Background
Lacenaire was born in Francheville, Rhône, near the city of Lyon in eastern France.
Lacenaire was born in Francheville, Rhône, near the city of Lyon in eastern France.
Upon finishing his education with excellent results, he joined the French army, eventually deserting in 1829 at the time of the expedition to Morea. 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.
In the months between the beginning of his trial for a double murder and his execution, he wrote Memoirs, Revelations and Poems.
He turned the judicial proceedings into a theatrical event and his prison cell into a salon. He made a lasting impression upon French society and upon several writers, such as Balzac and Dostoevsky.
He was executed on the guillotine at the age of 32. His hand, severed after death, was the subject of a poem by Théophile Gautier.
Dostoyevsky read about Lacenaire"s case and there are some similarities between his crime and Raskolnikov"s crime in Crime and Punishment.
In another of his novels, The Idiot, the character Yevgeny Pavlovitch mentions Lacenaire when discussing Hippolite"s failed suicide attempt with the prince. He is depicted in the French film Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du Paradis, 1945), directed by Marcel Carné from a script by Jacques Prévert. where his stance as a loner and a rebel is stressed. In the film, Lacenaire (Marcel Herrand) refers to himself as a bold criminal and a social rebel, but his actual criminal activities mostly stay outside the film"s narrative.
Philosopher Michel Foucault believed Lacenaire"s notoriety among Parisians marked the birth of a new kind of lionized outlaw (as opposed to the older folk hero), the bourgeois romantic criminal, and eventually to the detective and true crime genres of literature.
There is a French film called Lacenaire (1990) starring Daniel Auteuil.
During his trial, he fiercely defended his crimes as a valid protest against social injustice.