Sadistic Psychopathic Parents Are Nothing New; Aristocrats Can Be Especially Cruel
The awful tale of aristocrat Blanche Monnier, locked up for 25 years
BY MIKE ON • ( 2 COMMENTS )
There are many stories of young women being kidnapped and locked up by the foulest of men for their own gratification. But what if your kidnapper was your own mother? Aristocrat Blanche Monnier’s story may be over a century old, but that doesn’t make it any less terrifying.
Finally discovered when she was 50 years old, the then skeletal Blanche weighed only 55 pounds. The pathos of her prison defied adequate description. Upon her plight being uncovered so was the sight and smell of a hay bed covered in faeces, urine, bugs, and food scraps. While she was calm during the rescue, it was clear that Blanche Monnier suffered mental damage from the capture. What led her mother to lock her in such horrid conditions?
Like every other French socialite in 1876, Monnier was desperate for lasting love. At 25, she was still unmarried and was desperate to move on with her life out of her mother’s home. There in the French capital, she found love in the form of an older lawyer.
But her mother disapproved of the relationship. Still, Monnier’s heart was set on marrying this man, regardless of her mother’s wishes. That was her mistake though, as a vicious argument ensued. Madame Monnier forbade Blanche from seeing this man and even went as far as to beg her to call off the relationship. But Blanche refused.
From that point on, Madame knew Monnier would never give up her emotions on her own for this man. So she locked her daughter in the tiny garret with barricaded shutters preventing any light entering the room. If Blanche wanted freedom, she would have to break off the marriage to this common lawyer her mother disapproved of.
But Blanche was in love, and even if that meant never seeing her love again, then she wouldn’t deny herself loyalty and love. The pretty minor aristocrat stayed in the room, eating dinner scraps her mother would give her, and sleeping on a hay bed left upstairs.
As Blanche Monnier remained captive in that bare and tiny attic, she truly did never see her lover again, as he passed away in 1885. But the adorable young woman was just as important in high society as her mother and brother so how did they get away with her sudden disappearance? They got away with the crime by persuading those enquiring about Blanche that Blanche had died.
In the public eye, the missing Blanche Monnier was a dead woman, who her mother and brother would mourn at every chance to sell their story. Of course, no one doubted her death, as a young woman passing away unexpectedly was no raise for concern.
Her brother was also manipulated by their mother though, as well into his 50’s he was still at home with his mother. He never married, and stayed in the home with their mother, not questioning the situation with Blanche one bit.
Finally, in 1901, French police received a note full of scribbles, claiming there was something strange occurring at the Monnier address. The note even claimed they could hear screams coming from a closed window. While police knew that Blanche Monnier was dead, they still went out to investigate to confirm the claims were false.
But when the police arrived at the house, Madame Monnier peeped out the window and ignored the door. Frustrated and determined to get to the bottom of the matter, police officers kicked in the front door, As they did so they were hit with rancid odours coming from Blanche’s room. There, they found the now 50-year-old Monnier looking like a skeleton, smelling of her own waste.
After taking Blanche to the hospital, she was grateful for the treatment of the nurses giving her a bath and a proper meal. When interrogated by police, Madame Monnier claimed Blanche brought this all upon herself, being a woman with violent tendencies and a mentally ill woman since her younger years.
Her brother also agreed that Blanche did this to herself, claiming she could’ve left at any time and yet chose not to escape the torture chamber her mother locked her in. When it came time to face the court, her mother was given a longer sentence than her brother, but her mother died just 15 days into her sentence.
The brother, being a lawyer, wormed his way out of his year-long sentence shortly after appealing the charges. Yet Blanche was robbed of her life, and considering she was a 50-year-old woman with nowhere to go, she was admitted into a psychiatric hospital, where she lived for the remainder of her life. No justice was given to Blanche, as she lost over half her life thanks to her mother. Source 1, Source 2.
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Oct 14, 2020IBrent Swancer
The Weird and Scary Story of Blanche Monnier
- Bizarre
- historical oddity
- modern mysteries
- mysterious people
- strange people
- unsolved crime
- unsolved mystery
If you have ever seen the film Seven, you will know that it includes a very disturbing scene, indeed. The two protagonists approach a skeletal form lying sprawled out on a filthy mattress in a darkened, dirty room only faintly illuminated by light seeping through the blinds. They approach the still figure thinking he must surely be dead, but then BAM, the “corpse” awakens and we all collectively soil our shorts. It is an ingenious scene and seems perfect for a horror movie, but what many people might not realize is that this is a scene that played out for real back in the 20th century. Here we will look at the gruesome and tragic story of a woman who was believed dead and left to rot in her room, but who would mysteriously be saved and leave the whole world in shock.
