In a tale that makes Proust look like a page-turner and the French legal system like a particularly lethargic snail, Monique Olivier, a sprightly 75-year-old who has been France’s oldest female detainee since roughly the time the Concorde was still a glint in a designer’s eye, is finally shuffling towards a trial for the murder of her mother-in-law. Yes, you read that correctly. The defendant is a woman whose alleged crime dates back to a period when the Eiffel Tower hadn’t even started its affair with modernity and President Macron was still a gleam in his parents’ romantic holiday in Amiens.
Let us set the scene: It was 1988. Margaret Thatcher was still polishing her handbag, the Berlin Wall was standing tall, and somewhere in the French countryside, a family feud was brewing that would eventually simmer for over three decades in the cold bouillon of Gallic justice. Monique Olivier, née perhaps something more poetic, stands accused of dispatching her husband’s mother, Martine, with a level of brutality that would make a guillotine blush. The victim was stabbed, strangled, and found in a state that I shall politely describe as ‘compromised,’ lest I offend the delicate sensibilities of the readership.
The prosecution alleges that Olivier, a woman of ‘fragile temperament’ according to her defence lawyers, but a veritable she-wolf in the eyes of the gendarmerie, lured her 68-year-old mother-in-law into a trap, possibly involving a baguette and a suspiciously timed invitation to discuss estate matters. The motive? A simmering resentment over a disputed inheritance, because what else would drive a Frenchwoman to homicidal rage? The sagging Euro? The declining quality of Camembert?
But here’s the kicker: Monique Olivier has been in pre-trial detention since 1992. Thirty-two years. That’s longer than some marriages, longer than the shelf life of a French government, and certainly longer than it takes to properly age a decent Bordeaux. She has been mouldering in her cell while the legal system moved with the velocity of a glacier on Quaaludes. The delays are blamed on everything from procedural appeals to the sheer complexity of the case, which apparently required several decades to decide if a woman who allegedly stabbed her mother-in-law forty-seven times should go to trial.
Now, at 75, Olivier faces a jury of her peers, or at least a dozen people who weren’t born when the crime was committed. The prosecution will argue that her age does not negate the ferocity of the act. The defence will paint her as a victim of a slow-motion Inquisition, a woman whose life has been stolen by the very system that now seeks to condemn her. Either way, the trial promises to be a circus of Gallic proportions, with lawyers gesticulating like mimes on espresso and the judge probably stopping for a three-hour lunch break.
What does this say about France? That justice delayed is justice denied, but in this case, it might be justice just plain comatose. The country prides itself on its revolutionary ideals, its libertine spirit, and its philosophical musings on the nature of guilt. But when a woman can sit in a cell for over three decades awaiting trial, one wonders if the revolution has simply been replaced by a bureaucracy of infinite appeals.
In the end, Monique Olivier will either be convicted or acquitted. But one thing is certain: the real crime here may be the system that let her rot. Or perhaps the crime is the baguette that was never sufficiently crusty. I’ll leave that to the philosophers.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need a gin. A large one. With a twist of judicial contempt.
