"Terrific Family Tragedy in France"

In the November 1872 edition of the Illustrated Police News, the article “Terrific Family Tragedy in France,” details the horrific murder of a 28-year old French woman by her own parents. The paper reports that victim Elizabeth Durand was abandoned by her father and mistreated by her mother, forcing her to become a beggar for much of her life, was attacked by her father and stepmother and found in a field near her home, brutally maimed and murdered. The paper describes in detail the gruesome aspects of her death, including how her body was picked open with a blunt object on her shoulders and through her stomach, and how her intestines were left exposed; additionally, she was also strangled to death, and her body was found tied together in a dug grave. The stepmother had killed herself after committing the crime, prompting the police to investigate; it is revealed that the young brother and sister of the victim were witnesses of the crime, and led the police to their sister’s body, and the father was promptly arrested. The article reports that the father was not sentenced to the death penalty, but instead was sentenced to life in prison.

This article describes the barbaric murder of a young woman. The nature of the crime is salacious and sensationalized on its own, and yet the Illustrated Police News includes additional details of the extreme violence this woman endured, which impounds the reader with the sadistic and gruesome images of the woman’s murder. The article takes up a small amount of space on the bottom corner of the page, and it contains mostly details about the murderers; the only time the victim is discussed is in describing the tragedy of her life and her brutal murder. The paper seems in this article to capitalize on this tragedy, and the inculcation of violence against this woman is reminiscent of the way Thomas Hardy places many tragedies on the life of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, demonstrating how the violence and misery placed on Victorian woman for the consumption of the masses is akin to the idea of “tragedy porn" that appears in much of the articles about women in the Illustrated Police News, which demonstrates how there is a market in this era for these types of stories and narratives.