On July 2, 1835, Brigadier Le Courtois apprehended Pierre Rivière upon the road to Langannerie. For nearly a month, the young man had been missing following the death of his mother, his sister, and his brother. The gendarme inquired whence he came. Rivière replied: “From everywhere.” Asked why he had killed, he stated that his mother had sinned before God and that the two children had sinned by remaining by her side. He made no attempt to deny the killings. Already he was putting forward an explanation that would soon be weighed against the testimony of his family and the opinions of the physicians.
The catastrophe had occurred on June 3 at La Faucterie, in the commune of Aunay. The official procès-verbal drawn up on the premises depicts a domestic scene arrested in the midst of daily toil: a pot of porridge still hung over the hearth; near young Victoire, her lace loom remained. The victims were Victoire Brion, wife of Pierre-Margrin Rivière, her daughter, and her young son Jules. Jules was seven or eight years of age; his sister, approximately eighteen. Pierre-Margrin was absent at the time. His son had fled the house and vanished into the woods.
His flight endured for several weeks. In the memoir he later composed, Pierre recounts the nights passed under the open sky, the roots upon which he sustained himself, and his vacillations over surrendering to justice. He relates having passed close to gendarmes without summoning the resolve to give himself up. The official report, for its part, fixes the moment of his arrest: Le Courtois recognized him from his description. Rivière carried upon his person a few articles of wood and cord, a walking-stick, several knives, and a pocket-knife. He stated that he had cast away the billhook near Aunay. The interrogations commenced, yet his account was not confined to answering questions.
At Vire, he requested permission to write. He began his memoir on July 10 and brought it to a close on the 21st. His intention was to narrate the lives of his parents, the motives to which he ascribed his act, his thoughts prior to and following the murders, and the course of his wandering. He was twenty years of age. He had learned to read, retained much from his books, and harbored a longing to accomplish some deed that would render him celebrated. Now, he marshaled his reasons upon paper, while three names remained entered upon the inquest of the dead.
At the outset of the memoir, he describes the strife between his parents. He claims that his father had conceived an affection for him, whereas his mother had made their shared existence wretched. Yet he also concedes that several of these episodes came to him through his father’s talk. This family history is thus in part a received word, taken up anew by the son who committed the slayings. Pierre does not merely report a domestic quarrel: in the wake of the crime, he constructs an argument wherein his mother is cast as the sole cause of the paternal misery. The depositions do not dispel this view, and Victoire Brion was no longer there to answer him.
In his reckoning, slaying his mother alone did not suffice. He believed he was bound likewise to do away with the children who had stayed with her, and then to die himself; thus, he supposed, his father would not mourn his own execution. From tales of war, scripture, and the exempla of antiquity, he borrowed figures of sacrifice. He sought to act as a hero and to deliver the man he claimed to love. The consequence was to leave his father alive amidst the corpses of his wife and two of his children.
Jules appears in the memoir as a child his brother had known in the fields. Pierre writes that the boy would come to assist him in his labors and already knew how to lead the horse. He was aware also, he states, of how deeply his father was attached to the little boy. For this reason, his determination to slay him cannot be reduced to the frenzy of a stranger maddened by rage: in his own telling, he acknowledges that bond and explains that he intended to reckon with it by destroying those he believed he was protecting. The memory of Jules thus attends the very chain of reasoning designed to justify his death.
Pierre also details his preparations and the occasions when he might have stayed his hand. He speaks of pages he had begun to write, then concealed or committed to the flames. He recounts setting out for La Faucterie clad in his Sunday attire and armed with a billhook. The procès-verbal describes the house after the deed; the memoir charts the resolve of him who had departed it. These two documents do not offer the same manner of narrative, yet they coincide upon one point: he never denied that he had killed.
His answers, however, shifted over time. Upon his arrest, he had spoken of a command from God. Later, he explained that he had feigned to be guided by visions in order to pass for a madman and escape the scaffold. This version enabled him to cast his initial utterance as a calculated stratagem; it likewise renders it far more difficult to discern how much of his testimony ought to be believed. He subsequently asserted that he had repented during his flight, recalling the children to whom he had once been close. These professed regrets undo neither the design set forth in the memoir nor the culpability upon which the court was summoned to rule.
Dr. Bouchard observed him at the house of detention. While the physician questioned him, Rivière would return to his writing; the doctor perceived in this steadfast continuity and in the lucidity of his replies proof that he was not alienated in mind. Pierre’s father, on the contrary, insisted that his son had suffered from early childhood. The defense consulted Dr. Vastel, who gathered recollections from neighbors concerning the young man’s solitude, his habit of talking to himself, and his singular demeanor. Bouchard and Vastel had neither heard the same witnesses nor drawn the same conclusions from the case file.
At Caen, the memoir took its place at the trial alongside the depositions and the medical reports. For Bouchard, a mind capable of explaining an act was equally capable of answering for it; for Vastel, a coherent text did not suffice to exclude alienation. The jury found Pierre guilty, and the court pronounced the sentence of death. Thereupon, the jurors themselves petitioned that this penalty be commuted. They had just affirmed his responsibility, yet they shrank from seeing him led to the scaffold.
Seven physicians convened in Paris to examine the dossier, among them Esquirol, Orfila, and Leuret. They upheld Vastel’s opinion, refusing to allow the medical classifications of their day to be treated as rigid boundaries adequate to every case. Their report did not urge Rivière’s release; it supported the plea for clemency. In February 1836, the Royal Court of Caen gave effect to the letters of commutation. The scaffold was averted, but Pierre remained in confinement.
In a letter dispatched from Beaulieu in October 1836, he told his father that he loved him, begging his pardon for conversing so poorly and failing in ordinary courtesies. He asked no forgiveness for the murders. This detail, almost derisory set against the bloodshed at La Faucterie, renders their estrangement all the more stark: the son maintains his filial devotion, while the father must live with the loss of his wife and two of his children. Pierre’s memoir endures; his victims, for their part, were never able to write their own account.