Pierre François Lacenaire (20 December 1803 – 9 January 1836) was a French murderer and poet.

Biography

Lacenaire was born in Francheville, Rhône, near the city of Lyon in eastern France. His parents were Jean-Baptiste Lacenaire, an honest and successful bourgeois merchant, and Marguerite Gaillard. Upon finishing his education with excellent results, he enlisted in the French Royal Army, eventually deserting in 1829 at the time of the Morea expedition during the Greek War of Independence. He then became a criminal and was in and out of prison, which was, as he called it, his "criminal university." While in prison, Lacenaire wrote a satirical poem, "Petition of a Thief to a King, his Neighbor." He also wrote an article titled "The Prisons and the Penal Regime" for a magazine. To aid him in committing his crimes, Lacenaire recruited two henchmen, Pierre Victor Avril (whom he had met while in prison) and Hippolyte François. On 14 December 1834, Lacenaire and Avril murdered Jean-François Chardon with an axe, while suffocating Chardon's mother in her bed at Passage du Cheval-Rouge, Poissy. In the months between the beginning of his trial for a double murder and his execution, he wrote Memoirs, Revelations and Poems. During his trial, he fiercely defended his crimes as a valid protest against social injustice. He turned the courtroom into a theatre and his prison cell into a literary salon. He made a lasting impression on French culture and upon several writers, such as Balzac and Dostoevsky. He was executed on the guillotine at the age of 32.

In literature and film