Marie Françoise Victoire Salmon ( – 2 May 1827) was a French domestic servant in the Kingdom of France who was wrongfully convicted of fatally poisoning her employer and was condemned to be tortured and burned alive in 1782. After narrowly avoiding execution, she was fully acquitted of all charges in 1786 with the help of the lawyers Pierre Noël Lecauchois and Jean-François Fournel, who argued her innocence through a series of widely-circulated legal briefs that exposed a flawed criminal investigation and garnered public sympathy and support.
Salmon's exoneration was celebrated throughout France, elevating her to a celebrity status and earning her invitations from high society, including from Queen Consort Marie Antoinette and the writer Madame de Genlis. Her story became a popular symbol of the harsh and unfair criminal justice system of the .
Early life
Born in 1760, Marie François Victoire Salmon was the daughter of a day laborer in Méautis, Normandy. When she was young, a pig attacked her and permanently disabled her left hand, leaving her unable to fully open that hand. After her mother died and her father remarried, she left home at 15 to seek employment as a domestic servant.
In 1781, a parish priest attempted to rape Salmon; he was caught and convicted, but quickly released. A magistrate named Roland Revel de Bretteville, who knew her through her employer, suggested that she protect herself from the priest by moving to Caen, where he offered her a job in his household. However, Salmon noticed that Revel was trying to seduce her, so she found work as a domestic servant for the Huet-Duparc family in Caen instead.
Poisoning incidents
Death of Paysant de Beaulieu
The Huet-Duparcs were a family consisting of Madame Duparc, her husband, three children, and two grandparents. Salmon's duties for the household included preparing simple porridge meals for the 88-year old grandfather, Paysant de Beaulieu. According to Salmon, Madame Duparc gave her specific instructions for preparing Beaulieu's meals. However, on 6 August 1781, after Salmon had only been employed for 5 days, Madame Duparc interrupted Salmon's meal preparations and sprinkled salt into Beaulieu's porridge, even though Duparc had previously told her to never add salt.
Within hours of eating his porridge, Beaulieu became violently ill, vomiting and convulsing. Salmon sat by his sick bed and cared for him as he continued to worsen, while Madame Duparc told her son to ride out of town to inform his father of Beaulieu's condition. Beaulieu died that same evening on 6 August 1781.
Second poisoning and arrest
The following day on 7 August, while Salmon completed her duties and rested, Madame Duparc and her daughter prepared two separate soups: one for the family made with fresh broth and the other for Salmon and the housekeeper made from the previous day's broth. Later, Salmon helped serve the soup with new broth to the Huet-Duparc family and their dinner guests, and then she went to the kitchen to eat her own bowl.
Shortly after eating their soup, the Huet-Duparcs and their guests complained of stomach pains, and Madame Duparc declared that she smelled burnt arsenic in the kitchen. The guests became frantic, with one guest crying out [emphasis in source] () News spread throughout the city, and neighbors gathered at the Huet-Duparc home to investigate the commotion. After seeing the frenzied state of the Huet-Duparc family, who continued to insist that they had been poisoned, observers called for the authorities to arrest Salmon.
Conviction and delayed execution
The () in the court of Caen, Roland Revel de Bretteville, whom Salmon had left a few weeks earlier after she had declined his assistance, was assigned to investigate the case. After conducting what her lawyers would later argue was a prejudiced and flawed investigation fueled by personal animus, Revel sought the death penalty for Salmon.
On 18 April 1782, the court of Caen found Salmon guilty of poisoning, murder, and theft. She was "condemned to be tortured for the names of possible accomplices, to beg forgiveness in public barefoot and carrying a torch, and to be burned at the stake." The Parlement of Rouen upheld the conviction. The execution would take place in Saint Sauveur square. Around this time, Father François Lambert heard Salmon's religious confession and believed she was innocent. Time was short, so Lambert told her to claim she was pregnant in order to delay her execution.
On 30 May 1782, the day of her execution, Salmon suddenly fainted and declared she was pregnant. The execution was delayed while two midwives were summoned to examine her. However, because the midwives could not definitively determine if she was pregnant at that time, Salmon's execution was further postponed for two months, as the criminal code of the stipulated that the execution of a pregnant woman should be delayed until after the birth of her child.
During this delay, Lambert and another confessor wrote to a regionally famous lawyer from Rouen named Pierre Noël Lecauchois, asking him to reexamine her case. Lecauchois took on the case, and immediately instructed Salmon's confessors to file an official request to review the trial. He then obtained a stay of execution on Salmon's behalf; however, due to delays in transferring documents, news of the court order did not reach Caen until a few days before she was scheduled to be executed.
Retrial and exoneration
Strategy
Salmon's lawyer Lecauchois wrote a () to argue Salmon's innocence and published it for the general public, later producing a longer brief entitled . He worked with a colleague named Turpin, and, during the course of the proceedings, the "gifted and well-established" Parisian lawyer Jean-François Fournel joined them. Fournel wrote his own brief in support of Salmon titled .
