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The cycle of conferences will make it possible, through the unexpected events of this famous case, to reflect on the tensions between science, justice and law. Tuesday 3 November, at 19:00, the film ‘L’affair Lafarge’ (Pierre Chenal, 1938) will be projected for the first time in Spain. After that, professor José Ramón Bertomeu (Researcher at the IHMC) will present the book ‘The Truth about Lafarge Affair: Science, Justice and Law During 19 Century’. This Tuesday, 10 November, at 20:00, Olivier Leclerc (Researcher at the Centre of Recherches crítiques sur le Droit, Université Jean Monnet, Paris) will give the conference: ‘The Judge and the Expert: Science in Courts of Justice’. The two sessions of the cycle will take place in the Institut Français (Moro Zeit St., 6).

A long series of circumstances contributed to the enormous popularity of this case: the mysterious facts that surrounded the death of Charles Lafarge; the fame of the protagonists involved in the double judicial process; the use of new expert techniques of high sensitivity; the strong divergences between the experts during the trial and the uncertainties in the final verdict that were never totally vanished. In the words of a journalist from that time, the Lafarge affair confirms that “truth is more bizarre than fiction”. Nobody could have invented "this intrigue, these characters or the scenes of its development”, there is not any fiction story able to compete with such a “wild mixture of nauseating, horrible and carnavalesque ingredients”.

There was a strong public debate about the verdict for decades in France and it inspired works from writers like Gustave Flaubert or Alexander Dumas. Many other later authors have tried to unravel the truth about the Lafarge affair, from jurists and criminologists to doctors and historians. The uncertainty and the mystery are still up to our days.