Volume 20, Number 5 · April 5, 1973
French History: The Case of the Wandering Eye
By Robert Darnton
Reactions to the French Revolution
by Richard Cobb
Oxford University Press, 310 pp., $13.75
The Police and the People: French Popular Protest 1789-1820
by Richard Cobb
Oxford University Press, 416 pp., $2.95 (paper)
A Second Identity: Essays on France and French History
by Richard Cobb
Oxford University Press, 328 pp., $8.50
Crimes et criminalité en France sous I'Ancien Régime, 17e-18e siècles
by A. Abbiateci, by F. Billacois, by Y. Bongert, by N. Castan, by Y. Castan, by P. Petrovitch
Armand Colin, 22 F
Les Hommes et la mort en Anjou aux 17e et 18e siècles
by François Lebrun
Mouton, 88 F
Vision de la mort et de l'au-delà en Provence d'après les autels des âmes du purgatoire, XVe-XXe siècles
by Gaby Vovelle, by Michel Vovelle
Armand Colin, 18 F
In A Second Identity, Richard Cobb tells the story of Marie Besnard, a crafty peasant who confounded an array of lawyers, laboratory technicians, and criminologists trying to get her convicted for murder in a series of spectacular trials from 1952 to 1961. Marie showed that her accusers had scrambled the evidence so badly in their test tubes and jars that a kidney from one victim's body was cohabiting in Exhibit A with the gall bladder from another, and an eye, which had disappeared from its home cadaver, had turned up in the middle of a foreign skeleton. The wandering eye did the job, Cobb observes with satisfaction: the scientists lost their case, and Marie won her freedom. He does not come right out and say so, but the story stands as a parable to be pondered by sociological historians.
Review, 6000 words
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