On July 29th 1881, the law on the freedom of the press marked the starting point of an unprecedented development in the French written press which led to its playing what then became an essential role in the social, political and cultural life of all French people. Before long, the press in Puy-de-Dôme benefited from this development, to evolve in the same way. In parallel with the success crime reports brought to serialised fiction, these crime reports became one of the major commercial assets of this newly popular written press, and had done so in particular from the beginning of the 1860s and the founding of the Petit Journal. Newspapers would stop at nothing to show the readership what was involved; dispatches no longer sufficed. From then on it became necessary to go and see, investigate, reason things out and disclose information, with or without the collaboration of the judicial authorities. Indeed, crime has always aroused a wide range of emotions in people such as fear, disgust, curiosity, reprobation and fascination. In response to these emotions, the revelations of and verdicts given for criminal acts provided the press with an opportunity to endlessly praise or else to express criticism of the political and legal system, to show concern about the decline in moral values and to be scared of anarchistic threats and of monsters hiding in alleyways and fields. More than being simple informational or politicizing tools, newspapers, through crime reports, then became the indispensable relay of the questionings and convictions of society as a whole. The aim of this reflection is to highlight the specificities of this media representation of crime while insisting on the form it took in the provinces and on its evolution in the first few years of the Second Empire and the final hours of the Belle Époque.
