A Family Murder

A Family Murder Book Description: I, Pierre Riviére, who murdered my mother, my sister and my brother. 20-year-old Pierre Riviere, who lives in a small village in the Calvados province of Normandy in the 19th century, has been known for his strange behavior since his childhood. He avoids people, especially women, and exhibits pessimistic and unstable personality traits. The ideas of greatness that have always occupied his mind, combined with the problems experienced by his family, bring him step by step closer to the terrible end. He undertakes a mission that he thinks is sublime, such as saving his father from his unhappiness, and kills his mother and two siblings. The memoirs he wrote in prison are very interesting in terms of reflecting both his own subjective situation and the general profile of France at that time. At that time, France was in turmoil with the struggle for power between Republicans and royalists, and secret societies were springing up like mushrooms. The trial of Fieschi, who assassinated King Louis-Philippee, and the trial of Rivierein coincided approximately at the same time. Since the king was considered the father of all subjects, the transitivity between parricide and regicide caused the two litigation processes to be affected by each other. Medical experts and the justice mechanism are in great confusion as they cannot reach a consensus on whether he is mentally ill or a monster. Medical science is divided among itself and there is conflict with the justice mechanism. In short, there is an authority issue. Who can decide what and how much? Riviere and his memoirs, the Riviere case, has become a complete riddle for judges and doctors. When Michel Foucault and his friends set out to conduct a study on the history of relations between psychiatry and criminal justice, they come across the Riviere incident and are deeply impressed by the memoirs and the case file. A Family Murder is one of the most important moments of Foucault's intellectual journey towards understanding the lives of the weak and the losers, the mentally ill and the perverted. The fact that it is about a family murder alone makes the work interesting and worth reading. But to evaluate it in this single dimension would be to underestimate the work. An entire society with its medical science, psychiatry and justice mechanism stands against an uneducated villager who is fascinated by religious and national ideas and whose mental health is questionable. In a society where murders "for the sake of the homeland" are considered normal and legitimate in the eyes of colonialist and expansionist politics, where should a peasant who murders the members of his family be placed? Based on this, Foucault and his friends question the concepts of crime and punishment, flow health and insanity, and discuss the "normality" norms of the hypocritical society. They are opening. This shocking text, which makes us think once again about the relations of power, domination and conflict, is a very important contribution to our understanding of the lands we live in, which frequently witness all kinds of violence and "make babies murderers."