The Papin Sisters

by Rachel Edwards, Keith Reader

France's "murder of the century" remains also the most violent non-war crime by women against women on record. The Papin sisters' killing and mutilation of their mistresses in 1933 has provoked reproduction and speculation ever since, by such prominent cultural figures as Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Lacan, and Claude Chabrol. This book offers an overview of these reproductions and draws some provocative conclusions from them.

Genres: True Crime, Nonfiction

144 pages, Paperback

First published August 2, 2001

About the author

Rachel Edwards is an alumna of King’s College London where she read French with English BA (Hons).

She won an Arts Council award for her fiction and worked as a freelance writer for over 12 years prior to publishing her debut novel 'Darling' with Fourth Estate, HarperCollins. Her articles feature in the national press, including The Guardian and The Sunday Times, and she is a regular guest at literary festivals and on BBC radio.

Reviews

[Fishface · Rating 4 out of 5]

After the very brief account of the crime and trial, I thought this book was going to turn into a hard slog -- the author turns to the movies, plays, and books written about the case in all the years since, examining the case from the points of view of psychoanalysis, class warfare, the oppression of women and even conspiracy. But ultimately it comes clear that not enough questions were asked, or at least not the right questions, at the time the Lancelins were murdered, and nobody has ever gone back and caught up properly. So all we can do is speculate endlessly. And I have to admit the speculations are interesting, even hilarious in spots, like the conclusion drawn by some old-school Freudian psychoanalyst that Genevieve Lancelin had her thighs sliced up like loaves of bread because Christine Papin was trying to find her phallus. My only real quibble with this book is the tiny typeface -- the quotations in French are in bold so they're easy to read. If you read French. The footnoted translations, necessary for a user of rusty high-school French comme moi-meme, are not only in such small type that you need an electron microscope to read them, but someone chose to put them in a very faint, anemic typeface. And none of the quotes were connected in any understandable way to the many books and movies the author cited. But the book was really worth the Excedrin.

[Becky · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was expecting an historical account of the Papin sisters. This was not that. Maybe if I had a better understanding of French culture in the 1920's/30's I would have been able to read this.
The one thing that I really didn't like was the French quotes that were translated in the footnotes. Just put the English translation in the book and the French in the footnotes. I'm reading an English book for crying out loud.