Lecauchois opened Justification by recalling past victims of the unjust criminal code:
The lawyers' goal in circulating these legal briefs was to sway public opinion in support of Salmon's innocence while also connecting her unjust victimization by the criminal justice system to the broader movement for judicial reforms at the time. In their briefs, they presented the rules of evidence and judicial process, challenging their audience to judge the circumstances for themselves, while also providing an emotionally compelling first-person narrative from Salmon's perspective to "play up [her] candor and vulnerability." As Salmon narrates her story, "the reader is not allowed to forget for long that she is young, tender-hearted, and easily alluring."
Arguments
Prejudiced investigation
Both Lecauchois and Fournel raised issues with the investigation conducted by the prosecutor Roland Revel de Bretteville. In Justification, Lecauchois accused Revel of deliberately conducting a hasty and flawed investigation. Lecauchois argued that Revel collected evidence days after the alleged crime, placed unfair weight on Madame Duparc's testimony against Salmon, neglected to interview key persons of interest such as Madame Duparc's son, and did not consider testimonies that Salmon provided in her own defense.
In Consultation, Fournel described the past relationship that Revel had with Salmon shortly before her employment at the Huet-Duparc household, in which Revel tried to persuade her to move to Caen. According to Fournel, Revel held a deep grudge against Salmon after she had declined his invitation:
While Fournel alludes to the "secret" nature of Revel's profound resentment by describing Salmon's beauty and youthfulness alongside Revel's initial "effusion" of benevolence, modern historians and Sarah Maza state it plainly: Revel felt spurned after Salmon rejected his sexual advances.
Lack of evidence or motive
Lecauchois argued that the police, surgeon, and lawyer who arrived at the Huet-Duparc home to investigate Beaulieu's death readily accepted the Huet-Duparc family's accusations against Salmon and possibly even planted evidence against her. In one example, Lecauchois pointed out that when Salmon was searched, a shiny white substance, believed to be poison, was found in her left pocket, but, notably, she never used that pocket because her left hand had been disabled since childhood, when she was attacked by a pig. In Consultation, Fournel directly accused the Duparc family of framing Salmon for the murder of Beaulieu.
Lecauchois also argued that Salmon did not have any motive to poison Beaulieu or anyone in the Huet-Duparc household. He noted that she did not know the Huet-Duparc family prior to working for them, and she had only spoken highly of her employment in the household prior to the Beaulieu's sudden illness and death. Furthermore, he pointed out that she maintained the composure of an innocent person by quickly consenting to searches and agreeing to appear before the king's prosecutor. The Huet-Duparc family, by comparison, behaved very differently. According to Salmon, the family did not grieve for Beaulieu; rather, they seemed "relieved" that he was dead.
Proceedings and acquittal
Originally, the appeal for a retrial went to the king's court of justice called the ; those proceedings concluded on 18 May 1784, after almost two years. Lecauchois's arguments were so compelling that one of the royal magistrates, Godard de Belbeauf, was completely convinced of Salmon's innocence and recommended charges against the Heut-Duparcs. However, his colleagues disagreed. On 12 March 1785, Parlement of Rouen annulled the original verdict from Caen while stll requiring that Salmon remain in prison. Finally, the case was brought before the Parlement of Paris seven months later, and, on 23 May 1786, after over four years in prison, Salmon was fully acquitted of all charges. A large crowd waited outside the gates of the in Paris to cheer for Salmon and her lawyers Lecauchois and Fournel as they emerged. Witness and chronicler Siméon-Prosper Hardy wrote that ().
Afterwards, Salmon and Lecauchois had dinner at the home of the Parisian printer André-Charles Cailleau, who had originally published Lecauchois and Fournel's legal briefs about the case. Hardy went to Cailleau's home and wrote that he witnessed crowds gathered in the street outside to watch Salmon through the first-floor windows.
Freedom and fame
Nobility and celebrities
In the months following Salmon's exoneration, she and Lecauchois were invited to meet with nobility and celebrities, who bestowed generous gifts. King Louis XVI and Queen Consort Marie Antoinette held a private audience with Salmon and Lecauchois, in which they presented Salmon with a valuable wallet of coins. Hardy wrote that the gift from the royal couple included 25 and a lifetime pension of 300 livres. Salmon also received a sum of money from the Archbishop of Paris, Antoine-Éléonor-Léon Leclerc de Juigné.
Salmon and Lecauchois also met Madame de Genlis and the princes of the House of Orléans. Lecauchois was so moved by their meeting that he published a manuscript entitled () describing the scene. He wrote that Genlis and Salmon's arms were intertwined on the couch as the princes hugged and kissed Salmon, and he lamented that he could not capture the moment in a painting. Lecauchois shared a note he received from Genlis:
In , Lecauchois also wrote about an audience with Alessandro Cagliostro, the same Italian charlatan and occultist who was imprisoned in the Bastille after the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, though for unrelated reasons. Cagliostro offered his portrait miniature as a gift to Salmon, and he promised that he would have Lecauchois's legal briefs about Salmon's case translated into English when he travelled to London.
Public appearances