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

Notes

Notes introd uction . Problematizing Crimes of Passion 1. Archives de la Ville de Paris (hereafter AVP) D2U8/173, Maxant, 6 December 1884. All translations are by the author. 2. As legal scholar Louis Holtz wrote in 1904, crimes of passion are “caused by love, not motivated by financial interest, and only the violence of passion carried away a normally honest man” (Les Crimes passionnels, 11). 3. Ruth Harris claims that “literally hundreds” of defendants in cour d’assises cases claimed themselves to be “criminels passionels” (Murders and Madness, 210). Unfortunately, Ann-Louise Shapiro (Breaking the Codes, 90) and James F. McMillan (France and Women, 104) have repeated this claim. These scholars may have relied on earlier work by Joëlle Guillais, who reported that 735 crimes of passion were committed in France between 1871 and 1880 (La Chair de l’autre, 42). In my view, this number must be treated as a rough and uncertain estimate, since statistics on “crimes of passion” were not compiled by the judicial system. By comparing the categories in the Comte général de l’administration de la justice criminelle en France, which list adultery or jealousy as motives for crimes—presumably, crimes that could be construed to be crimes of passion—with surviving trial dossiers, it became clear that it is not possible to verify Guillais’s calculations. 4. Benjamin F. Martin, Crime and Criminal Justice under the Third Republic, 4. Martin bases his estimate on the annual volumes of the Compte général de l’administration de la justice criminelle. By contrast, the rate of acquittal in correctional court, where a panel of judges decided lesser crimes, was around 10%. 5. Emile Yvernès, Le Crime et le criminel devant le jury, 14. Acquittal rates rose between 1860 and 1890 for aggravated assault (27–78%), homicide (16–24%), and crimes against property (17–19%). 6. Although Maxant’s profession may have made him more aware of the conventions of criminal investigations, it was not unusual for defendants to participate as actively as he did in constructing his defense. 7. Articles 321–326 of the penal code defined the “excuses” that could reduce—but not eliminate—punishment for murder in cases where the murder was preceded by serious violence toward the murderer: where the victim was breaking into an inhabited house, where a husband or wife killed his or her spouse when his or her own life was in danger, and where a husband killed his wife or her lover when he surprised them en flagrant délit in the conjugal abode. 8. Arlette Farge, La Vie fragile, 11. 9. AVP, series D2U8, cartons 12 through 295. After 1892 no relevant dossiers have been preserved, and in fact only a handful of dossiers from the assize court of the Seine have been preserved for many decades after that date. 10. The corresponding French legal terms are coups et blessures, assassinat, tentative d’assassinat, meurte, tentative de meurtre, and empoisonnement. Poisoning was a separate category in French criminal law. 11. Among the works of enduring value are Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms; Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou; Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France. 12. Michel Foucault, I, Pierre Rivière. 13. Ginzberg, The Cheese and the Worms, xviii. 14. Harris, Murders and Madness. 15. Guilllais, La Chair de l’autre; Shapiro, Breaking the Codes. 16. My sample includes all the relevant cases studied by Guillais, Harris, and Shapiro , plus about 150 more. 17. Sherry Ortner, “Making Gender,” 2. 18. Ibid., 12. 19. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction. 20. Ortner, “Making Gender,” 13. 21. Pierre Bourdieu, The field of Cultural Production, 258. 22. Leslie Page Moch, Paths to the City. 23. Martine Segalen, Love and Power in the Peasant Family. 24. Michèle Perrot, Les Femmes ou les silences de l’histoire, 223. 25. For a concise statement of this cornerstone of Weber’s theory, see Economy and Society, 54–56. He writes: “The right of a father to discipline his children is recognized— a survival of the former independent authority of the head of a household, which in the right to use force has sometimes extended to a power of life and death over children and slaves. The claim of the modern state to monopolize the use of force is as essential to it as its character of compulsory jurisdiction and of continuous operation” (56). Although this passage proves that Weber included family violence in his theory of...