Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies

Vol. 18, n°2 | 2014 Varia

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/chs/1481 DOI: 10.4000/chs.1481 ISSN: 1663-4837

Publisher Librairie Droz

Printed version Date of publication: 1 October 2014 ISBN: 978-2-600-01854-8 ISSN: 1422-0857

Electronic reference Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies, Vol. 18, n°2 | 2014 [Online], Online since 01 October 2017, connection on 24 September 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/chs/1481 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/chs.1481

This text was automatically generated on 24 September 2020.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Articles

Policing the empire / Policing the metropole : Some thoughts on models and types Clive Emsley

Homicide and Organised in a Global Perspective

Bare Sticks and Naked Pity : Rhetoric and Representation in (1644-1911). Capital Case Records Thomas Buoye

Figures of Deterrence in Late Imperial . Frequency, Spatial Repartition, and Types of Crimes Targeted by under the Qing Dynasty Jérôme Bourgon and Julie Erismann

Violence in Ming-Qing China : An Overview William T. Rowe

Toward a Global History of Homicide and Organized Murder Pieter Spierenburg

Forum

Review essay

Confronting terrorism: British Experiences past and present Georgina Sinclair

Reviews

Clère (Jean-Jacques), Farcy (Jean-Claude) (dir.), Le juge d’instruction : approches historiques Dijon, Éditions universitaires de Dijon, 2010, 320 pp., ISBN 9 782915 611687 Vincent Fontana

Dominique Kalifa, Pierre Karila-Cohen (dir.), Le commissaire de police au XIXe siècle Antoine Renglet

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Simon Fieschi, Les gendarmes en Corse 1927-1934. De la création d’une compagnie autonome aux derniers “bandits d’honneur” Tulle, Service historique de la Défense, 2012, 267 pp., ISBN 9 7821112 90495 Clive Emsley

Patricia Fumerton, Anita Guerrini (Eds) (with the assistance of Kris McAbee), Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500–1800 Farnham, Surrey, and Burlington, VT, Ashgate Publishing, 2010, xvi + 357 pp., ISBN 9 780754 662488 James Sharpe

Ho (Lawrence K.K.), Chu (Yiu Kong), Policing Hong Kong 1842-1969 : Insiders’ Stories Hong Kong, City University of Hong Kong Press, 2012, 299 pp., ISBN 9 789623 72064 Clive Emsley

David Niget, La naissance du tribunal pour enfants : une comparaison -Québec (1912-1945) Rennes, PUR, 2009, 417 pp., ISBN 9 782753 508521 Briony Neilson

Michel Porret, L’Ombre du Diable : Michée Chauderon, dernière sorcière exécutée à Genève / Ulrike Krampl, Les secrets des faux sorciers : police, magie et escroquerie à Paris au XVIIIe siècle James Sharpe

Laura Stokes, Demons of Urban Reform : early European Witch Trials and Criminal Justice, 1430-1530 / Orna Alyagon Darr, Marks of an Absolute Witch : evidentiary Dilemmas in early modern England James Sharpe

Jacques-Olivier Boudon (dir.), Police et gendarmerie dans l’Empire napoléonien Paris, Éditions SPM, 2013, 240 pp., ISBN 9 782901 952992 Antoine Renglet

Frédéric Chauvaud, La chair des prétoires ? Histoire sensible de la cour d’assises 1881-1932 Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2010, 384 pp., ISBN 9 782753 510975 Jérôme de Brouwer

Frédéric Chauvaud (dir.), Le droit de punir. Du siècle des Lumières à nos jours Rennes, PUR, « Histoire », 2012, 200 pp., ISBN 9 782753 517967 Ludovic Maugué

Benoît Garnot, Bruno Lemesle, Autour de la sentence judiciaire du Moyen Âge à l’époque contemporaine Dijon, EUD, 2012, 376 pp., ISBN 9 782364 410282 Elisabeth Salvi

Klewin Silke, Reinke Herbert, Sälter, Gerhard (eds), Hinter Gittern : zur Geschichte der Inhaftierung zwischen Bestrafung, Besserung und politischem Auschluss vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart / Ammerer Gerhard, Brunhart Arthur, Scheutz Martin, Weiß Alfred Stefan (eds), Orte der Verwahrung : die innere Organisation von Gefängnissen, Hospitälern und Klöstern seit dem Spätmittelalter / Leukell Sandra, Strafanstalt und Geschlecht : zur Geschichte des Frauenstrafvollzugs im 19. Jahrhundert (Baden und Preussen) / Bretschneider Falk, Scheutz Martin, Weiß Alfred Stefan (eds), Personal und Insassen von « Totalen Institutionen » – zwischen Konfrontation und Verflechtung Benoit Majerus

Knepper Paul, The Invention of International Crime. A Global issue in the Making, 1881-1914 / Knepper Paul, International Crime in the Twentieth Century : The League of Nations Era, 1919-1939 Jean-Michel Chaumont

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Martin Thomas, Violence and Colonial : Police, Workers and Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918-1940 Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012, 527 pp., 12 cartes, 8 graphiques, ISBN 9 780521 768412 Romain Tiquet

Pieter Spierenburg, Violence and Punishment. Civilizing the Body through Time Cambridge, Polity Press, 2013, 223 p., ISBN 9 780745 653495 John Carter Wood

Nicola Goc, Women, Infanticide & the Press, 1822-1922. News Narratives in England and Aldershot, Ashgate, 2013, 212 pp., ISBN 9 781409 406051 Martin J.Wiener

Books received

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Articles

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Policing the empire / Policing the metropole : Some thoughts on models and types

Clive Emsley

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The author would like to thank David Anderson, David Barrie, Mark Finnane and Georgina Sinclair for their comments and advice on earlier drafts of this article, as well as the three anonymous referees for this journal. He alone is responsible for any errors and inconsistencies.

1 Over the last 40 years or so there has been an enormous growth in the history of policing. This began as an off-shoot of the study of the history of crime and popular disorder, partly as a way of exploring the way in which plebeian classes appeared to be subject to new forms of discipline, but partly also as a way of getting to grips with a working-class man (and before the early twentieth-century police officers were all male) in a particular form of work setting. Moreover, while the police officer could be criticised for being an instrument for imposing discipline on a new working class, it was also the case that police officers came from that working class and, in capital cities especially, could constitute one of the largest single labour groups and one that developed a distinct organisational culture. The history of police in the European colonies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been rather slower to develop, but important work is now beginning to appear. In this journal, for example, a recent cluster of essays addressed the topic beginning with an important conceptual study pointing out the hybrid nature of much colonial policing. This article stressed the professionalization of police practice as central to the colonisers’ understanding of civilisation through public order maintenance. In the process the authors insist, rightly : ‘Les notions de “transfert” ou de “diffusion de modèles” policiers glissant des métropoles vers les colonies doivent en effet être abandonnées’.2 Yet, in the British

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case, particular models and styles of policing were often central to what colonial administrators declared that they needed, even if, when it came to making deployments on the ground, the police that they created and deployed often looked different from the model that they claimed to need.

2 Two final points by way of introduction. This article takes the contrast between English and Irish models as its starting point and its main focus is the British imperial experience. Two distinct models were, and in some quarters remain, central to the way in which the British imagined police. It is to be hoped, however, that the types described will have some relevance for imperial policing elsewhere, hence there are references to other colonial examples. Secondly, it seems sensible to include the United States among the colonial powers since much of the development of police institutions in the USA is reminiscent of that in Canada, of that in other white dominions of the British Empire, and also of that among many of the USA’s southern, Hispanic neighbours.

British models and a typology

3 There is a commonly held view that there were two distinct models of British policing – the civilian model, originating in the Metropolitan Police of London and the imperial model inspired by the Royal Irish Constabulary and developed across the British Empire from the mid-nineteenth century. These models continue to be used, indeed it can be said that they are currently ‘marketed’ in the contemporary world as providing a choice of the best ways to reform and reorganise police institutions in failed states or states emerging from international or civil wars.3 Yet there was never any serious theorising about these contrasting models during the nineteenth century, rather colonial administrators appear to have made assumptions that something on London Metropolitan lines might pass muster for some towns, but for vast expanses of sparsely populated countryside, they needed some sort of para-military policing and hence they looked to Ireland. In the early 1850s, for example, administrators in the Australian colony of Victoria asked London for 50 men from the Irish Constabulary ; but, in the event, they were happy to receive 50 men from London’s Metropolitan Police.4 Yet on the ground nineteenth-century British colonial administrators were prepared to pick and mix what appeared to suit them best and what was affordable and practical in the circumstances. Admittedly in 1907 it became a requirement that all men destined to command British Imperial Police forces – excepting those of the White Dominions – should undergo training at the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) headquarters at Phoenix Park in Dublin.5 Arguably this was justifiable by the RIC’s primacy among British imperial police forces. But where else might young men have been trained for such a role ? There was, after all, no officer corps training for the police in England, Wales and Scotland, while the Phoenix Park Depot dated back to 1842 and, from the outset, had trained RIC officers as well as men.6

4 The model of the English/British police officer – no more than a civilian in uniform, policing by consent, unarmed and non-political – found its classic, if implicit representation in the work of Charles Reith. Reith never took his research beyond the mid-nineteenth century, which meant that he could situate his representation of the Bobby in what appeared to him, and to many others, as a society based on consensus rather than conflict.7 Moreover, while he began to produce his books during the inter-

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war period when there were scandals about police corruption, concerns about police brutality and political partiality, and growing numbers of confrontations between police officers and middle-class motorists, the books also appeared to a backdrop of the two world wars. In contrast to his ‘British police’ Reith set up a European model of ‘Gendarmerie-’ policing which was top–down ‘ruler-appointed’ and essentially ‘despotic’ even ‘totalitarian.’8 Reith appears not fully to have understood the complexities of the European gendarmeries ; nor does he appear to have understood the similarities between European police systems, including those in Britain, during the nineteenth century. In terms of accountability, control and form I have earlier delineated these similarities as being of three types as follows : 1. State military : the Gendarmerie forces, equipped like soldiers and responsible to a section of central government, often a ministry of war. 2. State civilian : generally police forces in capital cities usually, like the gendarmeries, responsible to part of central government, in other words a ministry of the interior and/or of justice. It is important to remember that, until 2000, London’s Metropolitan Police had no local government direction and were responsible to the home secretary 3. Municipal : primarily responsible to local government and often only in an attenuated fashion to central government. ‘Municipal’ is used here in a very broad sense to cover local police attached to a predominantly rural local administration (such as an English county) as well as a clearly urban one.9

5 David Barrie has cogently argued that this typology would be better applied ‘if it were broadened out beyond the institutional confines of accountability, organization and finance to incorporate legal, cultural, functional and intellectual structures and influences’.10 I would not disagree with this since one of the central tasks of the historian is to identify general patterns and changes over time, the contrasts within these patterns, and the reasons for those contrasts. But the issues that Barrie wishes to incorporate, I would suggest, are precisely those that define national and regional differences within the types. Moreover, my original aim was to draw attention to similarities which so easily get ignored in the usual historical focus on a single country or region.

6 In addition to his failure to understand the situation on continental , there is another significant gap in Reith’s work : his omission of Ireland. It would be possible to nit-pick his work by pointing out that the whole of Ireland was united with England, Scotland and Wales during the period that constituted the focus of his work. But while there was a ‘state civilian’ force for Dublin and, until the late 1860s, ‘municipal’ police in Belfast and Derry, most of Ireland was policed by the Irish (from 1867 ‘Royal Irish’) Constabulary. This body was armed and deployed along the lines of a gendarmerie, though the British Parliament preferred the term ‘constabulary’ when pressing forward with the legislation that created it in the early 1820s.11 In omitting the Royal Irish Constabulary, however, Reith was following, as well as perpetuating and strengthening, a tradition that understood this body as being quite different from the police deployed in the metropole.

7 The notion of distinct English and Irish models of policing was cemented in the history of British colonial police published in 1952 by Sir Charles Jeffries, who served as the Deputy Under-Secretary of State for Colonies for ten years from 1946. Jeffries recognised that some form of policing existed before the creation of London’s Metropolitan Police, but like the traditional British police historians of his day, he

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continued to see first, modern policing dating from 1829, and second, the Metropolitan Police as the model. In the colonies, however, he believed that an alternative system was required ; and he delineated three phases in the colonial police tradition, with much overlapping and variations in tempo. In the initial phase the basic essentials of law and order had to be secured. Once this was achieved the second phase could be implemented of establishing semi-military constabulary forces that could be called upon to suppress crime and ‘mass-outbreaks’. For this purpose Jeffries saw the colonial authorities looking to the RIC for a model. Into the merits or demerits of this system, as applied to Ireland, it is not for me to enter ; but it is clear enough that from the point of view of the Colonies there was much attraction in an arrangement that we should now call a ‘para-military’ organisation or gendarmerie, armed, and trained to operate as an agent of the central government in a country where the population was predominantly rural, communications were poor, social conditions were largely primitive, and the recourse to violence by members of the public who were ‘agin [sic] the government’ was not infrequent.12

8 During Jeffries’s third phase the semi-military constabularies were converted into a form resembling the ‘essentials [of] the British pattern … but still retaining certain continuing supplementary functions of a military character.’ Also, during this stage, there was the potential for a significant increase in officers and NCOs from the indigenous population.13

9 Jeffries’s phases of colonial policing offer a pleasing image of progress and a simple, rational theory of administrative development, yet his description covers neither the complexities that the British found when they first established themselves in the different territories that became their empire, nor those that developed subsequently. There were territories that were vast and undeveloped with scatterings of often nomadic, indigenous peoples ; but these peoples had chiefs and elders, arbitration and enforcement traditions, and social norms. Elsewhere there were already significant bureaucratic structures and municipal administrations that included policing systems. However, in what became the United States, and in the kind of territories that the British termed ‘White Dominions’, cities and towns grew up which often had few indigenous people making a home in them, but which acquired municipal structures, including urban police, very similar to those of the original mother country. The term ‘settler colonialism’ has been deployed to characterise areas where the settlers became the majority and denied any responsibility for colonialism.14 The White Dominions, as well as the USA and many of the states that emerged out of Spanish America, all more or less fit this form of colonialism and, as a result, their police institutions scarcely fit Jeffries’s phases of rational development.

Different police for different situations

10 The distinction described by Michael Broers with reference to Napoleon’s empire is equally useful for illuminating the complexities of European overseas empires during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Broers described an inner core, intermediate zones and an outer empire.15 In the British Empire an inner core could be found in the cities, towns and economically developed districts of the White Dominions where, although the European colonists could be troublesome, it was possible to deploy administrative and governmental systems not greatly removed from those in the

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metropole. The outer fringes, where the indigenous peoples were not particularly wedded to, or indeed much aware of their colonial masters, and where borders were indistinct and porous, required either a laissez-faire attitude or something forceful and vigorous, perhaps even a combination of the two depending on the circumstances. Policing in the European empires was much more pragmatic than Jeffries’ formulation ; it depended on the structure of the colony, the region to be policed, the finance available and the inter-relationship between those to be policed and the colonial government.

11 Nearly a quarter of a century ago Richard Hawkins warned that ‘anyone who surveys the police forces of the [British] empire, at whatever period, expecting to find so many replicas of the Irish constabulary, will be disappointed and indeed bewildered.’16 Sixty years earlier J.C. Curry, a European officer of the Indian Police, could write a book surveying the Indian Police and its history with only one mention of the RIC ; specifically a reference to General Sir Charles Napier who, after his conquest of Sind in 1843, created a police for the province on the Irish model.17 S.T. Hollins, who had grown up in Ireland and who joined the Indian Police in 1902 as a probationary Assistant Superintendent, made no mention of the RIC in his memoir of 44-years-service. Hollins took an examination for the Indian Police in London, and attended a police training college at Moradabad in India alongside two other young British officers and about 120 Indian cadets.18 A few have tried to explain what was distinctive about the RIC model and the memoirs of former members suggest a strong esprit de corps within the force. Yet the memoirs can be slightly contradictory. Thomas Fennell, who finished his career as a head constable, believed the RIC’s spirit to be unique. He also felt it was distinctive from other British police because it was ‘a semi-military body drilled and trained to the use of arms on military lines.19 Robert Curtis, who was a County Inspector, quoted at length the force’s Inspector General who, during the 1860s, challenged criticism of the corps as being ‘too military’, insisted that there was ‘no military mania’ and asserted that his men were ‘of a different stamp from those in the army’.20

12 Implicitly the difference between the Irish and English police models is that the former had the potential to be more repressive and punitive, or, as Georgina Sinclair has put it, the Irish was ‘“colonial” and armed’, the English was ‘“civil” and unarmed.’ But as she also notes, the ‘civil and colonial models of policing cross-fertilized throughout the nineteenth century.’21 During the 1840s, for example, a few English counties believed that the Irish Constabulary constituted a better model than the police of London for their own circumstances, and throughout both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Irish officers were selected to command English police forces.22 The RIC was deployed, like most European gendarmeries, in small barracks situated on main roads and containing around half-a-dozen men. The men themselves were almost all native Irishmen, mostly the sons, especially the younger sons of small farmers in the south, west and midlands of the country. No man was permitted to serve in the district of his birth, or that of his wife ; and, like the majority of the population, the men were mainly Catholic. They were armed with rifles and bayonets but, by the turn of the century, they were commonly patrolling without this weaponry and were reasonably well integrated with the local population in which they served.23 Indeed, by 1900 the RIC ‘Peeler’ was not greatly distinguishable from the British ‘Bobby’ and, possibly for this reason, official thinking on creating the South African Constabulary during the Boer War of 1898-1901 tended to look to the North West Mounted Police of Canada.24

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13 The distinction between the English and Irish models continues to be employed at least as a starting point by some of the more recent and perceptive historians of policing in the British Empire ; and Sinclair and Williams have argued that colonial police can be categorized, using my typology, as ‘state military’ forces. Such police, they maintain, evolved as centralised bodies, armed as soldiers and directly accountable to the civil power of a particular colony.25 I believe that my earlier typology of nineteenth-century police continues to have relevance for exploring the colonial situation but, as will be discussed in the remainder of this article, in a rather more complex fashion than in Europe. First, in the White Dominions and other areas of settler colonialism, there could be a fusion of state military, state civilian and even municipal aspects within the same force. Second, it is sensible to add a fourth type that might loosely be termed ‘colonial franchise policing’. By this term I mean police responsible usually to a local chief in a district where the colonial authority was distant, thin and feeble.26 Here leaders of the indigenous communities were authorised to exercise police powers under the suzerainty of the colonial administration. This franchise policing might, depending on the circumstances, be subdivided further as follows : 1. Native : These were policing institutions that existed before colonial occupation but which were authorised to continue under native rulers who had reached an accommodation with the imperial authorities. Generally they functioned within the framework of traditional norms and regulations, and the traditional chiefs or elders maintained their authority over these personnel. They functioned only in districts reserved for this population. Sometimes they were supervised by the colonial power but they rarely had any authority over any Europeans. 2. Restructured : In some instances old police institutions were reorganised by the colonial power ; they lost some old powers, gained some new ones, and were required to enforce the new forms of law introduced by the imperial authorities.

