“I came with the intention of killing a woman. I came to kill a woman ”. Before the Assize Court of the Alpes-Maritimes, in Nice this day in November 1902, Henri Vidal wiped away tears but answered straightforwardly the questions put to him. Direct, this hotelier, then 34 years old, had also confessed his crimes with a kitchen knife without resistance a few months earlier.
First he left two seriously injured prostitutes. Louise Guinard and Joséphine Moreno were stabbed for no apparent reason in downtown Hyères. For his two other victims, the outcome was fatal. Antonia van Brusselin, also a street girl, is killed in Tamaris, near Toulon. Then, it is a young Swiss woman, Gertrude Hirsbrunner, a saleswoman in a shoe store in Monte-Carlo, who is savagely slaughtered in her compartment of a wagon that left Nice before being thrown on the tracks.
His inexplicable hatred of women, his crimes as violent as they were sordid mobilized at the time a number of news items, judicial chroniclers and aroused comments fed by magistrates, doctors and criminalists. “An extraordinary discursive device” which will bring about a “new existence”, write Philippe Artières and Dominique Kalifa in A social biography, the subtitle of their book on the case Henri Vidal, the killer of women. Nicknamed in these terms by the press of the time, this serial murderer “is ultimately a very ordinary assassin”, underline the authors.
“A failure of society”
At the time, he was passed off as a vagabond, it was written that he possessed “a narrow-minded and violent soul, a very animal soul, barely a soul”, that he was a “slaughterer with wolf eyes”. We are building a new story, using the codes of the killers as we saw them at the time. In short, we give him a reassuring image: the assassins only belong to the same category. But Henri Vidal “is just a failure of society”, explains Philippe Artières to 20 minutes. “He doesn’t command a great deal of respect for his mother. He is a man who makes a living, but he is a type at odds with the images one might have of a criminal at the time, ”continues the historian.
“The pace is nonchalant, the aspect not very sympathetic” and “at first sight, Vidal gives the impression of a man of little intelligence”, described after several interviews the doctor Alexandre Lacassagne, medical examiner. “Mimicry that is not very expressive for a man from the south offers no interesting peculiarity. Indolence seems to be the basis of Henri Vidal’s character, ”also continues the man who is one of the founders of criminal anthropology.
Sentenced to death then pardoned
According to his conclusions and those of other doctors, reported by the press at the time, “Vidal shows no signs of insanity or epilepsy” but “some signs of degeneration” and “that accordingly, he must be declared responsible with a slight attenuation ”. When he was condemned to the guillotine, pronounced on November 5, 1902, certain other voices did not believe in his discernment. “How does the Nice prosecutor dare to ask for the head of this madman”, asks the socialist newspaper The Small Republic. Finally, the President of the Republic Émile Loubet pardoned him. He was sent to prison in Guyana, for forced labor for life.
There, in his cell, Henri Vidal began to write his memoirs, “encouraged” by contemporary criminologists and in particular Doctor Alexandre Lacassagne who saw him as a guinea pig for his research. He describes himself as moderately alienated but also sensitive in his own way. He says he suffered a lot because of the women, especially those of his family and especially his mother, who would not have given him sufficient attention.
There followed a sickly shyness with “the ladies” and extreme misogyny. On the evening of one of his crimes, he would have had “the absolute idea of killing the first woman who will appear in [lui], that any woman was unworthy of living and [qu’il] had to remove it ”. At the Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni penitentiary, 7,300 km from Nice, Henri Vidal will not even survive 4 years. He died in July 1906 at the age of 39.