nfanticide is a crime no one living in
France can commit. It is a crime that does not exist: page through the
French Penal Code and you won't even find the word. Yet, mothers killing
their newborn babies is a French phenomenon.
It is just that the French call infanticide by another name: under Art.
221-4-1 of the Penal Code it is qualified as the "assassination of a minor
under the age of 15." It is an "assassination" and not a "murder." French
law makes a distinction between ordinary murder – killing in a burst of
sudden anger, like a crime passionnel when a spouse kills an
unfaithful partner – and premeditated murder or, as in the United States,
first-degree murder. The latter is designated an assassinat – an
assassination, whereas the other is a meurtre – murder. Until France
abolished the death sentence in 1977, as a rule, punishment for
assassination was the guillotine; that of murder was life imprisonment – or
perpète in French, underworld slang – though it, too, could have
fetched a sentence of capital punishment.
There are, according to legal statistics, between 60 and 100 infanticide
cases in France annually. Most do not grab media attention, yet at present
(October 2007) six such cases are drawing intensive press coverage, thus
revealing that infanticide is a very real problem in France. One of the
cases, that of a woman named Véronique Courjault, now awaiting trial for
assassination, has allegedly inspired novelist Mazarine Pingeot, love-child
of the late President François Mitterrand and Museum Curator Anne Pingeot,
to tackle this distressing fact in her new novel, Le Cimetière des
poupées – The Cemetery of the Dolls. The novel is No. 1 on the
best-seller's charts amid strong denial from Pingeot, who is expecting her
second child, that she has drawn inspiration from the "Babes in the Freezer"
case, as the Courjault case is known here. According to Pingeot, she
followed five of the current French infanticide cases in order to try to
understand why a mother would kill a child she had carried in her womb for
nine months. (The sixth case did not surface until after her book was
published.) The novel is written in the voice of such a murderous mother who
tries to explain her act to her husband in letters she writes from the cell
where she is awaiting trial.
The writing career of Mazarine Pingeot, 33, has enjoyed ups and downs.
Le Cimetière des poupées is her fourth novel and fifth book. Her first
novel, Premier Roman (1998) sold 60,000 copies, whereas sales dropped
to 12,000 for the second and third. Her autobiography Bouche Cousue
however sold 200,000. The late President Mitterrand successfully concealed
her existence until a French magazine ran a cover story on her in 1992.
Journalists had, though, been aware of her existence almost since her birth
in 1974. She shares her life with the Moroccan-born Mohamed Ulad-Mohand, 41,
a movie producer.
The Six Cases
Véronique Courjault, 40, and her 41-year-old engineer husband,
Jean-Louis, hail from the town of Chinon, on the River Vienne, 177 miles
south of Paris. In Chinon, its population of 8,000 live in clusters of 15th
and 16th century houses with grey-slated roofs. Over the roofs tower the
ruins of France's oldest fortified castle, the Chateau of Chinon. It was
there in the town of Chinon that Joan of Arc first told King Charles VII
that visions and voices had sent her to him and that God will aid him and
his kingdom in the battle against the English.
The Courjaults were known as quiet, decent people: the only time a member
of the family had perhaps drawn attention was when Véronique Fièvre dressed
in black from head to toe, in 1995, to marry Jean and Geneviève Courjault's
son Jean-Louis. What the villagers did not know was that the bride wore
black because she was pregnant and she hoped that the dark color would hide
her rounded stomach.
For the first few years of their marriage, Jean-Louis and Véronique lived
in Villeneuve-la-Comtesse, a village of 700 rural souls, not far from Chinon.
The couple, parents of a son named Jules, appeared to welcome the birth of a
second son, Nicolas, within a year. Then Jean-Louis, an engineer, lost his
job and, as Véronique was a housemother, also with no income, a doom settled
over the Courjault household. Then, in 1999, the four set off for Seoul,
South Korea where Jean-Louis took up a job with a car parts manufacturer.
At his work, the bespectacled Jean-Louis was highly regarded; Véronique,
short, dark-haired and rather plain, was known as a shy but polite member of
the local French community: she worked as an auxiliary teacher at a
kindergarten for the children of French ex-pats. She enjoyed the reputation
of being an excellent teacher and colleague: all also said that she was an
exemplary mother to the couple's two sons, 9 and 11 respectively.
