Winter 1994
Volume 20, Number 2

I hope my readers will forgive. I am writing this book principally for my friends, and for myself if that is possible. My reasons will soon become clear.

A long time after the drama occured, I learned that two of my close friends (doubtless not the only ones) had not wanted me to be declared unfit to plead, a decision based on the medico-legal opinions expressed by three experts at Sainte-Anne's in the week following Hélène's death.1They would have preferred my case come to court. Unfortunately it was a pious wish on their part.

I was in no fit state to take part in legal proceedings on account of my serious mental state (confusion and hallucinations). The examining magistrate who visited me could not get me to say a word. What is more, I no longer enjoyed the freedom or my civic rights since I was automatically committed and under supervision on the orders of the prefect of police. Deprived of all choice, I was in fact the victim of an official procedure I could not escape and to which I therefore had to submit.

Such a procedure has its obvious advantages. It protects the accused, who is judged not to be responsible for his actions. But it conceals powerful disadvantages that are less obvious.

Certainly, after such a long and trying experience, I'm surprised by my own understanding attitude towards my friends! When I speak of that trying experience, I refer not just to the period of confinement but to my life since then and what I clearly see I shall be condemned to for the rest of my days, if I do not intervene personally and publicaly to offer my own testimony. So many people, with the best or worst of motives, have risked speaking out or remaining silent on my behalf! Any individual who is declared unfit to plead is destined to be surrounded by a wall of silence.

The grounds on which I was declared unfit to plead in February 1981 are summed up in the famous article 64 of the 1838 version of the Penal Code, an article that is still in force despite thrity-two fruitless attempts to reform it. Four years ago, a commission was set up by the Mauroy government to look into this delicate matter, which is inextricably bound up with a whole range of administrative, judicial, and penal powers linked to the science ideology, and practice of psychiatry as it affects internment. The commission no longer meets. It appears it came up with nothing better.

The Penal Code, at least since 1838, makes a distincton between someone held not to be responsible -- a criminal who has committed an act while suffering from "dementia" or "under duress" -- and an individual who is quite simply held to be responsible because he is recognized as being "normal."

In the case of someone held responsible, a straightforward procedure is set in motion. The person is brought b efore the court, and there is a debate in public. The public prosecutor, representing the interests of society, together with witnesses, lawyers for the defense and for the prosecution, who speak in open court, as well as the defendant himself, who gives his own personal account of what happened, all confront each other. The entire proceedings, which take place in public, conclude with the secret deliberations of the jury, which gives its verdict publicaly either for an acquittal or for a sentence of imprisonment and in this way is "supposed" to pay his debt to society and thereby "purge" his crime.

On the other hand, if someone is held not to be responsible in juridico-legal terms, he is denied the whole procedure of a public, confrontational court appearance. Above all else, such a decision directly condemns the murderer to a period of confinement in a psychiatric hospital. In this case, too, society is "protected" from the criminal, but for an indefinite length of time, and he is supposed to recieve the psychiatric help necessitated by the fact that he is "mentally ill."

If the murderer is acquitted after a public trial, he can return home with his head held high -- in principle at least, since the public may be indignant at his acquittal and make its feelings known. (In this sort of scandal there are always those knowing individuals who are ready to voice general disquiet.) If he is sent to prison or confined in a psychiatric hospital, the criminal or murderer disappears from society: for a specific period (which can be reduced) if he has been sentenced by a court; for an i>indefinite period in the case of someone held on psychiatric grounds. His position is, however, made worse to the extent that he is considered lacking in sound judgement and therefore deprived of his freedom to make decisions. So the murderer who is committed to hospital my lose the judicial right to speak his own name. this is entrusted by the prefect to a "guardian" (a legal figure), who signs and acts on his behalf, whereas a person convicted in the ordinary way only loses that right "in relation to his crime."

Because the murderer or criminal is considered dangerous, both to himself (he may commit suicide) and to society (he may reoffend), the danger is removed by his being imprisoned or committed. To underline this point it is worth not in that a number of psychiatric hospitals still resemble prisons despite recent progress. For those who are "dangerous" (manic and violent), security measures or means of restraint exist in these places, such as deep ditches and barbed wire, actual straitjackets or their chemical equivalent, which bring back unpleasant memories. the means of restraint are often worse than those found in many prisons.

It is not surprising the general public shoild view the two sorts of institution as indistinguishable, given the similar conditions that prevail for those who are imprisoned and those who are committed. In any case, the normal punishment for murder is imprisonment or confinement in a hospital. With the exception of emergencies -- in other words, acute cases, which are separate issues -- hospitalization is not without its ill effects, both on the patient, who often gets much worse, and the doctor, who is forced to live in an enclosed world. He is supposed to know everything about the patient and often has a close and disturbing relationship with him, which he all too often controls by affecting insensitivity or showing increasing aggression.

1Althusser, having been convicted of murdering his wife, Hélène, was granted a "non-lieu," literally "no grounds," on the basis of the psychiatrists' reports. In other words, he was declared unfit to plead. -- Trans.

Louis Althusser spent most of his career at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he taught philosophy. The publication of this memoir is the first of a series of works to be published after his death on 1990.

Richard Veasey, a lecturer in French from 1965 to 1989 at the University of Sussex, is a freelance translator.