his trial’?16 No sooner is this question excluded from the analysis of the subject’s relation to himself, to the Other and to the meaning of life and death, than it takes on an unbearable ‘common sense’ meaning. Does society have any other choice besides regressing, calling him a monster or a predator when everything designates him to be one, and requesting the maximum punishment, or even clamouring for a return to the death penalty? When it doesn’t do so, when it resists, it ceaselessly tries to reintegrate the criminal within the community, questioning him again and again so that he might finally say what pushed him to the act and confess, beyond the recognition of his acts, his most intimate subjectivity. It is indeed difficult for our society to grasp and understand that this point can precisely be lacking. Because if the sentence has no effect on the subject, then what is it worth? For the sentence and therefore the judgment to take their full signification and have value for the whole community, the criminal must be affected within his innermost self. The community must punish one of its members and not an absolute, elusive stranger. What can be made of this indifference? We can detach it from all causality and cover it over with infinite interpretations, or we can take it seriously. Is it a mask? Is it a mystery? This is what leads us to question its declensions at different times in the criminal’s life. Did the crime appear like a thunderbolt in the midst of an untroubled sky? Under what circumstances did this shift begin to occur?

Conclusion: psychosis and criminal responsibilities 175

It is sometimes noted that many ‘bizarre’ acts and enigmatic behaviours may have peppered the criminal’s life, ones that seem enigmatic to those in his entourage, but also to the subject himself. Sometimes, even, beyond a certain violence or a certain aggressiveness, these behaviours indicate disquieting points of non-meaning and rupture. These are so many features, signs of psychosis which psychiatry’s evolution toward quantification disregards. It would be fitting for us to take up these features within a discourse, one of a politics of psychiatry centred on the subject and his real. Shouldn’t the history be written of the trajectory of every offender, every criminal and his possible encounters with psychiatric institutions?17 Quite often, after the fact, memories return and the testimonies of those who rubbed elbows with a murderer bring forward these features to be included in the construction of knowledge about him. Courts as well as lawyers await this knowledge. What the justice system struggles to close in on is the delusional causal sequence when it infiltrates the everyday nature of life precisely at the point where, for the psychoanalyst, clinical approach and structure are articulated, between the void and the cloaking of the void, which often confers self-confidence and an absolutely unbreachable kind of assertiveness upon the psychotic subject.18 Yet this delusional causality, the topology of the void, structures his real and modifies all registers – those of blame, remorse and atonement, the bond of love and sharing – and it surrounds the subject with a wall of impenetrability. This is probably a fundamental explanation which enables us, with some distance, to interpret the behaviours and apparently incomprehensible acts which surrounded Landru’s crimes. Couldn’t there be an analogous approach today, regarding criminal cases that are difficult to hone in on, whether or not there is media publicity: a historicisation of the real? Jean-Pierre Roux-Durrafourt was tried for having killed four people and wounding seven others in Tours, France on 29 October 2001. Hooded and armed with a .22 calibre rifle, on that day he paced the streets of the city of Tours killing four passers-by and wounding seven others, including three policemen and a gendarme, before being wounded himself and arrested. He was found fully responsible for his acts without any extenuating circumstances. And yet, his life was punctuated by a delusion of persecution, a delusion of jealousy and delusional interpretations. We learn that he once paid a private detective to follow those who were supposedly stalking him and that he had surveillance cameras installed around his house ‘to watch those who were watching him’.19 The experts opined that he simply had an ‘excessive imagination’. Roux-Durrafourt’s concrete response to persecution nevertheless shows its real dimension, in which the certainty of the subject and his need to act blend together. Along these lines, he changed his route home from work every day, hoping to foil ambushes and throw off his enemies. What a strange ‘imagination’, erupting and breaking into the reality of life! Is this not rather the index of externalisation that indicates conspiracy, specific to paranoiac psychosis? Moreover, Roux-Durrafourt’s

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son stated that his father believed that he was being spied on and thought that his own children had been paid to mistreat him:20 ‘He often said that he wanted to kill the boss of the organisation.’21 Obviously, if one thinks this is imagination, one will disregard the idea of treating him. According to everyone who came across him, although he was a model worker, his moral and social isolation was blindingly obvious. He never greeted anyone, climbed directly onto his machine in the morning, didn’t even come down to eat and left in the evening without saying a word. He never went to any parties, ‘rather he was on his own cloud, pensive and solitary’. His wife confirmed this and went on to inform us of her husband’s delusional jealousy: he constantly watched her until she resigned from her job and he often threatened her with a hunting rifle. As for the tragedy of Tours, she affirms that it was all premeditated, planned. Not only does a psychoanalyst hear what she has to say, but he lends credence to her statements. Roux-Durrafourt’s wife is certainly right. A delusion can give a subject the certainty of being alone at war with the whole of humanity and in this context he can prepare himself to intervene. Then, a minute detail, a trigger is all it takes to precipitate everything in an act. We have learnt from both Pierre Rivière and Donato Bilancia on this point. A defensive, smooth and ‘perfect’ image – indeed unassailable – is maintained until a breach, an accident, sometimes even an extremely benign or fortuitous one, makes everything collapse. The plane changes, the real invades reality. This gap between real and reality was already legible in Roux-Durrafourt’s case when, during his military service, he met a young woman and missed his train. He then thought he was a ‘deserter’ and went AWOL for several days before being found. The numerous expert evaluations carried out during the investigation noted ‘a certain impediment in the control of his acts’, a concession to clinical analysis, but then immediately linked this to ‘imaginative symptoms’,22 refuting a major disorder of awareness or discernment. Of course! Patrice Alègre was tried at the assizes court for six rapes and five murders. He was 33 years old, had a 12-year-old daughter and a life that was said to be marginal – parties, drinking, drugs – a few pals, few or no friends. He was charged with criminal acts perpetrated on six young women for whom he was, at one point, a friend, an acquaintance. He befriended, more or less, each one of them, which makes him an ‘organised killer’. He was considered to have lucidity, will and premeditation and it was hoped that based on his so-called full self-awareness he would explain his life, give his reasons and ask for forgiveness. This hope would always be disappointed: his words were elliptical, vague, imprecise, formal and always far removed from any subjective involvement. So people had high expectations regarding his expert evaluation: they expected it to develop and give sense to his muteness and indifference; they expected it to explain what the subject did not. But the experts recognised, in covert words, that Patrice Alègre remained, in their eyes, a kind of psychiatric enigma. ‘A criminological puzzle so complex that there isn’t a term in the vocabulary of psychiatry that suffices to define his true criminal nature.’23

Conclusion: psychosis and criminal responsibilities 177

All they can then do is account for his nature by a supposed feeling of omnipotence. The experts retraced Patrice Alègre’s biography and defined it as ‘chaotic’. However, the moments of rupture constituting this chaos were not questioned. Thus, they state with regard to him: We cannot rule out that, during the paroxysmal outbursts, there may have been a derealisation (an alteration in the perception of the surroundings) and a depersonalisation (an alteration in the perception of the subject’s own body), but reality testing remained nonetheless preserved.24 The confusion in the remarks and the supposition of the purported experiences enable one thing and its opposite to be asserted at the same time: the surroundings, the subject and the body falter, but the perception of reality is indeed preserved. Overall, the expert evaluation obviously tends to eliminate the question of psychosis: ‘Unlike psychotic criminals, the subject never describes a hallucinatory metamorphosis of his victims.’25 This shows the extent to which it has indeed to do with adhering to the judicial request. The strict equivalence hallucination/ psychosis is evoked improperly here, and what is understood here by hallucination remains to be specified. No one has ever evoked hallucination with regard to Landru, but the absoluteness of his fundamental premise was no less mad. Beyond the concepts of derealisation and depersonalisation, beyond the history of psychiatry concerning passages to the act and the clinic of schizophrenia, the equivalence advanced by the experts is perfectly suited to serve a legal necessity. And if they evoke schizophrenia in order to refute it immediately, it is solely because Patrice Alègre had ‘never evidenced incongruity [discordance] between facial expression and affect, expression of delusional content, formal thought disorder, language dysfunction, bizarreness, or abstruseness [hermétisme]’.26 Will we find, through the books and newspaper articles dedicated to him, a few modest clues to enlighten us about him? Let us question his statements which, although laconic, nonetheless constitute a signifying whole capable of being read. There are some constants in Patrice Alègre’s discourse, among which his use of hypothetical constructions is the most obvious. When he evokes a first attempt at strangulation, carried out during his adolescence on a girl who resisted him, he says: ‘She must have turned me down, that surely annoyed me.’27 In passing, we may wonder what followed on from this strange way of manifesting his ‘annoyance’ at the time. He was 21 years old when his daughter was born and, even though he could say he loved her, he did not go to the town hall to recognise her (by registering as her father), giving the banal and insignificant reason that he was tired. Is there not, in this relation of cause and effect, a confusion of the planes, a flattening out of values, in continuity with his reaction of ‘annoyance’, a demonstration of signifiers emptied of their common signification? The trivial reason here appears too true, in other words, real compared to the ideal and symbolic dimension of love. This dimension is thereby abolished and desire is destructured.

