In the spring of 1875, on her twenty-sixth birthday, Blanche Monier vanished. The daughter of a respected bourgeois family in Poitiers, she was simply no longer seen by the wider world. For a quarter of a century, the mystery of her disappearance went unanswered. When the truth finally emerged, it revealed a secret so brutal that it scandalized French society.
Blanche Monier was born on the first of March 1849 in Poitiers, in western France. The Monier family was well established, with minor aristocratic pretensions in a period when France’s nobility was experiencing a revival. Blanche’s father, Émile Monier, was the head of the arts faculty at the local university. Her mother, Louise Monier, was a well-known socialite who had earned a prestigious award for good works, granted in nineteenth-century France to individuals perceived as virtuous contributors to their communities.
The family also held connections to high society in Paris. To all outward appearances, they were upstanding members of the community. Blanche’s early years were unremarkable. She attended school, moved in Poitiers’ society circles, and frequently visited Paris, which lay just four hours away.
As she entered adulthood, she developed into a striking beauty, with curly hair, fair skin, and bright eyes. But a dreadful fate awaited her. In the mid-1870s, as she approached her mid-twenties, Blanche fell in love with a young lawyer from Poitiers. Though his profession typically commanded high salaries, he came from a humble background and had few clients in the provincial town.
He was also substantially older than Blanche. Her parents were unimpressed with him as a potential match. They imagined her marrying into the minor nobility of western France, or perhaps even forming a union with a member of Parisian high society. Blanche, however, remained devoted to her older suitor, and her reluctance to end the relationship led to her acquiring a fame that no person would wish for.
Her unwillingness to abandon the man her mother called the penniless lawyer led her parents, with the aid of Blanche’s brother Marcel, to lock her in a small room in their large house in Poitiers on the first of March 1875, her twenty-sixth birthday. Confined to the chamber, the Moniers told their daughter that they would only release her once she agreed to end the relationship and give up any thoughts of marrying her lawyer. The matter might have ended shortly afterward, but for reasons that remain unclear, it did not. Days turned into weeks, and weeks into months, and Blanche remained imprisoned in the small room in her parents’ house.
In time, the confinement became permanent. It is a question worth asking how Blanche could disappear without anyone raising suspicions. In the weeks and months after her disappearance, there were indeed those who inquired after her well-being. Neighbors were concerned, as were her friends, and Blanche’s lawyer lover tried to ascertain her whereabouts.
But in time, the inquiries ceased. No one would have believed that one of the most respected families in Poitiers had imprisoned a family member in a room and simply decided to leave her there indefinitely. If anyone brought her disappearance to the authorities, the reports were evidently dismissed. Perhaps people simply believed Blanche had headed for the sunnier climes of Paris.
As the years passed, Blanche remained imprisoned in her parents’ home. While it seems clear that her mother was primarily responsible for the awful circumstances, other family members were involved. Her father Émile’s role came to an end when he died in 1879, four years after Blanche had been locked away. Thereafter, it was primarily Louise Monier and her son Marcel who kept Blanche under lock and key.
The imprisonment was brutal. The room was an attic chamber with a small window that had been blacked out, leaving no natural light of any kind. The door was kept locked from the outside, and Blanche was wholly reliant on whatever her captors provided for her survival. The true extent of the horrendous conditions would be revealed in due course.
Meanwhile, the original reason for her detention disappeared. The lawyer she had been courting died in 1885, nearly a decade after she was first imprisoned. Why her mother and brother continued to keep her in this torturous situation thereafter remains a mystery. Perhaps they believed that if they released her, she would report them to the authorities, a risk they were not willing to take, especially as they were a recognized family in Poitiers.
Nevertheless, the imprisonment continued year after year. After a certain point, the residents of the locality must have largely forgotten about Blanche, and her former friends and acquaintances as well. There were occasional incidents noted as strange. Many years later, a neighbor recounted an episode in 1892 when she believed she heard a woman shouting from the Monier house.
At the time she dismissed it, but later, when the truth was revealed, it made much more sense. Evidently, someone had gotten wind of what was happening. Over twenty-five years after Blanche was first imprisoned, an anonymous hero came to her rescue. On the twenty-third of May 1901, an attorney general of the city of Paris received an unsigned letter relating Blanche Monier’s predicament.
It read: “I have the honor to inform you of an exceptionally serious occurrence. I speak of a spinster who is locked up in Madame Monier’s house, half-starved and living on a putrid litter for the past 25 years, in a word, in her own filth. ” Whoever this anonymous informant was, they had witnessed firsthand the conditions in the room. The identity of her savior remains unknown to this day.
The police moved quickly. Within days, they entered the Monier household and began searching it from top to bottom. For a time, they found nothing out of the ordinary on the lower floors. Then they came to a door that was padlocked from the outside.
The police wasted no time. Instead of waiting for the Moniers to produce a key, they broke down the door. What they entered was a scene of horror. The smell was the first thing they noticed, a noxious, putrid odor produced by decades of filth.
But it was only when they removed the dust-heavy curtains from the small window and broke off the heavy shutters that had prevented any light from entering for twenty-six years that they realized the full extent of the evil. Blanche was lying completely naked in a room full of filth. Fragments of rotting food lay around, the air was putrid, and bugs ran across the place. She was absolutely terrified by the intrusion of strangers into her prison.
Her mind was completely gone. She weighed just over twenty-five kilos, approximately four stone. The police report gave a full account of what they encountered: “We immediately gave the order to open the casement window. This was done with great difficulty, for the old dark-colored curtains fell down in a heavy shower of dust.
To open the shutters, it was necessary to remove them from their right hinges. As soon as light entered the room, we noticed in the back, lying on a bed, her head and body covered by a repulsively filthy blanket, a woman identified as Mademoiselle Blanche Monier. 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 Monier’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. ”
In the hours that followed, the police and medical authorities removed Blanche from this room of horrors. Her mother and brother were both immediately arrested.
As word spread, a crowd gathered outside the house and remained there for days, calling for the heads of Louise and Marcel Monier. Unfortunately, no justice was to come. Blanche’s elderly mother died of a heart attack days later, escaping the punishment she richly deserved. It then transpired that Marcel Monier was largely psychologically incapacitated himself.
While originally sentenced to fifteen months in prison, he was subsequently acquitted and set free. After the trial, Marcel sold all the assets of his mother’s estate and retired to a commune in the southwest of the country. He also had a country house in central France, where he eventually died in June 1913. Blanche never recovered.
There was some limited progress, and at least some medical staff were able to afford her humane care in the years that followed. She was fifty-two years old at the time of her rescue and would live for a further twelve years. These were spent at a psychiatric hospital in the town of Blois in central France. She was plagued by several psychological disorders, notably anorexia and schizophrenia.
Her imprisonment had also impacted her in other ways; she had developed an extreme aversion to strong light as a result of being denied sunlight for over a quarter of a century. Blanche Monier died on the thirteenth of October 1913. She was sixty-four years old and had spent nearly her entire adult life either imprisoned or confined to a psychiatric hospital as a result of the mental scars of her earlier confinement. Her story was widely reported in France in the early nineteen hundreds, and it reached a new generation in 1930 when the French author André Gide, a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947, wrote about it in his novel The Confined Woman of Poitiers.
This was a semi-fictionalized version of Blanche’s story, in which the main protagonists’ names were changed but little else. Gide’s account subsequently influenced Michel Foucault when he came to write Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, one of his most significant works. As such, Blanche Monier’s horrendous story has had a considerable afterlife in twentieth-century French literature.