Unquiet Mothers: Violence, Care, and Maternal Ambivalence in 19th-Century France

Book discussion | Unquiet Mothers: Violence, Care, and Maternal Ambivalence in 19th-Century France

Speaker: Dr Susannah Wilson, Reader in French Studies, University of Warwick

Panel Discussants: Professor Katherine Watson (Oxford Brookes University) and Professor Caroline Warman (Jesus College, Oxford) 

Friday 6 March 2026, 3.30pm - 5pm

Seminar Room 63, Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities

All Welcome

Susannah Wilson: A Most Quiet Murder: Maternity, Affliction, and Violence in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Cornell University Press, 2025).

This talk explores a disturbing 1882 murder case in Dijon, where Marie-Françoise Fiquet, a 31-year-old factory worker and mother, abducted a five-year-old girl from the gates of an infant school. The child’s body was found the next morning on the banks of the city canal. The case shocked provincial France—not only for its brutality, but because the alleged killer was a mother and the motive remained unclear. Drawing on material from my book, I trace how the case was constructed through press reports, psychiatric evaluations, and trial records, arguing it reflects an early instance of what we now call Munchausen syndrome by proxy, or factitious disorder.

Author's Biography:

Susannah Wilson is Associate Professor and Reader in French Studies at the University of Warwick, specialising in the intersections of gender, criminality, the French psychological sciences, and cultural history. She is the author of Voices from the Asylum: Four French Women Writers, 1850–1920 (Oxford University Press, 2010), and editor of Prohibitions and Psychoactive Substances in French Culture (Routledge, 2019). Her work draws on a range of narrative sources to explore maternal violence, addiction, and psychological suffering. She has recently held fellowships from the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust.

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