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Other forms of his discourse include the declaration of intent and a great conformity to the discourse of the other, which means that he bounces back questions in the manner of an echo. What else are they but an extension of the reticence concealed by a paradoxical docility? Is this not the origin of the incongruity (discordance) so conducive to creating uneasiness in others? Always relying on the fact that the accused should relieve his conscience, people told him: ‘If you cannot say what you did, you must write it.’ Calm and compliant, he answered: ‘I am going to try.’ Isn’t there a schizophrenic irony in this? Sometimes, people called upon his feelings, as Judge Bonin had previously done with Landru, and gave him a cue for explanation: ‘Do you feel more like a man or a child?’ The answer comes after a long reflection: ‘A mixture of both, I believe.’ Finally, when the questions are too direct and target the subject, he evidently cannot handle them: ‘Don’t ask me any more questions, I won’t answer.’ There is indeed, in Patrice Alègre, no word, no sign attesting to a mark inscribed in the body by blameworthiness and which would give witness to an opening that blameworthiness inscribes in the body and which would give meaning to a confession. This indifference is indeed a difference implicitly wished for, an indifference in which people attempt to find signification. He was begged, exhorted, ordered, threatened, people hoped, waited for the shock, for the catharsis, and in the Nameof-the-Father the empathy of feeling and remorse. He was told: ‘Give us a chance to understand you, it is important that you speak about yourself.’ But Patrice Alègre doesn’t understand the question. He is human, but . . . in some other way. Thus, it is not easy to believe him: ‘I have nothing to say.’ And yet . . . this is how insignificant it is: he has nothing to say. He was 21 years old, having just become a father, when he committed his first murder. The question arises of a triggering circumstance, or even of a moment of destabilisation after an earlier triggering; let us not forget the attempted strangulation during his adolescence. At the time of these destabilisations, isn’t he confronted with words, with buffer-signifiers (signifiants-butoirs), with a neosignification which bring him to the edge of perplexity? Might we perhaps formulate a hypothesis that would bring together normality, the edge and the emptiness of an absence of words, of meaning and nuance to which he bears witness? He insists: for an adolescent to be a man, you can’t respond to him with ‘a refusal’; you can’t fail to ‘respect’ a man, and above all a father; all of that ‘is annoying’. These words seem to be the ultimate defence, the ultimate barricade surrounding the void that characterises him. Do they designate a disorder of signification, a disorder of language? For nothing seems to allow the subject to know what is expected by the other as a sign of love, friendship, fraternity or as a mark of allegiance. There, in its sincere naivety, the neosignification is coupled with perplexity: ‘No-one explained to me.’ No one (his father) told him everything, including the impossible to say. It is a delusional interpretation of what a father is. One day someone said something inappropriate to his brother, disrespecting him. Patrice Alègre pulled out a weapon and fired. And if he did not kill the

Conclusion: psychosis and criminal responsibilities 179

supposed troublemaker, it was because the weapon jammed. We encounter this void again during the trial, in a moment of great emotional tension, when he was confronted with one of his victims who succeeded in escaping from him. The President of the Court spoke to Patrice Alègre: ‘Here before you is the only one of the six victims to have survived. I would like you to make the effort of telling us what you feel at this moment.’ A journalist recounting the trial writes: ‘Patrice Alègre appeared not to understand.’ Does he understand? Is he ‘caught’ in this question? He answers: ‘What I would like to tell her . . .?’ There ensues . . . a silence. It was too late for the expected effect of subjectivity, it had already become a trivial misunderstanding within which a murderous act was nonetheless embedded. However, Patrice Alègre was not ignorant of the fact that one should neither kill nor rape. He had been taught it when he was a child. So he apologised: ‘I am ashamed of what I did.’ Here, the statement (what is being said) corresponds to the expectation of all, but not the enunciation (the act of saying it). We also know that the young woman who appeared at the trial had saved her life because she had had the courage to trivialise the terrible things that had just happened to her: rape and strangulation. Quietly regaining her senses while Patrice Alègre believed she was dead, she simply told him that what he had done ‘could happen to anyone’. In saying this, she included him in generality, in humanity. She gave this act, which for us is structural, the circumstantial and trivial sense of an annoyance. From then on, she no longer objected to anything, there was no refusal, she did everything he asked. In this regained universe of triviality, he was able to accompany her back to the home of friends, indifferent to the possible and obvious consequences for him. The fear of being arrested did not in itself constitute a motive to do away with his victim, even though it would not have been his first murder. His own life does not seem to have any lasting consistency, not even a logical one. This flattening of reality retrospectively modifies the premeditation that is supposed of him, which is no less empty than the rest. Introducing himself as a rather ordinary young man, apparently at ease and perhaps a bit of a bad boy, he meets girls, and then things fall apart pretty quickly. ‘I tried to kiss her, she refused . . .’ His encounters are of the order of everydayness and triviality. Rather than premeditation, it would be more suitable to speak of ameditation, of impossible meditation. This kind of absence of the subject to himself, which we also find in his hypothetical discourse – superficial, compliant, smooth, banal, evasive and which, just short of narcissism, goes along with an unlimited jouissance – makes it worth asking whether all of the symbolic was real for him. In other words, was Patrice Alègre schizophrenic? All I am doing here is highlighting what deserves to be studied in depth and which remains for the most part disregarded in conventional, ready-to-use formulas – contradictory formulas which suit the semblance of dialogue between justice and psychiatry, where everything is foretold. But semblance has its limit, and there are many who uphold their questioning and a real desire to know, notably in published

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works. There are some judges, gendarmes, journalists, psychiatrists, psychologists, lawyers and others who echo this sentence that marked Freud’s desire: ‘The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest till it has gained a hearing.’28 Indeed, Pierre Alfort, Patrice Alègre’s lawyer, unconvinced by the first psychological and psychiatric evaluations, asked the investigating judge to call for new specialists. He thought that these specialists would solve the mystery of Patrice Alègre’s personality.29 So too did Jean-Pierre Roux-Durrafourt’s lawyers seek, in spite of the experts, to understand on their own the motivations of his criminal act, by reading psychiatric works. Finally, Jean-François Abgrall, the gendarme who arrested Francis Heaulme, took his words seriously when Heaulme asserted, with disturbing irony: ‘Everywhere I go, there are murders.’30 Is it because of this strangeness, this ambiguity, that he initiated a dialogue with the criminal? This dialogue allowed him to spot that, for Francis Heaulme, the flaw cannot be said otherwise than with the term pépin (a snag, a glitch), a factual, neo-signified term, a term which accounts for a distortion of subjectivity and the minimal impact of any affect. This term surprises Abgrall, but he did not reject it, and it is by consenting to learn the language of the person he is questioning that he established a relationship with him. This allowed him, beyond a feeling of repulsion, to maintain the criminal’s humanity. It also allowed him to obtain what he wanted to know: a confession and the reconstitution of a criminal career. He thus gets beyond the screen of fascination and asks the right questions: For years, this man from nowhere littered his course with victims without ever being suspected. How could such a simple being (deranged, as the press often described him) slip so easily through the net? What kind of system is it that allows a dangerous man to stay in scores of psychiatric establishments and then be allowed to go on his way, undisturbed? Why did our investigative tools not lead to his rapid arrest? Is prison really the place for him?31 People may object that I seem to consider that psychotic subjects are very likely to become criminals. Is this not a ready-made category for making them nonresponsible? To this I would reply: there can indeed be a structural affinity between some forms of psychotic decompensation and the passage to the act, the isolated murder, repeated murders. When the supplementation (suppléance) or stabilising identification fails, a hole in the symbolic and the absence or insufficiency of any fantasy for anchoring an inner life can leave a psychotic subject in direct contact with a crude, other reality, which may lead him to throw himself into a passage to the act. Nevertheless, and this clarification is fundamental, if the structure of psychosis sometimes brings the subject to the point of rupturing the bond with the other and towards crossing limits and murder, this structure is far from being equivalent to being, and in its generality it is far from providing the measure of the subject’s responsibility. And let us not forget what the world in which we live owes to the creativity and inventiveness of many psychotic subjects on an artistic, literary and philosophical level, etc.