14 The edges of these types often shaded into each other, but situations on the ground rarely, if ever, fit the framework of ideal types with precision ; and, in the case of police institutions, this is thanks to the kinds of legal, cultural, functional and intellectual structures and influences that David Barrie emphasises.

Missionaries of (European) civilisation

15 In one of the first of the serious, modern analyses of nineteenth-century English policing, Robert Storch described the policeman as a ‘domestic missionary’, acting as ‘an all-purpose lever of urban discipline’, as well as dealing with the various other tasks of crime fighting and maintaining public order.27 Police in colonial towns and cities had similar roles. But whereas Storch was thinking in terms of establishing a respectable, middle-class morality, in the colonies the police missionary task, at least as far as the indigenous population was concerned, was to impose European values and norms.

16 The spread of European powers into the wider world was already under way by the late seventeenth century. Two centuries later awareness of the size and shape of the world and rule in the wider world had changed significantly. Much of the difference in the early nineteenth century was the result of colonists liberating themselves from their motherland. Much of the Americas were now governed by former colonists and the focus of European imperialism shifted to Asia, Africa and Australasia. The former American colonists had experience of different police institutions from the old regimes

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of Europe ; in the nineteenth century they began to establish police institutions much on the lines of those being developed in nineteenth-century Europe, though with a recognition of their particular circumstances. The thirteen colonies that came together to form the United States of America brought practices to the Americas similar to those in England, but developed them differently. During the nineteenth century, while sometimes looking to the London Metropolitan Police, city police institutions in the USA were established along the lines of the municipal type but usually with democratic and elective elements.28 Police institutions responsible to the governments of individual states were established towards the end of the century for supervising and maintaining order outside of the towns and cities ; and a small number of federal police institutions were formed with officers appointed to deal with offences and problems that crossed state boundaries or affected the union as a whole.29 The Portuguese imported their quadrilha system to ; this resembled the English system of constables, appointed for a fixed period from dependable local men. Early in the nineteenth century, as the Portuguese royal fled to its massive South American colony to escape Napoleon’s armies, a system of state police was developed along continental European lines. In the early 1830s two state military forces were formalised : the Guardas Municipais Permanentes (in 1831) for the city of Rio de Janeiro, and the Guarda Policial da Provencia do Rio de Janeiro (in 1835) for the remainder of the province.30

17 Both in the newly independent Americas and in territories that were brought into the expanding nineteenth-century European empires there were white explorers, colonisers, settlers, missionaries and jurists who considered that the indigenous tribal peoples among whom they planted their flags were anarchic, that their laws involved little more than ‘revenge’, and that they indulged in judicial and penal practises ‘only such as are consistent with a state of darkness and irrational superstition’.31 In the year that he was instrumental in the creation of the lieutenant général de police de Paris (1667), Jean Baptiste Colbert lamented that so little effort had been made in New France to bring the concepts of police and civil society (la vie civile) to the native Algonkin and Huron peoples.32 Others, in contrast, saw aboriginal peoples as having norms and laws that imposed well-considered sanctions on those identified as wrong-doers, and the imposition of sanctions, of course, required some degree of enforcing.33 The enforcers of norms in tribal societies came from the community that they served and took their guidance from those, usually chiefs or elders, who held the knowledge of their society’s norms. There were, in consequence, tight links and overlaps between any arbitrators or enforcers, their community, and those from whom they took direction. But not all of the territories in which Europeans sought trade and profit, and in which they planted their flags, were populated by nomadic peoples living in relatively small -style communities and self-policing according to custom and tradition. There were also much larger polities, particularly in Asia, with significant urban centres and centralised, legalistic forms of government that also experienced varying degrees of European involvement and occupation. By the eighteenth century both Imperial China and Mughal India, for example, had developed policing structures and systems that were in many ways similar to those in Europe. The baojia system, for example, had its origins during the in the eleventh century and was not unlike the English Frankpledge and the tythings that emerged in the same period.34 While in Mughal India policing was seen as a part of the hierarchical structure that ran down from the emperor through his provincial governors and urban administrators.35

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18 European imperialists often made little distinction between policing within the small, sometimes nomadic tribes and the structures of sophisticated kingdoms and empires ; all of these societies appeared to lack the rationality of European law and administration. The Europeans considered that their systems were best and that they were bringing civilisation even to peoples who had long left small tribal communities ; part of this ‘civilisation’ included the creation and maintenance of what the colonial state defined as ‘order’ and ‘law’ and this necessitated the imposition of some form of police institution. Gendarmeries offered one positive way of policing imperial territories and imposing European law. Indeed a key role of the gendarmerie forces (including the RIC) across the nation states and empires of nineteenth-century Europe, was to show the flag to peasants and emphasise to them that they belonged to a particular nation state or empire.36 Yet the vast areas of many colonial territories left gendarmes very thin on the ground. There were rarely more than 1000 members of the French Gendarmerie posted to overseas territories ; they were more numerous during military campaigns when the task of policing the army tended to be paramount, but in periods of financial stringency the number of gendarmes overseas could be significantly reduced.37 A small force of Maréchaussée was established in the Dutch colony of Curaçao in 1838 and, a quarter of a century later, on the eve of slave emancipation, this was extended to Surinam. In total a force of 122 men was recruited from European soldiers based in these Dutch colonies. But a police institution of such numbers was always going to be insufficient to maintain a permanent supervision of the rural areas and the plantations.38 In German South West Africa the police was distinct from the army but, while it was required to perform much the same tasks as the soldiers in the territory, there was no notion of describing it as a Gendarmerie. Financial cutbacks reduced the number of 750 men proposed in 1907 to barely 450 six years later. They were expected to police only about 60 per cent of the colony and rode through their respective districts to remind the indigenous population (estimated at the time to be about 60,000) of the presence of German soldiers (about 1900 of them in 1913), and to protect German farmers and other settlers (about 14,000). Like most European empires the Germans appear to have had mixed ideas about precisely what they were doing in South West Africa ; the police were supposed to bring and maintain the order necessary for a state on European lines but, like similar colonial police institutions, they were few and thinly spread, and since negotiation was usually better than force in day-to-day dealings with the indigenous peoples, the German policemen were also seriously hampered by their lack of knowledge of the native languages.39

19 From the revolution of 1848 successive French governments considered Algeria to be a part of Metropolitan France ; the hope was that it would provide a home for French workers and peasants, but the aspiration was never achieved, not least because of the resistance of the indigenous peoples who were more numerous and, arguably at least, better organised than most of the indigenous peoples of what became Britain’s White Dominions. The French swept away the old, apparently relatively effective policing structure and replaced it with their state-civilian commissaires de police for the cities and big towns and their gendarmes for the fringes of the towns and the main routes. A posting to Algeria was rarely popular with gendarmes from the metropole. The harshness of the terrain and the dangers of disease, the difficulties of supply and the unpleasant nature of distant territory for a man separated from, or even accompanied by, his family, all counted against it – though it has to be admitted that the harshness of Algeria was probably matched in the eyes of many men by the problems in Corsica

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where an alien, often hostile population, with out-dated ideas of honour and violence, combined with a harsh terrain and a high incidence of malaria to make this a similarly undesirable posting.40 Algeria, however, was vast and way beyond the supervision of the thousand or so gendarmes that composed the police garrison beyond the towns. One solution was to recruit members of the indigenous community as auxiliaries for the gendarmerie. French Algeria was not the only overseas possession to employ such auxiliaries. In German South West Africa black African Polizeidiener (police servants) were considered indispensable and were entrusted with their own armed patrols without a supervising white man.41 Nevertheless up until the end of the First World War most auxiliary corps generally had white, European officers ; and, even after 1919, white officers appear to have predominated in the senior posts of most such units. Within their institutional confines most of these forces still fit broadly into the state/ military form of police ; indeed, in some instances they were military or militia bodies given new and badges – the transfer of 10,000 or so Kikuyu Home Guard into the Tribal Police of Kenya in 1956 is a classic example.42

20 It was not just ‘auxiliaries’ that had European officers. Most colonial, as opposed to local native, police forces in British Africa had British officers, sometimes with a few junior Asian officers, and a rank and file made up entirely of Africans.43 It was much the same in India where, in 1861, the police stationed in the Madras Presidency had 64 Europeans, 93 Anglo-Indians and 24,033 Indians. At the same time, in Calcutta the police numbered 106 European and 2,993 Indians, but few of the latter were natives of Calcutta.44 The British tended to divide the Indian races. They considered that Bengalis were physically inferior and were inclined towards intellectual pursuits, consequently for policemen, as for soldiers, they put their faith in men from those that they considered to be of the ‘martial races’ – mainly Muslims from the north of the subcontinent.45 Elsewhere in the empire such martial races were sometimes preferred to recruits from the indigenous population. Throughout their colonial management of Hong Kong, the British found many of their police recruits for the island among the martial races of the Indian subcontinent. At the end of the First World War they also recruited big, tough men from Shandong province ; the problem was that while these men were ethnic Chinese and had a hefty physical presence, they had a poor grasp of Cantonese, the language of the majority of Hong Kong Chinese, and little or no English. 46

21 Just because some imperial police institutions were called ‘gendarmeries’, ‘constabularies’ or even ‘police’ forces, however, it was not necessarily the case that they were engaged in tasks that conventionally came under the broad heading of policing in the metropole. Nor did they always resemble the missionary tasks of bringing European civilisation to the indigenous peoples. The first premier of the dominion of Canada, Sir John A. Macdonald, telegraphed London for information about the RIC when he planned an expedition to plant the flag in the newly-acquired western territories between Manitoba and the Rocky Mountains. But, while Macdonald insisted that the men on his expedition be called ‘police’, the 270 men of the North West Mounted Police (NWMP) that embarked on the Great March West in 1874 wore the scarlet tunics of the , rode and were equipped like a regiment of dragoons, and also had the benefit of small artillery pieces. Most of them were native-born, white Canadians ; no more than 14 seem to have been born in Ireland.47 George Bowen, the first Governor of Queensland, claimed in 1860 that he wanted a native police on the ‘Irish model’. However the Native Police established in Queensland – made up of

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Aboriginal rank and file with European officers – was principally required to remove other Aboriginal people from their land to make way for white settlement. Like other Native Police in Australia, these mounted police troopers behaved more like marauding military auxiliaries, killing their prey, destroying small camps, and burning bodies together with any other evidence of their murderous behaviour.48

22 Even though British colonial governments thought that there might be something significant about the Irish Police, and even though they were often eager to employ former members of the RIC, they were also often sympathetic to the state–civilian model of the Metropolitan Police, particularly for urban areas. In the Madras Presidency during the mid-1850s, in spite of concerns about security and a high level of violent crime, the Irish model was deemed too military. Lord Harris, Governor of Madras, and Sir William Robinson, his police commander, devised a compromise by which the majority of men were unarmed while a small, armed reserve was maintained for each district. Initially it was intended that the membership of the two groups would be interchangeable, but the situation solidified and the two groups developed separate identities. The system established by the Madras Police Act of 1859 became common throughout British India. Both the armed and the unarmed police were responsible to central authority but, given the size of the imperial possessions, it was recognised that an all-India supervision of police was impossible and, in consequence, as with other government business in India, the police were organised within, and answerable to, the British provincial administrations.49

23 In India, as elsewhere where the indigenous people were seen as requiring European tutelage, there was no consultation about police reform and reorganisation. But nor was there much consultation when it came to policing towns full of white immigrants, or the sons and daughters of immigrants (or, in the case of New South Wales and Tasmania, convicts). In these situations, however, colonial administrators were often inclined to look to London’s Metropolitan Police for their model. The population of early nineteenth-century , for example, had brought from Britain a distrust of state-controlled police such as the French Gendarmerie ; but, in spite of their fears of convicts, of freed convicts, aboriginals and bushrangers, they preferred a system based on that of London. In 1841 they received from England as their First Police Magistrate and Chief Police Officer, William Augustus Miles, a man who had served as an Assistant Commissioner on the Royal Commission on a Rural Constabulary, who shared the ideas on police proposed by the great moral entrepreneur Edwin Chadwick, and who was determined to introduce the London system to the antipodes lock, stock and barrel.50 The city of Melbourne, in the neighbouring colony of Victoria, might have recruited large numbers of Irishmen into its police but, during 1850s and subsequently, the colonial government was keen to have its urban police following closely the style of beat policing aimed at the prevention of crime for which London was becoming famous. 51 During the 1850s both New South Wales and Victoria united their different and independent town police, water police, gold fields police and rural constabularies into single police forces whose members both walked urban beats along Metropolitan Police lines, and patrolled rural districts from small isolated posts. These police were an amalgam of state–civilian and state–military being answerable to the central government of each respective colony ; shortly afterwards Queensland and Western Australia did the same. The colony of Tasmania, however, moved in the opposite direction until the end of the century. There had been a centralised police in Tasmania since the 1820s, when the colony was populated by large numbers of convicts. This

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force became notorious for infringing liberties, providing little protection, and costing the colonial coffers a considerable amount. By the 1850s the indigenous population was virtually wiped out, the threats from convicts and bushrangers were seen as things of the past, the colony’s government wanted to cut expenditure, and the emerging rural elite wanted to exert its own local authority. Under the Rural Municipalities Act of 1858, 50 ratepayers could request the Governor to authorise municipal councils with the power to establish their own policing ; and this system continued until the end of the century.52

24 While the ‘Mountie’ has almost become a symbol for Canada the NWMP, subsequently the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (la Gendarmerie Royale du Canada), was always a small element of the police institutions in the country and in the early part of the twentieth century it was only patrolling the wastes of the new western provinces as a result of contracts signed between those provinces and the federal government. Elsewhere in Canada the structure of policing largely followed that of the boroughs of provincial England with the forces responsible, first and foremost to the local state – the city council and, sometimes, police commissioners. These were unquestionably municipal police institutions and different towns and cities selected their recruits according to their own preference – local men or immigrants, the sons of Canadian farmers or tradesmen, Scots, Protestants, and in Quebec, of course, the men needed a working knowledge of French.53

25 In Canada, in spite of the wide-open spaces and the centrality of the Mountie in the country’s popular history, policing had begun in the urban districts populated by European colonists. The situation was much the same in Australia where ‘it was the city that seemed to harbour the most dangerous criminal frontier’.54 Special mounted police forces to patrol the rural districts began to appear from the 1830s. These men covered enormous distances on patrols that could take weeks ; in 1869, for example, the magistrate in Dalby, just over 100 miles east of the Queensland capital of Brisbane, reported that, over the course of a month, two of his constables had completed a 700- mile patrol executing warrants and delivering summonses.55 The development of policing in New Zealand was similar, partly because the first relatively formal police structures were imported from New South Wales. Small urban police bodies designed to deal with white colonists functioned in parallel with an Armed Constabulary established to patrol rural districts and, particularly, to deal with any threat from indigenous Maori.

