Thierry Paulin and Guy Georges are the only two black serial killers in France.
What is the place of the psychically ill black man in French psychiatry? Why is he invisible?
If Georges and Paulin were described as "enigmas" by the psychiatrists charged with studying them, it was because this ignorance pointed to a fact. The emergence of the two murderers presented an unprecedented problem for doctors whose Eurocentric theories did not include a psychological understanding of Afro-descendant patients, yet in England, as early as the 1960s, white psychiatrists had begun writing reports linking the Afro-Caribbean migration crisis, historical violence, racism and rejection to a potential risk of schizophrenia, depression and various psychiatric disorders.
Guy Georges and Thierry Paulin. Two serial killers whose motherland is as fractured as their biological, nurturing mother.
If France's only two Afro-descendant serial killers made their mark, they were portrayed as monsters by the media for their horrific and barbaric acts.
Paulin massacred over twenty old ladies, although the police would have enough evidence to implicate him in almost forty murders between 1984 and 1987. For Guy Georges, more than a dozen women were assaulted and raped, and seven died before his arrest in 1998.
The two serial criminals have one thing in common. They can only be understood in depth through the misery of the black experience in France, French history in the context of post-colonialism, and the other side of the coin. The murderers are not "others", but the pure products of French society, economically, politically and, above all, historically.
Paulin represents the failure of West Indian migratory propaganda in Metropolitan France, especially in the context of the BUMIDOM, and Georges embodies the abandonment of these forgotten, rejected black populations, which have been present since the end of the Second World War. If the suburban youth of the 90s highlight the existence of a social malaise, Georges and Paulin, through their actions, were the first to symbolize the crisis of a marginalized black and mixed-race group evolving in a sphere where the failings of the French post-colonial era dominate.
Thus, French medicine sought to understand both men by relying on the basic theories of psychiatry, applying the same methods of medical analysis specific to white patients.
In the taboo of race, and in a quest for universalism, the problems and traumas of the Black man are forgotten.
In this contempt, French psychiatrists do not believe in the link between the violence of black history and the fracture of the sick individual. This study compares Paulin and Georges within the framework of psychiatry, but analyzes the profiles through history to understand the madness that ultimately consumes them. This book is the English version of
Crime, Race et Psychologie Guy Georges et Thierry Paulin
, which was originally published in September 2022.