Infanticide Law

In the France of the ancien régime, the law against multiple infanticide was a brutal instrument of social control, wielded with swift and public ferocity. Its most immediate appearance in the story comes when Grenouille's mother, having given birth on the putrid ground of the Cimetière des Innocents and left the newborn to die under a fish stall, is arrested, tried, and decapitated at the Place de Grève within a few weeks. The law does not distinguish between the desperate act of a poor, sick woman and premeditated murder; it demands a life for a life, and the state obliges without hesitation. The mother confesses openly, admitting that she would have let the child perish as she had with four previous births, and the legal machinery grinds forward: trial, conviction, and execution follow in rapid succession, leaving the infant Grenouille to be shunted from wet nurse to wet nurse before being deposited at the Cloister of Saint-Merri.

The Law's Reach and Its Limits

The Infanticide Law operates as a blunt instrument of retribution, but its application is riddled with bureaucratic and moral inconsistencies. When the police officer La Fosse attempts to send Grenouille to a foundling home, he is thwarted by a series of administrative hurdles: the child has not been baptized, has no official name, and the transport porters are instructed to convey only baptized infants with proper certificates. The law's concern for paperwork and ecclesiastical formality stands in stark contrast to the squalor in which the birth occurred. Father Terrier, the monk who baptizes the child and arranges for a wet nurse, is motivated less by compassion than by a desire to avoid further complications. The law thus functions as a sieve: it catches the mother and condemns her to death, but it lets the child slip through into a system of neglect and exploitation.

The Law's Echo in Grenouille's Trial

Decades later, when Grenouille himself is arrested for the murders of twenty-five young women in Grasse, the Infanticide Law is not directly invoked—the charges are murder, not infanticide—but the same legal logic of swift, exemplary punishment resurfaces. The judges of Grasse, under pressure from a terrified and vengeful populace, move the trial forward with extraordinary speed. The evidence is overwhelming, and Grenouille confesses freely, but when asked for his motives he offers only the cryptic reply, "I needed them." Torture—hanging by the feet, pumping with water, clamping his feet—fails to extract any further explanation. The judges, frustrated, declare him insane and proceed to sentence. The verdict, delivered on 15 April 1766, is a relic of medieval cruelty: Grenouille is to be bound to a wooden cross, his limbs broken with an iron rod while still alive, and left to hang until death. The customary mercy of strangulation is expressly forbidden. The law, in this instance, does not seek justice but spectacle, a public display of power meant to reassure a frightened community that order has been restored.

The Law's Collapse Under the Weight of the Perfume

Yet the Infanticide Law, for all its severity, proves utterly powerless in the face of Grenouille's ultimate weapon: the perfume he has created from the stolen scents of his victims. On the day of his execution, as he steps from the carriage onto the parade grounds, the fragrance he wears—a blend of twenty-five virginal auras—overwhelms the crowd of ten thousand. The bishop, the magistrates, the executioner, and the common people are all seized by an irresistible wave of love and adoration. The legal apparatus crumbles. The magistrate overturns the verdict. All witnesses recant. Grenouille is declared innocent, and Antoine Richis, the father of his last victim, embraces him as a son. The law, which had been so certain and so harsh, evaporates in the face of an olfactory illusion. The Infanticide Law, like all the other laws of the kingdom, is revealed as a mere human construct, vulnerable to the manipulation of scent and emotion.

The Law's Aftermath: Scapegoating and Erasure

After Grenouille's escape, the legal system of Grasse performs a desperate act of self-preservation. The judges agree to close the case, seal the files, and open new proceedings against an unidentified murderer. Dominique Druot, Grenouille's former colleague, is arrested, tortured, and executed in his place. The town, eager to forget the orgy and the humiliation, accepts this scapegoat without protest. The law, which had failed to protect the innocent and had been humiliated by the guilty, reasserts its authority by punishing a convenient substitute. The Infanticide Law, in its broader sense, is not about justice but about the maintenance of social order, and when that order is threatened, the law will sacrifice anyone—the guilty, the innocent, or the merely available—to restore the appearance of control.