I, Pierre Riviére, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother

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To free his father and himself from his mother's tyranny, Pierre Riviere decided to kill her. On June 3, 1835, he went inside his small Normandy house with a pruning hook and cut to death his mother, his eighteen-year-old sister, and his seven-year-old brother. Then, in jail, he wrote a memoir to justify the whole gruesome tale. Michel Foucault, author of "Madness and Civilization and Discipline and Punish, " collected the relevant documents of the case, including medical and legal testimony, police records. and Riviere's memoir. The Riviere case, he points out, occurred at a time when many professions were contending for status and power. Medical authority was challenging law, branches of government were vying. Foucault's reconstruction of the case is a brilliant exploration of the roots of our contemporary views of madness, justice, and crime.