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So structure does not sum up the subject’s behaviour, it does not say anything about the way in which the subject maintains himself on the edge and about what keeps him within the social bond or about what, in the act, pushes him to separate himself from the social bond. Every subject, whatever his structure, is confronted with the necessity of making do with the real of jouissance, by inventing ‘his’ way of being in the world and with others. The singular way in which the subject lends himself or resists, struggles or consents to the constraints that enliven him, as well as his compliance to the real, or what he succeeds in transforming of it, is what makes him a ‘unique being’. What he succeeds in constructing, or not, with his failings – as serious and incapacitating as they may be – gives shape and provides limits to both his jouissance and responsibility. The vacillation of this responsibility finds its measure in the gap between structure and jouissance. This is where guilt and responsibility are separated as well as articulated. As we have seen, a given criminal, declared to be responsible, is evidently guilty according to society, the judicial system, the whole world, but he is not so in his own eyes, and that is where the major problem lies. Moreover, this never fails to produce a powerful effect of amazement for those who are around such a person. When the subject is evidently non-responsible, the meanings taken on by madness make comprehension easier, truer, more real, and one retreats more easily before a subject so elsewhere, so unreachable. On the other hand, a mixture of delusion and everydayness remains more difficult to comprehend, more complex and more terrifying. The blending of madness and triviality establishes the subject in a place of extimacy32 in relation to others – a strange place, at once familiar and disturbing, impossible to define, and which provokes confusion and questioning. Through the irony without affect or flaw found in the Landru case (amongst other things), it is this extimate zone that, for some psychotic subjects, passes for perversion. In this place, a subject appears who – while being able to recognise the criminal acts imputed to him – cannot make a confession, a subjective confession within the formal confession. He won’t hesitate to apologise and show regret, as he would for having been impolite, but he won’t succeed in tearing out of himself the painful and violent reaction which would bring him back towards others. This reaction is what everyone expects, one which should entail a liberating reaction – one which would allow the victims’ families to recover and think about the last moments of the lives of their loved ones. The impenetrability of these subjects and their impossible destabilisation is matched by the insistence of those who seek to obtain a subjective confession. This power of confession allows the criminal to be judged via laws likely to deter or reform him, laws that could give him access to a sense of fault and thereby humanise him. This law – the law of the Other – could make him recreate every minute of his dreadful infamy with remorse. This confession, as we know, cannot take place. The blandness encountered by the victims’ families prolongs their suffering like an open wound, with the same acuity. It is certainly important that they learn from the psychiatric expert’s words, reconstituting the criminal’s life,

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the intimate mechanism of his homicidal madness. For, to a certain extent, the psychiatrist is the one who can, through detailed explanation, hone in on the act most closely. Indeed, the families experience the need to know, to not remain in suspense, to not break too quickly the chain that goes from life to death in order to accompany, for as long as possible, the person they knew and loved. My desire is to reconsider the ties between a psychiatry oriented by psychoanalysis and justice, for the simple and obvious reason that madness is no longer identifiable as a ‘big crisis’, and it does not obey the law of all or nothing. Today, we are in a position to make a diagnosis based on primary, minimal features, based on language disturbance and disorders of jouissance in the place where, as Lacan put it: ‘Structure is captured . . . at the point at which the symbolic is embodied.’33 What escapes the subject can nevertheless be circumscribed, in a second phase, with the help of psychoanalysis. If the subject cannot say the reason for his act, he might at least get close to the circumstances, the conditions, the moment of a more or less true reality and the tension in which the act was produced. If he himself cannot be open to the knowledge that sheds light on this topic, he can nevertheless become cognisant of what drove him to do the worst. The question has often been raised as to whether paragraph 1 of article 122-1 on non-responsibility in cases where there is an inability to distinguish (right from wrong) should be repealed. I don’t think so, and for a very simple but nevertheless fundamental reason. The suppression of this paragraph would make the very notion of madness, of crisis, disappear in favour of the strict study of personality, thus paving the way for an exclusively punitive drift (in sentencing practices). Episodes of madness do exist; they reflect the extreme limit of derealisation and depersonalisation. However, several questions can be raised: can paragraph 1 be applied during a trial; can it be compatible with a trial followed by treatment in an institution? Similarly, would it not be possible, under paragraph 2 of the article (on the attenuation of the ability to distinguish right from wrong rather than its absence), to leave more room, should the need arise, to debate the question of psychosis in the form of a biography elucidated by the real, given that this real is hidden from non-specialists? It can be demonstrated and certainly corresponds much more to reality. As I have shown, the advances in psychoanalytic research in the domain of so-called mental illness can attest to it. We already attest to it in institutions where psychoanalysis in the Lacanian orientation is present, in institutions created by our associations, the finest example being the CPCT.34 Analysts can help the justice system, in that the subtlety and truth of the judgment would no longer solely concern itself with a conception of the act as separate from the subject, but also with the vacillations of his responsibility. These vacillations may or may not converge towards the finding of extenuating circumstances, upon which jurors, informed of the subject’s trajectory and life, may or may not agree. Although punishment may prevail over care and lead the subject to prison, it should still not exclude psychiatric follow-up once psychosis has been recognised. This is what the case of Donato Bilancia teaches us by default. In other cases, care may prevail over punishment and follow-up take

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place, nevertheless within a specialised institution, together with the existing measures for required involuntary commitment. The variations of criminal responsibility defined by the court deserve to be taken into account on a case-by-case basis in an interweaving of justice and psychoanalysis because, whatever the historical period, the times always remain in the grip of the great tragedies of humanity. Clearly, a new relation between psychoanalysis and the judicial system would also offer the advantage of addressing the difficult question of recidivism in a completely different way. Recidivism would then present itself not so much as something that must be debated urgently when release is being considered, but rather as an integral part of the subject’s in-depth treatment. Finally, by raising the problem of criminal responsibility, the question of the judgment of criminals also in fact poses the question of advances in knowledge within the field known as mental health regarding madness and its extreme acts. By the same token, the judgment of psychotic subjects allows us to take the measure of the place granted by a given society to madness in general, the reception that it gives to those who are different, the way in which it participates in the prevention of the worst, which is also its share of responsibility. Would the Freudian discovery of the unconscious, which makes the subject Other to himself, have the effect of removing responsibility from the subject for his symptoms and the criminal for his crimes? Now that we have posed the question of criminal responsibility in the field of the criminal justice system and the French Penal Code, let us examine what responsibility is made of in psychoanalysis. In this regard, one of Lacan’s aphorisms resonates in a manner that some could find to be peremptory and which nevertheless shows his tremendous respect for the singularity and diversity specific to each human being: ‘One is always responsible for one’s position as a subject.’35 With this affirmation, Lacan extracts man from the objectifying perspective promoted by science, statistics and the market. He takes man away from the error of good faith, which, of all the errors, was, he said, the most unforgivable, an error that consists of misrecognising the place from which one speaks, the question of one’s own desire or of one’s own jouissance when presenting oneself within discourse. Responsibility is thus to be understood here as the bond between the subject and his symptom, his jouissance, his real. In this aphorism, Lacan builds on Freud. Freud carefully distinguished the unconscious from lack of conscience by phrasing the question in this way: ‘Must one assume responsibility for the content of one’s dreams’, for the immoral content of one’s dreams? To which he replied: ‘Obviously one must hold oneself responsible for the evil impulses of one’s dreams. What else is one to do with them?’36 There is thus no possible alibi for the subject, no shelter in the name of a supposed unconscious that overwhelms him. It is up to the subject to accept that he is the seat of the causality of these phenomena, even though this causality remains strange and opaque to him. It is up to him, as they say, to make a place for

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‘something within him, somewhere within him’. It is up to him to show surprise. Freud defined the ethical field of psychoanalysis as follows: ‘And if, in defence, I say that what is unknown, unconscious and repressed in me is not my “ego”, then I shall not be basing my position upon psychoanalysis.’ Beyond immutable guilt, beyond the judgment that immobilises the subject, being responsible means confronting this unknown, not misrecognising it, even finding its source, and sometimes wishing to modify its effects. So for psychoanalysis the concept of responsibility inextricably articulates the subject with his jouissance. This inextricable knot is what we call discourse – that is, the way in which each person sets forth in life with his way of being, his symptoms, his actions, his behaviour. This is why each person becomes symptomatic for another. Beyond particularity, this is precisely what is meant by the subject’s singularity in his encounter with the Other. This is the very essence of the social bond, which is indeed something other than sociological or categorical groupings. What we bring into the world comes back to us via the Other, even if we don’t want to know anything about it, and it is this feedback that humanises every subject and makes him responsible. So couldn’t we say that responsibility is the discourse of the subject and the always existing social bond as feedback – even when it comes to a subject who, in a passage to the act, took leave of this social bond? Even when it concerns a subject for whom the signification of the father was not actualised via the Oedipus complex, as a powerful organising force of social life. In other words, there is no hermeneutic explanation of crime: there is only a logic and a jouissance that are incarnated. Freud himself clarified this point in a short yet remarkable 1931 article.37 His intervention was solicited to support the request for re-trial of the young Halsmann. He was accused of parricide – the most Oedipal of all crimes – and the father of psychoanalysis was offered the opportunity to make use of his theory to account for Halsmann’s motive. Freud then resolutely turned away from any scientistic and generalising aims to show ‘the Faculty’ what the essence of psychoanalysis was. He started by recalling the universal features of the Oedipus complex, but he immediately specified that it was not applicable, even in the case of this young man, unless proof of the motive had been established, which can be found in subjective coordinates and in a necessity that propelled him towards action. For Freud, there is no possible application of the Oedipus complex without a subject: ‘Precisely because it is always present’, it will not enable ‘to provide a decision on the question of guilt’. Lacan gave this position its full weight and meaning in an aphorism that he put at the heart of his essay devoted to criminology, by incorporating within the very structure of the phrase that which belongs to the universal, to theory, and that which translates it within the subject – and doing so in a way that would be impossible to separate them: ‘in unrealizing crime, [psychoanalysis] does not dehumanize the criminal’.38 The social bond that structures communal life gets close to a limit when it manifests itself as undone in psychosis. How can a psychotic subject, free from symbolic debt, be accountable for something which never came into being for him,

