SOCIAL HISTORY ANO GLOBAL HISTORY (1945-¡

seems to ha ve been a result of a change not in standard ofliving but rather vi dual taste, influenced by a better understanding of the rules of diet."

7 Marcus-Steiff, Les Etudes de motivation, p. 28. 8For recent research methods, see ibid. 9 Although a great deal is known about this way of using food, this knowledge should be collected and organized. Among the topics to be included: the buying rounds of drinks, holiday meals, degrees and modes of dietary V>l<=nr:oti.

for different social groups. 10 Roland Barthes, "Le Bleu est a la mode cette année: note sur la recherche des

signifiantes dans le vetement de mode," Revue franfaÍse de sociologie 1 (196o), 147-62.

11 Here I am using "structure" in the sense that it has in linguistics: "an entity of interna! dependencies," according to Louis Hjelmslev, Essais um>w<tin.,

(Cophenhagen, 1959), p. r. 12 Paul F. Lazarsfeld, "The Psychological Aspect of Market Research," Harvard

ness Review 13 (1934), PP· 54-71. 13C iaude Lévi-Strauss,Anthropologiestructurale (Paris: Plon, 1958), p. 99· 14 Henri Jeanmaire,Díonysos (Paris: Payot, 1951). 15 Semantically, vegetarianism, in restaurants at any rate, appears to be an

copy meat dishes through various artifices not unlike the use of simili (copies) dress.

16 Social ostentation is not purely and simply a matter of vanity. Motivational (using indirect questions) shows that there is a concern with appearance very subtle reactions, and social censorship is very powerful even in matters

17 The expression "cuisine bourgeoise" originally had the literal meaning of cooking" and la ter acquired the extended meaning of a relatively soph". nr""''" sine, but it has late! y fallen out of favor, while the "peasantpot-aufeu" (stew) odically the subject of photographic features in the major women's magazines.

18 Alimentary exoticism can, of course, be a value, but for the vast majority of Frenchmen it seems limited to coffee (the tropics) and pasta (Italy).

19 This is a good place to ask what "manly" food is. There is of, course, no· psychological quality to distinguish such things. An item of food is viril e when for dietetic (hence historical) reasons, women, children, and elderly people do eat it.

20 One has only to compare the development of vegetarianism in England and France.

21 Curren ti y in France there is a battle going on between tradicional and modern (dietetic) values.

22 The power to awaken, to recharge a person's batteries, seems to ha ve been ferred, in France at any rate, to sugar.

FRAN<;OIS BILLACOIS

For a Survey ofCriminality in Ancien Régime France

are now and always will be records lying untouched in the ar­For every document in the Trésor des Chartes and every issue of

Moniteur that has received the attention of dozens of scholars, how bundles of documents, how many registers, how many entire se­

of records ha ve been totally overlooked? New methods are slowly surely bringing valuable unexploited documents into general circu­

and in doing so they are changing the face of history: first, fiscal llíidúvt:s: then, over the past few decades, notarial minutes; still more

, parish registers; and now, judicial archives are gradually giving toa serial history, a history that is based on massive documentation cart:fully nuanced, one that is qualitative as well as quantitative-a

human history. 1

records constitute one of the richest and, until recently, least IIPliOltc~d documentary series. Among the types of materials included

court decrees, prosecutorial records, hearing transcripts, interroga­o( witnesses, and affidavits prepared by the clerks of Ancien Ré­courts and preserved by a civilization mired in procedure, attentive

liJt.Dre,cedll"1 t, and apt to spin a whole series of cases out of a single offense. There are three.reasons why these materials have been little exploited

now. First, their very abundance has been a deterrent. Historians ~· . .-nr~r•" alone ha ve been overwhelmed by the massiveness of the docu­

The records of the Parlement of París fill seven kilometers in the Archives Nationales.Z There are four hundred bundles

nal documents from the Parlement of Grenoble (one of the least I1'"Ncn~:n.A jurisdictions in France), and these concern sorne eight thou­

cases from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In every de­archive, Series B is one of the most abundantly stocked, with

11 Billacois, "Pour une enquete sur la criminalité dans la France d' Ancien

nnales 22 (Mar.- Apr. I967), pp. 340-49·

---

[ 100) SOCIAL HISTORY AND GLOBAL HISTORY (1945

judicial records from every leve! of jurisdiction from the chaussée, bailliage, préstdial, and e ven parlement.