Colonial franchise policing

26 It is logical to expect that military and state–civilian police were more significant than municipal variants in colonial settings. The colonial state, after all, generally sought to establish its own mores, legal structures and perceptions of civilization on the often reluctant, indigenous populations. But the vast territories of the nineteenth – and twentieth-century European empires, and the prohibitive costs of providing police officers at levels similar to those of the metropole, meant that professional, bureaucratic police were bound to be thinly spread, particularly outside of the major towns. One remedy, especially in the initial period of colonial domination or in tribal areas only loosely bound to the colonial authority, was what I have called above ‘colonial franchise policing’. In this type the colonial power authorized a tribal chief or

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an indigenous group to carry out policing activity (native police), or to reorganise their activities in ways that introduced and maintained some of the colonists’ legal ideas and structures (restructured police).

27 The East India Company sought to establish itself as the legitimate sovereign power in Madras, Bengal and other territories as they came under its control. But it lacked the resources for a complete reformation of the existing legal systems and so incorporated some traditional institutions into its governing framework. It was from among these institutions, specifically the tahsildars of Madras and the daroghas in Bengal, that it found the men to act as both tax collectors and agents to preserve the peace. These police were drawn from the local society ; their office gave them status but, on behalf of their European paymasters, they were expected to maintain new kinds of discipline and order, and to enforce a wider definition of criminal law with rather more rigour than under the Mughals. Since their pay was poor it was hardly surprising that these police persisted in some of the less savoury aspects of policing that had been known under the old order – specifically torturing suspects and taking bribes. Perhaps because of the new rigour at least one Bengal policeman gave receipts for the bribes that he received. 56 Even after the development of formal police institutions following the Crown’s replacement of the East India Company as the colonial power, the watchmen in Indian villages were not formally incorporated into the new police even by the 1920s ; they remained local men closely tied to the local elite.57 Right up until the independence of India the various Indian princes who acknowledged the British Raj were permitted, amongst their other privileges, to their own police. They often borrowed a serving British officer, or appointed one who had retired, to reorganise their police. For example, S.T. Hollins’s final appointment, made in 1942, was as the Police Adviser to a dozen such states. Hollins had a poor opinion of the pay and conditions of these police and this, he believed, fostered corruption ; but the princes made little response to his assessment.58 And the tribal areas of British India’s North West Frontier were only ever loosely administered and supervised by the Political Department of the Indian Civil Service (ICS). The Border Military Police was established for the area with a commander drawn from the local Baloch tribes who reported to the local European political officer of the ICS. The Baloch tribesmen who served in the force were given a British Army rifle and a few articles of clothing, but they were expected to provide their own horses. There was little training and little paperwork and, within reason, the Balochs appear to have been permitted to continue their tribal traditions of honour and blood feud.59

28 During the first fifty years of Pakeha60 domination in New Zealand there were special judicial arrangements for the indigenous Maori and a Native Constabulary was introduced to control and supervise the indigenous population and to enforce, to some degree, Pakeha norms and prescribed tribal boundaries. George Grey, as Governor of New Zealand in the 1840s, aspired to make the colony’s police a mixed force of white men and Maoris. He saw this as a way of projecting European mores and ‘civilization’ among the indigenous people. Maori police recruited from the sons of tribal chiefs and men of standing, he believed, would go back to their people with European ideas and encourage their acceptance. But there was considerable opposition among the Pakeha to having Maori, especially armed Maori, patrolling streets and exercising any authority over white Europeans. Maori constables were soon limited to dealing with their own kin and tribe, or were also used as occupation forces on other tribes that had

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proved troublesome to the Pakeha. The Maori considered that service as constables, and their acceptance as such, was a means for them to ensure rangatiralanga, broadly translatable as autonomy ; and occupying and policing the lands of tribes who were troublesome to the Pakeha was a means of striking at tribal enemies. By the 1880s there were plans to phase out the Native Constabulary the colonists considered that Maori behaviour was becoming more acceptable, that the special judicial arrangements were no longer needed and that local people were likely to have too many family links to make useful police in their own communities. At the turn of the century, however, Maori councils were authorised to swear-in their own part-time constables to enforce local laws and regulations. But problems remained as these constables often continued to hold to the traditional ideas of a communal society with distinct customs and laws. As ever, the Pakeha insisted that Maori constables should never interfere with a European unless acting with a white officer. Yet Maori resistance, and the aspirations of rangatiralanga, meant that, even as the Maori became overwhelmingly urbanised in the twentieth century, they continued to exercise their own form of community policing and, towards the end of the twentieth century, the New Zealand government began to recognise the need for some form of partnership rather than simply requiring acceptance of Pakeha systems.61

29 In Nigeria the British authorised the creation of Native Authority Police Forces to enhance the authority of native administrations, particularly in the north and west of the colony, and to ensure their loyalty to British suzerainty. Many of these forces were based on the police systems that had existed before the arrival of the British and, while in their revised forms they were no longer recruited from slaves, they continued after Nigerian independence and until the collapse of the first republic in 1966.62 The South African Constabulary were used to deter risings by the indigenous peoples and to assist mine-owners when dealing with industrial disputes but, in general, they did not patrol locations where African tribal chiefs still ruled and remained responsible for law and order.63 In the Sudan, during the 1920s, the British established tribal police who acted under the authority of the local chiefs, but who provided a link between the chief and the nearest British District Commissioner.64

30 While it was not an imperial colony in the sense of those territories in Africa and Asia occupied by Europeans during the nineteenth century, there were similar native police developed in one of the greatest areas of settler colonialism, the western United States. The police established under the Bureau of Indian Affairs for the Plains Indians profited from traditions that existed before the white man came. As Dr Valentine McGillycuddy, one of the Bureau’s agents, put it : The Indians generally recognise the police authority, for, from time immemorial, there has existed among the Sioux and other tribes, native soldier organizations, systematically governed by laws and regulations. Some of the strongest opposition encountered in endeavouring to organize the police force … was from these native organizations, for they at once recognised something in it strongly antagonistic to their ancient customs, namely force at the command of the white man opposed to their own.65

31 Recruits to the Indian police were attracted by the regular job, the pay and the authority that the position offered them. The Bureau’s agents were keen to recruit those who had shown themselves hostile to the white man’s rule, hoping, in this way, to win over the more dangerous and threatening bands. But men more sympathetic to the white man predominated and the police were often involved in factional squabbles

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between the traditionalists and the so-called progressives who were more ready to accept the new order of things.

32 The problems of men being torn between their communities and the people that paid their wages was not something unique to the empires. In parts of Great Britain it was the policy of chief constables to recruit men from outside their force’s jurisdiction so as to avoid such difficulties and to ensure that men ‘maintained the peace and enforced the law’ without fear or favour. But in the empires – as well as in parts of Europe where the peasantry spoke a significant patois or a different language from that of the state’s bureaucracy – the policy of recruiting strangers to police strangers also created the kinds of problems noted above, for example, with reference to the Shandong men recruited to police Hong Kong. And if there was a problem over recruiting strangers to police strangers, there were also problems over European attitudes to the jurisdiction of indigenous police officers. Pakeha hostility to Maori police constables exercising authority in white men’s towns has already been noted. Elsewhere white settlers and businessmen commonly refused to be policed by indigenous peoples and expressed alarm about them being authorised to carry, and trained in the use of, firearms. Such fears were expressed with reference to the Aboriginal police in Australia and elsewhere where the black man was seen as uncivilised and one who easily slipped out of the control of his white officers.66 In the early years of the British occupation Chinese police in Hong Kong were not authorised to carry firearms, were not allowed on late night duty, and were not stationed in the European districts. In yet another example of franchise policing Chinese businessmen arranged for, and partially funded a separate night-time watch in their districts ; the District Watchmen Forces in the colony were monitored by European inspectors, but supervised also by a board comprising 15 Chinese community leaders under the chairmanship of the Secretary for Chinese Affairs. This was distinct from the management of the Hong Kong Police itself which came directly under the governor’s central administration.67

33 Just as there are exceptions to rules, so there are exceptions in administrative models. From the 1920s the Western Townships of Johannesburg appeared increasingly to be centres of violent crime. The aspiring black middle class in the townships worried about poorly-educated young men in low-paid, dead-end jobs and about unruly migrant workers who, together, seemed responsible for the violence. The South African Police (SAP) appeared more interested in enforcing pass-laws and alcohol regulations than in combating crime ; as a consequence the adult black community established its own police patrols. When the situation came to a head in the early 1950s the white Johannesburg City Council and its Non-European Affairs Department were sympathetic to the community patrols. Most senior officers of the SAP were hostile ; and the central government did nothing. The response from the centre was hardly surprising : the SAP did not want to admit that it could not control the districts ; the Apartheid government did not want to suggest any loss of legitimacy which allowing blacks to police themselves might imply.68

The importance of models and frameworks

34 At the beginning of this essay there was a quotation from an article by three young academics engaged in valuable work on colonial policing : it suggested the irrelevance of thinking in terms of the transfer of models. Vincent Denis and Catherine Denys have

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argued that research into models of colonial police tends to obscure rather than illuminate ; though they stress that men in the colonies selected from the forms and vocabulary with which they were most familiar.69 It may be that, in imagining police, the British have developed a sharper perception of models than their continental European neighbours. Identifying English and Irish models was, from the nineteenth century, a way to draw a distinction between the idealised non-political, unarmed Bobby and his armed, para-military Irish counterpart. At the same time an even sharper distinction could be drawn between the idealised Bobby and an imagined perception of continental European police based largely on ignorance and prejudice.

35 My own position is that types and models are tools for exploring the past, not things for the historian to pursue slavishly, and not something into which past institutions should be forced and hence distorted. Moreover if historical actors employed models and types in debate and discussion, as they often did, it is important to get to grips with what they understood by these types and models ; and all the more so when these models and types continue to be used in contemporary politics and contemporary understandings of the police. The cross fertilization of ideas about institutions, and the use of foreign models in political debate – sometimes distorted to make a political case or point – is nothing new. It was common in Europe with reference to policing during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.70 British imperial administrators were often vague about the RIC model, but appear to have assumed that it had a military and punitive potential which they might require ; some English magistrates during the 1840s appear to have concluded that the nature and deployment of the Irish Constabulary made it more relevant to their rural county than the urban-based London Metropolitan Police. But no self-respecting nineteenth-century Englishman was going to suggest deploying a French gendarmerie-style institution either at home or within the empire, even though in terms of accountability, organisation and finance this was essentially what the Irish force was. Moreover British colonists shared the beliefs of those in the mother country ; they disliked the idea of a military or para-military-style police in predominantly white cities and towns and expected to be policed by something similar to the state civilian or municipal models of the metropole. But for the historian models and types should never be more than a starting point, a means of establishing frameworks that can be used to explore similarities and differences, and how different regional, national, imperial circumstances and structures inter-acted with other elements to produce variations in forms and practices. If historians ignore broad types they are restricting their vision, and too much history fails to look beyond national confines.

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Storch, R.G., The Policeman as Domestic Missionary : Urban Discipline and Popular Culture in Northern England, 1850-1880, Journal of Social History, 1976, 9, pp. 481-509.

Sturma, M., Policing the Criminal Frontier in mid-nineteenth-century Australia, Britain and America, in Finnane, M. (ed.), Policing in Australia : Historical Perspectives, Kensington NSW, New South Wales University Press, 1987, pp. 15-34.

Veracini, L., Settler Colonialism : A Theoretical Overview, Houndmills Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

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Wilson, D., The Beat : Policing a Victorian City, Beaconsfield, Victoria, Circa, 2006.

Wynne, M. (ed.), On Honourable Terms : The Memoirs of some Indian Police Officers 1915-1948, London, British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia, 1985.

Zollmann, J., Communicating Colonial Order : The Police of German South-West-Africa (c. 1894-1915), Crime, histoire et sociétés/ Crime, history and societies, 2011, 15, pp. 33-57.

NOTES

2. Blanchard, Deluermoz, Glasman (2011, p. 39). 3. Emsley (2012) ; Sinclair (2012). Interviews conducted as part of ‘Exploring UK policing practices as a blueprint for police reform : the overseas deployment of UK Police Officers 1989-2009’, ESRC Grant RES-000-22-3922, demonstrated the continuing belief in the two models : ‘I’ve reconciled my thoughts to two styles of policing … the RUC [Royal Ulster Constabulary] was military in style…’ [Sergeant, Police Service Northern Ireland, served in Kosovo, Bosnia, Iraq]. ‘We’re a community orientated police force … our basic premise is the uniformed officer on the streets…. We’re unique … in that we’re unarmed.’ [Ex-Metropolitan Police Superintendent with wide ranging international experience including Bosnia and Kosovo]. They also saw themselves as very different from European police who they saw as regimented and state-directed. 4. Haldane (1995, pp. 20-36). 5. For the scale of this training and some figures of the numbers of Irish officers who served elsewhere in the Empire see Sinclair (2006, pp.16-19). The White Dominions were self-governing by this time. 6. Malcolm, (2006, pp. 86-92). 7. See, for example, Reith (1938) and (1943). Reith referred to the ‘British’ Police. At the time that he was writing there were around 160 separate forces in England and Wales, others in Scotland and the Royal Ulster Constabulary in Northern Ireland. In addition, virtually all of Reith’s examples and his overall history focus on the Metropolitan Police of London. For a Scottish critique see Barrie (2010). 8. Reith, (1952, pp. 20 & 244). 9. Emsley (1999b). 10. Barrie (2010, p. 274). Barrie develops this criticism to challenge the notion of ‘British Police’ ; and while he accepts that there was a greater similarity between police in England and Scotland than some would admit, by addressing his broader issues he is able to expose some marked contrasts ‘beyond institutional confines’ as a result of cultural, intellectual and legal structures and influences. 11. Palmer (1988, p. 242). 12. Jeffries (1952, p. 31). 13. Jeffries (1952, p. 33). 14. Veracini (2010). 15. Broers (1996, especially chapter 5). 16. Hawkins (1991, p. 19). 17. Curry (1932, p. 31). 18. Hollins (1954, p. 21). 19. Fennell (2003, pp. 39 & 101). 20. Curtis (1871, chapter 15). 21. Sinclair (2008, p. 188). 22. Philips, Storch (1999, p. 222) ; Sinclair, Williams (2007, p. 230).

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23. Griffin (1991) ; Malcolm (2006). The RIC was forced to return to its para-military style during the Irish War of Independence, and this style was continued by its successor, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, in the expanded province of Ulster after the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922. 24. Grundlingh (1991, p. 169). The South African Constabulary was established during the war and a large number of its men were recruited from Canada and Australia, as well as some Boers who had transferred their allegiance to the British and were known as ‘joiners’. ‘Peeler’ and ‘Bobby’ have the same origin in the of Sir Robert Peel who, as Chief Secretary for Ireland established a forerunner of the RIC and, nearly 20 years later as Home Secretary, was responsible for the legislation that established the Metropolitan Police of London. 25. Sinclair and Williams (2007, p. 223). See also Sinclair (2006) for a perceptive use of the Irish model as a starting point. 26. A similar argument is made in Anderson, 1994. Though Anderson suggests that there could be more categories. 27. Storch (1976, p. 481). 28. Monkkonen (1981). 29. We lack a good comparative study of the development of both State Police and Federal Police in the United States. 30. Holloway (1993, chapters 2 and 3) ; Leal, Pereira, Filho (2001, chapters 1 and 2). 31. Harring (1994, p. 10) ; Reynolds (1996, p. 62). 32. Havard (2009). 33. Harring (1994, p. 76) ; Brown (2002, p. 380). 34. My thanks to Songtao Yang of the University of Henan for information on this point. 35. Sangar (1998, pp. 23-24, 43-45 & 90-94). 36. Emsley (1999a). 37. Besson and Rosiere (1982, pp. 196 & 233). 38. Klinkers (2012, pp. 50-51). 39. Zollmann (2011). 40. Lorcy (2011) ; Fieschi (2012). 41. Zollmann (2011, pp. 40-41). 42. This is something that continues in post-colonial states. In Uganda, for example, demobilised soldiers have been transferred directly into the Police or the Police Reserve. My thanks to David Anderson for this information. 43. Anderson (1991, p. 184). 44. Arnold (1986, p. 43) ; Robb (1991, p. 128). 45. Arnold (1986, pp. 40-42). Curry, 1932, the former British Police Officer in India, provides some interesting perspectives on this. For example : ‘The Hindus of Bengal have no fighting traditions, which is one of the psychological reasons for terrorism and assassination as a political weapon being adopted by certain small groups among them’ (p. 40) ; ‘There are tribal communities like the Sindhis who will at times turn out to attack robbers … but apparently do not make efficient fighting troops…. There are again others like the Bhils, aborigines not yet definitely out of the hunting stage of human development, who regard it as something of a joke to form a gang and rob a fat trader or a moneylender … who have for generations joined the Bhil Corps, as irregulars or police for local service…’ (p. 42). 46. Ho, Chu (2012, pp. 16-18 & 25). 47. Horrall (1972) ; MacLeod (1976, chapter 6). 48. Richards (2008). 49. Arnold (1986, pp. 27-28). 50. Philips (2001, especially chapter 7).