Conclusion: psychosis and criminal responsibilities 185

and which is marked with the seal of ignorance and absolute imperviousness? How can he answer for a reality which the lack of mystery has rendered limitless? On occasion, he responds via a creation that is always primary for him.39 A creation which would have value as a condenser for all of the erratic significations, but, as we know, on the condition that this creation confer a valid and truly recognised place upon him within the social bond: this place is the name of his responsibility. The limit that produces a bond is therefore given to him by what comes back from the social field as the recognition of the Other. What comes from the Other to make a bond with him can purport to correct the non-inscription of the paternal function. He can thus do without the Name-of-the-Father, since he knows how to make use of it.40 The subject’s responsibility, captured via the intermediary of his object within a social network, becomes obvious, it makes him responsible to the extent of his know-how (savoir-faire).41 When this bond is not created and when the structure reveals its flaw at a moment of triggering, what can we say of responsibility? Can we say that the subject is responsible for his hallucinations, bodily sensations and delusions? The variations of responsibility are great; all it takes is to have listened to many psychotics to know the extent to which they sometimes fight, resist and seek to explain the phenomena, characterised as supernatural, that come crashing down upon them. And the extent to which they seek to address the Other even if the form of this address is diverted, deformed, enacted, in this moment that is outside of discourse. In this moment of rupture, the responsibility of those whom the subject addresses is decisive. This responsibility is perhaps both the last and first bond that provides a boundary to the chasm. It is apportioned in the urgency of the dialogue between the psychotic subject and the psychiatrist or psychoanalyst with whom he converses. The condition is that a desire accompanies his or her knowledge. The psychoanalyst’s responsibility is his or her desire. Today, criminal behaviour is not the only field in which we have to make it known what it is for a subject to be caught up in his delusion, in his symptom, in his real. We also have to make it known within the field of psychiatry, a field that shares some common points with the field of criminal behaviour. In French psychiatry, we are indisputably observing a dissolution of the clinical approach in the measuring instrument that comes to us from the United States, the DSM,42 in which the psychiatrist’s responsibility fades away. Indeed, the DSM is an instrument in which an ‘illness’ is nothing but a recomposition or, more precisely, the creation of a virtual subject resulting from the combination of a few signs. In order to attain the market efficiency that characterises our society, French society has accepted – at the level of its governing agencies – to modify fundamentally its conception of man and madness, by modifying, in particular, its policy concerning psychiatric institutions, the ‘secteur’,43 psychiatrists, psychologists and psychoanalysts.44 It would be more appropriate to expand catchment area psychiatry (psychiatrie de secteur) rather than reduce it to accommodating acute episodes, or moments in which patients experience a psychotic break. This would allow patients to be

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known ‘Otherwise’ than through a statistical coding, with trust rather, so that they come to us on the basis of a relation of knowledge constructed collaboratively. Such is my practice: subjects who are at the edge of impossibility know who to come to. This is a typical example: a patient came in as a walk-in and wanted to be hospitalised because he said ‘his feet hurt’. What was to all appearances inadmissible was taken up in my service in a very precise way. Because we know that, for him, this ‘detail’ was the harbinger of an otherwise severe depersonalisation: in his minimal delusion, ‘he holds onto life by his feet’, and from there, we can help him. This is how we have been able to prevent many passages to the act, whether it was foretold in terms of ‘blowing a fuse’, or ‘something’s going to happen’, or again ‘some people are intruding on my inner self’.45 The so-called new conceptualisations of psychiatry, on the other hand, want to separate radically personality from symptoms, which are henceforth only combined and targeted. The new conceptualisations want to separate personality from behaviour and claim to treat the first by correcting the latter exclusively and therefore artificially. Making the subject completely quantifiable and evaluable, without any sense of perspective, thus confers a cynical tone upon our times. It reduces man to silence and his happiness to the consumption of goods. In this context, how could a schizophrenic subject find the support that he lacks when he has no supplementation? In this context, the term prevention, which is the hallmark of our responsibility, is clarified by a new meaning: a meaning which, in the analytic dialogue, whether it is established in a public or private place, whatever the age of the patients, whatever the form of the request, preserves a place for the subject and in so doing, participates in the conquest of his responsibility. It is this responsibility, sometimes won over by the patient, sometimes shared between him and the analyst, the psychiatrist, or the institution (when it is oriented by psychoanalysis) that allows the psychotic subject not to approach the chasm, not to come up against the worst. Through what he knows of such breakdowns, and in the kind of reception he offers to them – aiming at the subject beyond the phenomena – the psychoanalyst can participate in the reformulation of a social bond. For psychoanalysis, it is clearly apparent that the question of psychosis does not just come down to a diagnosis or the mechanism of foreclosure. There is not one psychosis, but psychoses, and as with neurosis, there are as many psychoses as there are psychotic subjects. So there are as many variations in responsibility as there are subjects, with regard to the phenomena, the real and passages to the act. The Landru case, and also those of Pierre Rivière and Donato Bilancia, have allowed me to demonstrate the force of delusional causality. My wish was to share with readers interested in this question the knowledge that arises from my daily experience working with psychosis, whereas the era in which we are living is turning out to be incapable of thinking about madness, busy as it is promoting the enjoyment of goods, which goes hand in hand with personal autonomy and a disdain for the symptom. Public opinion is thus torn between two contradictory

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tendencies: on the one hand, a misrecognition of the function of speech and what it means to speak in favour of communication that is useful for the procurement of objects of jouissance and, on the other hand, a desire that persists: the desire to know what, in a criminal’s psychology, could account for a motive, in other words what his acts mean. This is the psychology of the criminal with which the justice system is concerned from the time of the investigation onwards, in order to be able to bolster the ethical value of its judgment. How indeed might justice judge and punish a man for whom the Other is as caught up in a derealised reality as he himself is? The path that I have followed shows quite clearly that psychosis itself is a complex phenomenon and that it is not always possible to reply in terms of total responsibility or complete non-responsibility, according to a law of all or nothing. The advances of psychoanalysis in the field of psychosis, with Lacan’s teaching, and that of Jacques-Alain Miller today, lead us to consider psychotic subjects in their singularity. They allow us to highlight the nuances of their personalities and enlighten the justice system so that it knows who these criminal subjects are and can consider to what extent they were able (or not) to resist the compulsion of the real. The capacity to judge belongs neither to psychoanalysts nor to psychiatric experts, but it is incumbent upon them, as Lacan once pointed out in his essay on criminology, to clarify for judges and jurors the ‘vacillation’ of the notion of responsibility, so that they can carry out their office and their judgment knowingly and apart from any prejudice. This speaks to the weightiness of responsibility, and of the role of psychoanalysts and psychiatrists in what comes to impose itself, for judges and jurors, as the inalienable and indisputable conviction that is forged, beyond reasonable doubt, in the course of a trial. This also speaks to their responsibility in shaping the public opinion’s conceptualisation of madness.

Notes 1 This is what led to numerous sciences like psychology, ethnology, etc, being called human sciences, a term which Lacan refutes in its application to psychoanalysis. Since the status of the subject is non-objectifiable: ‘There is no such thing as a science of man because science’s man does not exist, only its subject does’ (Lacan, J, ‘Science and Truth’ in Écrits, 2006, New York and London: WW Norton, p 730). 2 Lacan, J, ‘A Theoretical Introduction to the Functions of Psychoanalysis in Criminology’ in Écrits, 2006, p 103. 3 Art 121-1 Code pénal. 4 Art 121-3 Code pénal. 5 Pursuant to Art 121-5 Code pénal: ‘An attempt is committed where, being demonstrated by a beginning of execution, it was suspended or failed to achieve the desired effect solely through circumstances independent of the perpetrator’s will.’ 6 Is this not what Lacan is saying in ‘A Theoretical Introduction to the Functions of Psychoanalysis in Criminology’ in Écrits, 2006, p 112 when he writes: ‘Responsibility – that is, punishment.’ 7 Cf. Chauvaud, F, Les Experts du crime. La médecine légale en France au XIXe siècle, 2000, Paris: Aubier, p 151: ‘Responsibility is of one piece.’