Second, the documentation is not only massive but also ~o~ple~. Even a h~storian with a ~rm gr~sp of Ancien Régirne mstitUtiOns can eas¡Jy become lost m confl1cts over J. urisdict

1·

. 1 on, pmg customary aws, and transfers of cases from tribunal t And then there are the pitfalls of a formalistic style that is at

0 °

and highly abstract. In short, one is confronted with a maz~~e Ari~dne's threads take_one but _a shor~ distance before ending i~ poss1ble tangle. Those mventones wh1ch exist are cursory. So tions are not even classified chronologically. In arder to find ou~e a particular series is continuous enough to be usefully exploited no choice but to delve into its contents. There are a few irre ' aids, such as the Guzde des recherches dans les fonds judiciaires de régime, which not only describes the various collections in the Nationales but also gives a bibliography for each judicial · discusses the functioning and evolution of the various tribunals suggests types of research appropriate to each set of documents. ' scholarly aids, though, such as the famous and venerable Tables Nain are so difficult to use without a patient apprenticeship that more in the nature of an additional puzzle than a useful tool access to the sources.

Last but not the least among the obstacles we face in dealing documents from befare the second half of the seventeenth quite simply the difficulty of reading them. Clerks were slow to italianate script. With cramped hands and worn quills they covered after page of tria! transcripts without breaks for paragraphs or tion, following the arguments as best they could with the help of ations, omissions, variant spellings, and syllables tacked onto or off of words without regard to their meaning. The more legible a tence is, the more likely it was actually written befare or after the and simply repeats the usual judicial litany, full of stock flourishes as "item" and "de ce requis." By contrast, the closer the document is to spoken language, to the spontaneous reaction of the accused or the ness, the more palpably authentic the contents, the more apt the is to degenerate into impenetrable arabesque.

THE CoNTENTs OF THE CRIMINAL ARcHIVEs

Y et any social history that would be as comprehensive as possible do without this abundant though arduous resource. Here is a somewhat tedious, and by no means exhaustive listing of the contri tion that criminal records could make to various branches of history:

[ 101 ]

Groups · · · ¡ d · t" ons confessors associated certain sins wnh certam socia _con_ I I ,

knew that certain crimes were more likely to ?ccur m dl~ferent f society in part beca use of tensions inherent m the relatiOns of 0

· and' in part beca use of social stereotypes attached to each or social station. Marginals and nomads (itinerant traders, hawkers,

beggars, mountebanks) were especially apt. t~ end on_ the lP'IlllOo·ws. or at any rate in the dock. There is no more VIVId portrait of

"malingering" classes, which were the "dangerous_ cla~ses" of the Ancien Régime than that provided by the records of the1r tnals.

The history ~f domestic servants, another key social group, has yet to be written. Countless larcenies and robberies, as well as murd~rs of mas­ten by servants or of others by servants at the ~nstig_ation of th_e1r masters, could help shed light on the master-servant dialectlc, an amb1guo~s _rela­tlonship encompassing commitment as well as r~sent~e~t, comphcity as Well as hostility, as it was experienced on a da1ly bas1s ~~ seventeenth­and eighteenth-century shops, townhouses, and chateaux.

lnstitutional History . Only statistical analysis of working documents can replace a h1story that COnsists of external description of abstract metamorpho~es ~f c~ntentless !orrns With a real, vital history of legal procedure and mstltutiOn~ .. The slowness of justice" may prove to be somethi~g other than a trad1t10nal

rhetorical complaint of his majesty's subjects 1f o~e measures and com­Pares in broad diachronic perspective the durat10n of cases heard by

l 102 ] SOCIAL HISTORY AND GLOBAL HISTORY (1945-¡9

various courts, the number of cases processed in each session d . f h 'an proportwn o cases t at went to appeal. Other important inform ·

be o?tained would include the number and social background a~~~ to faultmg defendants, the number of criminal appeals the range of . e.