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51. Wilson (2006, especially chapters 1 and 2). 52. Petrow (2005). 53. Marquis (1994). 54. Sturma (1987, p. 16). 55. Finnane (1991, p. 34). 56. Peers (1991, pp. 30-33). 57. Robb (1991, pp. 138-140). 58. Hollins (1954, pp. 300-304). 59. Wynne, ed. (1985, p. 73). 60. The etymology of Pakeha, the word commonly used today to denote New Zealanders of European origin, is uncertain. Most probably it comes from the Maori pakehakeha or pakepakeha which was originally used to describe mythical fair-haired and fair-skinned creatures from the sea. 61. Hill (1986, pp. 238-239 & 252) ; Hill (1995, pp. 65-67& 127-130) ; Hill (2005). 62. Rotimi (2001, chapter 1). 63. Grundlingh (1991, pp. 176 & 179). 64. Johnson (1991, pp. 159-162). 65. Harring (1994, p. 185). 66. Richards (2008, pp. 180-181 & 198-199). 67. Ho, Chu (2012, pp. 13-15). 68. Goodhew (1993). 69. Denis, Denys (2012, p. 11). 70. Emsley (2007, pp. 64-65, 201 & 206) ; Johansen (2013).

ABSTRACTS

This article discusses the models and styles of policing deployed by European powers in their overseas empires. The main focus is on the police forces created in the British Empire and the assumption that the model for these institutions was the Royal Irish Constabulary. The article argues that, in reality, police systems in the empire were much more of a pragmatic pick and mix depending on the size and spread of the European population in a colony, the finance available and the size and form of the region to be policed. It builds on an earlier typology of European police and suggests that this extended typology provides a starting point for exploring the complexities of colonial police institutions and that it has relevance beyond the British Imperial context.

Cet article examine les modèles et styles de police déployés par les puissances européennes dans leurs empires d’outre-mer. Il s’intéresse principalement aux forces de police créées dans l’Empire britannique et sur l’idée reçue que c’est la Royal Irish Constabulary qui leur a servi de modèle. L’auteur soutient qu’en réalité, les systèmes policiers de l’empire relevaient de combinaisons plus pragmatiques, en fonction de la taille et de la densité de la population européenne dans chaque colonie, des budgets disponibles, et de l’étendue et de la forme du territoire considéré. L’article s’appuie sur un précédent essai de typologie des polices européennes et suggère que cette version élargie fournit un point de départ à l’examen de la complexité des institutions policières coloniales, dont la pertinence dépasse le contexte impérial britannique.

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AUTHOR

CLIVE EMSLEY Clive Emsley is Professor in the Department of History at the Open University.

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Homicide and Organised Murder in a Global Perspective

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Bare Sticks and Naked Pity : Rhetoric and Representation in Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). Capital Case Records

Thomas Buoye

1 At the peak of its power in the eighteenth century the Qing Empire had equaled or surpassed all previous Chinese dynasties in terms of population growth, economic prosperity, and territorial expanse. In stark contrast to the humiliating losses to foreign powers and the devastating rebellions of the nineteenth century, scholars have long considered the eighteenth century a ‘flourishing age’.2 Peace and prosperity were the hallmarks of the era, but on closer examination, this pivotal period witnessed both the full grandeur and the ineludible limits of pre-modern Chinese political, social, and economic institutions. Varying across time and space, the inexorable influence of economic commercialization and population expansion rippled through the vast empire and transformed society. The results of these powerful forces for change were often mixed. Along with the benefits of unprecedented economic and demographic growth came ethnic strife, sexual , violent land disputes, a sorcery scare, and sectarian rebellion that scarred the eighteenth-century social landscape.3 Seeking to stem a troubling decline in social order in its Chinese domains,4 the Qing court launched a far-reaching, but ill-conceived crackdown on violent crime. At the forefront of the drive was legislation that mandated harsher penalties, including capital punishment, for crimes when the offenses were committed by ‘bare sticks’ (guanggun 光 棍), a common term for the rootless underclass of unmarried males who were considered crime-prone troublemakers. While Chinese law had a long history of differential punishments based on kinship and gender, bare-stick substatutes effectively defined a new class of criminals who were subject to more extreme penalties based on their social identity.

2 Embracing a strategy to suppress crime that combined ‘criminal profiling’ with the presumed deterrent power of capital punishment, Qing emperors presented serious

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practical and ideological challenges to the judicial bureaucracy. Practically, the elaborate and time-consuming procedures for the investigation, trial, review, and sentencing of capital crimes that had been the mainstay of Chinese criminal justice since the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) remained in place. Increasing the number of capital crimes without allotting additional resources or personnel threatened to swamp the criminal justice system, which was already showing signs of strain. Ideologically, imposing harsh sentences and profiling bare sticks also posed political, moral, and cognitive dilemmas, particularly for county magistrates (zhixian 知縣) who dealt firsthand with violent crime and accused criminals. As a review of several exemplary capital case records reveals, reports of capital crimes by county magistrates sometimes presented evocative narratives that were at odds with the assumptions underlying the bare-stick legislation. These somewhat sympathetic representations of rural poverty and despair were, no doubt, rooted in the longstanding judicial ethos to seek leniency and save life that had been the hallmarks of Chinese criminal justice for centuries. 5 In the midst of a growing concern over the rise in violent crime, these emotional depictions sent a clear message that economic conditions played an important role in undermining familial stability and social order.

Reports of Capital Crimes

3 The review of capital cases varied over time, but the long-term trend was toward greater bureaucratization and centralized control in the prosecution and sentencing of capital crimes. In the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) capital cases were initially investigated and tried at the county level, and subsequently underwent automatic retrial and review at the prefectural, provincial and central government levels, culminating in the emperor’s verdict. The judicial review established culpability, cited applicable statutes and assigned specific punishments in strict adherence to the code. Judicial review required straightforward accounts of the essential elements of the crime, forensic evidence, and testimony from the accused and key witnesses to determine which laws had been violated and what punishments were appropriate. At each succeeding level of review the presiding official provided a separate report and recommendation. Complete case records were voluminous and quite redundant. The district magistrate’s initial report was the most extensive and comprehensive. While each of the officials was responsible for the document he submitted, the reports were most likely prepared by a legal expert of his staff. Most Qing officials were generalists who had no formal legal training. It was common for county magistrates to rely on secretaries to compose legal case records. So saying, the magistrate alone was responsible for the accuracy of the report and judicial affairs were carefully scrutinized and evaluated. Concern for his professional future dictated that the diligently oversee every aspect of the investigation and reporting of capital crime. Since the case record was subject to automatic review at every level of administration, it was the one document that was guaranteed to receive the scrutiny of a magistrate’s highest superiors. While it is unlikely that the emperor personally read every report, Qing emperors were known to comment on controversial or unusual case.

4 Reports of capital crimes cannot be fully understood without consideration of the two- tiered structure of judicial and sentencing review as well as the general predilection of magistrates to seek leniency that were hallmarks of Qing criminal justice. The legal

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requirements of the first round of judicial review required straightforward accounts of the essential elements of the crime, forensic evidence, and testimony from the accused and key witnesses that were necessary to determine which laws had been violated and what punishments were appropriate. Influenced by ideological values of benevolence and paternalism, magistrates interspersed case records with understated observations on the individuals involved in the crime that suggested their psychological states, motivations, and moral character. These observations could be used to mitigate final sentencing at the autumn assizes. Accused killers were often depicted as otherwise decent people under duress in extraordinary circumstances who inadvertently caused a death. In my opinion, these depictions were meant to obtain leniency for the vast majority of capital criminals who were sentenced to imprisonment pending final sentencing at the annual autumn assizes (jianhou qiuhou chujue 監候秋處決).

5 For nearly two decade historians have been mining judicial archives, especially the routine memorials of the Board of Punishments (xingke tiben, 刑科題本) at the Number One Historical Archives in Beijing, to expand our understanding of Qing social, economic, and legal history. My own research on violent disputes over property rights relied on capital case records to reconstruct the everyday struggles of rural society. Sampled at roughly five intervals from a collection of nearly 56,000 case records for homicides related to disputes over land or debts for the Qianlong reign, I looked at over 13,000 reports for all of China. From that sample I read 2,152 cases from Guangdong, Shandong, and Sichuan, which included disputes over debts and land. From that sample I focused exclusively on homicides related to disputes over specific property rights issues6 in three provinces : Guangdong (480 cases), Shandong (25 cases), and Sichuan (125 cases). While the number of extant documents as well as the number of cases used in my study is not insignificant, in order to get a broader perspective on violent crime during the Qianlong reign (1736-1795) one would need to examine two additional collections of capital cases “blows and affrays” (dou’ou 斗毆) and “marriage and illicit sex” (hunyin jianqing 婚姻姦情) that together contain about twice as many cases. Suffice to say, that the extant documentation of violent crimes for the six decades of the Qianlong reign is voluminous.

6 My current research concerns extreme crimes involving multiple homicides, brutal killings, intra-family killings, inter-ethnic violence, adulterous wives killing their husbands, and other capital crimes that violated cherished social norms, to ascertain the limits of leniency in judicial practice and the eighteenth-century crisis of Chinese criminal justice. Despite the common Western stereotype of Chinese justice as capricious, corrupt, and cruel, capital case records reveal that county magistrates carefully examined the facts and applied the law in capital investigations.7 After reading thousands of case records written by county magistrates from hundreds of different jurisdictions from across the length and breadth of China, one cannot help but be struck with the consistency, clarity, and competence with which magistrates investigated, adjudicated, and reported capital crimes.

7 County magistrates had a range of responsibilities from education to tax collection, but the investigation, trial, and reporting of capital crime were arguably the most complicated, onerous, and carefully monitored of all their duties. The successful investigation and trial of a capital crime required the supervision of a variety of subordinates, including constables to arrest suspects and gather evidence, coroners to examine wounds and perform autopsies, and legal secretaries to research the law and

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compile reports. Procedurally, the county magistrate’s direct responsibilities were limited to examining the evidence, determining culpability, identifying the appropriate law, and recommending a specific sentence. When done properly, capital case records were masterpieces of bureaucratic efficiency and thankfully, cornucopias of legal, social, and economic history for modern researchers. Interestingly, within the confines of the reports of capital crime there existed a subtle and reliable channel of communication between a county magistrate and his superiors, including the emperor. Every county magistrate knew for certain that his superiors would glance at if not carefully peruse these reports. Given the complexity of the sentencing procedures, official scrutiny of trial records could continue for years after a crime had occurred.8 I argue here that given the certainty that their reports would receive repeated review, some county magistrates availed themselves of this “channel of communication” to address, however subtly or indirectly, the prevailing views of the sources of violent crime and social disorder and the dire circumstances of the rural poor.

Eighteenth-century Chinese Society

8 While emphasis may vary, historians generally agree that the transformative impact of demographic pressures, environmental degradation, political corruption, and social instability were readily apparent in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Noting the similarities to the classical symptoms of ‘dynastic decline’, Philip Kuhn and Susan Mann have examined the interconnections between the “overproduction of literate men”9 and “rampant” corruption, and rising demographic pressures and an increasingly commercialized economy.10 Similarly, William Rowe has cited the “sudden and wrenching population growth”, “unprecedented geographical and social mobility” and “rapid commercialization and monetization of the economy” as the important trends of that transformed eighteenth-century China.11 While agreeing that the “single most important structural change was explosive population growth”, Wang Wensheng has also blamed the large scale social unrest in the Qianlong reign (1736-1795) on the growing gap between “state ambitions and state capacities” and the failure to increase the “political resources allotted for local administration”.12 More people and more territory were historical measures of dynastic prosperity, but Qing emperors and government officials alike knew that they also faced serious administrative challenges. As one of the most famous scholar officials of this era, Hong Liangji wrote candidly and presciently about the problems of overpopulation, political corruption, and the need to reform local administration. Famous for citing the potential catastrophic impact of unrestrained population growth, Hong also complained about poor channels of communication between officials as well as the throne and the overall decline of local administration.13 Hong’s frank criticism of the dynasty earned him a suspended death sentence and banishment to Ili in Xinjiang. Not surprisingly, no other officials ever matched Hong’s outspokenness, and there were few substantive institutional reforms in China until the middle of the nineteenth century.

9 The sorcery scare of 1768, which Philip Kuhn has written about so insightfully, provides a powerful illustration of the bureaucratic politics that impinged on Qing criminal justice.14 In many ways the prosecution of the soulstealing 15 was emblematic of the social and economic milieu of the eighteenth century. “Dropping out of the settled occupations into vagrancy and begging”, which Kuhn calls “downward migration”, was

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the backdrop for the sorcery scares. The potential for social panic was serious and the incidents, which often involved the cutting of victims’ queues, had political overtones that drew the attention of the . When provincial judicial officials, who initially did not share Qianlong’s same sense of trepidation, failed to placate his concerns, the emperor personally intervened and transformed the scope and intensity of the official campaign to uncover soulstealing. In this superb work of social history, Kuhn masterfully explores the deep complexities of these events. Most relevant to this study is the reaction of provincial judicial officials to imperial intervention. Based on their initial reactions, most provincial officials likely saw soulstealing as a troublesome folk superstition. But once the emperor intervened directly and forcefully, the previously skeptical suddenly began turning up culprits. Unlike the more pervasive and enduring threat of the generic bare sticks, the sorcery scare of 1768 was a protracted affair that drew the intense and direct scrutiny of the emperor. the sorcery scare illustrated an important point : from the lofty perch of Beijing a variety of mundane and extraordinary political and psychological concerns could easily distort the imperial perception of eighteenth-century grass roots society.

10 Nowhere were the contradictory crosscurrents of the eighteenth century more apparent than in the adjudication of capital crimes. The cautious and appropriate application of punishments, particularly in capital cases, had been a consistent theme in Chinese legal commentaries for over two millennia.16 In practice, a deep regard for human life was manifested in the special procedures for handling death penalty cases in Chinese law. Procedures for reviewing capital cases varied over time, but the long- term trend was toward greater bureaucratization and centralized control in the adjudication and sentencing of capital crimes and this trend reached its apex in the Qing dynasty. The reluctance to expand the government despite a doubling of population meant that the multi-tiered and repetitive reviews of capital crimes and most death sentences greatly exacerbated what was an enormous administrative burden for the Qing bureaucracy.

Chinese Legal Heritage

11 For a variety of complex reasons – cultural, intellectual, political and economic – Western observers frequently have misunderstood or misrepresented Chinese legal heritage and judicial practice, but the great Chinese dynasties could not have obtained the vast territorial expanses, elaborate administrative structures, and vibrant commercial economies without the existence of well-established legal institutions. The Qing dynasty was no different than its illustrious predecessors. Despite their alien origins, the Manchu conquerors readily embraced the Chinese legal heritage. Even more impressively, in 1670 the Kangxi Emperor (1661-1722) espoused Confucian principles and endorsed the efficacy of law in his Sacred Edict. Consisting of 16 terse maxims, the Sacred Edict has been called “a summation of Confucian moral values”17 and the “most concise and authoritative statement of Confucian ideology”.18 Meant to be read aloud in every village and town in the empire, the Sacred Edict envisioned a well-ordered society of filial subjects who obeyed the law, avoided disputes, extirpated heresy, paid taxes, and peacefully engaged in agriculture. Interestingly, law was an integral component of this Confucian-cloaked pronunciamento. The eighth maxim, “Explain the laws to warn the ignorant and obstinate”, endorsed law as a tool of

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government and succinctly encapsulated elite attitudes toward the source of criminal behavior – ignorance and obstinacy.19

12 The implications of the eighth maxim for a Confucian-trained official with experience in criminal justice would have been abundantly clear. Ignorance versus obstinacy established a simple dichotomy. Optimistically, the maxim implied that propagating the law eliminated ignorance and reduced crime. Furthermore, if criminal behavior was remedial through education, leniency was justified. Demonstrating the premise that dissemination of the legal knowledge went hand-in-hand with the propagation of Confucian ideals, one of the earliest commentaries on the Sacred Edict, published in 1679, explained all sixteen maxims with reference to specific laws and “examples of applicable legal guidelines”.20 Targeting popular ignorance of the law with public lectures clearly indicated both a belief in the efficacy of law and the responsibility of social elites to transmit legal knowledge to the illiterate masses. As Janet Theiss notes in her study of the eighteenth-century chastity cult, adopting the approach of “teaching and cultivation” (jiaoyang 教養) of the people, or the “transformation of customs through education” (jiaohu 教化), was an important component of imperial ambitions to transform society.21

13 However, what if crime did not abate despite the best efforts to educate ? Following the ignorance versus obstinacy dichotomy, Qing officials could assume it must have been due to obstinacy and obstinate criminals clearly deserved punishment. While the tendency to seek leniency and “save life” were cornerstones of Chinese legal philosophy that mitigated severity, there is plenty of evidence that Chinese magistrates did not shy away from using harsh punishments when criminal acts were deemed exceedingly heinous or wanton. What was distinctive about the eighteenth century was the legislative turn that resorted to the secernment of bare sticks.

