Pierre François Lacenaire

Pierre François Lacenaire

Pierre François Lacenaire (20 December 1800, Francheville, Rhône – 9 January 1836, Paris) was a famous French poet and murderer.

Biography

Upon finishing his education with excellent results, Lacenaire joined the army, eventually deserting in 1829 at the time of the expedition to the Morea. He became a crook and was in and out of prison, which was, as he called it, his "criminal university". Whilst in prison, Lacenaire recruited two henchmen, Victor Avril and François Martin, and wrote a song, "Petition of a Thief to a King his Neighbor", as well as "The Prisons and the Penal Regime" for a journal.

At the time of his execution for a double murder he wrote Memoirs, Revelations and Poems. He turned his trial into a theatrical event and his cell into a salon.

In literature and film

• Baudelaire called Lacenaire "one of the heroes of modern life".

• Dostoevsky read about Lacenaire's case and it inspired him to write Crime and Punishment, in which Raskolnikov's crime was a copy of Lacenaire's almost down to the last detail.

• Philosopher Michel Foucault believed Lacenaire's notoriety among Parisians marked the birth of a new kind of lionized outlaw (as opposed to the older folk hero), the bourgeois romantic criminal, and eventually to the detective and true crime genres of literature.

• Lacenaire is portrayed in the epic movie Les Enfants du Paradis (1945) — Children of Paradise in English — directed by Marcel Carné.

• There is a French film called Lacenaire (1990) starring Daniel Auteuil.

See also

For more information, see the French Wikipedia entry for Lacenaire: http://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pierre_Fran%C3%A7ois_Lacenaire