In her meticulously researched book, Maza lays out the history not of a mere crime but more thoroughly, a society undergoing profound social change. What happens to justice when the foundations upon which it rests are challenged by new ideas, attitudes, and events? Maza asks the reader to consider the case of Violette, a teen-aged fratricide and attempted mother-killer from the mindset of a Parisian or Frenchman living in those times.

Violette’s crime is viewed from the perspective that she was a “monster”; that she was a selfish and greedy girl unhappy with parental authority; that she suffered incestuous rape at the hands of her father, Baptiste, a railroad engineer, and killed because that was the only way to make it stop. Her case is examined from points of view beyond her own – from considering the role of the principle judge and the roles of Violette’s boy and men friends, from her Mother, Germaine’s, unnatural hostile reaction to her daughter that extends to bringing a civil suit against her; from the Latin Quarter students, the press; and from the letters of Paris citizens who write to the judge on all details of the case.

The point of Maza’s approach to her story is to illustrate that Violette was an individual who heightened and personified the wrongs that existed in French society at the time and the threat that upwardly mobile, independent, and sexually “abandoned” young women like her represented to the status quo. The book enlightens the reader to the anxiety produced within that society by women monopolizing certain jobs in the workplace, about young girls defying parental authority and restrictive supervision of their lives. The French class system of bourgeoisie and peasantry was being shattered as a new class, the upstart laboring to middle class, grew in stature and power with the entrance of educated women into the workforce. Maza contrasts the national cultural idea of the patrimony – the family nest egg – that was sacrosanct in the way that it empowered family in a country where family meant land, and land described status. Maza lets us see how the Paris arrondisements, each with its own identity, were experiencing a new-found heterogeneity due to the effects of upward mobility and immigration.

Violette Nozière’s case epitomized all those factors, putting a literal face on the abstract forces at work that would, following WWII, redefine French society.

I am impressed and astonished by this book, learning a great deal about the connections between the railroad system, cultural upheaval, Freudian influences, and changing attitudes in France about its highly patriarchal society between the wars. Fascinating. ( )

Violette Noziere was a young woman who poisoned her parents. Her father died; her mother lived. After she was apprehended (and perhaps before, though this is in dispute) she accused her father of incest. The story is fascinating in itself, but to Maza it is emblematic of interwar changes in Paris in social stratification, mores, art, fashion and politics and the rise of interest in noir, detective stories and fait divers. Excellent read as true crime and social history of 1930's Paris. ( )