I Pierre Riviere having slaughtered my mother my sister and my brother: A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century

To free his father and himself from his mothers tyranny Pierre Rivière decided to kill her. On June 31835 he went inside his small Normandy house with a pruning hook and cut to death his mother his eighteen-year-old sister and his seven-year-old brother. Then in jail he wrote a memoir to justify the whole gruesome tale. Michel Foucault author of Madness and Civilization and Discipline and Punish collected the relevant documents of the case including medical and legal testimony police records. and Rivières memoir. The Rivière case he points out occurred at a time when many professions were contending for status and power. Medical authority was challenging law branches of government were vying. Foucaults reconstruction of the case is a brilliant exploration of the roots of our contemporary views of madness justice and crime.