Pierre François Lacenaire

Pierre François Lacenaire

Pierre François Lacenaire (20 December 1803, Lyon – 9 January 1836, Paris) was a famous French poet and murderer.

Biography

Upon finishing his education with excellent results, Lacenaire joined the army, eventually deserting in 1829 at the time of the expedition to the Morea. He became a crook and was in and out of prison, which was, as he called it, his "criminal university". Whilst in prison, Lacenaire recruited two henchmen, Victor Avril and François Martin, and wrote a song, "Petition of a Thief to a King his Neighbor", as well as "The Prisons and the Penal Regime" for a journal.

In the months between the beginning of his trial for a double murder and his execution, he wrote Memoirs, Revelations and Poems, and during the trial he fiercely defended his crime as a valid protest against social injustices, turning the judicial proceedings into a theatrical event and his cell into a salon. He made a lasting impression on the age and on several writers such as Balzac and Dostoevsky (see below)

Lacenaire also appears in the classic French film Children of Paradise (1945), where his stance as a loner and a rebel is stressed. In the film, he refers to himself as a bold criminal and a social rebel, but his actual criminal activities mostly stay outside the story.

In literature and film

• Baudelaire called Lacenaire "one of the heroes of modern life". [Actually that is not true. A volume known as Curiosités esthétiques, a posthumous compilation of previously unpublished writings on the arts, contains a chapter titled De l'héroïsme de la vie moderne (On the Heroism of Modern Life) in which Baudelaire alludes to Lacenaire only obliquely, accusing him of "mournful boastings" but seemingly impressed that his "ferocious gallantry did not bow its head before the supreme machine," which is to say, the guillotine.]

• His hand, severed after death, was the subject of a poem by Théophile Gautier.

• Dostoevsky read about Lacenaire's case and it inspired him to write Crime and Punishment, in which Raskolnikov's crime was a copy of Lacenaire's almost down to the last detail.

• Philosopher Michel Foucault believed Lacenaire's notoriety among Parisians marked the birth of a new kind of lionized outlaw (as opposed to the older folk hero), the bourgeois romantic criminal, and eventually to the detective and true crime genres of literature.

• Lacenaire is portrayed in the epic movie Les Enfants du Paradis (1945) — Children of Paradise in English — directed by Marcel Carné. His role is played by Marcel Herrand.

• There is a French film called Lacenaire (1990) starring Daniel Auteuil.

See also

For more information, see the French Wikipedia entry for Lacenaire: http://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pierre_Fran%C3%A7ois_Lacenaire