Joseph Vacher and the Demonic Defense

In the autumn of 1898, the murderer Joseph Vacher stood trial at Bourg-en-Bresse, in eastern France, charged with the killing of a young shepherd named Victor Portalier and admitting in some form to ten further homicides committed across the French countryside between 1894 and 1897. His trial was one of the most notorious of the nineteenth century. It featured a defense that, although it relied on the formal language of psychiatric legal pleading, drew its emotional center from a much older vocabulary: the claim that Vacher had not been the agent of his own crimes but had been compelled to them by a demonic force that had entered his body, he said, through the bite of a rabid dog. The Vacher case sits awkwardly within any history of possession. It is a criminal case, not an ecclesiastical one, and the defendant was no devout religious in extremis but a vagabond charged with sexual murder. Its inclusion here is justified by the explicit and sustained use Vacher and his counsel made of the possession framework, and by the response of the French medical establishment, which contended with the claim across hundreds of pages of expert testimony.

Background

Joseph Vacher was born in 1869, the fifteenth child of an Isère farming family. Reports describe him as a difficult and increasingly disturbed young man. He served briefly in the army, was discharged after a series of incidents that included an attempted suicide, and was treated at the asylum of Saint-Robert in 1893, where physicians diagnosed what they then called acute mania. Released as cured in 1894, he resumed a wandering life across rural France and Switzerland. Between May 1894 and August 1897 he committed at least eleven killings, mostly of shepherds, farm girls, and other young people in isolated rural settings. His confessions, given after his arrest in August 1897, varied in detail and consistency. The number of his victims may have been higher.

What distinguishes the case from a hundred other contemporaneous cases of disordered violence is the framework Vacher used, both to himself and to the court, for understanding what he had done.

The Possession Defense

Vacher’s claim was specific. He said that as a child, in 1879, he had been bitten by a dog believed to be rabid. The bite had been treated locally with a folk remedy involving what he described as “drinks against the rage.” He claimed that whatever entity inhabits a rabid animal had passed into him at that moment, lay dormant for years, and surfaced in his adulthood as a compulsion that he experienced as alien to himself. He spoke of the entity as though it were a separate agent. He gave it various names. At his trial he described moments before each killing in which a kind of darkness fell on him, in which his vision narrowed, and in which he felt himself acting under the direction of something that was not himself.

His defense team, led by the lawyer Charles Carraz, framed this account in modern legal-medical terms as a plea of irresponsibility on grounds of insanity. The court appointed an expert commission led by the psychiatrist Alexandre Lacassagne, then the most prominent forensic psychiatrist in France. Lacassagne’s commission examined Vacher over many sessions, interviewed witnesses to his earlier life, reviewed his asylum records, and produced a long expert report that has become a foundational document of French forensic psychiatry.

The Medical Verdict

Lacassagne’s commission rejected the defense. They acknowledged that Vacher had a history of mental disturbance, that he had been treated as a lunatic at Saint-Robert, and that he was probably what they would have called a “déséquilibré,” a constitutionally unstable personality. But they argued that he had been competent in a legal sense at the time of his crimes. He had concealed his actions, fled when threatened with capture, given inconsistent accounts under questioning, and shown the kind of selective lucidity that, in their judgment, ruled out the total absence of agency that French law required for an insanity defense. They dismissed the rabid-dog narrative as a confabulation.

The “demonic” framework the commission addressed only obliquely. Lacassagne treated it as a culturally available vocabulary that a poorly educated rural defendant might reach for to describe experiences that contemporary psychiatry would call dissociative or compulsive. He did not engage the question of whether the entity Vacher described was a real demon. He noted only that whatever it was, it had not been beyond the defendant’s control in the relevant moments.

The court accepted the commission’s findings. Vacher was found guilty, condemned to death, and executed by guillotine at Bourg-en-Bresse on December 31, 1898, at the age of twenty-nine.

Skeptical Analysis

The Vacher case is significant within the history of possession less for what it tells us about the supernatural than for what it tells us about the late nineteenth-century transition from religious to medical frameworks for explaining anomalous violence. Vacher used the older vocabulary because it was available to him; Lacassagne used the newer one because it was the lingua franca of the courts. The territory both were trying to map—a man who experienced himself as compelled to acts he found morally repugnant—remains contested between psychiatric and religious vocabularies to the present day.

A modern psychiatric reading would situate Vacher somewhere on the spectrum of severe personality disorder with possibly comorbid psychotic features and likely sadistic sexual pathology. Whether he believed his own demonic narrative or used it instrumentally is impossible to know at this remove. The rabid-dog story, attractive though it is as a folk explanation, is medically implausible: human rabies has a different course, and the long latency Vacher described does not match.

The case bears comparison with Joseph Vacher’s own contemporary milieu of late-century French criminal-anthropology cases, and more obliquely with the much earlier convent crisis at Loudun in 1634, in which possession claims served similarly varied purposes for different parties.

Legacy

Lacassagne’s report on Vacher influenced French forensic practice for half a century afterwards. The case is regularly taught in French legal-medical training as a foundational example of the limits of the insanity defense. The popular memory of Vacher has been considerably darker, and he is sometimes misleadingly described as the “French Ripper.” The interest of the case, for our purposes, lies in the persistence of demonic vocabulary at the very moment when European institutions were officially abandoning it.

Sources

• Lacassagne, Alexandre. Vacher l’éventreur et les crimes sadiques. Storck, Lyon, 1899.
• Walker, Lawrence. The Killer of Little Shepherds. Ballantine Books, 2010.
• Pierre, Michel. Joseph Vacher, l’éventreur. Aubier, 2003.
• Court records, Cour d’Assises de l’Ain, October–November 1898.