Thierry Paulin A Black Tragedy

Between October 1984 and November 1987, Parisians lived in confusion and fear. A serial killer was attacking old ladies to steal money from them. It took nearly three years for French investigators to find the killer.

Once arrested, Thierry Paulin, the greatest French serial killer confessed to having murdered twenty-one old ladies. However, the police had enough evidence to suspect him in nearly forty cases.

Before Guy Georges, the East of Paris knew Thierry Paulin, a young mixed-race Martinican. Born in 1963, in Fort-de-France, Paulin found a quick way to make a name for himself in Paris, in the very early 1980s. There, in the most expansive Parisian nightclubs, his friends wrongly thought he was wealthy, not thinking he was a mass murderer.

A living dichotomy, it is impossible to understand Thierry Paulin through the media of that time. Indeed, the serial murderer, as well as his victims, were exploited by French journalists to support sensationalism and voyeurism.

In the process, racist and homophobic remarks were commonly used to attack the killer. Thus, like his French-Guyanese accomplice Jean-Thierry Mathurin, the two men were reduced to their sexual orientation, their drug addiction, the social margin in which they evolved and what was presented as an excessive love for money.

Yet, no one among the journalists tried to grasp the human tragedy which Thierry Paulin embodied. At just twenty-four years old, the young man left a macabre legacy on earth, almost thirty-three years after his death from AIDS on April 16, 1989. The unfair treatment of the media not only took away his humanity as a black man, but it also prevented the families of the victims from clear explanations regarding his source of violence.

In large part, the violence of the killer stemmed from the violence of Afro-Caribbean history, especially when it comes to the impact of slavery upon family structures.

Through press clippings, studies of hearings dating from 1987 (the year of his arrest), text analysis of Frantz Fanon and W.E.B DuBois, this book examines the psychology of Thierry Paulin from the failure and the fracture of West Indian history to the issue of uprooting and the specificity of black psychology.

The Franco-Belgian historian and researcher, Victoria "VKY" Kabeya, has studied the case through a prism that has been, until now, ignored, hence that of the tragedy of the black experience in the West. Through this work, she proves that the brutality of black Western history generates mental issues which can lead an fragile individual to the point of murder. But this suffering is knowingly ignored by French institutions which still refuse to address the racial issue knowing that it contributes, along with poverty, to the psychic fracture of people who can sink into a total madness manifested by gang wars, but also by serial murder.

In other words, the black historical violence has visible consequences on the psyche of the groups which endure constant pains not treated and recognized by the white institutions which ignore them. Thierry Paulin was the proof of it.