Planting Foucault in Juárez

A Translator’s Reflections on the Story of Two Teenage Murderers Separated by Almost Two Centuries by John Washington

“He donned his holiday clothes, had his sister sing a canticle beginning ‘O happy day! holy joy!” and, his mind wholly deranged, his weapon, an ax, in hand, he executed his mother, his sister, and his young brother.”

So one Dr. Vastel describes Pierre Rivière’s parricide-fratricide of June 3, 1835 in the rural French village of Faucterie. The description comes from the book, edited by Michel Foucault, I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother. The astonishing volume includes the seventy-page memoir (“of remarkable eloquence,” according to presiding judge M. Daigrement) written by the nineteen-year-old murderer, Pierre, in which he candidly describes the particulars of his difficult family life and the details before, during, and after he murders his mother, his sister, and his brother, in that order.

Pierre writes of his youth: “I crucified frogs and birds, I had also invented another torture to put them to death. It was to attach them to a tree with three sharp nails through the belly. I called that enceepherating them, I took the children with me to do it and sometimes I did it all by myself.”

Pierre writes of his crime: “I went into my mother’s house and I committed that fearful crime, beginning with my mother, then my sister and my little brother, after that I struck them again and again…” (The death certificate described his mother’s face as “so slashed that the cervical vertebrae were wholly severed from the trunk, the skin and the muscles on the left side still retaining the head.”)

Pierre writes of his judgment: “I know the article of the penal code concerning parricide, I accept it in expiation of my faults… so therefore I await the penalty I deserve.”

The book also contains a collection of coeval medical and legal opinions, newspaper articles, and seven essays written about the case by Foucault and other critical theorists in the 1970s.

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In November, Verso Books published The Story of Vicente, Who Murdered His Mother, His Father, and His Sister, by Sandra Rodríguez Nieto. The title for the Spanish edition of the book is La Fábrica del Crimen, or, literally translated The Crime Factory. (Along with Daniela Maria Ugaz, I am the co-translator of the book). Rodríguez, who spent ten years writing for the Juárez newspaper El Diario, tells the story of Vicente León Chavez, who, together with two friends, murder his mother, his father, and his little sister, then dump and burn their bodies in a desolated strip...