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 exsoldiers – 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)