The Legislative Turn

14 The Qing law code was a living document that underwent revisions to address the changing needs of Chinese society. Officially, the emperor was the chief law maker and some laws originated in imperial decrees, but normally the emperor “approved or rejected recommendations made to him in memorials submitted by officials charged with judicial and legislative authority”.22 Zheng Qin, an authority on the Qing code, has noted “the extraordinary enthusiasm and dedication of top imperial authorities toward their lawmaking enterprise”, which he argues indicated “the importance of the law to Qing rulers.”23 In fact, a major revision of the code, the third since the Qing dynasty was founded in 1644, was completed in 1740. The new code contained the original 436 statutes, most of which were unchanged, and 1,049 revised or newly added substatutes. 24 Knowledge of these revisions was crucial because magistrates were required “to cite the statues and substatutes upon which they relied in deciding a case to ensure that the result conformed to the statutory purpose”.25 Any historian familiar with Qing capital case records can readily attest to the importance of citing specific statutes for every crime reported.26 Tellingly, the new substatutes were guideposts to the sources of tension in eighteenth-century society. For example, addressing property rights in land, the revised code included a range of substatutes that included the criminalization of rent defaults and the clarification of terms of conditional sales.27 Given China’s rich legal heritage, it comes as no surprise that eighteenth-century emperors resorted to

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legislation to define property rights and to combat the rise in violent crime. What was surprising was the number and specificity of new substatutes. For example, during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) there was one statute and two substatutes in the section on robbery (qiangdao 強盜), during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) there was still only one statute but there were an additional 49 substatutes, “most of which dated from the 17th and 18th centuries”.28 Similarly, fostering and protecting female chastity was also codified during the eighteenth century. Legislation on sexual provides another very sobering example. Fortunately, we have two in-depth studies of sexual assault for eighteenth-century China, by Matthew Sommer and Janet Theiss.29 Both scholars agree that that anxiety at the highest levels of government was behind the proliferation of new legislation that increased penalties for sexual assault and related crimes. Duly noting the substatutes related to illicit sex promulgated during the Yongzheng and Qianlong reigns – “illegalities in the contracting of marriages (some twenty-five substatutes), homicides arising out of sexual assaults, adultery and prostitution (altogether over forty substatutes), and causing a woman to commit suicide through improper behavior (some twenty-five substatutes)” – Theiss argues that “collectively these myriad new substatutes reflected widespread anxiety among mid-Qing elites”.30 Similarly, in his discussion of rape laws Sommer notes “a plethora of new measures aimed to suppress the ‘rootless rascals’31 (guang gun) who were now imagined as sexual predators”. 32 Whether it was myriad or plethora, this legislation disturbingly reflected the tenor of the times. For example, a substatute was added in 1788 (QL53) and later revised in 1809 (JQ14) under statute against Plotting to Kill Another (282) that increased the penalty to “immediate” decapitation33 for the leader of the plot to kill when the victim was a child aged ten or younger. If there was or sexual abuse, the penalty was increased to decapitation with exposure of the head in public.34 The fact that a law specifically addressing the premeditated killing of children under ten years of age was deemed necessary was a frightening indication of the types of violent acts that were perpetrated in Qing China. By the eighteenth century the defining characteristics of a bare stick, violent coercion or physical intimidation, had become firmly imbedded in Qing legal parlance and political discourse. Interestingly, both the Qianlong and Yongzheng emperors framed the problem of violent crime in terms of the moral failings of bare sticks and responded by promoting conservative moral values and promulgating harsher laws that specifically targeted bare sticks. The combination of moral exhortation, condemnatory rhetoric, and harsh sentencing was readily apparent in the proliferation of new substatutes promulgated during the eighteenth century.

Bare Sticks

15 In the eighteenth-century judicial discourse the term bare stick became synonymous with a variety of serious crimes, but the use of the term to describe rootless males had been part of the Chinese vernacular since the Song dynasty.35 By the Ming dynasty the terms “bare sticks” and “urban toughs” (lahu 啦唬) were used to describe members of criminal gangs involved in robbery, intimidation, and prostitution in the Beijing area.36 The term also appears in the popular Ming novel The Plum in the Golden Vase, which describes an incident in which bare sticks induce the son of an Imperial Commissioner to join them in visiting a brothel. When the bare sticks later attempt to extort money from the hapless youth he seeks the help of the local magistrate who orders a beating

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for the “detestable” bare sticks.37 According to Qing literary sources, anyone engaged in racketeering, swindling, black mail, or other “scoundrelly activities were generally known as bare sticks.”38 Legally, the term first appeared in the Ming code.39 The Ming code specifically labeled bare sticks : demobilized soldiers, the homeless, and other marginalized people “not engaged in honest work” (buwu zhengye 不務正業) who used force and intimidation to swindle honest people. Whatever the sociological origins of bare sticks, the term had become common judicial jargon in the Ming code in 1443,40 but there was no specific offense defined as the bare stick substatute until the Qing dynasty.

16 Judicial officials throughout the realm must have known how seriously the emperors viewed the problem of bare sticks. During the Qing dynasty the scope of bare stick crimes was expanded to include illegal activities of yamen personnel, pettifogging, false accusation, , opening graves, , tax resistance, witchcraft, and other crimes.41 In 1705 the Kangxi emperor (1661-1722) excluded bare sticks from imperial pardons and in 1729 the Yongzheng emperor (1723-1735) commended officials who cracked down on bare sticks.

Bare Sticks in the Law

17 While there was nothing equivalent to a modern legal definition that strictly delineated who was a bare stick, substatute 273.7,42 under the statute “Using Intimidation to Obtain Property,” was commonly referred to as the “bare stick substatute” (guanggun 光棍例). Interestingly, this substatute lists a range of crimes involving violent extortion, intimidation, beating, killing and false accusations that should be punished more severely “if the circumstances are serious” and bare sticks were “truly to blame”. 43 The only other term used to refer to the perpetrators is another general term usually translated as scoundrel (e’gun惡棍). Apparently, it was assumed that judicial officials would know bare sticks when they saw them. As the table below indicates, the bare stick substatute was cited in another sixteen substatutes. In fifteen of those substatutes the bare sticks substatute was to increase the severity of punishments. Some of these substatutes were already in versions of the code compiled during the Shunzhi (1644-1661) or Kangxi (1662-1722), but most were added or amended during the Yongzheng (1723-1735) and Qianlong (1736-1795) reigns.

Laws That Cite the Bare Stick Substatute44 :

Law Substatutes

– Monopolizing Markets (154) 1

– Pushing Honorable Persons too Far and Causing Them to Revolt (210) 1

– Wrongful Taking in the Daytime (268) 3

– Using Intimidation to Obtain Property (273) 3

– Kidnapping Persons and Selling the Person Kidnapped (275) 1

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– Engaging in an Affray and Killing or Intentionally Killing Another (290) 1

– Striking an Imperial Emissary or the Head Official in One’s Own Office (306) 1

– Fornication (366) 4

– Persons Sentenced to Penal Servitude or Exile who Run Away (390) 1

– Citing Laws and Orders in Deciding Cases (415) 1

18 While the link between bare sticks and sexual crime is warranted, given that four substatutes under the law against “Fornication” were sentenced under the bare stick substitute, perpetrators of crimes sentenced under the substatute were not merely rootless male sexual predators. For example, substatute 154.6, under the law against “Monopolizing Markets”, which concerns crimes committed by employees of the Imperial Household Department or their relatives, imperial princes, eunuchs, officials or their relatives – none of whom would be considered downwardly mobile males – cited the bare sticks substatute to determine the punishments.45 Other crimes, such as Pushing Honorable Persons too Far and Causing Them to Revolt (210.2), addressed a variety of illegal forms of collective actions, such as tax resistance or monopolizing markets as well as instigating lawsuits or interfering with local civil service examinations. The bare stick substatute was cited to authorize immediate decapitation for the leaders of these actions when the act involved more than forty or fifty people.46 Similarly, Wrongful Taking in the Daytime (268.23) specifically named bandit groups active in four provinces and cited the bare sticks substatute to punish the leaders of bands of five or more. Fornication has the most substatutes citing the bare stick substatute but here too the picture was complicated. Appallingly, two of the four substatutes under Fornication involved assaults on minors. The substatutes under Fornication that applied the bare stick substatute included gang rapes (366.2), kidnapping and sodomizing boys (366.3), raping and causing the death of young girls under twelve or enticing girls over the age of ten into sex (366.4) and (366.9) rapes committed by lamas and monks. Suffice to say that although sexual crimes bulked large in official denunciations of bare sticks, “bare stick crimes” included a wide variety of violent crimes that might be undertaken individually or collectively. Depending on the crime, bare stick would be better translated as hoodlum, rapist, swindler, extortionist, or gangster.

19 Space does not permit detailed discussion of every crime, but the common denominator of “bare stick crimes” does not appear to be the social status of the perpetrators. On the contrary, these crimes appear to be related, albeit in very different ways, to the social side-effects of an increasingly complex commercialized economy and a highly mobile population. As grass roots officials responsible for day-to- day administration, county magistrates were well aware that the economic expansion, population growth, and increasing commercialization of the eighteenth century had serious social repercussions. Similarly, regional variation in economic development was significant. Time and place were critically important to understanding connections between social conflict and economic change.

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Regional Variation in Crime

20 As homicides related to violent disputes over property rights have revealed significant regional variation in the overall levels of violence as well as the social and economic status of disputants.47 Given that homicides related to property rights were a transitional phenomenon related to induced demand for changes in property rights, it makes sense that provinces experiencing economic change at different times would also exhibit different patterns of violence. For the six sample years used to compare regional variation in homicide related to property right disputes, Shandong had far fewer homicides (25 cases), than Guangdong (150) and Sichuan (125). Interestingly, although Shandong had fewer cases overall, the individuals involved in violent disputes there more closely fit the rootless male profile.48

21 Information gleaned from capital case records reveals that the condition of rural employment in Shandong was clearly inferior to that of either Guangdong or Sichuan. Farms were generally larger in north China and productivity lower, requiring closer supervision and control of laborers and tenants.49 Qualitative analysis of Shandong disputes in my earlier study revealed that individuals involved in violence were often quite poor and their employment was tenuous. Landlords hired managers who wielded great power over tenants and hired laborers. Evidence from homicide reports reveals that these managers readily dismissed tenants and laborers for poor performance and that the managers themselves could be fired at the whim of the landowner. Tenant farmers and hired laborers also had little personal freedom and economic independence. Many lived in their landlords’ home and relied on their landlords for draught animals, plows, and seeds.50 While a range of variables might explain the lower incidence of violence in Shandong, capital case records vividly reveal that individuals involved in disputes in Shandong were worse off economically than their counterparts in Sichuan and Guangdong.

22 Case records of capital crimes from Shandong frequently reveal tantalizing glimpses into life in eighteenth-century rural society. Consider the case involving Jiang Hansan, Fan Wuyuan, Li Jing, and Wang Yin, who were all tenants on Chen Gengwu’s land.51 What makes this case interesting is the migrant status of the tenants : Jiang Hansan was from Guancheng county, Fan Wuyuan was from Dingtao county, and Li Jing was from Puzhou county. Only Wang Ying was from Caoxian county, where the dispute occurred. This was quite different from Guangdong where tenants and landlords were almost always from the same county and many tenants, as former owners of the land they rented, had deep personal and customary ties to the land that they tilled. (Interestingly, the alacrity with which Jiang’s tenants came to his aid when a violent dispute arose with a neighboring landowner also suggests a degree of class solidarity among hired laborers that was not found in Sichuan or Guangdong). The absence of personal ties to the land that they worked along with the fact that Shandong landlords often supplied the necessary capital, such as seeds and tools, may explain why tenants were treated like hired laborers in Shandong. This proletarianization of agricultural labor often meant that Shandong tenants were normally judged solely on performance and could be dismissed for ‘laziness’. In Shandong, deadly confrontations over property rights were rare, but what property-related violence did occur was clearly the domain of the desperately poor who had been left behind in the economic expansion of the eighteenth century.

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The Luckless Tenant52

23 Wang Chen’s fate poignantly illustrated the precarious nature of life in rural Shandong. Wang leased 24 mu (畆) of land from Guo Gengyuan in Wenshang county. Guo Gengyuan lived some distance from the field, so he entrusted Cheng Zhao with the management of the land. On the morning of 13 June 1749,53 it rained, and Wang Chen decided it was a good time to plant soy beans. He asked Cheng for the seeds. Unexpectedly, Cheng not only refused to provide the seeds, but he also accused Wang of being lazy and demanded that he return the land immediately. In his subsequent testimony, Cheng claimed that Wang had done a poor job of planting the sorghum and millet. Cheng feared that the landlord, Guo Gengyuan, would criticize him for Wang’s poor work. Wang Chen suggested that they wait until after the autumn harvest before he relinquished the land. Unfortunately, Cheng not only rejected this request but also accused Wang of dishonesty. Cheng later claimed that he was only trying to frighten Wang in order to motivate him to work harder and did not really mean to evict Wang. Wang, however, took this threat quite seriously and replied : “If you demand that I return this land now, is it not the same as killing my family ?” Wang Chen died from the injuries suffered in the ensuing struggle with Cheng Zhao.

24 To the casual observer this case might appear to be an unfortunate but unexceptional example of manslaughter. An experienced official reading this case record however would no doubt take notice of evocative statements such as : “If you demand that I return this land now, is it not the same as killing my family ?” Declarations like these were not typical in case reports. Both the statement from the manager and his tenant’s entreaty indicated the depth of despair and hopelessness of the rural poor in eighteenth-century Shandong. Wang was clearly a pitiful individual. Threatened with the loss of his livelihood he equated the loss of his tenancy to the death of his family. In a highly structured and otherwise unemotional recitation of the facts of the case, this statement had an immediate and jarring impact. The prominent positioning of such a powerful metaphor in an otherwise straightforward account must have been deliberate. In my opinion, by prominently quoting Wang’s desperate plea, the magistrate was intentionally sending a powerful message to his superiors. Poverty was killing the family in Shandong. This was how a bare stick was created.

The Hapless Gambler54

25 Of course, many peasants lost their land, but they managed to survive as agricultural contract workers. Perhaps employment in the master’s household could provide a surrogate family for the landless laborer. Consider the case of Huang Bang. At forty-two sui (歲),55 Huang, who had no immediate family, was hired as a contract worker in Ming Keyi’s home on 23 December 1748. Huang had lost 2000 wen (文) gambling with three of his co-workers, Li Hai, Ming Kuijiu, and Yang Seng, all of whom tried repeatedly to collect the debt. In 1749, after the wheat harvest Huang’s workmates once again dunned him. Huang went to his employer, Ming Keyi, and asked him for some grain in advance of his wages so that he could pay his debts, but Ming, “unaware that it was a gambling debt”,56 refused. Huang became angry and cursed Ming, complaining that he

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had no face. When Huang finally received his wages, 500 wen, he used them to pay part of his debt.

26 On 21 April 1749, Ming Kuijiu informed Ming Keyi (same but not related) that Huang had gambling debts. Huang overheard Ming Keyi advise Ming Kuijiu to wait until after the harvest to Huang. Ming Keyi further advised that if Huang could not pay in full, Ming Kuijiu should beat him and take him to the officials. About six months later, Huang overheard Ming Keyi and Yang Seng chatting about the gambling debt. Once again the boss repeated his advice to beat Huang and take him to the officials. At this point Huang became desperate. Huang testified that he knew Ming Keyi would “expel him after his work was completed” and that Ming Keyi had ordered his co- workers to demand money, beat him, and take him to court.

27 When Huang realized that he would lose his livelihood he “harbored resentment all the more deeply,” and “murderous thoughts arose”. Knowing that physically he was no match for his boss, he thought about killing Ming’s two sons instead. The next day he went to the market to buy poison that he intended to use on himself after he killed the boys. On his way home he bumped into Ming Kuijiu, and they argued loudly. After Ming Kuijiu returned home he informed Ming Keyi, who sought Huang out and confronted him. Huang also threatened to sue Ming Keyi for stirring up trouble for him. Upset and angry, Huang waited until Keyi left the house the next morning. Armed with a wooden mallet, he entered the sleeping quarters of Keyi’s two young sons and smashed their skulls.

28 Ming Keyi later testified that Huang was from a nearby village and worked for a living. According to Ming, Huang’s “character had never been good”, but he hired him because Huang was a capable farmer. Ming admitted that he hated Huang for gambling and stirring up trouble, and that he had suggested that Kuijiu “sue” Huang (his own testimony omitted reference to beating), but he asserted that the matter of the debt did not concern him. Ming Keyi also emphatically stated that he did not incite Ming Kuijiu to dun Huang. Instead he claimed that he was concerned that there might be trouble if the co-workers privately dunned Huang so it was better to take the matter to court. Finally, Ming explained that he had confronted Huang the day before the killings because Ming Kuijiu told him that Huang was threatening to sue him. Ming could not understand why Huang hated him so much that he killed his two sons.

29 Not surprisingly, Huang had a different version of events. Huang’s testimony emphasized that he was completely dependent on his master, Ming Keyi, for his livelihood. Huang complained that Ming had twice told his workmates to beat him and sue him and that he feared Ming would turn him out of his home. In his final cross examination, Huang stated that he was a poor person who hired out to make his living and relied on his employer to look after him. According to Huang, Ming Keyi twice spoke “wicked words” to his co-workers. He accused Ming of waiting until the harvest was in to turn him out, and of inciting his workmates to turn him in to the local officials. Huang noted that his wages were insufficient and asked rhetorically, “If I lost the master’s pay, how could I repay my debts ?” Expressing his complete despair, Huang inveighed : “This clearly would put an end to my livelihood and would lead to my death”. Thus, he was angry and wanted to kill Ming Keyi. In final effort to obtain leniency, Huang admitted his guilt and declared that he was willing to pay for his crime with his life.