188 Serial Killers: Psychiatry, Criminology, Responsibility 8 Art 122-1-1 Code pénal. 9 A case was dismissed after an indictment for aggravated manslaughter, attempted rape and rape with a weapon in light of psychiatric opinions finding that the accused, suffering from a dissociative psychosis of the schizophrenic type, committed the acts he was being charged with ‘unbeknownst to himself’ (Decision of the Criminal Section of the Court of Cassation, 18 February 1998, Bulletin Criminel 66). 10 Art 122-1-2 Code pénal. 11 Alfort, P and Durand-Souffland, S, J’ai défendu Patrice Alègre, 2005, Paris: Le Seuil, pp 770–771: ‘1°) Does the evaluation of the accused evidence mental or psychical abnormalities? If yes, describe them and specify which affections they pertain to. 2°) Is the offence the subject is being charged with related or not to such abnormalities? 3°) Say if the subject was suffering, at the time of the facts, from a psychical or neuropsychical disorder affecting his discernment or his control over his actions in the sense of the new article 122-1 Code pénal. 4°) Is the subject dangerous? 5°) Is he amenable to criminal punishment? 6°) Is he treatable or re-adaptable?’ 12 Art 122-1-1 Code pénal. 13 Archives of the Police Prefecture of Paris, Box III, Report of Dr Dubuisson, 1906. 14 Devos, C, ‘Roux-Durraffourt n’était pas “psychiatriquement malade’’’ (‘R-D was not “psychiatrically ill”’), La Nouvelle République du Centre-Ouest, 24 March 2005. 15 Cf. Chapter 1 on the narcissistic pervert, p. 22ff. 16 Rankl, U, Patrice Alègre, l’homme qui tuait les femmes, 2004, Paris: Nicolas Philippe, p 317. 17 Cf. ‘Prisons . . .’, Bulletin annuel de la Cause freudienne, spring 2006, Bibliothèque Confluents: Ile-de-France. 18 The void corresponds to the dead part of the subject, which gives him the appearance of being detached from affects, not governed by the subjective division. 19 Embareck, M, ‘“Bizarre”, vous avez dit “bizarre”’, La Nouvelle République du CentreOuest, 24 March 2005. 20 This is something other than ill-treating one’s father in the name of generational difference. In any case, he did not think that his children were difficult because of the generational conflict or adolescence crisis. 21 His son’s testimony: ‘il se croit espionné’ (‘He thinks he is spied upon’), La Nouvelle République, 30 October 2001. 22 Devos, ‘Roux-Durraffourt n’était pas “psychiatriquement malade”’, 2005. 23 Rankl, Patrice Alègre, 2004, p 316. 24 Alfort and Durand-Souffland, J’ai défendu Patrice Alègre, 2005, p 77. 25 Alfort and Durand-Souffland, J’ai défendu Patrice Alègre, 2005, p 77. 26 Alfort and Durand-Souffland, J’ai défendu Patrice Alègre, 2005, p 77. 27 Tourancheau, P, ‘Cinq meurtres et toute une vie de violence’, Libération, 11 February 2002. 28 Freud, S, ‘The future of an illusion’, quoted by Lacan in ‘A Theoretical Introduction to the Functions of Psychoanalysis in Criminology’ in Écrits, 2006, p 105. 29 Cf. Alfort and Durand-Souffland, J’ai défendu Patrice Alègre, 2005, p 71. 30 Abgrall, J-F, Dans la tête du tueur. Sur les traces de Francis Heaulme, 2002, Paris: Albin Michel, p 195. 31 Abgrall, Dans la tête du tueur, 2002, p 245. 32 A conceptual neologism created by Lacan which condenses intimacy and exteriority. (Cf. Lacan, J, The Seminar Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960, London: Routledge, 1999, p 139 ; and Le Séminaire, Livre XVI, D’un Autre à l’autre 1968–1969, 2006, Paris: Le Seuil, pp 224 and 249. The concept of extimacy was developed and studied by Jacques-Alain Miller in his course at the Department of Psychoanalysis at Paris-VIII University, L’orientation lacanienne 1985–1986 entitled ‘Extimité’ (unpublished).

Conclusion: psychosis and criminal responsibilities 189 33 Lacan, J, ‘Radiophonie’ (1970) in Autres Écrits, 2001, Paris: Le Seuil, p 408. Cf. also Lacan, J, Le Séminaire, Livre XXIII, Le sinthome 1975–1976, 2005, Paris: Le Seuil, p 122. 34 The first of a series of Psychoanalytic Centres for Consultations and Treatment (Centre Psychanalytique de Consultations et de Traitement – CPCT) was founded by the association École de la Cause freudienne in 2003. In these centres, psychiatrists and psychologists offer free, short-term treatment in the psychoanalytic orientation to people in various precarious situations. 35 Lacan, ‘Science and Truth’ in Écrits, 2006, p 729. 36 Freud, S, ‘Some Additional Notes on Dream-Interpretation as a Whole’ (1925), SE XIX (1923–1925), pp 123–138. In this text, Freud studies the subtle bond between the subject and what belongs to him, between the subject and the object. 37 Cf. Freud, S, ‘The Expert Opinion in the Halsmann Case’ (1931), SE XXI (1927– 1931), pp 251–253. 38 Lacan, ‘A Theoretical Introduction to the Functions of Psychoanalysis in Criminology’ in Écrits, 2006, p 110. 39 Cf. Chapter 1, p. 16ff. 40 Cf. Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre XXIII, 2005, p 136. 41 Cf. Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre XXIII, 2005, p 61. 42 Cf. American Psychiatric Association (APA), Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edn, Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR), 2000, Washington, DC: APA. 43 Trans. note: For the purposes of psychiatric care, France is divided into geographical ‘sectors’ which are each required to have a hospital unit and one or several outpatient clinics, amongst other services. This system, which was developed in the 1960s and underwent intensive implementation in the 1990s, emphasises continuity of care over the long term, with a single team that comes to know the patient, with a set of integrated services in proximity to where the patient lives. The idea is also to distribute patient care between different structures belonging to a given regional network (le secteur) so that the patient is no longer confined to psychiatric hospitals and may remain in close contact with his relatives. See Verdoux, H, ‘The Current State of Adult Mental Health Care in France’ (2007) 257(2) European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience 64–70. 44 The reader is referred to presentations made at the ‘Forums des Psy’ and published between December 2003 and January 2005 in Le Nouvel Âne; and to Miller, J-A (ed.), L’Anti-Livre noir de la psychanalyse, 2006, Paris: Le Seuil. 45 A number of innovations – day hospital (Hospitalisation de jour intra-muros, HDJ), but also the retention of current hospital beds, therapeutic flats, therapeutic stays with a family, etc., Medico-Psychological Centre (Centre Médical et Psychologique – CMP), Part Time Therapeutic Care Centre (Centre d’Accueil Thérapeutique à Temps Partiel – CATTP), which favour de-compartmentalised, non-segregating care – are developed in Sector 94 G15 of psychiatric hospital CHS Paul Guiraud Villejuif, in the service of Dr Jean Ferrandi, where I work.

