On Tuesday February 3, 2026, M6 scheduled a M6 special night around the Josacine case known as the Josacine poisoning. At 9:10 PM, the TV movie “Pour Emma,” directed by Ionuț Teianu and starring Julie de Bona, reopened a story more than 30 years old. Then a debate hosted by Ophélie Meunier and a documentary by Corinne Tanay shifted the focus: from suspense to mourning, from the verdict to the trace left behind.
A Night in Three Acts, From Fiction to Reality
The setup is clear, almost academic, and yet slippery. First, fiction. In Pour Emma, little Emma, 8 years old, collapses after a spoonful of antibiotic. The narrative follows a mother, Claire, who refuses to accept fate and looks for someone to blame. The investigation becomes intimate: that of a household, of a village, of a lingering suspicion.
Next, the studio: Pour Emma: From Fiction To Reality. A short discussion, tense with the question everyone already knows without stating it directly: can you tell a true-crime story without manufacturing the truth?
Finally, an intentional sidestep. The documentary Mourning: How Do You Rebuild After the Unthinkable? does not promise new investigative elements. It offers something else: navigating absence over the long haul, with ordinary words and a truth that cannot be proven.
This triptych looks like a bridge. It can also become a trap if viewers confuse dramatic construction with what the justice system decided. It becomes problematic if emotion covers the duty of nuance.
1994: A Bottle, A Fair, And A Life Shattered
The real tragedy is rooted in Seine-Maritime. On Saturday, June 11, 1994, Émilie Tanay, 9 years old, was left with the family of a classmate. The day lasted long, people talked about the village festival, costumes, a fair. The child was not “in danger.” She was simply sick, a nasopharyngitis, medications in a bag.
In that bag, a bottle of Josacine, an antibiotic syrup, prepared in advance, and packets of Exomuc. Nothing extraordinary for a weekend. Then came dosing time. A routine gesture that should reassure. And that, that evening, turned everything over.
Émilie collapsed shortly after taking the syrup. Rescue services arrived. The hospital. Resuscitation attempts. And the impossible news: the child died that evening. Analyses soon confirmed a cyanide poisoning: the poison was in the bottle. The poison is not a metaphor: it was in what was supposed to heal.
From that moment, the relatives’ lives split in two. And so did the village. Because poison in a medicine does not fall from the sky. A hand was involved. Or a chain of errors. Or an obscured intent.
1997: A Conviction And A Doubt That Never Closes
The investigation at the time focused on those around that weekend. One name eventually stood out: Jean-Marc Deperrois, a business owner and local official. The prosecution’s thesis, in short, was that of a failed crime of passion: the poison would not have been intended for the child but for an adult, and the victim would have been “the wrong one.”
This hypothesis, by nature, tears things apart. It turns a little girl into collateral damage and places supposed jealousies at the center of intimate relationships. It also focuses on minutes of schedules and purchases of chemical products. Moreover, it looks at gestures impossible to reconstruct.
At the end of the trial, in late May 1997, Jean-Marc Deperrois was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment for the murder of Émilie. Since then, the man has proclaimed his innocence. His supporters criticize a decision based on a body of presumptions. Others, however, emphasize the strength of a decision by an assize court.
Years pass. The sentence is served. Then the man is released: he was conditionally released in June 2006. The controversies, meanwhile, remain out in the open. Requests for retrial, counter-expertises, competing hypotheses: the case continues to divide, not only on the facts but on how to read them.
It is that knot that television touches. A knot where justice has made a decision, and where part of public opinion refuses to close the file.
What Fiction Changes And What It Exposes
Pour Emma does not claim to match every detail. The fiction changes names, simplifies timelines, condenses characters. It chooses a viewpoint: that of the mother, Claire, played by Julie de Bona, standing alone against the walls. The walls of an investigation that moves slowly. The walls of a village watching itself. The walls of a pain beyond debate.