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30 The crime was heinous and brutal, and there was no question that the punishment would be severe. Huang was sentenced to “lingering death”57 for the premeditated killing of his master’s two sons. There was no hope of leniency in this case, no matter how pathetically Huang was portrayed. Why then would the report include this poignant depiction of a desperately pitiful contract worker ? I would argue that the portrayal of Huang was meant to inform or warn higher level officials about the dire social consequences of the abject poverty in Shandong countryside. Chinese society was ideally built on hierarchical relationships that carried mutual obligations. Huang was alone in the world but he still sought honest employment rather than crime. Because he was bereft of family, his employer was his only possible benefactor in times of distress. Huang felt betrayed when his employer not only refused to help him but also aggravated his plight by instigating his workmates to sue him. In his desperation, Huang intentionally killed both of his master’s sons. Few crimes were more abominable in Confucian society, yet the county magistrate, rather than revile the killer, presented a nuanced account that explained the depth of Huang’s desperation.

The Making of a Bare Stick58

31 The case of Kuang Wenqi provided another tragic and barbarous example of the toll that Shandong’s grinding poverty was taking on individuals, illustrating the slow, agonizing, and dehumanizing descent into rootless poverty. After his father died, Kuang Wenqi was raised by his uncle Kuang Yuxiang and his aunt Ms. Dong, with whom he shared a home. Wenqi was described as “not law-abiding”, and his uncle often lectured him. According to neighbors, Ms. Dong was a mean person who never displayed kindness to her nephew. Kuang’s aunt was portrayed as a shrew who often interfered in Wenqi’s life. When her husband agreed to lend Wenqi money, Ms. Dong intervened to stop him. Wenqi lived modestly and was married, but not happily. Ms. Dong disparaged Wenqi to his wife, causing the couple to fight often. Neighbors testified that Kuang Wenqi had a difficult life and that he blamed his aunt for the deaths of his mother and brother, his marital difficulties, and his dire straits. The magistrate also described Ms. Dong as “harsh” and “too talkative in front of her husband”, one of the seven grounds for divorce under Qing law. Suffice to say, the portrayal of Ms. Dong was uniformly unflattering.

32 In the fall of 1747, while Kuang Wenqi was away trading, his mother and younger brother died. His uncle and aunt had them buried after his maternal uncle arrived to confirm the circumstances of their deaths. When Wenqi returned home he suspected that his aunt had “worn them down” to death and he harbored resentment against his aunt. In February 1748, Kuang sold his wife for 10,000 wen because she followed Ms. Dong’s efforts to stir trouble. His uncle borrowed 4000, which he did not repay despite Wenqi’s requests. In roughly six months Wenqi had lost his closest living relatives and he had sold his wife. His uncle, the only senior male relative in his life, took advantage of Wenqi’s sale of his wife to borrow money which he did not repay.

33 Alone and with no one to rely on, Wenqi wandered as a vagrant. In his absence Ms. Dong occupied Wenqi’s room in their home. On 20 December 1748, Kuang returned home, but Ms. Dong cursed him and refused to let him into the house. He asked his uncle to repay the money he had borrowed but his uncle refused. “Cold and hungry and without a home or kin to support him”, Kuang blamed all his troubles on Ms. Dong. The

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next day he returned to the house with a knife and stabbed Ms. Dong six times. When Ms. Dong’s twelve-year-old son saw Wenqi the boy fled, but Wenqi chased him and slashed him with the knife. Returning to the house, Wenqi found Ms. Dong’s five-year- old daughter crying and he killed her too. Covered in blood, Kuang immediately turned himself in to the authorities.

34 Clearly, Kuang Wenqi’s crimes were unforgivable. He was sentenced to lingering death for killing three members of the same of family. But despite the viciousness of his crime, the county magistrate managed to evoke sympathy for Wenqi’s downward spiral into poverty. While Ms. Dong did not deserve her brutal fate, it was clear from the case record that she cruelly tormented Wenqi. More telling was the language used to describe Wenqi after he sold his wife and wandered the countryside. He roved about “alone and had no one to rely on”. Similarly, when Kuang returned home to find that Ms. Dong refused to allow him to enter the courtyard and his uncle cursed when Kuang asked him to repay the money he owed, the county magistrate provided another pathetic image. He described Kuang as “cold, hungry and impoverished”, “without any place to stay”, and “bereft of kin”. In my extensive reading of homicide reports I have rarely seen this type of language. It was purposefully used to evoke pity for Kuang.

35 No amount of pity would save Kuang from his gruesome punishment, lingering death, but officials who reviewed the case could not help but notice the affective language used to describe Kuang’s downward slide into penury. Kuang’s life was a depressing illustration of rural distress and the disintegration of a family. He had lost his mother and brother to disease, sold his wife, and his only kin had harassed him and rejected him in his hour of need. He was homeless, penniless, jobless and alone, but he had tried to carry on as an itinerant peddler. While Kuang Wenqi had become a bare stick in the simplest definition of the term, officials who reviewed the case would never confuse him with the career criminals who used force and intimidation to survive. Kuang Wenqi was clearly flawed but his crime, no matter how heinous, was depicted as the final act of a pathetic man who had lost everything.

Conclusion

36 Historically, legal, moral, and political concerns combined to make capital cases an abiding and direct concern of Chinese emperors for whom compassion and mercy were considered hallmarks of virtuous rule. The highly elaborate system of capital case and sentencing reviews were the institutional representation of these concerns. Ostensibly, the role of the county magistrate in adjudicating capital crimes was strictly limited. But, as the primary author or ‘editor’ of the trial record, the county magistrate was uniquely positioned to influence superior judicial officials through his presentation of the facts, construction of the narrative, and selective quotation of depositions. 59 Ironically, although the autumn assizes centralized review of capital cases to an unprecedented degree, the higher the level of judicial administration and the more removed from the original jurisdiction, the more dependent officials were on the information that the county magistrate provided in his case record. I would argue that the same editorial techniques that were used to expedite judicial review and to encourage leniency could also be used to present a more complex picture understanding of the connection between economic distress and violent crime.

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37 When it came to understanding the true nature of crime, no one in the judicial bureaucracy was better informed than the county magistrate. The emotionally charged crime of rape provides another telling example of the gap between official perception and social reality. As Janet Theiss has found “contrary to the assumptions of much judicial discussion on rape, most cases of sexual assault and adultery involved not male outsiders but neighbors, friends, and quite often even relatives.”60 Theiss’ conclusion is consistent with Lai Huimin and Xu Siling’s study of rape in eighteenth-century China61 as well as contemporary research of sexual assaults.62 The apparent discrepancy between the real-world threat of bare stick rapists emphasized in imperial rhetoric and the social reality of the crime illustrates the dilemma of grass-roots judicial officials. While the emphasis on the bare stick as sexual predator was largely a product of ill- informed ‘criminal profiling’ at the highest levels of judicial administration, judicial discourse made the bare stick the scapegoat and legislation targeted him for severe punishment. But as Theiss notes, regardless of whom they arrested and prosecuted, “magistrates were confronted with a society that looked quite different from that imagined in morality handbooks”.63 Thus, in the discharge of their judicial duties, local magistrates had to employ subtly in their reports. As Kuhn clearly demonstrated in his reconstruction of the sorcery scare of 1768, judicial officials who challenged imperial perceptions of crime did so at their own peril.

38 A close study of the case report suggests that, in addition to fulfilling the strict requirements of their judicial duties, some county magistrates used these account to instill awareness in superior officials of the harsh conditions faced by the rural poor. The message conveyed from Shandong was stark. The luckless tenant equated the loss of his livelihood with the death of his family. The hapless gambler belied the argument that hired laborers’ could count on their employers to substitute for the security of the family. Finally, Kuang Wenqi’s life story was a painful panorama of the destruction of one man’s family. As we have seen in the case of sexual crimes, recent studies indicate a significant gap between social reality and imperial perceptions. Just as any competent county magistrates would have been aware that the crime of rape was far more complicated than the imperial rhetoric indicated, the cases recounted above demonstrate that county magistrates in Shandong were firsthand witnesses to the destruction of the family, a phenomenon directly related to the emergence of bare sticks.

39 Clearly county magistrates were capable of recognizing the complexity of the plight of the downwardly mobile peasant, even those who committed multiple homicides of children. It is hard to imagine a case in which the legal, moral, and political tenor of the time was more heavily stacked against the criminals. Local officials were undoubtedly well aware of the official attitude and they could have easily echoed the strident tones of imperial condemnations of rogue males. Nevertheless, at least in their representations of these crimes to their superiors, the county magistrates attempted to impart some knowledge of the sense of betrayal and the abject poverty that drove men to kill. Leniency for those who willfully killed was out of the question, yet even the perpetrators of these horrible crimes were not denied their humanity. To varying degrees the three cases employed evocative descriptions of rural distress and nuanced depictions of peasant and hired laborers living on the margins of subsistence to issue a stark warning to central government authorities. Poverty was killing the family in Shandong.

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NOTES

2. The traditional term in Chinese, shengshi, (盛世), usually translated as ‘flourishing age’, has normally been reserved for exceptional periods of political, cultural and economic development.

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3. The literature on these topics has been prodigious. For ethnic conflicts see Dai (2009). For sexual assaults and rape see Sommer (2000) and Theiss (2004). For violent disputes over property rights see Buoye (2000). For the sorcery scare, see Kuhn (1990). For sectarian rebellions, see Wang (2011). 4. The Qing rulers were Manchurians and their multi-ethnic empire include vast territories that were predominantly Tibetan, Mongolian, and Turkic. These domains were ruled differently than the more populous Han Chinese provinces. 5. The rhetoric of leniency permeated the Qing judicial system from top to bottom. As the Kangxi emperor (1661-1722) noted in his preface to the revised Qing code in 1678 : “I have the utmost feeling for human life, especially for that of my people ; and where at all possible, I am unwilling to impose the death penalty.” Quoted in Alabaster (1936, p. 427). Huang Liuhong, author of a widely circulated seventeenth-century administrative handbook for county magistrates stated: “The magistrate must always lean on the side of leniency. If there is one iota of reason for the suspect to be exonerated, the magistrate must explore the point to mitigate the punishment.” See Huang (1984, p. 65). 6. I distinguished two categories of disputes : contractual, which included rent defaults, evictions, and redemptions of conditional sales, and non-contractual, which included boundary and water rights. 7. For an example of statutory pardons, see Buoye (2007). 8. The ultimate fate of individuals who were imprisoned awaiting final sentencing at the autumn assizes in the eighteenth century was uncertain. By law if capital punishment was deferred for three consecutive years after the initial review at the autumn assizes, the death sentence could be reduced to banishment. In practice archival records clearly indicate that the three year deadline was often exceeded. Further research on this issue is needed but mandatory investigations of deaths of prisoners awaiting final sentences for capital crimes reveal that some individuals remained in local jails for over three years. The most egregious case I have encountered was an individual who died of illness in a county gaol after his capital sentence had been deferred at 24 consecutive annual meetings of the autumn assizes. 9. Beginning in the Song dynasty (960-1279) civil service examination was the normal route to government service. The content of the exams was based on Confucian classics that educated male elites began studying in childhood. In this sense the overwhelming majority of Chinese officials could be consider literate men or scholars. Exams were held at the local, provincial, and national levels but only the national level degree holders were guaranteed government employment. While the Chinese elite comprised only 2% of the population, limits on the number of degrees granted and the unwillingness of Qing rulers to expand the size of government meant that the absolute number of highly educated elites who could not find government employment was also on the rise during the eighteenth century. See Elman (2000) for a description of the increasingly competitive nature of the civil service examinations in the Qing. 10. See Mann, Kuhn (1976, pp. 107-163). 11. Rowe (2002, pp. 473-562 p. 473). Rowe’s essay draws on a wide range of scholarship including the classic English-language studies : Ping-ti (1959) and Lin (1990). For an in-depth economic analysis of the period, see Myers, Wang, (2002), pp. 570-572. 12. See Wang (2011). While Wang agrees with much of the received wisdom on the topic, he stresses the Qianlong’s “overambitious attempts to push empire-building beyond a supportable limit” as an important factor in undermining the government’s ability to maintain social order. 13. See Liu (1999, pp. 172-178). Some Western scholars have dubbed Hong “China’s Malthus” though Hong wrote some five years earlier. 14. Kuhn (1990). Briefly, the sorcery scare was based on the popular belief that the human soul could be separated from the body and that the individual who obtained the soul could use its

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force. Alleged incidents of soulstealing, particularly when the victims were male children, led to violent attacks on the accused perpetrators. 15. Kuhn (1990, pp. 26-27). The process involved reciting incantations over some physical entity that had been removed from the victim. Quite often this was hair from the individual’s queue, the politically significant ponytail worn by Chinese men. The ruling Manchu dynasty had decreed the wearing of the queue by all Han Chinese males under penalty of death. 16. Noting the irreversibility of capital punishment, the oldest extant Chinese document that discussed the administration of justice, the Kang Gao (康誥) (dating from the early 1046-771 BCE), strongly admonished rulers to apply physical punishment judiciously and urged the substitution of fines for corporeal punishments in doubtful cases. The Lü xing, (呂刑) (dating from the c. 475-221 BCE) also urged caution and mercy in the use of physical punishments. See MacCormack (1986-1987, pp. 35-47). 17. Spence (1999, p. 60). 18. Mair (1985, p. 325). 19. Perpetrators of homicides, regardless of the circumstances, were invariably described as “ignorant of the law” and frequently labeled “obstinate”. The retention of these formulaic references, even when capital crime reports underwent extensive streamlining during the latter half of the eighteenth century, indicates the importance of this understanding of origins of criminal behavior. 20. Mair (1985, p. 329). 21. Theiss (2004, p. 35). Janet Theiss notes that “The concept of jiaohua was an old staple of Confucian statecraft discourse, but it acquired a distinctly paternalistic and bureaucratic cast in the eighteenth century as emperors and officials basking in the peace, prosperity, and imperial might of the High Qing formulated new ambitions for the state’s role in society”. 22. Edwards (2003, p. 181). 23. Zhen (1995, p. 332). 24. Ibid. The final published revision of the code in 1870 contained a total of 1892 substatutes. To date there is no complete translation of the substatutes in English although the unchanging statutes have been translated in to French and English. Scholars only familiar with the statutes, many of which remained unchanged in successive dynasties spanning several centuries, have mistakenly gotten the impression that Chinese law was “unchanging”. 25. Edwards (2003, p. 183). 26. Indeed, Jerome Bourgon has called this principle of legality “one of the major institutional inventions of Chinese civilization.” See Bourgon (2012, p. 171). 27. Buoye (2000, p. 96). 28. Meijer (1991, p. 24). 29. Sommer (2000) ; Theiss (2004). 30. Theiss (2004, p. 47). 31. Sommer prefers to translate guanggun as “rootless rascal”. 32. Sommer (2000, p. 10). 33. The sentence of “immediate” decapitation could not be carried out until after a full judicial review. 34. All citations for substatutes come from the Xue Yongsheng, Duli Cunyi on line at [http:// www.terada.law.kyoto-u.ac.jp/dlcy/index.htm] (accessed May 23, 2013). 35. Chen (1993, p. 272). 36. Robinson (2001, p. 49). Robinson includes both bare sticks and urban toughs under the heading of “men of violence”, criminal gangs who were active in Beijing and its satellite cities in the mid-Ming. 37. Sheng (1993, pp. 269-271). 38. Chen (1993, p. 273).

