The 25-year imprisonment of Blanche Monnier
In 1876, young French socialite Mademoiselle Blanche Monnier was in search of a suitor. She was sought after by many upper-class men for her beauty and kindness, but at the age of 25, she fell in love with an older lawyer. Her mother strongly disapproved of the ‘penniless’ attorney, and in hopes of ending the affair, she committed a heinous crime against her daughter for a quarter of a century.
Blanche’s mother, Madame Louise, tried everything to keep her daughter from continuing the courtship with the lawyer, but Blanche continued her affair. After many failed attempts, Madame Louise thought she had finally solved the problem when she locked her daughter in a tiny dark room. Louise told Blanche she would remain locked inside the room until she agreed to break off the romance with the lawyer. At the time, she believed her daughter would agree to the terms and end the affair, but Blanche never did.
For the next 25 years, Madame Louise kept Mademoiselle Blanche Monnier prisoner, only feeding her scraps from her own meals. Soon, Blanche began to wither away.
To the people of France, it seemed as if Blanche had disappeared from one day to another. Her mother and brother publicly mourned her loss and told people she had run away. Blanche Monnier was never seen or spoken of again until 1901.
In May 1901, the Paris Attorney General received an anonymous letter about a woman being held captive at a house in Poitiers, France. The letter read: “Monsieur Attorney General: I have the honor to inform you of an exceptionally serious occurrence. I speak of a spinster who is locked up in Madame Monnier’s house, half starved, and living on a putrid litter for the past twenty-five years—in a word, in her own filth.”
The police were skeptical of the claims the letter made because Madame Louise Monnier Demarconnay was a well-respected citizen along with her law school graduate and former administrative official son, Marcel. Still, after remembering how devastated the public was after the disappearance of Blanche Monnier, authorities decided to investigate.
When police arrived at the Monnier home, Madame Louise refused them entry, but police forced their way through.
On the second floor of the home, they discovered a “tiny, dark, foul-smelling room,” and once they pried the windows open, they were horrified by what they saw.
In a bed in the corner of the room was Blanche, covered in her own filth with a dirty blanket. To an officer, she looked like “a gaunt creature with abundant black hair hiding her body.”
Blanche had been deeply malnourished and weighed about 50 pounds. She was not allowed to get out of bed or practice basic hygiene. She ate, urinated, and defecated in her bed.
An officer at the scene said: “The unfortunate woman was lying completely naked on a rotten straw mattress. All around her was formed a sort of crust made from excrement, fragments of meat, vegetables, fish, and rotten bread…We also saw oyster shells, and bugs running across Mademoiselle Monnier’s bed. The air was so unbreathable, the odor given off by the room was so rank, that it was impossible for us to stay any longer to proceed with our investigation.”
When officers took her out of the room, Blanche “seemed like a scared animal.”
The New York Times published on June 9, 1901: “Time passed, and Blanche was no longer young. During all that time the girl was confined in the lonely room, fed with scraps from the mother’s table–when she received any food at all. Her only companions were the rats that gathered to eat the hard crusts that she threw upon the floor. Not a ray of light penetrated her dungeon, and what she suffered can only be surmised.”
Madame Louise was arrested but died in prison 15 days later after confessing to her daughter’s abduction. Marcel was sentenced to 15 months in jail but was released on claims that he did not physically restrain Blanche from leaving the room.
Mademoiselle Blanche Monnier was freed from her mother and brother, but after her long imprisonment, she developed mental health issues and health problems such as schizophrenia, coprophilia, and exhibitionism that made it hard for her to return to society. Instead, she was sent to a psychiatric hospital in Bois, where she died 12 years later, in 1913.
As for her beloved lawyer, he passed away in 1885, nine years after she was imprisoned.
