Crime et culture au XIXe siècle (review)

Like Louis Chevalier's seminal Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses à Paris pendant la première moitié du dix-neuvième siècle and Robert Nye's Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France, Dominique Kalifa's new book takes as its starting point the common perception of the nineteenth century as the epoch of crime par excellence. His introduction charts the proliferation of authority discourses about crime that arose during the century — legal, medical, sociological, criminological — and points out culture's fascination with representing criminality, noting how the famous affaires of the epoch (the cases of Lacenaire, Marie Lafarge, Vacher, Marguerite Steinheil, among others) inspired numerous books, and later films, birthing a mythology of the modern criminal. He also makes the (perhaps rather self-evident) point that any history of crime is a cultural history of crime, since given acts were punished according to local and regional cultural mores and values. For example, the fascinating fact is cited that, in Brittany, infanticide was considered a faute rather than a crime; while in Poitou, chicken theft could result in the perpetrator being brought before a criminal court. The three sections that follow the short introduction go on to explore figures and locations of crime; crime and mass culture; and delinquency and the crisis of security. These sections each comprise five short chapters, which are devoted to a key text, genre, affaire or phenomenon. The opening chapter, on the topography of criminality in Paris at certain key moments throughout the century, will be of interest to historians and theorists of the city. Particularly rich for literary scholars are a chapter on the emergence of the genre of the police memoir and one treating the influence of faits divers on fictional crime writing. Political and social historians will appreciate the third section treating the sociology of public and personal security, which explores in detail the ways in which these concerns became central to contemporary and subsequent political debates and discourses.

There is much in this book that will be of value and interest to scholars of nineteenth-century history, literature and culture. The research is exceptionally thorough and many of the analyses and discussions offer a genuinely new and rich perspective on the study of the nineteenth-century cultural imaginary and its preoccupation with the violation and safeguarding of the law. However, the work overall lacks a central thesis, and the absence of a conclusion contributes to the impression that this is a series of separate papers that have been brought together to form a book-length contribution, rather than a book conceived of as such.