Paris, a city of light, has once again revealed its darker corners. A 79-year-old matriarch, her hands stained with the blood of her own kin, has been sentenced to life imprisonment for a murder so grisly it would make the angels weep. The woman, whose name I shall not dignify with repetition, was found guilty of strangling her daughter-in-law in a fit of familial rage, then concealing the body in a manner that suggests a mind unhinged by decades of bitterness.
The French court, ever eager to display its severity, handed down the harshest penalty allowed by law. Contrast this with the British legal system, where our judges, in their infinite wisdom, prefer to treat murderers as victims of circumstance, offering them rehabilitation and understanding. In France, they still believe in justice.
In Britain, we believe in explaining away evil. The Victorian thinkers understood that a society that does not punish its criminals is a society that encourages crime. We have forgotten this.
The French, at least, have not. This case is a reminder that we are witnessing the decay of our own moral fabric, a decay that can only be arrested by a return to the old certainties: guilt, punishment, and the protection of the innocent. The matriarch's age is irrelevant; evil does not age, it only festers.
And so, as France locks up its elderly monsters, we in Britain must ask ourselves: why are we so afraid to do the same?
