Pierre François Lacenaire

Pierre François Lacenaire (born 1800 in Lyon; died 1836) was a famous French poet and murderer.

Upon finishing his education with excellent results, Lacenaire joined the army, eventually leaving at the time of the expedition of Morée in 1829. He became a crook and was in and out of prison. This is where his "criminal university" was, as he called it. Whilst in prison, Lacenaire recruited two henchmen, Victor Avril and François Martin.

He is portrayed in the epic Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise), a film by Marcel Carné. There is also a French film called Lacenaire, starring Daniel Auteuil.

Dostoevsky read about Lacenaire's case and it inspired him to write Crime and Punishment, in which Raskolnikov's crime was a copy of Lacenaire's almost down to the last detail.

Foucault believed Lacenaire's notoriety among Parisians marked the birth of a new kind of lionized outlaw (as opposed to the older folk hero), the bourgeois romantic criminal, and eventually to the detective and true crime genres of literature.

For more information, see the French Wikipedia entry for Lacenaire: http://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pierre_Fran%C3%A7ois_Lacenaire