While the German states together with Denmark and Sweden were the home for specific legislation and courts in England seem to have dealt with all crimes as particular, in France these crimes quite often came to be of psychiatrical interest. As in England, these crimes in France were not an object for specific legislation. Possibly related to them, however, was the reasoning in legislation concerning the funeral and burial of the executed resulting in the Code Pénal. Several proposals for a regulation were discussed and the intent of them were similar. The relatives would be able to arrange an ecclesiastical funeral, but without any pomp or sumptuousness.614 Characteristic, however, in France was a relatively high level of medical interest and involvement in these cases. That also the theological motives were well known by the psychiatrists is evident when Etienne-Jean Georget describes how the wish to be saved from temptations and evil in this world and go to heaven could lead someone to a specific solution. Neither having the courage to commit suicide nor wanting to be damned through it, the answer was to go to the scaffold and there receiving death after reconciliation with heaven.615 Although the psychiatric profession had worked much with these cases before the murder by Henriette Cornier in 1825 when she decapitated the 19-month-old Fanny Belon, the examination of this murderer is said to have been important in the finding of monomania as a psychiatric condition not unknown among those that wanted to be executed. Cornier was found guilty, but not to premeditated murder and thereby not sentenced to death but to being publicly exposed for an hour, being branded on her shoulder with a glowing iron, and to a life of hard labour.616 France different realities and reactions 614 Chauveau et Hélie 1887 p 270 sqq, Code Pénal § 13. 615 Georget 1825 p 95 sq. 616 During 1988 p 86 sqq, Semelaigne 1930 p 119. 176
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