11 d s ' Pnso terms actua y mete out, the. eb? and flow of particular types of crirn 11

the use of torture, and the s1gmficance of executions in effigy de; public executions. an of

Religious Lije

The royal tribunals had jurisdiction over crimes ofblasphemy and . 1 Al h h · · · sacr¡. ~g~. , t oug cnmes commm~d by .clenc.s wer~ judged by the offi. czalztes, the royal courts dealt W1th cnmes m wh1ch ecclesiastics

. . Cl . were v1ct1ms. early, these records can be explo1ted to study religious ce 1·

d h . . 11 e rng, an t e reactwns of the Witnesses are as revealing as the charges th selves. Crimes of religion and common law can also tell us aboute~. Protestant and Jewish communities, and even about groups of d ·t e

h . d l'b . e1sts, at eists, an 1 ertmes, as well as about the Catholic majority 's attitude to~a.rd t.hese ?roups. Was there, for example, a distinctively Protestant cnmmahty, d1fferent from Catholic criminality as to the nature orfre­quency of t~e ~rime~ committed? Was the percentage of Protestant ~efe~da.nt~ 1~ lme ~1th th.e proport~o~ of Prot~stants in the popula­t1on. D1d 1t mcrease m penods of rehgwus confl1ct (or of social tension and economic difficulty)? Were people of different religions punished equally for the same crime?

Clearly, .then, this is a vast area, as vastas the history of material facts and collect1ve representations and sensibilities itselC These are sorne of the goals to be pursued through serial study of Ancien Régime criminal records. [ . . . ]

CoLLECTIVE INVESTI GA TIO N BEGUN

~n investigation has been launched under the auspices of the Sixth Sec­twn of the Ecole Pratique des H autes Etudes in collaboration with a sem.inar .on the history of the penal law. The parameters and sources of the mqu1ry ha ve been set and a team of researchers is already in place.

Sources

The. inquiry wi~l focus on criminal archives from the París region (in· clud~ng rural cnmes, urban crimes, and crimes associated with the capi· tal): m other words, records of the Chatelet, Parlement, and Bastille.8 As for the ~h~telet, which had initial jurisdiction in the majority of cases, the surv1vmg seventeenth-century records are quite fragmentary. By contrast, its eighteenth-century records are as complete as those of

NALES AN D PROGRAMS FOR SYSTEMATIC RESEARCH ( 103 ) ~~~ A N

~ and the loss of certain documents is compensated by the pro-p rlernen ' · · T · h 3 · of written records to wh1ch every case gave nse. wo e1g -Ji(er:~1_:ntury collections facilita te the approach .considerably by in~lud­reen rnes, ages, occupations, and sentences for 1mportant categones of 111g

11~ants. These are the Registres de la prévóté d'Ile-de-France and the defen taire alphabétique du grand crimine/ du Parlement de Paris. 9

Jnven

TneMethod . . . . . h investigator exammes tnal depos1t1ons related to h1s own work,

As eac . . ll h . e . h . h ·u also prepare a file card contammg a t e mwrmat1on t at mrg t he Wl . f . . l' l . h h . d f, be eful for a h1story o cnmma 1ty, a ong w1t ot er 1tems an re er-

us that could be needed for more specialized studies. At the conclu-ences . . . . · of this project these cnmmal records should be avarlable m a form

SIOn · h d Q .. suitable for treatment using modero data-processmg met o s. ur m1-tial goal is more modest, namely, to redu~e th~ sources to .a st~ndard form (a sample is appended to the end of th1s art1cle). To begm w1th, we are also making only periodic samples of the records (one year in every ten). Starting with the year 1785, we plan to work backward in time, beginning with the most complete and legible records as well as the ones Jeast alíen to our habitual ways of thinking, so as to perfect our method before tackling more difficult cases.

