Violette Nozière

Violette Nozière was a French woman convicted in 1934 of poisoning her parents, killing her father and seriously injuring her mother, in their Paris apartment in August 1933. The case became one of the most closely followed criminal trials of interwar France. Violette, then eighteen, claimed she had acted to free herself from years of sexual abuse by her father, an allegation the prosecution rejected and that has never been independently confirmed. The "Nozière affair" divided public opinion along political lines, drew the support of the Surrealist movement, and remains a recurring subject of French historical and cultural commentary, notably through Claude Chabrol's 1978 film, Violette Nozière.