That narrative freedom has a cost: it can give the illusion of reconstruction. Yet the judicial machinery is made of procedures, delays, contradictions, technical documents. On screen, everything must breathe, take shape, and fit into two 45-minute halves. Reality does not.
Émilie’s mother, Corinne Tanay, reminded viewers before the broadcast: an adaptation is not an investigative file. She also said the fiction seemed not very faithful to the reality of the facts. However, she praised the lead actress’s performance. That position says a lot: accepting that a story circulates, but refusing to confuse it with the 1994 truth.
In the fiction, the central question is posed like a thriller hook: “Who added the cyanide?” In reality, the question is heavier. It does not seek just a name. It seeks a certainty that, for some, never came.
Ophélie Meunier’s Panel: Putting Words Without Reopening The Trial
The debate broadcast after the fiction acts like an airlock. It comes when emotion is hot, when viewers want to conclude. The panel invites slowing down.
Ophélie Meunier hosts Julie de Bona and Corinne Tanay, among others. The implicit stake is delicate: to recall established facts, distinguish registers, without turning into a parallel courtroom. Because television, when it takes on a true-crime story, always carries a temptation: to retry at a distance with fresh images.
The discussion can, at its best, serve as a beacon. It must state what belongs to creation. It also clarifies that the case was judged. It also recalls that the convicted man contests his guilt. Finally, doubt here is not a plot device but a social reality.
It can also, despite itself, expose a fracture: that between relatives who want to live with the judicial decision and those who want to reread it again. In such cases, every sentence carries weight.
The Documentary On Mourning: The Personal As Shared Language
The third part, the documentary, changes the lens. Corinne Tanay speaks in the first person, not to plead but to tell what justice does not write: the years, the bodies, the after.
The film follows a simple idea: mourning does not end, it transforms. One can write, travel, see therapists, work. One can laugh sometimes, feel guilty. One can exhaust oneself and rise again. The documentary does not seek to “solve”; it aims to share.
To do so, the director meets other bereaved people. Different paths, different tragedies, but the same landscape: life that goes on without asking permission. Among these testimonies, well-known public figures appear, because their losses have entered the collective history. The idea is not comparison, much less hierarchy. It’s the common thread: how we survive, then how we live.
By placing this documentary after the fiction, M6 offers an exit from the stage. It’s a way of saying that a true-crime story is not only a mystery. Indeed, it represents a long trauma whose relatives remain the holders.
Between Justice And Television, Time Does Not Pass The Same Way
Justice works in the present of the file: hearings, expert reports, deliberations, appeals. Television works in the present of the viewer: what captures, what signals, what unsettles. Between the two, there is a gap in kind.
When a case returns to the screen thirty years later, it’s not just because it “marks.” It’s because it lends itself to a narrative: a medicine, a poison, a little girl, a village, a convicted man who denies it. Simple elements, almost too simple.
But the times have changed. Today’s viewers are used to “true crime,” investigative series, podcasts revisiting archives. That listening comfort can become a dangerous distance: you think you understand because you’ve already seen. Real lives, however, do not let themselves be cut into episodes.
In that context, a fiction like Pour Emma has a double responsibility. On one hand, it can recall the violence of a true-crime without aestheticizing it. On the other, it must avoid turning justice into a backdrop.
A Memory That Refuses To Be Silent
The night of February 3, 2026 says something about France’s relationship to true crime: we do not forget. We only shift the way we tell it.
Fiction brings the shock back up. The panel tries to frame it. The documentary opens another door, rarer on television: the long time of mourning.
At the center, there is a child who died one June evening in 1994. Around her, a trial handed down in 1997 is contested by some and accepted by others. Moreover, a society periodically returns to circle the same fire.
One demand remains, the only one that holds in this file: do not confuse. Do not confuse emotion and evidence. Do not confuse a scene and a fact. Do not confuse the need for a story with the lives of the people involved. Indeed, they never had the end credits.