TheTeam lt is currently small, which justifies the modesty of our initial goals. Students will probably soon be added. We are confident, moreover, that the utility of such a study for all areas of the history of the final years of the Ancien Régime will bring additional collaborators for shorter or longer periods of time, people who will be led to our work by their own problems and who willleave us with those problems partly solved and with our joint program that much further advanced-for a collective labor is an ethical test.

TRANSLATED BY ARTHUR GoLDHAMMER

[ 104 ] SOC I AL HISTORY AND GLOBAL HISTORY (1945_

r--------------·----------·---------------·----·---------------·----·--=~

CRIMINAL CAsE STANDARD FoRM

I. T he Tria! A. Judgment

1. Date 2. Reference

B. Procedural file 1. Date 2. Reference

C. Other documents (if any) D. Initial judgment or appeal of judgment of __ _

II. The Offense A. Nature B. Date C. Place

III. The Accused A. Social characteristics

1. Last na me, first name, alias 2.Sex 3· Age 4· Rank or occupation 5· Place ofbirth 6. Place of residence 7· Religion 8. Signature 9· Miscellaneous

B. Absent, present in court, in custody, or deceased? C. Has he been involved in other cases? D. Were there accomplices?

IV. The Victim A. Social characteristics

1. Last na me, first name, alias 2.Sex 3· Age 4· Rank or occupation S· Place ofbirth 6. Place of residen ce 7· Religion 8. Signatu re 9· Miscellaneous

B. Relation to the accused (if any: kin, employment, neighbor, debtor)

V. Succinct analysis of the case with mention of accomplices if any lnr•r•o·JJillj

VI. Decision of the Court '

AND pROGRAM S FOR SYSTEMATIC RESEARCH [ 105 ]

NoTES

Uent analytic piece by Pierre Chaunu, "Une Histoire religieuse sérielle: exd~ diocese de La Rochelle (1648- 1721) et sur quelques exemples nor­Revue d'histotre moderne et contemporame 12 (1965), pp. 5-86. f" forrnation is taken frorn C harles Braibant's introduction to the Cuide

0 10 dans tes Jonds judiciaires de l'Ancien Régime (París: Direction des Ar-

.-~d~e,nft:>rance, 1958). départementales de l'Isere, ~ 21 18. . . .

--··"""'"'u• review of E. Thomas s Les Pétroleuses m the Tzmes Lzterary Supple-14,

1965), pp. 17- 19, entitled "Women in Arms," points out that in revo­

tirnes servants are always found on both sides. In 1871, for example, the _ ., .. ,rna•.u ofthe lady ofthe house sided with the Versailles government (justas

charnbermaid would later be an anti-Dreyfusard), whereas the govern­sided, at least in her heart, with the Commune, along with female indus­

workers and shopgirls. But what about 1789, or 1798, or the riots and uprisings eighteenth century? Were valets foot soldiers on the si de of the established or­did they lead the "populace" in pillaging wealthy residences?

methods are essential here, because the law, barring a few exceptions, did prison terms, which were left to the judge's discretion. early seventeenth centu ry L'Estoile in his ]oumal makes frequent mention of sentences for sorcery, bestiality, and sodomy. In the eighteenth century, these

while still illegal, no longer ended up in Parlement, much less on the scaf­When and how did the transition take place?

trials are an excellent touchstone for understanding religious beliefs and no­Henri Hours has described a riot that occurred when a group of women rose ward off a hailstorm they expected to strike their village owing to a threat of

p onlUJim:<lt.Jun. Trials also tell us about such collective notions as crime itself, the eighteenth century still encompassed such di verse offenses as "domes­"blows and excesses," blasphemy, and rnurder.

archives of the Bastille are preserved in the Bibliotheque de 1' Arsenal. Many of documents (along with documents of other provenance scattered through ar­ac~oss Europe) ha ve been published by F ran<;ois Ravaisson, Archives de la Bas­

r866-r884), 16 vols. Nationales, Y r8 792-18 795 and Inventaire 450.