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39. For example, the term appears frequently in the Huangming tiaofa shilei zuan 《皇明條法事類 纂》 vol. 34 Xingbu lei (刑部類). I am indebted to my colleagues, Jiang and Wu Yanhong, who explained the significance of the Ming statutes. 40. Zhang (2008). 41. Zhang (2008, pp. 156-158). 42. Numbering of laws and substatutes follows Xue (1970). 43. A translation of the entire substatute can be found in Sommer (2000, pp. 327-328). 44. The substatutes in this table include the bare stick substatute 273.7, and all other substatutes that cite the bare stick substatute to assess punishments. The term bare stick appears elsewhere in the Qing code but the substatute is not cited. 45. According to Xue Yunsheng, the law originated in the Ming dynasty, but the death penalty was not invoked then. Available at [http://www.terada.law.kyoto-u.ac.jp/dlcy/index.htm] (accessed May 23, 2013). 46. Ibid. 47. See Buoye (2000). 48. Buoye (2000, Chapter six). 49. Li (1988, pp. 33-34). 50. Yang (1988, p. 54). 51. Xingke Tiben, tudi zhaiwu lei (刑科題本土地債務類 hereafter XKTB), 3252, Qianlong 45.09.26. The archival source for the cases is the Number One Historical Archive in Beijing. The documents are Board of Punishments routine memorials (xingke tiben) from the category of land and debt (tudi zhaiwu lei), 3252 is the bundle number and the document was compiled on the twenty-sixth day of the ninth month in the forty fifth year of the Qianlong reign (October 23, 1780). 52. XKTB 0714, QL 15.4.17. 53. Dates in documents are given in reign year and lunar month. 13 June 1749, is QL 14.4.29, meaning the twenty ninth day of the fourth month in the fourteenth year of the Qianlong reign. 54. XKTB 0714, QL15.4.17. 55. Traditionally, Chinese reckoned age as one sui at birth. A newborn is one sui at birth and “turns” two at the start of the second year. In this way an individual who is 42 sui might be 40 or 41 by Western reckoning. 56. Noting that the employer, Ming Keyi was “unaware” that this was a gambling debt, absolves Ming of any connection to the crime of gambling. 57. Also translated into English as death by a thousand cuts or death by slicing, lingering death entailed flaying of the limbs, dismemberment, and decapitation. In judicial practice, there were three forms of capital punishment : strangulation, decapitation, and lingering death. Based on the Confucian belief that the body should be returned ‘whole’ to ones’ parents, any mutilation of the body was considered unfilial. (See Feng (1983, p. 358)). Thus, strangulation was considered the least severe punishment because the body remained intact. Lingering death was the most severe form of capital punishment because the body was dismembered. 58. XKTB 0714, QL15.4.17. 59. Karasawa (1995, pp. 212-250). It should be noted that Karasawa’s cases are from the last decade of the Qing when, what I have called, the routinization of capital case reporting had been firmly established. In fact the increased ‘streamlining’ of capital case reporting was already evident over the course of the Qianlong reign. 60. Theiss (2004, p. 10). 61. See Lai, Xu (1998). Lai and Xu also found that most cases of sexual assault or harassment involved a male who was known to the victim. Sexual assault and harassment are difficult crimes to study under the best of circumstances. Neither Theiss nor Lai and Xu, attempts a systemic sampling of the tens of thousands extant case records available, but their findings are similar to contemporary studies.

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62. Available at [http://www.nij.gov/topics/crime/rape-sexual-violence/victims- perpetrators.htm] (accessed 29 May 2013). Modern studies indicate that victims and perpetrators are often known to each other. 63. Theiss (2004, p. 154).

ABSTRACTS

This article examines the rhetoric and representation of Chinese capital case records from the eighteenth century, when, as part of a far-reaching crackdown on violent crime, the use of capital punishment was extended to crimes committed by ‘bare sticks’, a common term for the underclass of crime-prone males. Adopting a strategy to suppress crime that combined ‘criminal profiling’ with the presumed deterrent power of capital punishment, Qing emperors presented serious challenges to the judicial bureaucracy. Ideologically, imposing harsh sentences and profiling bare sticks posed dilemmas, for county magistrates who operated within the confines of the rigidly bureaucratized structure of judicial and sentencing review. The article argues that county magistrates utilized case records to present sympathetic representations of rural poverty and despair that was at odds with the imperial denunciations of violent crime. Rooted in the longstanding judicial ethos to seek leniency and save life, hallmarks of Chinese criminal justice for centuries, these emotional depictions sent a clear message to the central authorities that economic conditions, rather than the moral failings of bare sticks, played an important role in undermining familial stability and social order.

Cet article examine la rhétorique et les représentations inhérentes aux dossiers des procès capitaux chinois du XVIIIe siècle, période où la peine de mort fut étendue aux « bâtons nus », terme argotique désignant les hommes marginaux portés à la délinquance. Les empereurs Qing, en adoptant une politique pénale combinant le « profilage criminel » et le caractère supposément dissuasif de la peine capitale présentaient un sérieux défi à la bureaucratie judiciaire. Au plan idéologique, l’imposition de sentences cruelles et le ciblage des « bâtons nus » suscitaient un dilemme pour les magistrats locaux qui opéraient dans les limites d’une procédure de jugement et d’un système judiciaire étroitement bureaucratisés. Cet article argumente que ces magistrats utilisaient les dossiers judiciaires pour présenter sous un jour sympathique la pauvreté et le désespoir ruraux, en allant à l’encontre des dénonciations impériales de la criminalité violente. Selon un ethos judiciaire traditionnellement porté à l’indulgence et à la sauvegarde de la vie – leitmotivs de la justice pénale chinoise depuis des siècles – ces représentations jouaient sur les émotions pour clairement faire savoir au pouvoir central que plutôt que les déficiences morales des « bâtons nus », c’étaient les conditions économiques qui jouaient un rôle important dans la fragilisation de la famille et de l’ordre social.

AUTHOR

THOMAS BUOYE Thomas Buoye is Associate Professor of History and Department Chair at the University of Tulsa and Research Associate at the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. He

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earned his PhD from the University of Michigan, in 1991. He is currently working on two projects : Capital Crime and Criminal Justice in Eighteenth-century China and Ruler, State and Economy in Eighteenth-Century China : The Economic Role of the Qing Imperial Household Department. His main publications include : Manslaughter, Markets, and Moral Economy : Violent Disputes over Property Rights in Eighteenth-Century China, Cambridge, CUP, 2000 ; Criminal Justice in China : The Place of Incarceration’, China Review International, 2012, 18, 1, pp. 14-18. Sanctimony and Self-deception : The Eighteenth-Century Origins of Western Misperceptions of Chinese Capital Punishment, Studies in Chinese History, 2013, 23, pp. 1-26 ; Evenhandedness and Excess : The Diverse Fates of Ethnic Minorities and Women in Qing Criminal Justice, Xingbie, zongjiao, zhongzu, jieji yu Zhongguo chuantong sifa [Gender, Religion, Ethnicity, Class and Chinese Traditional Law] (Lau Nap-yin ed.), Taibei, Academia Sincia, Philology Research Institute, 2013, pp. 257-292.

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Figures of Deterrence in Late Imperial China. Frequency, Spatial Repartition, and Types of Crimes Targeted by Dismemberment under the Qing Dynasty

Jérôme Bourgon and Julie Erismann

Introduction

1 Numbers are rare in Chinese history, which forces China historians to rely on empiricism and rule of thumb. It may seem that legal history is less hampered by the shortage of quantitative data than economic or social history, since there are plenty of codes and casebooks to explore. Yet evaluating the efficiency of the legal system in general, or the implementation of death penalty and its deterring effect on the Chinese populace, the lack of reliable figures becomes a serious obstacle.

2 As far as we know, there have been only two attempts from historians of China to treat crime and punishment statistically. Both rely on the xingke tiben, the routine memorials written by the provincial governors presenting cases of capital sentencing from their jurisdictions to the Board of Punishment. These documents were ultimately registered by a bureau of the Censorate specialized in penal matters (xingke), and conserved in the Grand Secretariat archives. In 1990, James Lee used copies of xingke tiben available at the Utah genealogical society to establish a first survey of 22,000 capital cases transmitted by four provinces (out of eighteen)2. With a yearly average of 2,000 to 3,000 death penalties submitted to the Assizes, only a minority, fluctuating between 12 and 40%, were executed. The system deliberately made executions uncertain, in order to enhance the role of the imperial mercy. Such uncertainty, added to the unevenness of recording throughout the provinces of the great empire, makes any general assessment challenging.3 In his innovative book, Thomas Buoye focused on 385 homicide cases

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caused by dispute over land and debt in the Guangdong province during the second half of the 18th century. 4 Relying on Lee’s figures for the rest of China as a point of reference, Buoye subtly analyzed the social and economic causes of dispute leading to increases in homicide rates. These two pioneering studies regard judicial archives as documents for social history, and are interested in crime and punishment as indicators of social conflicts. They are specifically concerned about the gap between statistics and the elusive reality, the notorious ‘dark figure of crime’.5

3 This article is less concerned with ‘social realities’ than with the nature and significance of punishments. What we search in figures of executions are not so much reflections of social conflicts than messages from the State about proper social behavior. Ultimately, we aim at assessing the human cost of crime deterrence, in order to assess whether deterrence was efficient in preventing violence, or whether the remedy was worse than the evil. Whereas Lee and Buoye dealt with the legal definition of crimes as a distortion of the true criminality, we focus on the penal agenda of the State in its conceptualisation of crime and staging of punishment, as well as the dogmatic canonical background. This opens for a new set of questions : Were punishments correctly conceived, and did they reach the targeted objective ? Or did they go in a different direction, and turned counterproductive in relation to the values they claimed to defend ? Such dogmatic issues cannot be studied in fragments through provincial or periodical samples ; they require general evaluation on the scale of the whole empire, and for the whole Qing era. Admittedly, such objective is far beyond our current documentation and capacity of treatment. As a way to remove the obstacle, this article proposes a short-cut, by bringing together the growing part of the Qing archives that are now easily accessible through digitization. It has become possible to get what Pierre Chaunu called a “pesée globale”, a “comprehensive weighing”, of crimes and punishments as social practice.6 As approximate and incidentally flawed it may be, this comprehensive assessment raises issues that would not be apparent in a more limited and fragmented study. As such, we hope to open new field of reflection on law and crime in China.

Why focus on executions ?

4 This paper focuses on executions by dismemberment, lingchi chusi in Chinese, which are more commonly known by the expression “death by a thousand cuts”. In reality the practice involved no more than eight to ten cuts. Why focus on lingchi, that constituted the most extreme form of deterrence in the Qing penal system ? As the harshest form of death penalty, it was assured the highest degree of visibility as well as certainty, due to its exclusion from the judicial revision process. Like other crimes, lingchi sentences were systematically conveyed through memorials drawn up by the provincial judge (ancha shi) on behalf of the provincial governor under whose authority cases were investigated, processed and submitted to the Board of Punishments in Beijing. Crimes committed in the Beijing metropolitan area were adjudicated directly by the Board of Punishment in a procedure called “immediate adjudication” (xianshen). Once examined by the specialized services of the Board, the cases were assigned to the “Three Legal Courts” (Sanfasi) composed by the directorates of the Board of Punishments, the Censorate (Duchayuan), and the Court of Revision (Dalisi). Lingchi sentences were then transmitted to the emperor for confirmation by the emperor, like all capital sentences.

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5 This judicial process was somewhat perfunctory, however, since lingchi was not an ordinary death penalty, it did not appear among the “Five Punishments”, the list of legal penalties in Article One of the Chinese penal codes, which had been in force since the Tang. The Fifth and most serious penalty was subdivided into “death by strangulation”, supposedly a milder form of execution because it left the body in its integrity, and “decapitation”, more severe since “head and body were separated” (shenshou yichu). While the Chinese legal system was based on the principle that the nature of crimes and punishments must be clearly and publicly defined and announced, so that people would be deterred from committing crime, the absence of the harshest punishment of all in the list of the legal penalties is intriguing. It makes dismemberment a terse and duplicitous device of deterrence.

6 Lingchi was peculiar in another respect which was hidden in the depth of the code. In various sections, death penalty was allowed in order to fit itemized crimes, each time specifying whether the sentence required “immediate execution” (lijue), or whether, as in most cases, extenuating circumstances justified preventive “detainment in jail” (jianhou), meaning that the death sentence was suspended until its reexamination by the Autumn Assises. This procedure effectively reduced executions to a small number of “confirmed sentences”, while most death sentence were finally commuted to banishment or pardon. These broadly dispensed mitigations were welcome in a harsh legal system, but lingchi completely derogated from them. The few articles of the code that mention this penalty – the detail of which will be examined below – always implied “immediate execution”. Accordingly, lingchi sentences were excluded from the revision procedure of the Autumn Assizes. Introduced in the code by the conquering who established the Yuan dynasty, lingchi was originally intended as a sheer instrument of terror, and it remained so both under the Chinese Ming dynasty and the Manchu Qing dynasty. Its application therefore had to remain outside the boundaries of mercy and pardon, although the latter was quite generously dispensed in the penal system as a whole.

7 In addition, legal provisions could be circumvented to make the execution more “immediate”. Prior to its legalization and codification by the Mongols, lingchi had started as an expeditious device against rebellions, and these shady origins resurfaced in the procedural shortcuts which were at the disposal of provincial governors. Indeed, a significant number of lingchi were meted out through a speedy process, reverently dubbed : “Respectfully requiring a sovereign order” (gongqing wangming). In practice this meant that the provincial governor had already proceeded to the execution, and requested a post-facto imperial rescript to give this arbitrary execution an appearance of legality.7

8 This plethora of derogations deprived the accused of the due process which was normally guaranteed by the revision system. This is undoubtedly the evil face of the imperial legal system, reserving in many respects a sphere for extra-legal measures and draconian justice where legal procedures were systematically distorted or ignored. Although a curse for the population, the lingchi penalty and its procedures are a blessing for the statistician, who can assume that all identified lingchi sentences were executed with very few exceptions. For this particular punishment sentence meant execution, with only a negligible margin of discrepancy.

9 Another advantage of lingchi for historical enquiry comes from the formal nature of the memorials sent by the provincial authorities to the central boards. These reports

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mostly consisted of the lists of convicted persons, categorized according to the sentences they received. Only those who were ‘short listed’ were named, while the others were left unnamed under the character “deng”, meaning etc., et alii. For instance : “Condemned to immediate decapitation are Wang X, Zhang Y, and 18 others”. Lingchi condemnations were judged serious enough to be presented separately in a single memorial, where each individual was identified by name with the crime he or she had committed. Whenever lingchi sentences were mentioned in a routine memorial including several different types of penalties, lingchi sentences were placed at the top of the list. In group executions of rebels or bandits, the ringleader was usually condemned to lingchi and his full name was used to identify the case, while his subordinates who were condemned to decapitation were mentioned only cursorily by the et alii stock designation.

10 This conspicuousness has allowed the identification of a significant sample of over 1100 lingchi sentences executed between the Qing conquest in 1644 and the abolition of lingchi and other ‘cruel penalties’ in 1905. This set of cases is briefly described below and more details are provided in the appendix.

Common assumptions about lingchi and the issues they raise

11 My first encounter with lingchi execution was in Bodde and Morris’ Law in Imperial China, the textbook wherein many legal historians of China learned the ropes.8 In this book, the description of the Qing legal system ends with a section headed “Western glimpses of Chinese punishments”, describing the cases selected, the authors explain, “because of their seeming accuracy and objectivity, as well as detail”.9 The most memorable, for most readers, is the long and minutely detailed description of a series of decapitations of bandits, ending with the dismemberment of their ringleader, witnessed by Thomas T. Meadows, a Senior Officer at the British Consulate in Canton in the 1850s. Cherished among Sinologists for the perceptiveness and reliability of his views on the Qing administration, he is also known for his pleas for British support to the Taiping rebellion, although his efforts were to no avail. He wrote two books on Qing China. In one he included what remains the only accurate eyewitness account of execution by dismemberment. Here is a description of the dismemberment of the ring leader : As soon as the thirty-three were decapitated, the same executioner proceeded, with a single-edged dagger or knife, to cut up the man on the cross, whose sole clothing consisted of his wide trousers, rolled down to his hips and up to his buttocks. He was a strongly-made man, above the middle-size, and apparently about forty years of age. (…) As the man was at the distance of twenty-five yards, with his side towards us, though we observed the two cuts across the forehead, the cutting off of the left breast, and slicing of the flesh from the front of the thighs, we could not see all the horrible operation. From the first stroke of the knife till the moment the body was cut down from the cross and decapitated, about four or five minutes elapsed. We should not have been prohibited from going close up, but as may be easily imagined, even a powerful curiosity was an insufficient inducement, to jump over a number of dead bodies and literally wade through pools of blood, to place ourselves in the hearing of the groans indicated by the heaving chest and quivering limbs of the poor man. Where we stood, we heard not a single cry ; and I may add

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that of the thirty-three men decapitated, no one struggled or uttered any exclamation as the executioner approached him.10

12 The impact of this breathtaking rendition is put into context by Bodde and Morris who stressed the exceptionality of the event : The fact that these accounts from north, central and south China have to do with events occurring respectively in 1860, 1857, and 1851 is important because all three dates fall within the period of the Taiping rebellion (1850-1864). This conflict, probably the most destructive civil war of all time, devastated much of the richest land of China, killed twenty or more millions people, and very nearly overthrew the Manchu government. These then were years of crisis, very different indeed from the period only thirty or forty years earlier to which the bulk of the cases translated in this book belong. Hence it may be not wholly fair to project what is said about penal institutions during the one age back to the earlier age of political stability.11

13 These few lines raise a lot of questions. First, why rely on “Western glimpses”, why not compare them with Chinese accounts ? The answer is that there are no such accounts. As curious as it might seem, no substantial account of a lingchi execution from a Chinese writer can be found for the whole Qing period ; Chinese literati did not write about such things.12 More importantly, to what extent are these accounts by Meadows and other Westerners representative of Chinese Law under the Qing ? The italicized passages above hint that the shocking aspects of repression and deterrence were due to the extraordinary conditions that faced the Qing State at that time, such that “it would not be wholly fair to project to the earlier age of political stability”. There is no reason to challenge this judgment in general, nor to deny the depth of the mid-19th century crisis caused by the Taiping rebellion and other contemporary uprisings as well as their tremendous impact on the Qing state and Chinese population. A naïve reader of Bodde and Morris may infer from their comment that dismemberment and other deterring devices were extreme measures employed mainly during an age of turmoil, in sharp departure from the normal course of justice in the heyday of the Qing.