In June of 2006, the four Courjaults returned to France on vacation.
Jean-Louis, however, had to rush back from Chinon to Seoul to resolve a
crisis at his office. Back at the family's luxurious Seoul apartment, he
opened the family freezer and nearly fainted. Running to the apartment
building's concierge, he babbled something about the bodies of two babies in
the freezer. The supervisor followed him up to the apartment and, yes, in
the freezer, wrapped in plastic bags, were the bodies of two babies. The
South Korean police allowed the greatly shocked Jean-Louis to return to
France, but not before he had supplied a DNA sample. They already knew that
they could obtain Véronique's DNA from a hospital where she had undergone an
ablation of the uterus (this procedure makes a woman unable to bear children
without having to remove the womb). Both the DNA samples matched those of
the two dead newborns: they were perfectly-formed boys born in 2002 and
2003, weighing 7.5 lbs and 7.9 lbs.
In France, the "Babes in the Freezer" story very quickly hit the
headlines. Véronique and Jean-Louis denied that they were the parents of the
two murdered babies and, giving "South Korean media lynching" as reason,
they refused to return to Seoul. The French public seemed as outraged at the
allegations that the respectable couple could have committed such an
atrocious crime. French police meanwhile carried out their own DNA tests and
theirs confirmed that of the South Korean's.
Promptly arrested, the couple still vehemently denied having killed the
two newborns; they did not, they said, even have any knowledge of their
presence in their freezer. It took Véronique three months to break down and
confess: She said that she suffocated the babies immediately after birth.
She had apparently successfully hidden the pregnancies from her husband and
had given birth all alone in the bathroom. She had, as she was to confess
next, already killed a newborn. That was back in 1999 in sleepy, rural
Villeneuve-la-Comtesse. On that occasion she had also suffocated the baby on
birth, but she had burnt that little body: She had done so in the fireplace
in the family home and buried the charred remains in the garden. Police
started to dig and found the remains.
France never extradites one of her nationals and therefore Véronique is
to stand trial in France. Jean-Louis, though, was released sous contrôle
judiciaire sans caution – under control order. The police believe that
he was unaware of what he's wife had done. While he waits for her case to
come to court (as the French legal process is slow, this will only be in the
latter part of 2008), he lives at a secret address: the couple's two sons,
described as "traumatized," live with him. Both the Fièvre and Courjault
families are supporting him, and so they do Véronique. Mrs. Geneviève
Courjault, Jean-Louis's mother, quite indignant, has written to author
Pingeot to complain about her novel, and in Chinon, a petition has been
drawn up to have the novel, published by Editions Julliard of Paris,
withdrawn. So far 200 have signed the petition; not many, certainly, but as
Mrs. Marie-Françoise Canal of Chinon says: "The Courjault family is very
highly regarded here and they have suffered enough. We are also considering
Jean-Louis and Véronique's two boys – they must be protected." Jean-Louis's
father recently died; according to the man's widow, he died from a broken
heart caused by the tragedy that had hit the family.
The first of the remaining four cases from which Pingeot could have drawn
inspiration for her novel, came to light at the same time as the Courjault
case.
This is the case of a 39-year-old woman identified only as "a woman from
Toulouse." Toulouse is no backwater. Four hundred and thirty-three miles
from Paris and only 200 from the Spanish city of Barcelona, it has a
population of almost half a million which makes it France's fourth most
populous city.
This infanticide was committed in 2004. The woman, already the mother of
four children of whom the eldest was her 15-year-old daughter, found herself
yet again pregnant. Although the baby's father was her partner (he had also
fathered the other four children) she decided that she did not want another
child; the couple's relationship was falling apart anyway. Soon it ended,
but the man called in on his former partner and their children regularly
carrying food parcels. Then, last November, he did so again. On that
occasion he had brought along some meat and opening the freezer to store it
away, he found the small, naked, frozen body of a baby. The body was in a
transparent plastic bag. He summoned the police and his ex-partner, called
from her work, quickly confessed to having smothered the baby, a boy, in the
minutes after birth. As she said, "I didn't want it." Now incarcerated, this
woman's trial will also commence in the latter part of 2008. Her eldest
daughter, now 18, faces the charge of "non-assistance to a person in
danger." She allegedly knew that her mother was pregnant and that she was
going to kill the baby. Presumably she also knew that the tiny corpse was in
the freezer.
