Monsters in the village? Incest in nineteenth century France.(WINNER OF THE 2008 GRADUATE STUDENT COMPETITION)(Report)

Introduction

Lost deep in the consciousness of mankind, incest continues to suggest hotror. Beyond just the crime, the taboo has created the monster. (1) But in France, since the end of the nineteenth century, the social imaginary of incest is undoubtedly telated to poverty and the rural world. Creating a mental map of this crime, French society had relegated incest to peasants and distant villages. A picture of these criminals can also be painted: drunkards, savages and idlers. They represent the worse of humanity: the "hot monster" led to the path of crime by his passionate and vivid nature. (2) In less than one hundred years, this monster's face had been shaped. We can understand this construction given the importance of the family as the society's mainstay. In the patriarchal structure of the family, the father guaranteed the good order in his home. But the growing publicity of incest cases in the late nineteenth century revealed the existence of the crime and the criminal father's image to the entire society. Introducing horror and immorality into their homes, incestuous fathers became pariahs and were seen to endanger the moral society of the nineteenth century.

In fact, the definition of the crime became gendered. "The man who easily forgets that love is consent and often drifts to brutality in sexual pursuit--this brutality often resulting in rape and abduction--doesn't always spare his children. Incest is much more frequent among men than women," wrote the alienist Charles Fere in 1899. (3) Beyond the vision of male violence, fathers were the incarnation of authority. Through this conception, incest could be defined as a broken link. The importance of the family in the nineteenth century French society gave this transgression a criminal character. Every person in charge of the education of young children--an age when sexuality is normally prohibited-had betrayed the confidence of the society. Therefore, incest was no longer a question of biology. As they were the moral authority in charge of young children, step parents or lovers were also concerned by this prohibition.

However, a society's morals do not always necessarily dictate the codes of justice. Since 1791 and all throughout the nineteenth century, the French justice refused to criminalize incest. Incest was not a crime but a moral prohibition that did not enter into legal jurisdiction. However, this phenomenon can be approached through the judicial archives kept in French departements. In fact, for each French departements a court of justice named Com d"assises was created in 1808 for judging crimes defined by the penal code. Then, the revision of the code in 1810 did consider the aggravating circumstances of attentat a la pudeur or rape of a children under fifteen years old when committed by a person "of the class of those who have authority over the person to whom they committed the attempt." (4) Cases of rape, murder or infanticide allow us to analyse incest in daily life. At the same time, the growing importance of forensic scientists in the penal field contributed to reinforce the definition of the crime. Their corpus of debates and theses, published all along the century, give us a key to enter into the medical definition of incest. (5) Some contemporary social researchers can also be helpful. Observing the French poor in the nineteenth century, Louis-Rene Villerme or Frederic Le Play provided a window into incest's sphere. (6) To write a history of incest doesn't come down to a history of crime but rather to a history of perception and invisibility. Though French historians have studied sexual criminality, a specific analysis of incest has never been done. (7) Nevertheless, such a study appears to be essential for the historian who wants to understand how a common crime, perpetuated in distant villages, could be understood by the justice system and populat opinion. Or how incest, a juridically and socially silent crime, was revealed by a nineteenth century which contributed, paradoxically to construct it and to confine it to the rural world and the monstrosity? At last, such a study amounts to one simple question: how the visibility of an invisible crime is built by a society?

Committed within the confines of the private home, incest is linked to the history of private life and the nineteenth century housing structure. However, in a village where neighbors are ubiquitous and people are constantly observing each over, the crime doesn't remain a secret. Rumor and opinion spread until finally the justice system is obliged to acknowledge the crime.

House of crime

Most nineteenth century observers maintained that the housing situation of the poor was the trigger for immoral behaviours. (8) In 1832, the July Monarchy reestablished the Academic des sciences morales et politiques in order to continue the observation of the masses already begun in the eighteenth century. (9) But a slippage occurred between the two centuries in the growing fear of poor and indigent. Hygiene and illness were no longer seen as the threat that morality now was. Povetty and close quarters were understood as the path to crime. All along the century, the housing structutes of the workers were undoubtedly the more suspicious ones. Louis-Rene Villerme, about Etaques street in Lille, reported: "I have seen lying together fellows of both sexes and of very different ages, most of them without a shirt and of a repulsive dirtiness. Father, mother, old peoples, childten, adults, squeeze up against each others and pack into the place. 1 stop ... 1 prefer the reader to finish the painting himself, but I warm him: if he wants it complete, his imagination has not to draw back in front of any of the disgusting mysteries that happen into these impure levels, within the darkness and the drunkenness." (10)