Violette Nozière

April 11, 2011
An academic history with a pulpy noir heart, Maza's account of Violette Nozière, who at age 19 poisoned her parents and whose case captured Paris's imagination, is also the story of a socially unsettled interwar France. Maza, a professor of history at Northwestern (The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750â1850), uses the Nozière affair to examine social mobility; working-class Paris neighborhoods like the Nozières'; department-store fashion that allowed an upwardly aspiring girl like Violette to dress fashionably; crime journalism; surrealism (André Breton sympathized with Violette during her trial). Yet the story of the depressed, angry Violetteâwhose father likely molested her, and whose "drama-prone, overbearing" mother survived the poisoning to become her daughter's most vocal opponentâkeeps the book beating in time. Reminiscent of the O.J. Simpson trial, the Nozière affair reflected the anxieties of its society: the horror of parricide paired with later accusations of incest presented a "troubling ambiguity" that the public struggled to disentangle. Fluently written and thoroughly researched, Maza contains "a whole constellation of contemporary experience" in the wrenching story of the Nozières. Photos.