The legendary autobiography of Jacques Mesrine, France's most infamous
criminal
France's Public Enemy Number One from the late 1960s to the end of the
1970s--when he was killed by police in a sensational traffic
shootout--Jacques Mesrine (1936-1979) is the best-known criminal in
French history. Mesrine was notorious both for his violent exploits and
for the media attention he attracted, and he remains very much a public
media figure in France and Europe. In 2008 there were two feature-length
films based on his life, one of them starring Vincent Cassel in the lead
role. Mesrine wrote The Death Instinct while serving time in the
high-security prison La Santé; the manuscript was smuggled out of the
prison and was later published by Guy Debord's publisher Gérard Lebovici
(who briefly adopted Mesrine's daughter, Sabrina, before being
assassinated, a few years after Mesrine). The Death Instinct deals
with the early years of Mesrine's criminal life, including a
horrifically graphic description of a murder he committed early on in
his career and a highly detailed account of the workings of the French
criminal underworld--making this book perhaps one of the most intriguing
and detailed anthropological studies of a criminal culture ever written.
