Murder Ballads | Criminocorpus

Murder Ballads in France (1870-1940)

Jean-François "Maxou" Heintzen

From this page, you have access to 1393 murder ballads composed between 1870 and 1939, related to 683 crimes committed in metropolitan France. By "murder ballad" we mean a sung text recounting, for informative and/or edifying purposes, the details of an authentic news event, this text being contemporary with the crime described.

You can use:

An interactive search from a map of France, on which pictograms indicate the sung crimes. It happened near you, give it a try!
A simple or advanced search if you are interested in a specific crime, or in the ballads composed about a given department, for example.

Then, you will have access to the ballads and the description of the related news event. Eventually, all the lyrics of the ballads in this database will be accessible, as the corresponding images are integrated. The same goes for the melodies to which they were sung. Be patient!

Learn more about this database

You can also contribute to this database: if you own a song sheet with the lyrics of a murder ballad absent from our corpus, contact the administrators.