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

Michel Foucault (Editor), Frank Jellinek (Translator)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0803268572 | ISBN-13: 978-0803268579 | Publication Date: December 1, 1982

To free his father and himself from his mother's tyranny, Pierre Rivière decided to kill her. On June 3,1835, 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 Rivière's 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. Foucault's reconstruction of the case is a brilliant exploration of the roots of our contemporary views of madness, justice, and crime.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A spell-binding account—not only of the murder of a family by a ''madman,'' but also the murder of free will and responsibility by the mad-doctors. A glimpse into the birth of the psychiatrization of law, the medicalization of crime, and the therapeutization of justice."—Thomas S. Szasz, M.D.

(Thomas S. Szasz )

"For Foucault, Rivière provides the ''excuse'' to examine power structures and social institutions, to question the scientificity of medical science, and to delineate the chaos of values and beliefs, of knowledge and power as it existed 150 years ago—a chaos we have not yet eliminated."—Edith Kurzweil, The Age of Structuralism

(Edith Kurzweil )

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press (December 1, 1982)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0803268572
• ISBN-13: 978-0803268579
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #127,833 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #5 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Crime & Criminals  > Offenders

More About the Author

One of the leading intellectuals of the twentieth century and the most prominent thinker in post-war France, Foucault's work influenced disciplines as diverse as history, sociology, philosophy, sociology and literary criticism.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Battle of Discourses, June 6, 2006

By 

Bobbem (Evanston, IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: I, Pierre Riviere, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother: A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century (Paperback)

The reason Foucault is not attempting to interpret Riviere's deeds is NOT to show simply how "people respond to a crime", as a previous reviewer put it. By publishing this collection of texts, Foucault was attempting to recover the struggles and plays of forces between juridical and psychiatric discourses in their attempt to make sense of the murders and the murderer. The legal and psychiatric discourses attempt to envelop Riviere's own account of his deeds in various power relations (mainly by marginalizing Riviere's voice as either that of a parricide or that of a madman). Had Foucault interpreted Riviere's deeds, he would have subjected them to strategies similar to those employed by the medical and legal experts.

This is a fascinating collection (don't skip Foucault's introduction though!), but a reader would definitely appreciate it more after reading Discipline and Punish or "Two Lectures" in Foucault's Power/Knowledge.

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Against Interpetation: The Bald Man Pleads Indecision, July 4, 2001

By 

Lloyd Ravlin III - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: I, Pierre Riviere, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother: A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century (Paperback)

Okay, the reason why Foucault did not interpet the reasoning behind the crime was because the issue of guilt or innocence was not his topic. He was more interested in how people treat crimes and approach the issue of criminality.

It is not Riviere who is at trial *again* in Foucault's book, but rather it is a trial described, which could be any trial. A crime after the fact is a story, a memory for those who were involved, but we all become involved in an event as if it were a story we have heard before. What other way to approach a murder that is to us words and the heaving bosom of a witness, the placid tension of the accused? We confront a forced performance with confused or feigned characterizations.

Yet even said, this is not Foucault, nor what Foucault was reaching for. All Foucault does is show how people act in response to crime and reveal the obvious ploys that repeat themselves throughout history, because the story that composes our lives has not died.

And if a man approached you with a mark on him, and claimed to have killed his brother, and the soil did cry out to you, would you raise your hand against him?

This book is a good accompanyment to his work Discipline and Punish.

1 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating Story--Not Enough Analysis, June 19, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: I, Pierre Riviere, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother: A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century (Paperback)

The story of the young Frenchman who murdered his family is a fascinating piece of documentary work by Foucault and his student assistants. However, I would have liked to know much more about how they interpret this "unusual" behavior.