The Papin sisters, a case study

The case of the Papin sisters deeply impacted the society of their time. They were two domestic service employees who murdered the people they worked for. At the beginning, it was a great scandal, the media coverage was total, uttering here and there phrases of indignation and adjectives of horror and contempt for women.

Also from the beginning There were many criminologists, psychoanalysts, psychologists and psychiatrists who focused their attention on the case of the Papin sisters.. What happened attracted attention due to its dramatic details. Once they were tried and convicted, the press forgot about them, but students of criminal behavior did not.

Jacques Lacan himself Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir made many reflections on this case of psychosisas well as several criminologists and jurists.

The writer Jean Genet created a play to record what happened with the brief name of The Maids. It is considered one of the great dramatic works of the 20th century. Let’s see what the story of the Papin sisters was like.

Lacan

The story of the Papin sisters

Despite the gruesome details of the case, the story of the Papin sisters is a story, above all, of suffering. There were three: Emilia, Christine and Léa. Very little is known about the eldest, Emilia: only that she was abandoned in an orphanage.

Christine and Léa were the protagonists of the crime. His father, Gustave Papin, was an alcoholic and aggressive. His mother, Clèmence Derèe, a woman who had no vocation for motherhood.

Clèmence gave Christine to a sister-in-law to raise. Seven years later he takes her out of there and puts her in the same orphanage where her older sister, Emilia, was. She then has Lèa, with whom she repeats the same pattern.

When Christine turned 15, her mother took her out of the institution and put her to work as a maid in bourgeois homes. She did the same thing when Lèa turned 13.

The two sisters, Christine and Lèa were hired by the Lancelins, a wealthy family composed of the father, the mother and an only daughter. The two girls behaved in an exemplary manner during the following years. They were submissive attentive and very hardworking. So much so that they received the nickname “The Lancelin Pearls” from the neighbors.

The crime

The Papin sisters did not go out to have fun and had practically no social life. Christine protected Lèa and Lèa always followed her. At one point, both begin to call her “mother.” to Mrs. Lancelin.

Léa was still a minor and that is why they went to the mayor’s office to ask for her full emancipation from her real mother, Clèmence. However, surprisingly, when doing the procedure they could not remember that mother’s name.

On February 2, 1933, the Papin sisters killed Mrs. Lancelin and her daughter. Both of their eyes were gouged out, while they were still alive.. Then they hit them with everything they could find: hammers, vases, etc. Then they left the bodies lying around, cleaned all the instruments and bathed themselves. They immediately went up to the room, lay down and hugged each other. That’s how the police found them.

They said they caused a blackout due to an iron in poor condition. Apparently, Mrs. Lancelin became angry, wanted to attack Christine and this unleashed the crime.. In Lacan’s opinion, when they killed Mrs. Lancelin, they were actually murdering her mother, who had always seen them as objects.

Outcome

During the trial that followed, the Papin sisters reported abuse and beatings by Mrs. Lancelin. Christine was sentenced to death; penalty that would later be exchanged for confinement in an asylum.

Lèa was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Clèmence, her mother, went to visit them in prison, but they did not recognize her and called her “ma’am.”

The moment of separation was very dramatic. They both clung to their mother and had to use force to separate them.. Christine refused to eat and died of starvation some time later. Lèa was released from prison in 1943 and then went to live with her mother. She died at 70 years old.

Many believe that the social, moral and psychological exclusion to which the Papin sisters were subjected returned in the form of the terrible crime. which, for Lacan, was a case of paranoid psychosis.

In France at that time, where the events took place, it was discovered that domestic workers were the group with the highest rate of admission to psychiatric establishments. Once hospitalized, the figures continued to be alarming: they represented 80% of suicide cases.

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