Crime of passion

A crime of passion (French: crime passionnel), in popular usage, refers to a violent crime, especially homicide, in which the perpetrator commits the act against someone because of sudden strong impulse such as anger or jealousy rather than as a premeditated crime.

Yet she must die, else she'll betray more men ~ Shakespeare

Quotes

• ‘Myn housbond is so ful of Ialousye,
  That but ye wayte wel and been privee,
  I woot right wel I nam but deed,’ quod she.
  • Chaucer, "The Milleres Tale"

• It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,—
  Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars!—
  It is the cause. Yet I'll not shed her blood;
  Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow,
  And smooth as monumental alabaster.
  Yet she must die, else she'll betray more men.
• ... Then must you speak
  Of one that loved not wisely but too well;
  Of one not easily jealous, but being wrought
  Perplex'd in the extreme; of one whose hand,
  Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
  Richer than all his tribe; ...
  • Shakespeare, Othello, Act 5, Scene 2

• He did not wear his scarlet coat,
    For blood and wine are red,
  And blood and wine were on his hands
    When they found him with the dead,
  The poor dead woman whom he loved,
    And murdered in her bed.
  • Oscar Wilde, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol", I

• I saw through my father’s eyes ‘the bravest man I ever hanged’, the soldier who had come home from the South African War and found his wife unfaithful. He carried his little daughter in his arms up the stairs of his North London home, and cut her throat, and then tore down the decorations which had been put up for his return, and took a Union Jack from them and placed it over the child’s body. Then he went to the police and gave himself up. They asked why he had done it. ‘So that she would not grow up like her mother,’ he replied.
  • Albert Pierrepoint, quoting Henry Pierrepoint, Executioner: Pierrepoint (1977), Chapter 3. My Inheritance

• There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined. But the Penal Code makes the convenient distinction of premeditation. We are living in the era of premeditation and the perfect crime. Our criminals are no longer helpless children who could plead love as their excuse.
  • Albert Camus, The Rebel, translated by Anthony Bower (Vintage Books, 1956), Introduction

Further reading

• Howard Engel, Crimes of Passion: An Unblinking Look at Murderous Love (2002)