The woman known as Blanche Monnier was in her time about as high profile as they came. In the 1870s she was a prominent socialite and aristocrat in Paris from a wealthy, well-respected bourgeoisie family, and she was quite often the talk of the town. Rich and well-known for her reputed stunning beauty, she had no shortage of suitors, but her heart would fall for an older man who at the time was a struggling lawyer. The two were often seen out on the town and generated plenty of rumors, much to her mother’s chagrin, as she did not approve of the relationship at all. Nevertheless, Monnier kept dating her suitor, and even made plans to marry him. Yet, as her future seemed bright and her heart filled with love, the wedding would never happen, because one day Blanche Monnier just sort of disappeared off the face of the earth.
The previously high profile social butterfly who had been at all of the parties and mingled relentlessly with high society was suddenly nowhere to be seen, and after some time of this, Monnier’s mother, Louise, and younger brother Marcel came forth to admit that she had in fact died. They mourned her and often wore clothes to signify this, and the shocked social elite who had known Monnier were at a loss at how suddenly she was just gone, not the least of which was Blanche’s would-be husband. He also mourned, and would go on to die in 1885 without ever seeing her face again. As far as everyone was concerned, Blanche Monnier was dead, and as the years went on she was sort of forgotten, but then there would be a strange series of sinister events that would play out, and it would turn out that all was not as it seemed.
In 1901, the Paris Attorney General received an anonymous handwritten letter that changed everything. There was no return address, no signature, no clue as to who it was from, and the writing was barely legible, little more than scribbles, but the words that it contained were shocking and revelatory. The mysterious letter read:
Monsieur Attorney General: I have the honor to inform you of an exceptionally serious occurrence. I speak of a spinster who is locked up in Madame Monnier’s house, half-starved and living on a putrid litter for the past twenty-five years – in a word, in her own filth.
It was unknown if this was some hoax or sick joke, but the police took it seriously enough to go check out the Monnier house at 21 Rue de la Visitation. When they arrived no one answered the door, although they did hear someone walking about within and there was even movement at one of the curtains. Police calls to whoever was inside went unanswered, and so the decision was made to break in forcefully and raid the place. As soon as they were in, they found Louise Monnier sitting calmly in her living room, but she refused to speak with the policemen. They went about searching every room in the house, finding each without any sign of Blanche, until the only place left to check was the attic, which had to be pried open to reveal utter and complete darkness, the one window within covered by a casement and thick curtains. One officer on the scene would later say:
We immediately gave the order to open the casement window. This was done with great difficulty. The old, dark curtains fell a heavy shower of dust. To open the shutters, it was necessary to remove them from their hinges.
Once they gained entry and could see a little, a horror show awaited them. The first thing that hit them was the stench, a putrid concoction of rotted meat and human feces and urine, which was enough to cause some of the officers to wretch. The room itself was in shambles, the floor strewn with pieces of decomposed food, human waste, trash, and unidentifiable effluence that was patrolled by countless scurrying roaches. Their eyes stinging from the rancid olfactory onslaught, the officers peered into the gloom past this filth and saw lying there on a rotting straw mattress the skeletal, emaciated form of a woman, so thin and wraith-like that they did not at first even recognize her as the once beautiful Blanche Monnier. They at first took her to be dead, but then she shuddered, gasped, and turned to them like a ghoul out of a nightmare, and she soon recoiled from the light to hide beneath a filthy blanket. They had found Blanche Monnier, or at least a shadow of what she once was. One of the policemen would say of the horrific scene:
The unfortunate woman was lying completely naked on a rotten straw mattress. All around her was formed a sort of crust made from excrement, fragments of meat, vegetables, fish, and rotten bread… We also saw oyster shells, and bugs running across Mademoiselle Monnier’s bed. The air was so unbreathable, the odor given off by the room was so rank, that it was impossible for us to stay any longer to proceed with our investigation.
After being taken to a hospital, it was found that Monnier, who was now 50 years old, weighed a meager 55 pounds, the bones poking through her pale skin, and she was completely incomprehensible and stark raving mad. In the meantime, the gruesome story of what happened to her began to come into the light. It would seem that when Monnier had refused to break things off with her lover and fiancé, her mother had done everything in her power to sabotage the relationship, and when that hadn’t worked she had taken the rather extreme measure of locking her own daughter in the attic, where she would remain for the next 25 years. During her imprisonment, she had been fed only scraps of food and had not seen the sunlight or taken a single step out of that dank, cramped space, and there she had languished, her previously affluent, happy life stolen from her.
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