A History of Violence: From the End of the Middle Ages to the Present (review)

In November 2005, France witnessed widespread, violent protest in its urban peripheries (banlieues) when police excess resulted in the death of two youths. Young men, many from marginalized poor and ethnically diverse neighborhoods around France, responded by burning cars, destroying property, and occasionally attacking people. Muchembled provocatively and contentiously situates this episode in the history of the pacification of violent behavior that began in the late Middle Ages. He argues for comparing this and other recent episodes of violent protest in Europe and beyond to early modern “cultures of violence based on the need to defend masculine honor against rivals” (8). He specifically links this culture to unmarried males in late adolescence or early adulthood.

Muchembled limits his consideration of violence to “crimes against persons, including homicide, assault, and rape” (9), argues that human violence has both a biological and cultural foundation, and, although he draws upon examples from histories outside Europe, mostly derives his evidence from French history. He claims that young males have manifested propensities to aggressive violence throughout history, but that different cultures enable or restrain them based on their priorities and capacities. In medieval Europe, adult males tacitly, if not openly, accepted young male violence of “knife and sword” (the phallic tools of male honor and power) as the price of delayed marriage and prolonged liminal status.

Muchembled credits the emergence of a “new sensibility” in the sixteenth century for the decline in deadly violence in Western Europe over the next three centuries. That sensibility “invented” homicide and infanticide as “inexpiable crimes” and redefined male and female roles (120). Two interlinked developments encouraged this trend. First, the social and commercial interactions associated with urban living increasingly urged self-control and civility. “Town air softened” (93, 101). Second, the emerging early modern centralized state determined to define and monopolize legitimate violence and a developed a growing capacity to repress. Adult men collaborated because they found adolescents (themselves a newly invented category) increasingly difficult to control. Thus, the civilizing process and judicial revolution combined to dampen violence.

However, as violence declined in the public space, nobles invented the duel, and men from all classes moved it into the household. Muchembled argues that by the nineteenth century, domestic violence (assault and rape) became more frequent and more visible. Women thus found themselves relegated to subordinate positions, as victims denied rights to violent expression. Muchembled’s description and explanation of women’s experiences, however, feel incomplete. Likewise, his argument that the great peasant revolts of the seventeenth century largely represented a backward-looking protest against efforts to pacify youthful males seems overplayed. Overall, Muchembled largely dismisses the political import of public violence, individual and collective.

Eruptions of bloody violence may still occur, but their shock value stems from their location in a Western culture that has mostly limited “legitimate” expressions of violence to police action or to “just” wars determined by the state and displaced the “taste for blood” to the imaginary realm of literature (6). Thus, ironically, a “dual model” of masculine behavior has emerged—an “imperial man” who acts brutally when enlisted by his government, and a “peaceable citizen” who functions as “good husband and father” (197).

Muchembled develops and challenges some earlier explanations of the history of violence. He argues that urbanization and industrialization lessened rather than aggravated propensities to violent bloodletting while partially redirecting it toward property (200). He qualifies both Elias’ notion of the civilizing process by emphasizing that it had multiple sources and Foucault’s focus on the Enlightenment contribution to the disciplinary tactics of subjection by arguing that the origins lie several centuries earlier.¹ Although he draws most of his evidence from France, Muchembled gestures toward a specifically British path to male pacification, a delayed trajectory of pacification in eastern and southern Europe, and a relocation of much European manly violence to the colonies.