Violette Nozière (11 January 1915 – 26 November 1966) was a French woman convicted in 1934 of poisoning her parents, killing her father and seriously injuring her mother, in their Paris apartment in August 1933. The case became one of the most closely followed criminal trials of interwar France. Violette, then eighteen, claimed she had acted to free herself from years of sexual abuse by her father, an allegation the prosecution rejected and that has never been independently confirmed. The "Nozière affair" divided public opinion along political lines, drew the support of the Surrealist movement, and remains a recurring subject of French historical and cultural commentary, notably through Claude Chabrol's 1978 film, Violette Nozière.
Sentenced to death, Violette was reprieved by presidential pardon, had her sentence progressively reduced, and was released in 1945. She later married, raised five children under a changed name, and in 1963 was granted a judicial "réhabilitation"—a rare restoration of civil standing for someone convicted of a capital crime. She died of cancer in 1966.
Early life Violette Nozière was born in Neuvy-sur-Loire, in the Nièvre department, the only child of Jean-Baptiste "Baptiste" Nozière,Baptiste Nozière was born in Prades, Haute-Loire, on February 17, 1885. Source: Municipal Archives: Civil Registry - Birth Certificate No. 2 - Prades Town Hall. Le Bourg, 43300 Prades. Baptiste Nozière's birth certificate lists only one given name. His father, Félix Nozière, 27 years old, was a farmer, and his mother, Marie Constance Bernard, 19 years old, was a homemaker. Félix Nozière's occupations were successively: domestic servant, farmer, baker, and innkeeper. a locomotive engine driver for the Paris–Lyon–Méditerranée railway company, and Germaine Hézard.Germaine Hézard was born in Neuvy-sur-Loire on August 4, 1888. Source: Municipal Archives: Civil Registry - Birth Certificate No. 17 - Neuvy-sur-Loire Town Hall, Place de la Mairie, 58450 Neuvy-sur-Loire. Her parents were Alsime François Hézard, 42, a winegrower, and Clémence Philomène Boutron, 38, a homemaker. Given her father’s position in the railroad company, Violette's family would be considered to be solidly middle class.:13-15
Her parents married shortly before her birth. Germaine was already several months pregnant. The family settled in Paris's 12th arrondissement, near the Gare de Lyon, living in a small two-room apartment at 9 rue de Madagascar that afforded the family little privacy.:21Violette was a capable student in primary school, earning her certificat d'études, but her academic performance and conduct deteriorated as she moved through the École primaire supérieure Sophie Germain, the Lycée Voltaire, and finally the Lycée Fénelon. She was frequently ill during her teenage years. A school report described her in unflattering terms, citing laziness, deceitfulness, and a poor influence on classmates.
By her mid-teens she had begun a pattern of lying about her family's social position—describing her father as a senior railway engineer and her mother as a fashion-house "première"—and had taken several lovers, including a fellow student. She also began stealing money from her parents and from shopkeepers, and supplemented her income through occasional prostitution, euphemistically referring to these encounters in her own writings.
In early 1933, Nozière learned she had contracted syphilis.Jean-Marie Fitère, Paris, Éditions Acropole, coll. « Jugés coupables », 3 mai 2007, 228 p. (ISBN 978-2-7357-0288-6). She persuaded a complicit doctor to issue a false certificate implying the disease was hereditary, in order to convince her parents—falsely—that they themselves were responsible for her infection. This triggered a serious family confrontation. The previous winter, after being caught shoplifting, she had left her parents a note threatening suicide, but was found safe near the Seine.
Murder
On 23 March 1933, Nozière gave her parents doses of the sedative Somnifène, telling them it was medicine prescribed by their doctor. Violette took the same dose as her parents at the same time. That night a fire broke out in the apartment; her parents were treated for smoke inhalation, and the incident was not linked to poisoning at the time.The attempted suicide plus murder theory seems plausible given Violette's plan to take her parents to their deaths. Writer Bernard Hautecloque, in the radio program "L'Heure du crime" (The Hour of Crime) dedicated to Violette Nozière, expresses the same opinion. The reasons are numerous: a profound sense of despair, Violette's erratic behavior and illness, family disputes, and also the question of incest.
On 21 August 1933, she administered a much larger dose of the same drug, again disguised as medicine. Her father died; her mother survived because she discarded half of the dose.:97 Nozière then stole money from the apartment, left, went shopping, dined and danced with friends. She returned the next day to the apartment, opening the gas taps in an apparent attempt to suggest the deaths were a suicide.:97-100 She alerted neighbours, who summoned the fire brigade and police. Investigators quickly found inconsistencies that pointed to her involvement —an unupdated household expense ledger and a gas meter reading inconsistent with attempted asphyxiation.
Flight, arrest, and confession Brought to the hospital where her mother was recovering, Nozière fled when she realized her mother might identify her, an act treated by police as effective self-incrimination. She spent roughly a week as a fugitive in Paris before being arrested in the 7th arrondissement on 28 August, after being denounced to police by an acquaintance.