The second case is that of Aline Lelièvre, 19. In November of 2006, Aline,
in great distress, summoned police to her tiny one-roomed apartment in the
town of Redon. She hails from Fégréac. Redon and Fégréac are towns in
northwest France, close to the Atlantic coast. In Fégréac (2,000
inhabitants), Aline lived with her parents in a small, white-walled house
that stood at the end of a gravel road. Her father worked in a mattress
factory and her mother in a school canteen. Yet still so young, Aline wanted
more to her life than a dead-end gravel lane and her job cooking pancakes in
a creperie. There was a problem though: She was pregnant by her
Portuguese boyfriend, a waiter. The boyfriend, however, abandoned her to go
to live in Switzerland. When notified that he was to become a father, he
made it clear that he was not ready for fatherhood and certainly not for
settling down.
Aline's parents helped her as much as they could; they loved the child
she gave birth to, a boy named David, as if he was their own. But Aline
still craved for a better, more exciting life. Redon, 12 miles from Fégréac,
with its 10,000 inhabitants, therefore suddenly looked like a gilded
metropolis to her. That was where she and David would go. She waited until
the boy was 14 months old and then she made the move.
Working as a waitress in a pizza bar, Aline could afford to rent a tiny
apartment in downtown Redon. She dropped David off at a neighbor's each
morning before setting off to sell pizzas.
Then one night, Aline summoned the police. She'd been living in Redon for
just two months. Her son, David, she stammered, has been kidnapped. Police
rushed to the apartment and listened to Aline's story. She said she'd put
the little boy to bed and had then gone downstairs to chuck out the garbage
and to smoke a cigarette. On her return to the apartment a few minutes later
David was gone. Over the following few days, Aline's bespectacled, pimply,
tearful face had all France crying with her. Photographs of her appeared on
the front pages of leading magazines: on some she was holding and cuddling a
chubby, smiling, blue-eyed baby David. Accompanying stories recounted
Aline's sad life: how her Portuguese lover had walked out on her; she was
working as a waitress to keep starvation at bay, and David's nanny had
stopped taking the little boy in. This had meant that the young, single
mother had been taking the child with her to the restaurant; she had,
though, told her employer that she would have to leave her job unless she
could find someone else to take David in.
A sad story certainly, but the experienced police decided that what she
was saying about David's kidnapping did not hang together and, before long,
she confessed to having killed the child. She said she suffocated him, then
wrapped the little body in a pink sheet from the child's bed, put it in a
bag and rode out to a pond on her scooter and threw the bag into the water.
In jail, awaiting her trial that will also not be heard until the latter
part of 2008, she has tried to commit suicide by drinking a detergent.
David's father remains living in Switzerland; having been unaware of what
his ex-girlfriend was up to, there are no charges against him.
The third case came to light when a recently retired couple bought an old
house in the village of Contres in the picturesque Loire region south of
Paris, and, digging in the garden came across the body of a baby. The
police, having been summoned to the property, brought in dogs, and soon they
found another tiny body also buried in the garden and still yet another. The
third was hidden in the house's fireplace. The house's previous owner,
Marinette Pezin, 39, soon found and questioned, admitted to having killed
the three babies right after their birth. She had no explanation for what
she had done other than that her 18-year marriage had been an unhappy one –
by then it had ended in divorce – and she already had four children and did
not want another. Her ex-husband is not facing any charges: He was
apparently unaware of the three pregnancies. This case is also to be heard
some time in 2008.
The fourth case of infanticide from which Pingeot could have drawn
inspiration came to light this past August.
Virginie Labrosse, 36, admitted to killing three of her newborns. Like
Veronique Courjault, the "woman from Toulouse" and Marinette Pezin, she also
kept the tiny cadavers at home, and as with the first two, the bodies were
discovered by the unsuspecting father.