Index

act, vii, viii, 2–6, 10–12, 17–19, 23–6, 86, 94, 117, 119–20, 123, 137, 159, 163, 166, 171–82 ‘activism’, 72 passage to the, 12, 17–19, 23–4, 26, 75–6, 96, 120, 141, 144, 148, 159, 161, 167–8, 172–3, 180, 184 push-to-the, 71, 155, 161 aesthetics, 12 aetiology, x, 2 aggressiveness, 102, 175 Alègre, Patrice, 21, 23, 176–9 Alexander, Franz, 11 Alfort, Pierre, 22, 180 alienation, 76, 162 Allio, René, 158 anamnesis, 9, See also: case formulation anger, 31, 72, 125, 150 Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD), x, 12 Artaud, Antonin, xii autonomy, 36–8, 79, 91, 101, 134, 147 186. See also Landru: autonomy auto-veridiction, 3 bad faith, 101, 133 Badinter, Robert, xi Barthélémy, 74. See Landru victims: Jaume, Madame Beccaria, Cesare, xi Behavioural Evidence Analysis, 4 Belin (Inspector) xi, 21–2, 70, 101, 103–5, 123, 126 Bentham, Jeremy, xi Béraud, Henri, 105, 109 Bilancia, Donato, 6, 17, 147–58, 176, 182, 186 brother’s suicide, 149 father, 148, 50

mother, 148 relation to his own body, 150, 153 Bilancia victims Centanaro, Giorgio, 148, 151–3 Parenti, Maurizio, 148, 151–3 biography elucidated by psychoanalysis, 5, 20, 143, 148, 171–2 bis (mother of Landru’s mistress, Fernande Segret), 81–2, 90 blameworthiness, 5, 178 Bluebeard, xii, 19, 28, 67, 138 Bolo-Pacha, 108 Bonaparte, Marie, 11 Bonin (Judge), xiii, 54, 75, 102, 105, 127, 132, 178 borderline, 8 Boston Strangler, ix Botul, Jean-Baptiste, 139 Bourget, Paul, 87 Brazil, 67, 80. See Landru victims: Laborde-Line Brussels, Dr. James, ix Bundy, Ted, vii, ix, xii case formulation, 5–11 causality, 2, 4, 18, 24–6, 89, 126, 174–5, 183, 186 cause and effect, xi, 177 Cavo, Ilaria, 147, 149, 153–7 Cénac, Michel, 11 certainty, 24, 39, 91, 108, 133, 150, 166, 173, 175–6. See also delusional certainty chameleon, vii, xii, 46, 124 Chaplin, Charlie, xi, 6, 23, 59, 79 Chine, 74. See Landru victims: Jaume, Madame Citroën, André, 44–5, 139 Cleckley, Hervey, 7, 9

Index 191 Clémenceau, Georges, 108 Clérambault, Gaëtan Gatian de, 25, 133–4, 162 clinic [clinique], 12, 23, 102, 143, 158, 173, 177 Colette, xi, 135 Comte, Auguste, 86 confession, xii, 3, 5–6, 65, 78, 104, 107, 113–4, 117, 133, 138, 148, 159, 178, 180–1 cooling-off period, viii Cour d’Assises, 12 crimes of enjoyment, xi, 80 crimes of utility, xi, 59, 140. See also utilitarian criminal behaviour, ix, 1–2, 8–11, 185 criminal justice, 2–3, 5, 18, 22, 171, 174, 183 criminality, 1, 8, 21–2, 32, 125, 147, 171 criminology, 3–4, 24–5, 108, 158, 184, 187 Crozatier, 53, 67, 80. See Landru victims: Guillin, Madame cruelty, xii, 136 to animals, viii Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder, 1 dangerousness, 3–4, 8 Darmon, Pierre, 35 Dautel (Inspector), 44 de Maistre, Joseph, xi de Quincey, Thomas, xii de Saussure, 7 death, 31–3, 48, 53–4, 61, 65, 69, 76, 79, 80, 83, 86, 88–9, 92, 94, 102, 106–11, 113, 121, 127–30, 137–8, 140, 142–3, 147, 151–3, 159, 161, 163–9, 174, 182 decompensation, 8, 140, 180 dehumanisation, 26, 76, 80. See also inhumanity delusion, ix, 7–8, 10, 16, 18, 24, 29, 35, 40, 44, 47, 53, 61, 66, 85, 91, 94, 96, 100, 111, 125, 131–3, 137, 140, 150, 152, 159, 163, 166–8, 173, 175–81, 185–6 absolute rationality, of, 131 delusional causality, 175, 186 certainty, 133, 166, 173, 176, See also certainty disorder, 6, 147 erotomania, 102

jouissance, 96 guilt, 129, 131, See also guilt limit, 53 logic, 159, 167 maxim, 78–9, 132 motive, ix narcissism, 108 persecution, 102, 175 depersonalisation, 129, 177, 182, 186 depression, 129–31, 136 derealisation, 128, 155, 174, 177, 182, 187 desire, 20, 35, 38–9, 61, 63, 66, 80, 91, 93–4, 96, 116, 123, 132, 134–8, 157, 159, 165, 168, 177, 179, 182–3, 185, 187. See also object of; signifier of Freud’s, 180 diagnosis, 1–2, 7–8, 132, 137, 182, 186 dialectic, 39, 78, 88–9, 148 discourse, 9, 11, 12, 17, 20, 22, 35, 39, 65, 73, 76, 88, 103, 112, 131, 134, 139, 147, 155–6, 175, 179, 183–5 disintegration, 35, 41, 47, 137, 140, 152 Don Juan, xii Dostoyevsky, 61 double, 39, 71–7, 89, 108. See also splitting drive, xii, 8, 12, 19–20, 22, 25, 51, 80, 137, 157, 165, 174 DSM, x–xi, 1, 185 Dubuisson, Dr., 110, 120–1 Duclos, Dennis, x Dumas, Alexandre, 87 Dupré, Ernest, 38 Durham v. U.S., 11 duty, 39–40, 47, 59, 61, 124, 132, 167–8. See also Landru: duty, sense of ego, 8, 117, 167, 171, 184 alter, 140, 162, 167 -Ideal, 45 ego-psychology, 8 empathy, viii, x, 178 lack of, 7, 115 emptiness, 12, 23, 61, 112, 127, 147, 157, 178 enigma, 1–2, 5, 16–18, 21, 26, 28, 31–2, 43, 73, 75, 85, 91, 105, 113, 115, 133, 139, 158, 165, 175–6 enjoyment, xi–xii, 80, 122–3, 132, 186 enunciation, 20, 113, 122, 150–1, 179 erotomania, 102, 108

192 Index exception, 20, 50, 82, 96. See also father extenuating circumstances, 3, 12, 105, 175, 182 Ey, Henri, 7 fantasy, 29, 36, 39, 80, 135, 137, 150, 180. See also object of fascination, 21, 26, 102, 139, 180 father, ix, 17, 59, 61, 91, 107, 184. See also Bilancia, Landru, Rivière. exception, father as 20, 96 function, 20, 36, 40, 89, 185 law of the, 38–9, 94 One-father, 93 FBI, vii, viii, ix, xi feminisation, 89, 93, 96, 108, 111, 132 father, of the, 93, 101 Ferry, Jules, 33 foreclosure, 63, 66, 72, 94, 123, 133, 157, 186. See also Name-of-the-Father forensic experts, vii, 103, 109 Paul, Doctor, 54 psychiatrists, vii, 7, 10, 16, 22–3, 60, 78, 91, 103, 119–26, 128, 147, 149, 159, 171, 173, 175–7, 180, 187 Foucault, Michel, 3–4, 6, 158 freedom, 17, 24, 36, 76, 124, 184 Fregoli, 63 Freud, Sigmund, 19, 20, 33, 61, 132, 183–4 gambling, 149–50, 152 gaze, xi, 21, 26, 32, 70, 83, 100, 106–8, 122, 135–6, 162 dead, 136 Gilbert, Président, 105–6 God, 19, 100, 111, 159, 164, 172 Godefroy, public prosecutor, 90–1, 105–6, 115–8, 131 Landru’s letter to, 90, 131 grandiosity, 7 graphomania, 123 Guillet, Léon or Lucien, 41, 44–6, 52, 73, 103, 138, 141–2 guilt, 5, 16, 24, 29, 31, 54, 56, 102, 104, 107, 109, 111, 123, 125, 136, 139, 149, 168, 181, 184, See also responsibility and delusional guilt. Guiraud, Dr. Paul, xiii, 25 hallucination, ix, 8, 147, 150, 177, 185 Hare, Robert, x

hate crimes, x hatred, x, 94, 101–2, 138, 151, 156, 165 Havre, 53, 68, 80. See Landru victims: Héon, Madame Hesnard, 24 hetero-veridiction, 3 Hinckley, John, 10 Hitler, Adolf, 23 holophrase, 90, 137. See also signifier, holophrased Hugo, Victor, 87 Humbert, Charles (Senator), 108 hyperactivity, 35, 47, 123 ideal, 39, 44–5, 60, 79, 94–5, 140, 157, 164, 177 identification, 17, 20, 25, 40, 61, 63, 89, 90, 95, 98, 100, 116, 127, 131, 136, 143, 147, 180 conformist 89 imaginary 89, 90, 98 stove, with the, 116, 143 identity, 2, 8, 18, 36, 38, 44–5, 49, 76, 103, 138, 142 idiographic meaning, 9 idiosyncrasy, 7, 10 imaginary, 20, 38, 47, 82, 122, 132–7, 140, 150, 164 imputability, 3, 171 incapacitation, 1–2, 4 indifference, 7, 18, 23, 34, 61, 66, 104, 108, 127, 130, 174, 176, 178–9 indifferentiation, 96, 101 individualisation of sentences, 3 industry, 36–7, 40–1, 48, 50, 55, 61, 73, 75, 79, 84, 159 inhumanity, xii, 6, 78 insanity, 6–7, 10–11, 16 irony, 26, 32, 60, 65, 71, 73, 78, 85, 90, 102, 105, 123, 126, 132, 134, 137–9, 148, 153–4, 178, 180–1 J id. or J idem, 53, 80, 82. See Landru victims: Cuchet, Madame (Jeanne) jouissance, xi, 19–20, 39, 79–81, 87–91, 96, 112, 132, 135–7, 143, 152, 157, 165, 174, 179, 181–4, 187 subject of, 79 Joyce, Nora and James, 85 kakon, 124, 155 Kant, Immanuel, xii, 79 Keppel, Robert, vii

