FRANCE: Life for Violette

At Hull, England, fortnight ago, a crowd of about 300 gathered in the early morning before the prison yard to watch the flagstaff. Many were praying. Two unarmed policemen with their thumbs stuck purposefully in their belts kept the crowd in order. At 9 o’clock a black flag broke out on the staff. By that signal spectators knew that, despite a blizzard of petitions to the Lord Mayor of Hull, to the Home Secretary, to King George himself, Mrs. Ethel Lille Major had died on the gallows for poisoning her truckdriver husband, first woman to be executed in England in eight years.

In France things are different. Under sentence of death in Paris last week lay a surly, silent 19-year-old girl named Violette Nozières. Not since 1887, when Jeanne Thomas was executed for burning up her mother in the fireplace, had a Frenchwoman paid the supreme penalty for murder. French juries are notoriously tender with wives who murder their husbands, but Violette Nozières was no wife. A spoiled brat with a fondness for nightclubs and loose living, she succeeded, after many attempts, in poisoning her father, a railway engineer, and her mother. Then she turned on the gas to make the crime seem suicide.

But Violette Nozières was too hasty in calling for aid, for her mother was not quite dead when the ambulance arrived. The girl stole 1,500 francs from her dead father’s wallet and spent a riotous week in Montmartre bistros, living successively with a German, a Negro, an Egyptian. She broke with each in turn when he expressed the hope that the police would catch the murderess about whom all the papers were writing. Finally a young student recognized her from her published photographs, turned her over to the police.

“Why did you call the police?” she asked.

“Because you are a parricide!” cried the student.

“What does that mean?” asked Violette Nozières.

She was tried and convicted while Paris papers ran page after page of feature articles, compared her to every famed murderess from Messalina to Beatrice Cenci. Though crowds’ rioted against her outside the jail, though fellow prisoners spat hatefully at her, grey-haired President Lebrun was so moved by a last-minute plea for mercy from the mother whom she had tried to kill, that he commuted Violette Nozières’ sentence last week to life imprisonment.