Virginie and the babies' father, described as a 40-year-old plumber who
had in 2001 served a seven-month incarceration for sexually molesting a
female hitch-hiker, had been together for 16 years. By all appearances, the
couple, who in 2006 had bought an elegant, cream-walled, double-storey house
with white shutters in the green hills above Albertville, in the mountainous
Savoy region of Eastern France, were financially comfortable and getting on
very well. However, their relationship was stormy, and while the two were
still living in an apartment in downtown Albertville, Virginie had begun a
love affair with their 20-year old neighbor. Then, in August, she left her
husband and moved in with her lover. Alone at home, the husband started to
scratch in cupboards and around the cellar and came across a box. Inside,
were the decomposed bodies of two babies. In a state of shock and almost
incoherent, he instantly summoned the police. Virginie, brought to the
house, then led the police to another box and in it was yet another tiny
decomposed body.
According to Virginie, who confessed that she was not "maternal" and had
no wish to have a child, she had killed the three babies immediately after
birth: one was a boy, another a girl, but she claimed that she couldn't
remember the sex of the third (decomposition has also made it impossible to
determine the sex). The first she had killed in 2001. As she told police,
she had given birth to that baby "in the toilet" and the baby had "drowned."
The second she killed in 2003 and the third in 2006. DNA tests will have to
establish whether the third child was fathered by her lover. Both her
husband and her lover were unaware of the pregnancies, though the lover's
mother told police that Virginie had last year told her son that she was
pregnant but she had suffered a miscarriage while on the toilet. "Virginie
had put on a lot of weight and often complained about stomach ache but she
wouldn't consult a doctor, and then when I saw her last October she had
suddenly lost a lot of weight," said the woman.
Meanwhile, Virginie has told police that she kept the babies because she
did not want to abandon them. She said: "I considered them part of myself."
A psychiatrist explained that she had turned the babies into "dolls."
Virginie had, in fact, moved the little bodies around the house – perhaps
playing with them? She had, though, first kept them in the freezer, but
fearing that her husband might find them there, she had taken them out and
kept them in boxes; the boxes were moved regularly from one room to another,
and up and down from the basement. Then, as a police spokesman said: "When
the couple started to carefully wrap the crockery to move from the apartment
to the new house, she took great care to wrap the little bodies as well.
Make no mistake, they were going along."
Incarcerated, Virginie's mental state is being assessed. Her husband and
lover do not face any charges. Should Virginie be diagnosed sane and fit to
stand trial, the case would not be heard until 2009.
The sixth and most recent case stunned television viewers on Oct. 19 when
newscasts reported the bodies of "several" newborn babies being found in
garbage bags in a cellar of a house in the French town of Valognes, 210
miles north of Paris. Gendarmes thought that there might be four or five
bodies, but because of advanced decomposition, they had to wait for a
pathologist's report.
(Gendarmes "police" rural areas and towns of fewer than 20,000
inhabitants. Unlike the French police who fall under the jurisdiction of the
"Ministry of Interior", "gendarmes" fall under that of the "Ministry of
Defense" and they hold military ranks.)
Céline L., as the murderous mother is being called, in fact, killed six
of her newborns. She had done so between August 2000 and September 2006. She
has been incarcerated and, like the other five murderous mothers, she faces
the charge of "assassination of a minor under the age of 15", for which the
maximum penalty is life imprisonment. Her former lover, the father of the
first five babies to have died, is also under lock and key. He knew what she
was doing and faces 10 to 15 years imprisonment for "non-denunciation of a
crime". (He has been identified only as Pascal.)
It was the 34-year-old Céline's current lover, only known as Luc M.,
father of the sixth baby, who summoned the gendarmes to the couple's
first-story apartment in a government housing complex for people with a low
income.
Luc M. had gone down to the cellar where he was almost overcome by a
nauseating odor. Looking for the source of the stench, he opened one of
several garbage bags and found the decomposed body of a baby. He ran
upstairs to "have it out" with the woman he had been living with for about
two years. What was said between the two is not known, but later he was
almost incoherent on the phone to the duty officer at the local
"gendarmerie."
Céline is the mother of an 11-year-old boy, fathered by Pascal. He has
been bringing up the boy. "She didn't want to look after him, so we
"recuperated him," Pascal's current lover, identified as Nadège, told
reporters. Nadège does not face any charges: when Pascal had moved in with
her about a year ago, he had kept his and Cèline's dark secret to himself.
Relatives, friends and neighbors of Cèline's are now telling reporters
that they have often in the past suspected that she was pregnant. "She
always denied that she was and we couldn't be 100 per cent certain because
she was always wearing large sweaters," said one friend.