Index 193 Kernberg, Otto, 8 Kraepelin, Emile, 38 Lacan, Jacques, 7, 10, 11–12, 19, 20, 25, 59, 61, 63, 79, 85, 89, 96, 107, 122, 136, 157, 161, 171–2, 182–4, 187 Lacanian orientation, xii, 182 Lacassagne, Alexandre, 120 ‘Lady Vanisher’, 28 lalangue, 122, 133, 146, 165 Landru, Henri-Désiré architect, 29, 31, 34, 38, 41 advertising, 37, 43, 49 autonomy, 36, 38, 79, 91, 101, 186 body, relation to his, 126–32. See also psychosis, body in chameleon, 46, 124 charming, xii, 64, 83 confession, impossibility of, xii, 3, 6, 65, 78, 107, 113–14, 117, 138, 181 dead leaves, 54–5, 78, 104 love, 86, 108, 132 subject, 78, 88 death, theory of, 54 duty, sense of, 39–40, 47, 59, 61, 124, 132 early arrests, 37 engineer, 36–7, 41–52, 62, 68, 73, 137–8, 140, 147 family, xii, 7, 29–31, 33, 35–41, 46–51, 53, 59–62, 69, 71–2, 79, 84, 89, 92, 96, 108, 116, 124, 127–9, 131, 137, 138, 140, 143 father (Landru as) 16, 18, 28, 30–1, 35, 40, 46, 51, 61, 108, 124, 128, 140 father (Landru’s), 29, 33, 45, 48, 83, 89, 92–6, 100–1 father-mother, 93, 101 suicide of, 48, 76, 92 flowers, 52, 64, 77, 81, 85–6 furniture dealer, 48–54, 88, 145, 149 inventing, 16, 29–30, 36–8, 40–1, 43–5, 47–8, 61, 77, 112, 137, 141, 143 love, theory of, 94–5 mother, 33, 48, 50, 59–60, 67, 71, 83–4, 88–96, 136 as signifier, 89–91 need, xii, 59–62, 71, 79–80, 84, 96. See also objects of parallel market, 38 physical examination, 121 poem to his lawyer, 111, 123

police, 100–5 god, as, 100 neo-conception of, 115 pseudonyms, 41, 44, 63 sexuality, 80–1, 95–6, 123–4, 132 sister, Florentine, 33 stove, xi, 19, 28, 54–5, 103, 107–8, 113–6, 143 drawing of, 113–14 victim, as, 47, 101–2, 106 ‘wall’, 21, 23, 78, 91, 95, 101, 106, 113, 115–16, 120, 132, 175 ‘war economy’, 49, 64, 140 wife (Marie-Catherine Rémy), 28–31, 34–5, 38, 43, 47–8, 53–4, 60–1, 68, 71–2, 81–2, 84, 89, 92, 107, 120, 124, 140 La Landru, 41–3 Landru business associate (Falque, Madame), 76, 113–15, 135, 142 Landru defense lawyers, 32, 108–17 de Moro-Giafferi, 32, 105, 108–12, 130 Navières du Treuil, 32, 105, 108, 112–16, 137–9, 155 Landru mistress, Segret, Fernande, 44, 53, 58–9, 70–1, 76, 81–95, 108, 114–15, 123, 131–2, 135, 138 as part of family, 81, 138 engagement, 84–5 love story, 81–2 on sexuality, 132 Landru notebooks, 50, 52–4, 62, 68, 71, 73–4, 80–1, 86, 101, 109–10, 123, 125, 138, 141 Landru victims Babelay, Mademoiselle (Andrée), 53, 62, 70–1 Buisson, Madame, 54–5, 62, 71–3 Collomb, Madame, 55, 62, 68–9, 71–2, 77 Cuchet, André, 53, 62–5, 71, 80, 124 Cuchet, Madame (Jeanne), 41, 53, 62–7, 71, 77, 80, 82, 124–5, 142 Guillin, Madame, 44, 52, 54, 62, 67–8, 71–3, 77, 89 Héon, Madame, 53, 62, 68, 72 Isoré, Madame (marriage swindle), 37, 64, 103 Jaume, Madame, 53–4, 62, 73–4 Laborde-Line, Madame, 53, 62, 66–7, 72, 77 Marchadier, Mademoiselle, 53–4, 62, 75–6, 78, 88, 104, 141–3

194 Index Pascal, Madame, 53, 62, 74–5, 77–8, 111, 135 Landru, Charles, 30–1, 35, 43, 46, 51–52 Landru, Henriette (daughter), 35 Landru, Maurice (son), 35 Landru, Suzanne (daughter), 35 language, 8–9, 22, 39, 88, 96, 101, 115, 121–3, 131–2, 134, 136, 165, 177, 179, 180, 182 language disorder, 88, 96, 121–2, 132, 177–9, 182 Lefebvre, Madame, 11. See also Bonaparte, Marie Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 7 limit, 20, 36, 48, 52–3, 80, 87, 107, 137, 143, 153, 160, 173, 179, 182, 184–5 logic, 2–3, 5–6, 9, 16, 26, 40, 51, 53–4, 61, 71, 76, 82, 84, 114, 132, 140–3, 152–3, 158–9, 165, 167, 173, 184 Lupin, Arsène, xi Lyanes, 74, 80. See Landru victims: Jaume, Madame lypemania, 119, 130 M’Naghten, 12 MacDonald triad, viii, x Mad Bomber of New York, ix madness, 1–3, 8–9, 16–17, 19, 21–2, 24–5, 28, 31, 76, 88–9, 109–10, 117, 119–21, 123, 125–6, 133, 139–40, 147, 153, 155, 158–9, 161, 163, 168, 171–3, 181–7 Maigret, Commissaire, xi mania, 88, 120, 131 manic-depressive, 131 manipulation, x, 7, 119, 148, 153, 155, 173 marketing, 16, 41, 43 master-signifier, 39, 40, 45, 60, 61, 90, 120, 131, 133, 136–7, 140, 152, 157–8 megalomania, 24, 34, 38, 40–1, 47, 61, 70, 91, 108, 114, 129–30, 138, 164, 167 melancholia, 119–20, 129–33, 169 Meloy, J. Reid, 7, 9 mendacity, 133 mens rea, 10 mental illness, 1, 6–12, 22, 88, 119–21, 162, 172–3, 182–3 metalanguage, 108 metaphor, 78–80, 85, 88, 116, 129, 132, 135, 150, 155, 164–5 love, of, 85, 89 metonymy, 47, 103, 137, 143, 151, 164–5

micro-delusion, 7, 10 Miller, Jacques-Alain, 8, 19, 134, 187 mirror, 30, 41, 47, 49, 70, 78, 96, 101–2, 108, 111, 140, 153 monomania, 7 Monsieur Verdoux, xi, 6, 59, 79 Montaigne, 109 morbid rationalization, 51, 151 morbid universe of the fault, 24 Moro-Giafferi. See Landru defense lawyers Morrison, Helen, vii mother, ix, 17, 59, 90, 96, 133, See also Bilancia, Landru, Rivière. motive lack of, 3, 6, 18, 24–5, 148, 152–3, 173 rational, xi, xii multiple personalities, 63, 72, 133 Musset, Alfred de, 87 mythomania, 38, 70, 84, 123, 133, See also Dupré, Ernest , 38 Name-of-the-Father, 39, 45, 66, 91, 108, 134, 178, 185 foreclosure of, 66 Navières du Treuil. See Landru defense lawyers neologism, 39, 100 neo-reality, 7 -duty 132 -formed status, 137 -love 132 -semanteme, 91 -signification, 53, 108, 150, 165, 178, 180 neurosis, 8, 24, 39, 47, 80, 134, 136, 172, 180 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 61 normality, 6–7, 9, 16, 22, 125–6, 132–3, 155–7, 178 object, See also gaze a, 136–7, 143, 157 -choice, ix, xii -relations, 8 desire, of, 116, 136–7 fantasy, of, 80, 135 love, of, 88 metonymic, 164 need, of, 59, 80, 132 proof as impossible, 102 psychosis, in, 137, 143 Oedipus complex, 7, 90–1, 96, 184

