A pair of sisters would devastate the entirety of France with their actions. On the one hand, they were called Les Diaboliques. On the other, they opened up the discussion of class oppression.
Clémence Derré and Gustave Papin were dating, but the relationship was tumultuous. When Clémence found herself pregnant, Gustave did the honourable thing – he married the woman he suspected was having an affair with her employer in October of 1901. Five months later, their oldest daughter Emilia was born.
Gustave decided enough was enough. He wanted to move the family, to get his wife away from her employer. He found a job in another city, declaring that they were moving. Clémence was having none of that – “she would rather commit suicide than leave Le Mens.” Gustave was stuck. He was unhappy. He started drinking.
The marriage deteriorated, though neither party ever really sought divorce. Gustave kept drinking, and Clémence “showd no affection for her children or her husband.” Reports also indicated that she was mentally ill, and often referred to as “unstable”.
Clémence was not one for motherhood. When Emilia was around 9 or 10, Clémence sent her to Bon Pasteur Catholic Orphanage. There, Emilia found her calling. She later joined a convent and became a nun.
Emilia’s two younger sisters met similar fates. Christine was born on March 8th, 1905, and was given to her paternal aunt and uncle. When she was 7, they placed her in Bon Pasteur. This would not do, according to Clémence. One daughter was already a lost cause, this one would not disappoint her as well. Clémence, instead, put her daughter to work.
Christine was described as “a hard worker and a good cook who could be insubordinate at times”, but she was serving her purpose – she was making her mother money.
Léa was born on September 15th, 1911. Just like her sister, she was given to relatives, this time her maternal uncle. Ill equipped to raise a child, he placed her in Bon Pasteur, where she remained until she was 15. Then, Christine did everything she could to find work for the both of them, so that the sisters could be together.
Léa was described as “quiet and introverted but obedient”, often with comparisons to Christine’s higher intelligence. Léa couldn’t be without Christine, many thought. As such, the sisters were a package deal, working as maids in various “high society” homes around Le Mens.
In 1926, the sisters found live-in work as maids in the Lancelin home. Monsieur René Lancelin wanted help for his wife, who was strict about keeping up appearances and keeping the home in order. Monsieur Lancelin was a retired solicitor, and he lived in the home with his wife, Madame Léonie, and their younger adult daughter Genevieve. Their eldest daughter had married and left the home to be with her husband.
In the beginning, the sisters were praised for their hard work in keeping the Lancelin home in tip top shape. They were even “provided with food, decent accommodation, and reasonable payment for those years.” But, as they say, all good things come to an end.
Over the years, Madame Léonie developed depression, and often took her mental illness out on the Papin sisters. “The abuse worsened to the point that she would slam the girls’ heads against the wall.” It was all becoming too much for Christine and Léa – they often feared their employer, never knowing when she was going to come down on them, screaming and hitting.
Enough was enough. The sisters decided it was time to fight back.
On Thursday, February 2nd, 1933, when Christine was 27 and Léa was 21, it all came to a tragic, horrific end.
Monsieur Lancelin was supposed to meet his wife and daughter at a dinner party. The women had gone out shopping just for the occasion. When they returned to the home around 5:30PM, the women noticed that all the lights in the house were out.
The Papin sisters attempted to explain that the power outage had been caused by a faulty iron. Madame Léonie was enraged. That simply would not do. These sisters were a blight upon the Lancelin home. She attacked Christine on the landing.
Christine knew she needed to fight back. She lunged for Genevieve, getting out from under Madame Léonie. Her fingers grappled with Genevieve’s face, gouging out her eyes. She called for Léa to help.
Léa jumped in, following her sister’s example, and went for Madame Léonie’s eyes, gouging them out as Christine had done. At one point, one of the sisters grabbed a large and heavy pewter pitcher and used it to bash the Lancelin women in the head. Shortly thereafter, Christine ran to the kitchen and came back with a knife and a hammer.
The sisters continued their attack. “Experts who later responded to the scene estimated that the attack lasted about 30 minutes.”
After the brutality of the attack, the sisters cleaned themselves up. For whatever reason, they didn’t flee the home. They stayed put. In fact, they locked themselves in their room.
Monsieur Lancelin returned to the home and found it to be in total darkness. He assumed that Madame Léonie and Genevieve had simply gone ahead to the dinner party. He quickly made his way to meet them.
When he got to the party, he realized that his wife and daughter were nowhere to be found. Curious, he returned to his own home with his son-in-law, somewhere between 6:30 and 7PM.
The house was still completely dark. Except for one light – a flickering light coming from the room shared by the Papin sisters. The two men attempted entry into the home, but found the front door bolted from the inside. Now approaching distress, Monsieur Lancelin decided they needed help. With his son-in-law in tow, he went to the local police station to ask the officers for help.