All of them do, though, describe the young woman as "very charming" and
"an intellectual": she wears metal-framed "granny" glasses and no make-up.
According to the gendarmes, Cèline confessed to having given birth to the
babies all on her own in the bedroom and to having suffocated them
immediately after birth.
"I put my hand over their faces and kept it there until I could see that
they were no longer breathing," she said.
Not sure though on two occasions that the babies were indeed dead, she
had then also strangled them.
She claimed that she could no longer remember whether the babies were
boys or girls, therefore the pathologist on the case would have to determine
their gender.
Why did Cèline kill them?
The only explanation she would give gendarmes was: "I wanted them, but I
also didn't want them."
Unemployed for the past two years (she used to work as a clerk), she has
been augmenting her unemployment allowance by babysitting for her neighbors.
A Seventh Case
A seventh case of infanticide is being investigated at present (March 2008)
after the discovery of the body of a newborn baby-girl in a freezer on a
horse farm in Brittany. Valérie Le Gall, 35, the farmer's wife, admitted to
police that she had given birth to the baby last July (2007), but she denied
having killed the newborn. An autopsy showed that the baby was strangled to
death within minutes of birth. The little body was also covered in bruises
perhaps caused by a rough unassisted confinement. According to French law
the woman has been charged with the "assassination of a minor." Her husband,
Fréderic, had been arrested with her, but he has been released, and
according to the police, he won't face any charges. He had been unaware of
the little body in the family freezer; similarly, he had not known that his
wife was pregnant.
The plastic-wrapped body was found by the baby's grandfather who had gone to
the farm, south of the town of Guingamp (300 miles from Paris), to feed the
horses because his son, daughter-in-law and their two children, aged five
and three, had gone away for Easter.
It was not only the husband who had not noticed that his wife was pregnant,
neither had anyone else. "Valérie was a well-built woman," said a neighbor.
Le Gall's explanation for having kept the pregnancy secret was that her
nine-year marriage had been under pressure at the time and she had feared
her husband's reaction to having been told that another child was on the
way.
The news of this seventh case of infanticide coincided with all charges
against Jean-Louis, husband of Véronique Courjault of the "Babes in the
Freezer" case that had inspired novelist Mazarine Pingeot's best-seller, Le Cimetière des Poupées - The Cemetery of the Dolls – to be dropped.
Chief Prosecutor Philippe Varin had notified Marie-Dominique Boulard-Paolini,
the judge on the case, that he had found no evidence that Jean-Louis had
known about his wife's three pregnancies and the subsequent killings of the
babies.
"The decision is a great relief after an 18-month nightmare. It is a
great relief to everyone, but mostly to my children (two teenage sons) who
have suffered because of all of this. After all the things they've heard and
read, they are happy to know that their father is innocent," said
Jean-Louis.
He continued: "I will now be able to devote all my time to support my
wife, who I love."
Later this year (2008), nine jurors assisted by a presiding judge (in
this case it will be Marie-Dominique Boulard-Paolini) and two assessors will
deliberate Véronique Courjault's fate. She risks spending the rest of her
life in prison. French legal experts though think she will receive a
ten-year imprisonment sentence with a reduction for the time she had already
spent in jail.
What Is It with the French?
The French, apart from now wanting to know what in the French psyche
makes the nation's mothers kill their newborns, also ask themselves what
this says of French men as fathers. How can a man, who does not only share a
woman's daylight hours but so too her nights, not know, not see, that she's
pregnant, especially when she's in an advanced state of pregnancy?
Another puzzle is why a woman would carry a child she really does not
want to termination and then slay it brutally on birth, when she lives in a
country where she may undergo an abortion legally. Abortion was legalized in
France in 1975 and can be obtained on demand and free of charge on the
state's health scheme, the Securité Sociale.
In 1976, the first year of legal abortion in France, 134,173 women
underwent the procedure here, whereas in 1974, the year before legalization,
there had been a reported 36,400 illegal abortions in the country. In 2002,
the most recent year for which statistics are available, 134,797 women
underwent an abortion. Of these the majority (34,887) were aged between
20/24, while 968 were 45 and over, and 6,137 were aged between 12/17. The
highest number of abortions was in 1983 with 182,862.
