Crime and Punishment

Dr Chris Pearson

Two competing visions of crime and punishment in

19C France:• A narrative of improvement in

crime detection and more enlightened punishment regime?

• Or a narrative of more draconian punishments mobilized as a form of social control? (Foucauldian)

Lecture outline

•Crime and punishment from the revolution to the fin-de-siècle

•Urbanization and crime (Chevalier’s ‘dangerous classes’ thesis)

•Links between crime and gender

Crime during the ancien régime

• Crime dealt with within the local community – charivari

• Functions and jurisdiction of courts overlapping and confused

• Severe punishments – public execution – frequently handed out

• 1780s – property protected in courts, rather than community justice

Rationalizing crime and punishment?

• Influence of Enlightenment thinking – Cesare Beccaria’s Dei delitti e delle pene (1764) and Jeremy Bentham

• Punishment should match the crime• Rational actors would obey the law

to avoid punishment• 1791 penal code• 1810 penal code

Creating a professional police force

• 1800: police brought under control of prefects and commissaires de police (CP) created in towns with over 5,000 inhabitants

• Between state and local interestes

Police under the Third Republic

• Many police drawn from ranks of ex-soldiers – poor quality

• Initially very limited training (often none)

• But: Paris police school opens in 1883• New crime detection techniques –

figure printing, photography• New specialist units

Foucault – again!

• Discipline and Punish (1975)

• Move from public violence against the body (ancien régime) to “correction” of the criminal in prison

“Delinquency” in 19C France

• Individualizes crime and sets it apart from political/collective protests against political and economy equality

• Law-abiding members of working class distance themselves from the delinquents; the cost of committing crime becomes too great

• Prison/penal system a form of social control

Prison during the July Monarchy

• ‘The threat of imprisonment was a central feature of working-class life’ (MacPhee, Social History of France, 142)

• Incarceration rates reached their peak with 43,000 people (or 1.2 in every 1000) in prison

• Vast majority of prisoners urban, male, working class

• But some attempt at rehabilitation- productive work, education

Bio-medical explanations of crime

• Doctors, criminologists, psychologists identified biological factors that caused crime

• Certain people physically pre-disposed towards crime – provoked by modern urban environment and alcohol and drugs

• Supports Foucault’s argument that “experts” claimed to be able to empirically identify individual criminals

Doubting the penal system

• End 19C some doctors and criminologists losing faith in justice system based on rational and moral agents – crime seemed to be getting worse

• Criminal individuals needed to be carefully managed to neutralize their harmful impact on society

• See Harris, Murders and Madness (1989)

Punishment during the Third Republic

• Liberal, democratic government oversaw harsh punitive regime

• Transportation to the colonies continued - 1,770 transportations occurred annually in 1890s

• Prisons poorly funded and often overcrowded

• Capital punishment remained

‘The theory of degeneration enjoyed its immense popularity precisely because it provided a secular, scientific language for talking about the problem of recurring revolution and intractable criminal and antisocial tendencies. Political instability, class struggle, and social injustice were reassuringly translated into medicalized terminology and explained as part of a wider psycho-sociological pathology amenable to scientific investigation.’

Harris, Murders and Madness (1989), 78

The ‘dangerous classes’

• H.-A. Frégier’s book on the ‘dangerous classes’ (1840)

• Criminals, vagabonds, street urchins, low-paid workers, artists – all susceptible to crime and revolution

• Their vice displayed on the ‘contorted and twisted faces’ (Balzac)

Chevalier’s Labouring classes and dangerous

classes (1958) • ‘“Criminal” is the key word for the

Paris of the first half of the nineteenth century.’ (p.2)

• Fear of, and fascination with, crime• The bourgeoisie feared the arrival

of uprooted, poor migrants to Paris• Suffering from disease and poverty,

the city was in ‘pathological state.’ (p.23)

Questioning crime and urbanization:

‘The linking of crime, violence, and disorder to urban growth must fall into the category of things people simply want to believe, for the belief rests on no substantial foundation of verified fact or systematic analysis.’

Lodhi and Tilly, ‘Urbanization, Crime and Collective Violence in 19th Century France,’ American Journal of Sociology (1973), 296

Trends in urban crime

• Crimes against property fell from 1831 to 1871, as did the rates of crimes against persons– no direct link between crime and urban growth (Lodhi and Tilly, 1973)

• Theft not linked directly to urban growth but increase in theft in urban areas (Zehr, 1975)

• Violence higher in countryside than in urban areas (Zehr, 1975)

A challenge to the uprooting theory of urban crime: Corsicans

in Marseille• Corsican migrants to Marseille in 19C less

likely to commit crimes than other migrants

• Well-educated so gravitated towards stable, bureaucratic jobs and stayed for a long period

• Left behind the vendetta system – less likely to commit crime in urban Marseille than rural Corsica

• See Donovan, ‘Uprooting Theory of Crime,’ French Historical Studies (1984)

Gender, crime, and madness

• See work by Ruth Harris, Ann-Louise Shapiro

• Doctors and legal experts believed that female biology caused insanity

• Pregnancy and menstruation supposed led to bouts of madness and criminal acts

• Revolutionary criminal code made allowances for pregnant female defendants

‘In response to the pressing questions that were addressed to her, she responded, in tears, that she was tormented by a violent desire to kill someone. This young woman was married and a mother. When these attacks overcame her, it was especially her husband and children who became the focus of her deadly inclination… This murderous instinct had taken her suddenly; it coincided with a disturbance in her menstrual periods, which had become irregular.’

1829 report, quoted in Shapiro, Breaking the Codes (1996), 105

Women and kleptomania

• 1880+ doctors, legal experts and department store owners noted rise of shoplifting

• Crime seemed to be mainly committed by bourgeois women

• Medical and legal literature diagnosed kleptomania as irrational (women stealing objects they didn’t actually need)

• See O’Brien, ‘Kleptomania Diagnosis,’ Journal of Social History (1983)