Gender and Justice: Violence, Intimacy, and Community in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (review)

In 1872 Alexandre Dumas fils set off a heated debate with his categorical reply “Kill her!” to the question of how a man should treat his adulterous wife. The crime of passion, nearly always imagined as a husband killing his faithless wife, fascinated France in sensational accounts in the press, novels, and the writings of jurists, psychologists, feminists and other social critics. But as Eliza Earle Ferguson argues in Gender and Justice: Violence, Intimacy, and Community in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, this discussion did not understand domestic violence as Paris’s working people practiced it. For ordinary Parisian workers, both men and women, violence was not a masculine right, nor a resurgence of primitive instinct, nor as the Director of Criminal Statistics in the Ministry of Justice speculated, a somnambulist response to modernity. Rather, violence was retribution for serious breeches in the pact of reciprocal, although unequal, obligations that constituted the couple, and integral to policing gender roles.

Gender and Justice takes us deep inside the lives of Parisian working-class couples at the end of the nineteenth century. Ferguson has digested the files of some 260 cases in the assize court of the department of the Seine from 1871 to 1900 containing the testimony of the accused, the victim (if she or he survived!) and innumerable witnesses: friends, relatives, workmates and especially neighbors. With many engrossing examples, Ferguson shows us that although the level of violence that landed these parties in court was extreme—shooting, stabbing, dousing with sulfuric acid, defenestration—the circumstances that engendered the violence were banal. As witness after witness testified, attacks did not come as bolts from the blue; they were nearly always the final blows in escalating battles over what each partner owed the other in terms of money, work, sex and emotional support. The less serious might keep a partner in line in the future; the most serious enacted personal justice.

The law, of course, did not allow individuals to take justice into their own hands. The infamous article 324 of the penal code granted extenuating circumstances to the man who killed his wife when he caught her in flagrante delicto. This could reduce his sentence, but it did not absolve his guilt. However, Parisian juries frequently acquitted men, and even more frequently acquitted women, accused of murdering or attempting to murder their partners, despite the fact that the accused nearly always readily admitted the crime. Ferguson argues convincingly that in these cases, juries responded to a different understanding of justice than what was established in law but one that was amply underpinned by judicial practice. In an insightful analysis of investigatory and trial procedure, she shows how juries were placed in the position of judging whether or not the victim merited the violence that the accused had meted out.

Unsurprisingly men were most often the wielders of violence within the couple. In about a quarter of these cases, they were acquitted because the juries found that their wives or mistresses had deserved such punishment due to their sexual promiscuity, slovenliness, disobedience and other gross failures of their domestic obligations. Women less frequently used severe violence to punish their partners, but when they did, juries were much more likely to acquit them. In about two thirds of the cases in which the accused was a woman, she was able to show that while she had done her duty, the man in her life had not; he had abused her, failed to support her and abandoned her and their children. Therefore her retributive action was legitimate.

Although a few bourgeois appeared in these cases, the vast majority of the parties and the witnesses were working people—small craftsmen and shopkeepers and their employees, day laborers, piece workers, and servants. Ferguson uses their evidence to explore the material conditions of their lives as well as their values and emotions. Most lived day to day...