In May of 1847, back in Paris with his regiment, Bertrand’s desires overcome his sensibilities. After walking around Père Lachaise Cemetery, scoping out access points, he decided to come back one evening. The cemetery, now popular after the remains of the tragic twelfth century lovers Abélard and Héloïse were transferred there in 1817, had walls surrounding it, but around 9pm, one June night, Bertrand climbed over and prowled the paths between the graves and tombs looking for an opportunity to exercise his dark ideas. He found a common grave that would allow him easy access and began to dig. Beneath the soil, he found the body of a 40-year-old woman. He disembowelled her and cut the entrails ‘into a thousand pieces,’ this satisfied him enough and he did not sexually abuse the corpse. Over the next two weeks, his obsession brought him to the cemetery most evenings, where he would dig up women and cut up their entrails but not sexually assault them—the mutilation enough for orgasm—he would masturbate while fondling the disembowelled organs or part of the corpse. He would then re-bury the body parts. One night, disturbed by guards who threatened to shoot him, he explained his way out of the predicament by saying he had drank too much and fallen asleep in the cemetery. This encounter with authorities scared him off for a time until his regiment left for Soissons in Picardy, but there the cemetery proved impossible to break into at night.
Interpreting Marx’s analysis of the 1848 French Revolution and capitalism, Slavoj Žižek could be writing about Bertrand and his ‘actual corrosive power which undermines all particular lifeworlds, cultures, and traditions, cutting across them, catching them in [his] vortex.’[111] In February 1848, just days before the end of the Orléans monarchy and the establishment of the Second Republic, Bertrand’s personal vortex overwhelmed him with the urge to mutilate a body. Stationed in the northern town of Douai, on the 10th of March, after the bugle call at 8pm, Bertrand climbed the regiment’s compound walls, swam across a wide and deep ditch filled with icy water. Once in the cemetery, he exhumed the body of a teenage girl, the first corpse with which he had full sexual intercourse. He fondled the 15-year-old’s dead flesh, kissed her all over, hugged her passionately, caressed her breasts and buttocks. After 15 minutes of making love to the body, in the throes of an indescribable passion, he mutilated the girl and ripped out her viscera. He then re-interred the body and once again swam through the icy ditch and scaled the ruined walls of his barracks.
This escalation in Bertrand’s necrophiliac desires results in an increase in his exhumation of and intercourse with corpses. In Lille, from late March over a period of a month, he disinterred four women and has sexual intercourse with their bodies before eviscerating and mutilating them. On a few occasions, the hardness of the ground made it impossible for him to dig up corpses, this happened in Doullens in early July, the summer sun baking the earth until Bertrand tore his nails trying to dig his way down. At the end of July, back in Paris, in the middle of the 1848 revolution, the guards at the regiment’s camp at Ivry-sur-Seine had it under lockdown but Bertrand’s desires meant he had to escape. Each night, he found a way out and made his way to Montparnasse cemetery. On the 25th of July, he disinterred and had sex with the badly decomposed body of a twelve-year-old girl, after disembowelling her and mutilating her genitals, he masturbated over the corpse. One night, he dug up two bodies and carried them to a tomb where he would not be disturbed by the armed guards, he had sex with the body of a 60-year-old woman but left the corpse of the three-year-old girl untouched.
Were these acts sexual reproductions of the violence in French and European culture at the time? Marx wrote of the June days of the 1848 revolution that ‘The tricolour republic now bears only one colour, the colour of the defeated, the colour of blood. It has become the red republic.’ That ‘the Paris of the proletariat burned, bled and moaned in its death agony.’ And that ‘The June revolution is the ugly revolution, the repulsive revolution, because realities have taken the place of words, because the republic has uncovered the head of the monster itself by striking aside the protective, concealing crown.’[112] Did the fomentation of social revolt lead to a fermentation of sexual rebellion, of revolting erotic desires?
In a cemetery closer to the camp in Ivry, over a period of a month, Bertrand copulated with the bodies of a girl aged seven and a woman in her late thirties, mutilating the young girl but not disembowelling either body. Finding Montparnasse too difficult to break into, Bertrand visited hospital and suicide graveyards. Unable to find the bodies of women, he took out his anger by digging up male corpses and, repulsed by them, slashing them with his sabre. In the space of four months, he exhumed fifteen bodies, only two of which were women. His anger and sexual frustration escalating, he had sex with the women, eviscerated them, split their mouths to a Joker smile, cut their bodies to ribbons, pulled at their limbs, twisting the bodies into grotesque shapes in an attempt to ‘destroy’ them, he would then masturbate.
Toward the end of this period of escalation, at 10pm on the 6th of November, guards fired a shot at Bertrand as he climbed over the wall into the cemetery, the bullets missed and Bertrand waited two hours on cold and wet stone steps before re-entering. Once in, he dug up the recently buried body of a woman in her mid-twenties, a well-preserved victim of drowning. Again, he eviscerated her, mutilated her genitals, and made a deep cut through to the bone in her left thigh—with this corpse, he achieved a greater orgasm than with previous ones and hoped that the intensity would satiate his violent and dark desires.
His cravings were becoming uncontrollable and he stated that ‘[I]n all my violations of sepulchres, in no case was the act premeditated; when the attack got possession of me, whether at noon or at midnight, I had to go; it was impossible to postpone it.’ and in December guards shot at him, the bullet tearing through his greatcoat. He fled into the storm-ridden night but re-crossed the muddy fields to the Ivry cemetery where he attempted without success to exhume a corpse. In January 1849 in Montparnasse, another shot rang out as he escaped the traps the guards set for him and the dogs prowling the pathways.
Leaving the Luxembourg Gardens on Thursday the 15th of March, Bertrand tried to break into Montparnasse by climbing the walls but a booby-trapped gun shot him. Bloodied from wounds along his right side, Bertrand arrived at the Val-de-Grâce military hospital at 11:30pm. The story of his wounds soon started circulating and became the gossip of soldiers. A Montparnasse cemetery gravedigger heard about the story and informed authorities, and police visited the hospital to arrest Bertrand. One of his surgeons, Dr Marchal de Calvi, took down Bertrand’s confession and the prosecution used the notes at Bertrand’s trial—as necrophilia did not exist as a crime, the court found Sergeant François Bertrand guilty of vampirism.