A Most Quiet Murder: Maternity, Affliction, and Violence in Late Nineteenth-Century France

A Most Quiet Murder examines the death of a five-year-old girl in late nineteenth-century France, unfolding the mystery through judicial investigations, psychiatric medical evaluations, and ultimately, a trial for murder.

The investigators quickly learned that the child, Henriette, had been abducted by Marie-Françoise Fiquet, an employee at the city tobacco factory and known troublemaker. Fiquet had taken the child back to her home and kept her there all day. But what actually happened between the abduction at midday and the discovery of the child’s body at five o’clock in the morning remained a mystery.

Susannah Wilson uses archival records, press coverage, and psychiatric reports to reveal how the troubled history and reputation of Marie-Françoise Fiquet, marked by suspicions of sexual debauchery, infanticide, abortions, poisoning, theft, and extortion, was a case study in an emerging medical paradigm. Her signs of trauma, psychological disturbance, and medical morphine abuse provide insight into factitious disorders--or simulated illnesses--that would be more commonly observed in the following century.

A Most Quiet Murder provides a new view of nineteenth-century France, where the law and public authorities intervened in the lives of the working classes and their children during moments of crisis to exercise the law of the land. The murder of a child reveals the connections between the psychology of female violence, the emergent understanding of factitious disorders, and the psychologically complex motives that extend beyond simple altruism.

Susannah Wilson is a Reader in French Studies at the University of Warwick. She focuses on French cultural history from the fin-de-siècle to the mid-twentieth century, with an emphasis on women’s lives, pathology, criminality, and drug cultures. Wilson is the author of Voices from the Asylum.