Violette Nozière is one of Chabrol's films concerning women and is set in the early thirties at the time of increasing fascism. It is inspired by a fait divers, about an eighteen-year-old woman (Isabelle Huppert acting for Chabrol for the first time) still at school who regularly secretly leaves the petit bourgeois parental home at night to prostitute herself. When the doctor diagnoses her as having syphilis, she somehow manages to convince her parents (Jean Carmet as Baptiste and Stéphane Audran as Germaine) that she has inherited it from them.
Then she falls in love with Jean Gabin (Jean-François Garreaud), an opportunist for whom she hands over the profits from her (occasional) prostitution and money she steals from her parents. She forges doctor's prescriptions and poisons her parents, although, 'respecting' her mother, she gives her a lower dose and Germaine survives.
Violette Nozière claimed that her father has repeatedly raped her, although she was nevertheless given the death sentence. This was later commuted to a life sentence, and in August 1945 de Gaulle pardoned her, she married the prison clerk, had five children by him, and died in 1963 a fully pardoned woman.
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