Index 195 omnipotence, 23–4, 177 ordinary psychosis, 8 Other, the, 20, 38–9, 84, 87, 100, 128–9, 132, 134–5, 137–8, 140, 142–3, 150–3, 155, 157, 162, 164–5, 174, 181, 183–7. See also social bond paranoia, ix, 7, 11, 140, 153, 155, 157, 175 paterfamilias, xii, 36, 40, 159 patriarch, 60–1, 124, 128 Paul, Dr., 130, 138 peculiarity, 22, 24, 66, 82, 101, 126, 134, 136, 162 penis, xii, 132, 149 perplexity, 23, 91, 93, 123, 150, 155, 178 persecution, 93, 96, 100–1, 106, 121, 125, 133, 135, 150–1, 156–7, 163, 165, 175 personal law, 7, 36, 40, 50, 63, 79, 96, 132 perversion, xii, 17, 19, 24, 28, 38, 51, 53, 107, 132, 137, 153, 172, 181 narcissistic, 7–9, 23, 147 phallus, 63, 66, 89, 91, 96, 129. See also signification plasticity, 47, 62, 65, 122, 133 Poirot, xi premeditation, 10, 158–9, 176, 179 prevention, x, 1–2, 4–6, 9–11, 157, 167, 183, 186 profiling, ix–xi, 2, 24 projection, 71, 78, 84, 95, 102, 157 proof, 53, 84, 102–5, 110, 113, 125, 138, 156, 184 proportionality, 4 psychiatry, 3, 4, 6–7, 12, 18, 21–3, 105, 119, 158, 173–187 psychoanalysis, 5–8, 11–12, 16, 18–19, 20, 25, 139, 143, 148, 158, 171–2, 182–7 psychology, ix, 3, 8, 22, 25, 126, 148–9, 155, 171, 179, 185, 187 Psychology, Investigative, ix psychopathology, 1, 7, 9, 11, 18, 22, 60, 71, 101–2, 120, 125, 152, 163, 173–4 psychopathy, viii, x, 1–2, 7–9, 23–4 psychosis, 6–9, 17, 22–4, 38, 40, 61, 89, 91, 96, 107, 112–13, 119–43, 147–51, 153, 161–2, 164, 171–87 body in, 52, 81, 90, 122, 126–32, 135–6, 150, 153, 168, 177–9 mission in, 60–1, 96, 138, 166–7 triggering of, 8, 140, 153, 162, 178, 185 punishment, 2–3, 11, 172–4, 182

rape, 7, 21, 23, 176, 179 rationality, 44, 49–50, 53, 113, 117, 123, 126, 131 real, 10, 17–20, 26, 43, 45, 53, 61, 66, 75, 82, 84, 89, 102, 116, 122, 131–7, 139–40, 143, 147–8, 150–3, 155, 158–9, 164–5, 172–7, 181–3, 185–7 reality, 17–20, 29, 32, 35, 39, 43, 46, 52–3, 61, 63, 66, 73, 84, 86, 90, 116, 131, 133, 135, 139, 140, 147, 150–2, 154, 156, 159, 164, 166, 174–7, 179–80, 182, 185. See also neo-reality. derealised, 187 loss of, 10, 96 mortified, 86 testing, 8, 10, 177 real and reality, 17–20, 116, 131, 140, 159, 176 remorse, 24, 116, 149, 175, 178, 181 responsibility, 2–5, 10–12, 17–18, 22, 24, 36, 40, 47, 60–1, 119–21, 125, 131, 134, 138–9, 143, 148, 154, 158–9, 171–87 delusional logic of, 61 diminished, 110, 119 subjective, 5 Ressler, Robert, vii reticence, 66, 105, 122, 125, 133, 178 revenge, 148, 150–2, 165 Riboulet, Detective, 54 rigour, 53, 62–3, 79, 82, 113, 137, 143 rigidity, 79, 115 Rivière, Pierre, i, 6, 17, 158–69, 176, 186 duty, 167–8 father, 158–68 incest,165 invention, 164–5 mother, 158–68 ‘singularities’, 164 suicide, 168–9 Robert, Dr., 130 Roques de Fursac, Dr. Joseph, 120, 125 Romains, Jules, xi, 45–6, 63, 121 Roubinovitch, Dr., 120, 125 Rouletabille, xi Roux-Durrafourt, Jean-Pierre, 175–6, 180 rubber-man, 126–7 Ruquier, Laurent, xi Sade, Marquis de, xii, 80–1 Schiff, Paul, 11 schizophrenia, 6, 70, 131, 134–5, 137, 140, 177–9, 186

196 Index ‘secretary to the insane’, 112, 155 semblance, 60, 78, 134, 140, 142–3, 179 sentencing, 3, 4, 12, 173–4, 182 shame, 48, 78, 116, 136, 148, 179 Sherlock Holmes, ix, xi signification, 17, 21, 38–9, 47, 60–1, 66, 77–8, 80, 86, 91, 101–2, 125, 129, 131, 137, 139–40, 143, 150, 152, 155, 165, 167, 172, 174, 177–8, 184–5 personal signification (anomalous), 7, 115 phallus, of the, 66 lack, of, 129, 137 signifier, without, 139 signifier, 8, 20, 26, 39, 43, 45, 47, 49, 60, 66, 72, 78, 84, 86–7, 89–91, 103, 105, 116, 123, 128, 136–8, 141–3, 152, 165, 177–8 alibi-signifier, 141 bis-signifier, 90 body, and the 131 ‘buffer-signifier’ [signifiant-butoir], 90, 105, 115–16, 165, 178 ‘crime’, 103 death, of, 89, 129, 140, 142, 163 ‘defiles of’, 20 desire, of, 66, 137 ‘duty’, of, 39 empty, 40, 60, 84, 86, 102, 152, 177 ‘engineer’, 43–5 ‘family’, 39, 60, 131 imaginary, 90 ‘killer’ 138 holophrased 137 madness, of, 89 ‘mother’, 89–91 ‘responsible’, 128, 131, 138 signification, without 47 war, 141, 143 ‘work’, 39, 131 silence, xi, 5, 21, 23, 26, 66, 104, 122, 129–30, 133, 179, 186 singularity, xi, xiii, 2, 18, 38–9, 63, 77, 91, 122, 132, 143, 181, 183–4, 187. See also Rivière. ‘Sire of Gambais’, 28, 45 social bond, 6, 8, 12, 17, 36, 39, 40, 45, 59, 76, 112, 124, 134, 137, 139, 143, 149, 164, 166, 171, 181, 184–6 speaking being, xii, 20, 25

speech, 5, 20, 23, 25–6, 36, 40, 85, 102, 121–5, 127, 130, 132, 134, 147–51, 160, 187 splitting, 31, 112, 127, 133, 160 Staub, Hugo, 11 structure, 7–9, 18, 20, 47, 59–60, 65, 84, 100–1, 107, 112, 115, 120, 132, 138–9, 143, 147–8, 150, 158, 161, 164, 172, 175, 177, 179–82, 184–5 subjective death, 143, 152, 168–9 division 39, 78–80, 122 recognition, 5, 174 subjectivity, 1–5, 9, 11–12, 17, 23, 39, 80, 90, 93, 122, 131, 147–8, 151, 154, 162, 165, 174, 176, 179, 180–1, 184 sublime, xii superego, 8 voice of the, 168 supplementation [suppléance] in psychosis, 40–1, 45, 94, 143, 180, 186 Suriray, Father (vicar of Aulnay), 161 symbolic, 12, 20, 38–9, 44, 60–1, 80, 82, 89–90, 93, 100–1, 122, 128–9, 132, 134, 136–7, 143, 148, 156, 167, 177, 180, 182, 184 schizophrenia, and, 134–137, 148, 180 symptom, viii, xi, 1–2, 6, 8–10, 22, 39, 132, 134, 136, 171, 176, 183–6 topology, 7, 175 Tramar, Comtesse de, 64, 87, 94–6, 132 transgression, x, 2, 5–7, 137 transitivism, 108, 131 treatment, x, 5–11, 155, 172, 182–3 Trenet, Charles, xi utility, utilitarian, xii, 62, 71, 111, 124, 143, 172. See also crimes of utility U.S. v. Brawner, 11 Vallon, Dr, 30, 119, 120–1, 125 Vastel, Dr., 161–2 Vaux, Clotilde de, 86. voice, 122, 136, 160, 168, 180 void [vide], 12, 17, 38, 47, 87, 90–1, 115–6, 122, 125, 133, 137, 148, 156, 175, 178–9

Index 197 Wannsee, xii writing, 36, 49, 52–3, 67, 81, 83, 121, 129, 132, 141, 154, 159, 161, 165

Zucca, Enrique (Judge), 150, 155–6