The Vampire of Montparnasse

Some of the most notorious cases of necrophilia have come to us from France. One of the most famous necrophiles was Sergeant François Bertrand (1824–1850), a sergeant in the French army, who during the years 1847–1849 dug up corpses from Montparnasse, a Paris cemetery, to have sex with them. Widely known as the Vampire of Montparnasse, the sergeant showed a strange fascination with the dead early in life, when he developed a habit of dissecting dead cats and dogs (much like Jeffrey Dahmer of modern times). When he grew up, he began exhuming dead bodies to perform sexual intercourse with them. He also eviscerated and dismembered the bodies after intercourse. Bodies of both men and women were retrieved from graveyards.

He even chewed some of the bodies, thus showing signs of necrophagia as well. (The corpses he left usually showed signs of having been gnawed upon.) Bertrand’s necrophilic impulses usually came with headache and palpitation of the heart. His necrophilic tendencies started unmistakably toward the end of 1846, when he first felt the desire to have sexual intercourse with human bodies. In 1847, being by accident in a graveyard, he ran across the grave of a newly buried corpse. Suddenly he got the necrophilic impulse with headache and palpitation of the heart, which became very powerful. So powerful did it become that although there were people near by, and he was in danger of detection, he started digging up the body for sexual intercourse. In the absence of a convenient instrument for cutting it up, he satisfied himself by hacking it with a shovel.

In 1847 and 1848, over the course of 2 weeks, the impulse, accompanied by violent headache, forced him to commit necrophilic intercourse about 15 times. He used to dig up the bodies with his bare hands. When he had obtained the body, he cut it up with a sword or pocket knife, tore out the entrails, and then masturbated. The sex of the bodies is said to have been a matter of indifference to him, though it was ascertained that he had dug up more female than male corpses. During these acts he declared himself to have been in an indescribable state of sexual excitement. After having cut them up, he reinterred the bodies.In July 1848, he accidentally came across the body of a girl of 16. Then, in his own words,

I covered it with kisses and pressed it wildly to my heart. All that one could enjoy with a living woman is nothing in comparison with the pleasure I experienced. After I had enjoyed it for about a quarter of an hour, I cut the body up, as usual, and tore out the entrails. Then I buried the cadaver again.

Sergeant Bertrand was eventually captured on March 15, 1849, as a result of being wounded by a police bullet in Montparnasse Cemetery. Seriously wounded on his right side, he came to Val-de-Grâce hospital, a military hospital in Paris, for treatment. During his stay there, he not only offered no denials, but was rather unregretful of his deeds to the police investigators. He claimed he could not explain why he committed these crimes. He could only explain that he often felt compelled to exhume the recently deceased and cut into their flesh with his sword and teeth. While still recovering from his wounds in the hospital, one of Bertrand’s surgeons, the honorable Dr. Marchal de Calvi, obtained his full written confession, in which he stated that he had violated dozens of graves before being caught. This confession was admitted in his trial in July 1849.

Bertrand was finally convicted on 15 counts. Dr. Lunier, the state psychiatrist at the time, opined that the Sergeant did not have all his mental faculties and should be confined and treated in a psychiatric asylum rather than be imprisoned. It was a new thought at that time. The famed McNaghten case, which had introduced the concept of insanity as a defense in criminal cases, occurred just 6 years earlier—in 1843. Nevertheless, François Bertrand was awarded a sentence of 1 yearand was imprisoned (the prosecution could not prove rape, as it could only be committed on live people). He proved a model prisoner, served his sentence of 1 year, and was released in 1850. He committed suicide soon afterward.

Wilson states that, in addition to having sex with newly buried corpses, he also had mistresses who even testified to his sexual potency. Nobus suggests that his case may not be that of a true necrophile, since what was central to his offense was mutilation of corpses and not sexual gratification with them. His sexual gratification was only secondary. Bertrand himself explained in a detailed response to Michéa that he was principally concerned with the physical mutilation of corpses, masturbation occurring only as a secondary phenomenon in relation to his contemplation of the dismembered bodies.