“Le dragon dans l’œil”. L’affaire Pajot, à travers les peurs et la criminalité parisienne du XVIIIe siècle

Conference by Pascal Bastien, Professor of Modern European History at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)

In September 1736, in the noisy corridors of the Grand Châtelet prisons, a Brigade Commander of the Maréchaussée crossed Criminal Lieutenant Nègre, head of criminal justice in the jurisdiction of the provost of Paris. Upon hearing the physical description of the prisoner whom the soldier had just delivered to the caretaker of the Châtelet, Nègre recognized the fugitive from an interrogation he had attended. The "dragon in the eye," a stain in the pupil of the fleeing woman, allowed the fugitive to be identified to the criminal on a composite sketched by a suspect a few days earlier.

Geneviève Pajot was an unfortunate 19-year-old seamstress, who was hanged for domestic theft at the Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville in Paris, January 1738. This execution, rethought and investigated from the first archives of the crime, will enable us to trace the fragile life of a poor but inventive and resourceful young woman, trapped in the rampant imagination of urban insecurity of the eighteenth century.

Pascal Bastien is a Professor of Modern European History at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and Director of the Research Group on Sociable History (GRHS). He is currently a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies (IEA) in Paris.
His work focuses on the history of judicial rituals and criminal law in Paris in the 18th century, as well as the history of urban sociability during the Enlightenment. He published The Public Execution in Paris in the Eighteenth Century (Champ Vallon, 2006) and A History of the Death Penalty. Paris and London, 1500-1800 (Seuil, 2011); and directed, along with Daniel Roche and Sabine Juratic, the great publishing project of the Journal (1753-1789) by Siméon-Prosper Hardy (Hermann, 12 volumes).

Admission is free upon reservation. Reservations are subject to availability.