[Surrealism] Violette Nozières

Brussels: Editions Nicolas Flamel, 1933.

8vo.; illustrated throughout in black-and-white; uncut pages; photographically illustrated wrappers stamped in burgundy; mylar dust-jacket, as issued. Minor wear to edges. Original material inserted loosely.  

First edition of 2,000 copies, the full edition. 

In March of 1933, 18-year-old Violette Nozières attempted to poison her lower-middle-class parents, engine driver Jean-Baptiste and housewife Germaine, with an insufficient dose of barbiturates. Violette was posing as an upstanding student in the confines of their tiny shared apartment and slipping out after dark to subsidize her escapades in Paris’s Latin Quarter with occasional sex work. When she fell for Jean Dabin, a gambler with expensive tastes, and promised to pay his rather hefty debts, a more rapid influx of cash was required, and her parents were the closest source to hand. In August of the same year, she poisoned them again, and, in the case of her stepfather, was successful. After a short shopping-spree jaunt on the lam, Violette was apprehended and tried for the murder of Jean-Baptiste. 

During the trial, it had been established that Nozière had been raped by her father since the age of 12. She became a symbol of female independence in Depression-era Paris and a cause célèbre, especially in leftist and Surrealist circles, where she was proclaimed a symbol of liberation from “bourgeois” morality. On October 12, 1934, the jury deliberated for just one hour and returned with a unanimous guilty verdict and death sentence. In 1934 women were no longer guillotined but were rather covered in black cloth as the charges were read and then shot. She quickly filed an appeal that was just as quickly tossed out. On December 6, her attorney reached out to the President of France, Albert Lebrun, who overturned the death penalty in exchange for a life sentence at a forced labor camp in Alsace. Ultimately she was given time served and released by the Vichy head-of-state, Marshal Philippe Petain, in 1942.

This scarce first edition of the collective Surrealist homage to Nozières, published in December 1933 when her fate was still very much undecided, comes with texts by André Breton, René Char, Paul Eluard, Maurice Henry, E.L.T. Mesens, César Moro, Benjamin Peret and Guy Rosey and illustrations by Salvator Dali, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, Victor Brauner, René Magritte, Marcel Jean, Hans Arp, and Alberto Giacometti.  A photograph by Man Ray was used for the cover. This provocation of the surrealists in favor of Violette Nozières during her trial didn't produce the planned effect, as the books sent to Corti, the French distributor, were seized at the border and sale was prohibited in France. This makes the book scarcer than the print-run would suggest. The case has remained famous in France. In 1978, Claude Chabrol made an eponymous film.

Held with:

- Anonymous

Autograph letter. November 6, 1934. 4to.; one leaf; recto and verso.

Autograph letter. November 16, 1934. 4to.; one bifoliate leaf; rectos and versos.

Autograph letter. Undated [circa November 1934].. 4to.; one leaf; bottom half excised from page; recto and verso.

These letters were, which were all written in the same hand, come from the period between Violette’s first guilty verdict in October and Lebrun’s order of clemency in Early December. While it was generally assumed that France’s most notorious female criminal would not be executed, it is safe to say that in 1934 nobody could have predicted how Violette’s story would end. 

- R. R. Tearsheet with autograph annotations. Review of Violette Nozières in La Nouvelle Revue Francaise. February 1, 1935. 8vo; one leaf; recto and verso.

A capsule review of Violette Nozièrs from France’s famous literary review, also known simply as the NRF.