On April 21, 2011, the bodies of four people were discovered in Nantes: they were the four children of Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès and his wife. The father of the family cannot be found. For more than ten years, many speculations have been made about this man who is the main suspect of these terrible crimes. The magazine Point of view returns to the case through his best friend, Bruno de Stabenrath, who wrote the book The Impossible Friend. In particular, he brings his view of the man he has known since childhood.
Bruno de Stabenrath does not seek to find excuses for the man who has long been his friend. With what he knows personally of his experience, he believes that it is in any case not a stroke of madness. “It’s a long program: from 1995, Xavier has the impression that everything is collapsing around him. First he learns that he was fooled by his mother and his wife: he is not a ‘chosen one’ and his wife is unfaithful.“
Indeed, it digs into the relationship of Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès with his mother, Geneviève Maître. In the 1960s, she founded a sectarian group called ‘Philadelphia’, around which the mystery remains. He thus bathed in a mystical universe until he was 35 years old. Age from which he began to question his faith and the “voices” that his mother said he heard. As for Agnès, his wife, she cheated on him “with his best friend so for him it’s terrible“, writes Bruno de Stabenrath. However, he preferred to stay with her for purely material reasons: “He needs Agnès, he needs money and then he won’t be able to pay alimony, he doesn’t have the means.“
The death of the father of Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès completes the descent into hell of the alleged culprit. For his childhood friend, “during his father’s lifetime, he would never have committed this act. He had too much respect for him and for the line of Ligonnès“. It would therefore be the accumulation that could have led the man to commit such acts: “His origins in Versailles, the heaviness of the environment, the mystico-apocalyptic regimentation of his mother, a tendency to schizophrenia, the adultery of his wife, the disavowal of his father, then his death.” He would then have liked to start all over again, in the United States for example where he lived young. In any case, this is the theory that Bruno de Stabenrath advances in the columns of the Point of view.
Find the full interview in the magazine Point of view from August 10, 2022
The Impossible Friend by Bruno de Stabenrath, now published by Poche, Folio