The Museum will virtually bring to your homes a selection of photographs coming from our archive. Every week you will discover new images.
Enrico Pranzini, “le Chéri magnifique”, Paris, 1887.
Unidentified photographer, albumen print on cardboard.
Enrico Pranzini born in Alexandria, frenchified Henri-Jacques (1856-1887), is a seductive, well educated, well mannered, polyglot and intelligent adventurer whom in 1887 is captured, tried and sentenced to death in Paris for the brutal murder of three women.
The case captures the interest of transalpine public opinion. The press finds it difficult to explain to the public how an unprecedented man for violent crimes and so inserted into Parisian society could have committed such an atrocious crime.
On the figure of Pranzini hovers a halo of exoticism and mystery: some newspapers propose the thesis that the killer could have acted under hypnosis. The Corriere della Sera newspaper hosts an intervention by Lombroso where, while expressing reservations about the Pranzini case, he confirms the possibility of being able to perform a crime under hypnosis.