Under questioning by Commissioner Marcel Guillaume, a senior detective who had previously worked the Bonnot Gang and Landru cases, Nozière confessed to the poisoning. She told police and the examining magistrate, Edmond Lanoire, that her father had sexually abused her for roughly six years, beginning when she was twelve. She claimed that did not tell her mother because her father had told her that she was as guilty as he was and that he would kill her and himself if she did. She said that she had decided to kill him to escape this abuse.:109-113
Nozière also insisted that she had not tried to kill her mother and that she had acted alone. Investigators also recovered pornographic materials and a cloth allegedly used by her father for ejaculation in order to prevent pregnancy, which Nozière cited as supporting evidence for the accusation of incest. Her mother offered an alternative explanation for the same object, and the dispute was never resolved.
Inspector Guillaume later wrote that he found Violette's account credible and believed she deserved a degree of leniency, though he was never called to testify to this effect at trial. Two acquaintances of Nozière (Pierre Camus and Jean Leblanc) also reported that she had confided to them about incest; Pierre Camus quoted her as saying "my father occasionally forgot I was his daughter". Violette's mother, Germaine, adamantly denied her daughter's allegations.:122-123
Press coverage The case dominated French newspapers for months, with major dailies, weeklies and the new illustrated crime press, competing for sensational coverage. At the time, the public accusation of incest was virtually unheard of—indeed, taboo—especially as a subject for the popular press. The press coverage began at the early phases of the investigation, with journalists not only contributing information through their own private investigations, but also apparently obtaining access to what should have been the privileged information of the magistrate.
Almost immediately (and before the trial), nearly all coverage by the mass circulation press was virulently dismissive of Violette's version of the story.:113-114 The press portrays her as a bad element, vicious and a liar: she would see different men, sporadically, and without any plans for marriage. She was the “monster in petticoats” and her incest story was nothing but a contemptible defense that sullied her father’s good name.Zoé Poli , Juliette Zanetta , « L’affaire Violette Nozière : relire le parricide au prisme du genre », Encyclopédie d'histoire numérique de l'Europe [en ligne], ISSN 2677-6588, mis en ligne le 08/10/25 , consulté le 20/06/2026. Permalien : https://ehne.fr/fr/node/22643
Historians have noted that, through the press coverage, the case became a vehicle for broader anxieties in early-1930s France. It raised issues of sexual mores, the female role in intrafamily violence and the younger versus the older generations. This journalistic phenomenon was among the first, and almost certainly the first in France, to deal with, even obliquely, the issue of incest (though without showing any sympathy or understanding of the victim). That would come decades later.
Trial The trial opened before the Cour d'assises of the Seine in Paris on 12 October 1934, the day after the assassination of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia in Marseille had dominated headlines.:229 Even so, the courtroom was reportedly crowded that day and throughout the trial.
Nozière was defended by Henri Géraud and René de Vésinne-Larue, the latter of whom would represent her for the following three decades. The prosecution, led by advocate-general Gaudel, argued that the poisoning was motivated, not by sexual abuse, but by greed— it conjectured that Nozière wanted to inherit the roughly 165,000 francs that her parents had saved. It noted that the fact that her father had tested negative for syphilis undermined her account.
Germaine Nozière formally joined the prosecution as a civil party against her own daughter—an unusual step— though she would later, in court, tearfully ask the jury for mercy on her daughter's behalf.:237-239
Court-appointed psychiatrists found Nozière fully responsible for her actions,:237-239 a conclusion her defense disputed by invoking, among other comparisons, the recent Papin sisters case, in which a death sentence had later been reduced on grounds of diminished responsibility. The defense's case did not center primarily on the incest allegation, instead arguing chiefly that Nozière had no rational motive to harm her mother.
The all-male jury, after only about an hour of deliberation, convicted her without mitigating circumstances and sentenced her to death on 13 October 1934. An appeal to the Cour de cassation was rejected in December.:255
Clemency and imprisonment
Nozière's death sentence—considered at the time to be largely symbolic, since no woman had been executed in France since 1887—was commuted to forced labour for life by President Albert Lebrun in December 1934, following an appeal for clemency by her lawyers and a public campaign that included an open plea from the writer Marcel Aymé. She was transferred to the Centrale de Haguenau in Alsace, where she turned to Catholicism, attracting praise for her conduct from the prison authorities and the Dominican sisters who worked there.
In October 1937, Violette Nozière recanted her accusations against her father. This belated retraction, in a letter from Violette to her mother, was published in the press through her lawyer, René de Vésinne-Larue In exchange for publishing the main excerpts from this open letter, the major newspapers paid Germaine Nozière financial compensation. This material reward relieved Ms. Nozière of the legal costs of the case, which she had previously borne. This letter contributed to a reconciliation between mother and daughter.