They returned to the home with a policeman. The policeman gained entry into the home by climbing over the garden wall. Once inside, he found the bodies of Madame Léonie and Genevieve. They’d been “bludgeoned and stabbed to the point of being unrecognizable. Madame Lancelin’s eyes had been gouged out and were found in the folds of the scarf around her neck, while one of Genevieve’s eyes was found under her body and another on the stairs nearby.”
After the gruesome discovery, the policeman feared the Papin sisters may have met a similar demise. He rushed to their room, only to find that locked as well. The policeman knocked, but he did not receive a response. He made quick work of summoning a locksmith.
Once they managed to get the door to the room open, the policeman found the sisters “naked in bed together, while a bloody hammer, with hair still clinging to it, was on a chair nearby”. Candlelight was flickering softly throughout the room.
The sisters didn’t hesitate in confessing to the crime – Christine claimed it was self-defence, telling the policeman: “It was her or us.” The sisters were promptly arrested, and separated from each other.
The separation did not sit well with Christine. She picked fits, became increasingly hostile, and demanded to see Léa. Eventually, the prison guards relented. They gave in, and allowed the sisters to be held in the same cell.
In July of 1933, Christine attempted to gouge out her own eyes. She had to be placed in a straightjacket in order to prevent future attempts at self-harm. “She then made a statement to the investigating magistrate, in which she said that on the day of the murders she had experienced an episode like the one she had just had in prison and this was what precipitated the murders.”
After that, three court appointed doctors were sent to perform psychological evaluations of the Papin sisters in order to determine their mental state. They were deemed sane, though they made note of medical testimony during the trial, which occurred in September. The doctors noted a “history of mental illness in their family. Their uncle had committed suicide, while their cousin was living in an asylum”.
During, and well after, the trial, many experts chimed in with their own findings. The consensus was that the sisters exhibited signs of Folie à Deux – madness of two – a form of shared psychosis. “Such a condition presents as a variety of symptoms like paranoia, hearing voices, inventing fictitious threats that somehow require self-defence, and even unusual sexual behaviour.”
The sisters focused their perceived threat on Madame Léonie. Christine took control of the situation, and of Léa, and decided to remove the threat that Madame Léonie posed to the sisters.
Other experts also argued that “the murders were a manifestation of the class struggle”. The sisters, having had enough of working as servants to the rich Lancelin family and being treated as less than human, rebelled and fought back.
It was brought to the attention of the court at trial that, despite the fairly good conditions under which the Papin sisters worked, there were a lot of strange happenings in the home. Never once, in the 8 years they’d worked in the home, had the sisters ever once spoken to Monsieur Lancelin. They always dealt with Madame Léonie.
Madame Léonie often thought it beneath her to physically speak to the girls. She would often deliver her missives in the form of passive-aggressive notes under the door to the room they shared. She taught her daughter to do the same – one does not, in fact, speak to the help. Unless necessary.
If the sisters did something that Madame Léonie did not agree with, well, then it became necessary. In this case, Madame Léonie would verbally, psychologically, and physically abuse the sisters. They were not treated as human beings.
The living conditions of the Lancelin home seemed exceedingly appealing, but the persons within the dwelling left much to be desired.
At the trial’s conclusion, it took jurors merely 40 minutes to come to their conclusion. They determined that “the Papin sisters were indeed guilty of the heinous crime of which they had been accused”. They also believed that Léa was under the influence of her older sister, Christine.
As a result, Léa was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment. Christine was not so lucky. Initially, she was sentenced to death at the guillotine. However, her sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment.
Christine did not handle being separated from Léa well at all, exhibiting behaviour similar to when the sisters were first arrested. Her condition rapidly deteriorated – “she experienced bouts of depression and ‘madness’, eventually refusing to eat”. She was transferred to a mental institution in Rennes, though it did very little good. She continued to starve herself. Christine Papin died on May 18th, 1937 of cachexia – ‘wasting away’.
Léa fared better, even seeming to thrive now that she was out from under Christine’s thumb. She served 8 years of her sentence, and was released in 1941 where she lived with her mother in the town of Nantes. She changed her name and assumed a false identity, gaining employment as a maid in a hotel.
No one is quite sure what happened to Léa after she changed her identity. Some reports claim that she died in 1982. Claude Ventura, a French film maker and producer, has a slightly different idea.
While researching for a documentary about the Papin sisters, he claimed he found the real Léa living in hospice in the year 2000. The woman he claimed to be Léa “had suffered a stroke which had rendered her partially paralyzed and unable to speak”. This woman died in 2001.
On the one hand, Les Diaboliques, as they came to be known throughout France, committed an incredibly heinous crime. On the other, had they been treated as decent human beings, they may not have felt so helpless and so persecuted by their employers.
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Sources:
The Brutal Case of the Papin Sisters – Stefan Andrews – The Vintage News
Insanity or Class Warfare?: The Gruesome Case of the Papin Sisters – Gisely Ruiz – All That’s Interesting
Papin Sisters: The Shocking Housemaids’ Crime that Shook France – Kimberly Lin – Historic Mysteries
Christine and Léa Papin Wikipedia page