14 Hence the question that underlies this article : to what extent is Meadows’s account of a bandit’s execution by dismemberment and beheading representative of Chinese law under the Qing ? Was lingchi a tool of deterrence used in periods of exceptional turmoil, which significantly receded in peaceful times ? An implicit assumption by Bodde and Morris is that lingchi was mainly employed against rebellions and gangs of violent bandits. In another part of their book the authors provide a complete list of the crimes that were punished by lingchi. Nevertheless it is clear that in their view this punishment was primarily a technique of mass terror intended for reestablishing State authority and public law and order disrupted by revolts and armed banditry. Other crimes punishable by dismemberment, such as of elder relatives, bloody feuds between families or lineages, are deemed marginal and anecdotal compared with the major disruptions of the public order. Must we regard this kind of executions primarily as a tool of political terror used by the State against society ?

15 Our data gives insight on the following five issues : 1. Frequency : how many lingchi executions took place during the 261 years between the Qing conquest in 1644 and the abolition of the ‘cruel penalties’ in 1905 ? 2. Trend : do we discern an upwards or downwards trend in the use of lingchi during the Qing period ?

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3. Periodization : were there periods which saw an abrupt increase or decrease in lingchi executions ? Were some Qing Emperors more prone than others to authorizing ‘slicing’ executions ? 4. Localization : were lingchi executions spread evenly throughout the empire, or did some provinces or regions witness the executions more frequently than others ? 5. Dissuasion target : Among the few major crimes for which the code provided for a lingchi sentence, which crimes were most frequently subject to linchi execution ? Were there significant changes across provinces and time ? Were certain types of crimes more targeted or repressed in particular provinces, or during particular periods ?

Problems and potential of the collected data

16 We have gathered a sample of 1,140 persons killed by the lingchi process across 1,017 executions. The discrepancy between the two figures results from the fact that several could take place in the same execution, as the dramatic case of the Monk Snowfield and his followers will show. Let us start by presenting our source (for further details see appendix 1).

17 Our two major sources are the “Archives of the Grand Secrétariat” (neige daku dang’an) and the judicial chronicles in the Shenbao which reproduced the “Beijing gazette” (jingbao). The archives preserve the record of 357 persons dismembered in 338 executions between 1644 and 1854 ; the Shenbao supplies us with the record of 453 persons dismembered in 453 executions. This makes up the first sample of 810 lingchi, a good basis for our enquiry, but it presents two vexing flaws. First, the periods covered by each source are grossly unequal in length : 210 years for the archival source versus 33 years for the newspaper source. Moreover, the eighteen years from the last year of the archival source, 1854, to the first year of the journal source, 1872, are entirely devoid of data. As a matter of fact, the gap is wider, since the Grand secretariat archives show a sharp drop of executions from the early 1840s down to almost none in 1854. Given that these are the years of the high tide of lingchi and many other forms of violence caused by the Taiping, Nian, and Muslims rebellions, it is clear that these small numbers, or none at all, most likely reflect the disruption of the Qing administration rather than a real decrease in executions. During these thirty years, the rebels as well as the officials acted outside the law and off the record. Even though the lingchi sentences imposed on the Taiping leaders as well as on the chiefs of other rebellions were recorded, most punishments occurred through summary “executions on the spot” (jiudi zhengfa) which were rarely reported. The magnitude and lawlessness of violence for these two decades renders all judicial statistics unreliable.

18 Similar problems might negatively affect the data of previous periods. For instance, the Grand Secretariat records only 34 executions for the 60 years of reign of the Kangxi emperor, i.e. around 1.4 lingchi per year. The average is much lower if we consider that a single collective execution held in 1667, that is, during Regency, counts for 27 lingchi, or 80% of the total number of the individuals executed. If we consider the number of the executions, rather than the individuals, the number falls to eight, which is barely more than one every ten years. Either Kangxi’s was the Grand lenient reign that admirers of imperial ‘légendes dorées’ like to venerate, or the data are flawed. Our inclination for the second view prompted us to compensate the gap in time and flaws of data by referring to three complementary sources. These are collections of

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administrative and judicial documents issued by State agents, either officially or unofficially (see appendix 1). Such sources allow raising the rate of executions under Kangxi to a more credible 3.9 per year. However, there are still spans of over ten years entirely “blank” of all executions under Kangxi or Yongzheng reigns, which lead us to suspect deficiencies in judicial registration.

19 Resorting to complementary sources could not compensate for the sharp discrepancy between the last thirty years, corresponding exactly to the reign of Guangxu, and the rest of the Qing period. It simply allowed reducing the Guangxu share of the lingchi executions toll from 55% to 40%, but still a remarkably high proportion ; this question will be discussed later. The imbalance might result from the difference of coverage between the sources kept or issued by the central Qing administration, and the Shenbao, a modern newspaper that daily extracted information from the Beijing gazette as well as from other local reports thanks to an efficient network of correspondents. Hence a possible underestimation of the numbers prior to Guangxu, which only a systematic survey of the judicial archives in Beijing would be able to rectify.

20 Despite the problems indicated above, our two major sources provide for complete and accurate information for over 1,100 lingchi sentences. We are provided with the name of the individuals condemned to dismemberment, along with the of their followers sentenced to decapitation ; the place where the crime was committed ; the name or of the official or the government services that supervised the execution at the provincial and central level (or both) ; and, less frequently, the local magistrate who started the investigation. Details or at least outlines of the cases are given, informing us of the nature of the crime, the reasons for the sentence in Chinese described as “the name of the crime” (zuiming). Finally, the gender of the criminal is normally specified except for a few cases. In brief, these are highly reliable execution registry and the executions most certainly took place except when the condemned died in prison. Even in the latter cases, which are duly specified in the data, laws and practices usually commanded that the convict’s body be dismembered, so that they can also be counted as lingchi executions, even though their deterrent effect on the public is more questionable.13

21 The complementary sources are less reliable. They contain the name of the condemned, the authorities that confirmed the sentence, the “name of the crime”, and the date of sentencing. In around one hundred cases, however, the locality is not indicated, or even the province, where the case originated. We laid down as basic requirement for our samples that the case include the name of the condemned, a clear statement of the sentence to lingchi, and the nature of the crime. On the whole, this set of samples is sound enough to attempt a “comprehensive weighing” of lingchi executions under the Qing and to find answers to the five questions raised above.

Frequency of linchi sentences and trends throughout the Qing period

22 The 1140 lingchi sentences pronounced between 1644 and 1905 produce an average of 4.5 executions per year. It amounts to 5.5 per year if we do not take into account 65 ‘ blank years’ for which we suspect that the records have been lost. From the linear diagram (see b. in Appendix 2), we start with a low average under the Shunzhi, Kangxi and Yongzheng reigns, especially in the last two decades of the 17th century and the

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first three decades of the 18th when the number of lingchi is at its lowest. From the 1730s we observe an increase that continues throughout the 60 years reign of Qianlong. The upward trend picks up after 1770 and reaches its peak under Jiaqing during the first decade of the 19th century. Then, under Daoguang comes a dramatic decrease ending with the ‘blank years’ in the 1860-1870s, which can be ascribed to the disruption of the judiciary caused by the huge rebellions of the mid-century. The mid-1870s saw the beginning of the noticeable rise which occurred in the Guangxu era : with more than thirteen per year, the average is ten times higher than in Kangxi era (four times if the ‘blank years’ are deducted), three times higher than in the Qianlong era. 439 executions over thirty years represent a little less than 40% of the total for the whole Qing era. Strikingly enough, by the time of the abolition, the number of executions was at its highest with 22 executions in 1904, which marks the second highest record year after 1883. Certainly, 1905 might have reached a new top if the abolishing decree had not brutally interrupted the rising trend in late April of that year.14 These changes are at odds with the expectations inferred from the European cases : in Europe the abolition of the “tormented executions” and judicial torture came after a long period of gradual decline, during which these kinds of practices were increasingly regarded as barbaric and backward. How are we to explain this discrepancy ?

23 The diagram shows a regular trend upward from the last years of Kangxi (after 1700) to the reign of Jiaqing (1810). If, as we suspected, the trend downward that started during this era can be explained by the judicial breakdown, we can compensate for the lack of data by conjecturing a continuation of the trend upward from the peak of the Jiaqing reign in 1806 to the peak of the early Guangxu reign. Since the gap in the diagram corresponds to the bloodiest years of the civil conflict, when lingchi executions of the kind that Meadows witnessed took place in great numbers. It is reasonable to imagine even higher peaks under Xianfeng and Tongzhi – between 1850 and 1875 – than under Daoguang : thus the line would reach a peak around 1860, over twenty executions per year, which then would slightly decrease and remain at around fifteen per year under Guangxu.

24 Even if we refrain from such bold statistical speculation, the general trend upward seems undeniable with the available data. At the present stage, it might be interpreted as a confirmation of Bodde and Morris’ assumption of a growing recourse to lingchi as a reaction to the unprecedented civil conflicts of the mid-19th century. The most suitable interpretation would be as follows : once the critical years of settlement under Shunzhi and the regencies of the early Kangxi reign passed, lingchi was seldom employed during most of the Kangxi and Yongzheng reigns, marking the acme of the dynasty. It was more frequently employed under Qianlong, whose reign was plagued by millenarian revolts and banditry during its last years. Then followed a troubled period during the early 19th century, mostly concealed by the absence of archival data. Finally, once the State administration was restored and a better recording of judicial activities by the new media became available, the change appears dramatic : lingchi had become the unmistakable device of mass deterrence in a Chinese empire in general turmoil.

25 This interpretation seems coherent, but it relies on the idea that lingchi was mostly a tool for repressing rebellions and restoring ‘public order’. Conceptually, it places the dynamics of the evolution not so much in the law but rather in society which was marred by ethnic, social, and political conflict. In such a perspective, lingchi is just a tool of repression in the hand of the State. The momentum is external to law, which

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reflects events passively : more rebellions to repress implies more lingchi sentences and executions. This paper will contend that, contrary to these interpretations, law is dynamic and creative : by determining what is criminal, it shapes the social reality in which the crimes take place. Far from a mere tool, lingchi was a conception of society and power cast in a dogmatic mold and grounded in the most sacred Classics. The trend of sentences therefore had its own dynamics, relatively independent from the socio- political events, no matter how tremendous the impact of such events.

Targets of deterrence : crimes liable of lingchi and their share in effective lingchi sentences

26 Crimes subject to lingchi in the Qing code fall in the following categories : 1. Rebellions, high treason, conspiracies (real or attempted) against the dynasty, and armed banditry. In analyzing the statistical and diagrammatical data, all the forms of collective actions that subverted or disrupted public order have been grouped under the same category of “Revolt”, marked by R in the diagrams of the appendix15 (see diagram c. and d. in appendix 2) 2. Killing three persons or more in another family. This was clearly a measure against family extermination, or “familicide”, that marked particularly vicious forms of blood feuds between lineages. These are the F crimes in the diagrams.16 3. Murder, attempted murder, or similar action, by a younger person on the elder person, or an inferior on the superior in the same family or clan. This is the general category of “parricides”, marked by P. This category can be split into 5 sub-categories, according to whether the victim of the crime was the father (Pf), the mother (Pm), other close relatives (aunt, uncle, elder brother or sister all regrouped under the collective noun of zunzhang, that can be translated as “senior elder”, hence Pse in the diagrams) ; the killing of the household head (Phh) by a slave or hired domestic ; and the killing of the husband by his wife, which I propose to call viricide, as a Latin symmetric of uxoricide – marked Pv in the diagrams.17 4. Inhuman crimes such as maiming and desecrating of the body of an enemy killed in a feud, or taking a body part of a living person for cannibalism or witchcraft (or both), have been ranged in the category of “atrocities” (A).18

27 These categories of crimes affect different realms, which can be regarded as concentric circles. The first circle concerns the public order of the empire, and the crimes in question have the potential for disrupting large areas or even the whole territory, as was the case of the massive rebellions of the mid-19th century. For crimes within this category, lingchi fulfills its ‘classical’ function of protecting the State and the dynasty. Crimes of the second category delineate a more restricted circle : a village or a district, the order of which could be disrupted by blood feuds between rivaling families engaged in ‘private wars’ or vendetta that affected local communities in many parts of the empire. In this field, lingchi does not defend the State itself but local peace and order.

28 The third circle is the family, in its twofold legal definition : Firstly, as a household including the head of the family, all relatives living with him, slaves and hired servants. Secondly, as including all relatives linked by duties of ritual mourning, even those living separately. These two kinds of kinship – the existential one and the ritual one – were taken into account in the legal framing of a “parricide” sentence, thus condemning to lingchi a domestic servant suspected of having plotted the death of the family head as well as a younger brother accused of having killed his elder brother even

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if living in separate dwellings. Moreover, a junior member of the family who killed a distant senior relative, for instance an aunt visiting his parents, was also liable of lingchi. Here, dismemberment was intended to maintain a strict subordination of the ‘younger junior’ (beiyou : those who were of a younger generation, or junior in age) vis- à-vis their senior or elder relatives (zunzhang : those relatives of an older generation, or elders of the same generation). This subordinate status was for life : one remained the lifelong ‘younger junior’ of one’s elder brother or sister, which changed only by the arrival of new members in the family who became one’s ‘younger junior’.

29 The fourth circle is the most intriguing, since it delineates the individual body : death by dismemberment for desecrating the human body, either in the course of a vengeful feud or with the intent to use parts of the bodies for witchcraft or wicked sectarian cults. Here, lingchi serves to defend a certain idea of human dignity, at least its bodily integrity. Despite the original significance and intentions behind making this a crime of lingchi, such cases became rare under the Qing, with most of them occurring at the height of blood feuds (see diagram c in appendix 2).

30 The underlying connection between these four realms can be easily understood as a reflection of the relationship between the Empire or Universe, the family, and the Self which is at the foundation of the Chinese conception of an orderly State. The ‘Great Study’ (Daxue), a Confucian Classic compiled in the 4th century BC., established the nexus between self-cultivation, or the ability of the true Gentleman (Junzi) to govern himself, the ability to rule his family, and consequently to govern and pacify the empire19. The same dialectic relationship between macrocosm and microcosm, with the familial hierarchy at its center as an epitome of the Filial Piety, reflects the Confucian cardinal virtue to unify the three realms, which permeates the whole range of lingchiable crimes. No matter how horrible a form of execution, and how legally questionable its status as a clearly codified penalty, and irrespective of the procedural shortcuts in its implementation, lingchi was perfectly in line with Confucian orthodoxy in its conceptual background, suitable for the crimes that violated filial piety.

31 The four categories of crimes had their specific realms, so that their respective proportions are indicative of the main trend in the repression of the most heinous crimes. The code merely provides us with a theoretical definition of the most heinous crimes. To identify which of these crimes were most effectively repressed in practice, we need to turn toward the lingchi sentences pronounced by the judicial courts. The data allow for calculation of the share of each of the four categories of lingchi sentences, and for representing the figures in pie charts covering the reign of eight Qing emperors (see c. “Four categories of lingchi sentences for eight Qing emperors reigns” in the appendix).

32 Some structural characteristics become immediately apparent. Thus, the relative proportion of each category of crime during the reign of Shunzhi is strikingly similar to that of the reign of Guangxu, and to the intermediary reign of Daoguang. Condemnation for parricides represents around two thirds of the crimes, while the last third is shared between revolts and familicides : there are more revolts (30%) than familicides (7%) under Shunzhi (30% vs 7%) and also under Daoguang (22% vs 8%), but under Guangxu there are slightly more familicides than revolts (14 vs 16%). During the long 18th century, under Yongzheng, Qianlong and Jiaqing rules, the occurrence of parricides remain under or around 50%, and revolts somewhere between 33 and 45%. The share of revolts tends to increase throughout the time, until the early 19th century.

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Finally, there are the anomalies of the Kangxi and Tongzhi periods, during which revolts accounted for 94% of all crimes under Kangxi and 100% of parricides under Tongzhi. This aberration, however, simply indicates that the data are flawed. Apart from parricides and revolts, familicides would require a special study : they remain stable between 7 and 9% for most of the period, and jump to 16% under Guangxu. Judicial archives as well as novels by popular authors, confirm that familicides and their punishment with lingchi formed a basso continuo of local life throughout the empire. They occasionally came with “atrocities” (maiming of bodies, dead or alive), which slowly declined from 4% to 2% of the sentences between the Qianlong and the Daoguang reigns, and disappear thereafter.

33 Under the late-Qing, familicides became the most chronicled form of crime. Some famous cases offer fascinating examples of interconnection, if not confusion, between reality and fiction, jurisprudence and gory tales. This is well illustrated by the historian of China, Jonathan Spence, who included a chapter in his best-selling Death of Woman Wang which mingled his description of a real case of “killing four people in the same family” with a novel of the popular early-Qing novelist Pu Songling.20A very similar case occurring in the late 18th century was turned into a popular novel by Wu Woyao a century later.21 This novel was published at the moment when a real case made the headlines, and recently established modern newspapers reported the investigations and the trial in a novelistic form, which adopted all the stereotyped characters known from fiction. This was a true case, however, which ended with the execution by lingchi of Wang Weiqin and the beheading of his elder son and four of his collaterals in October 1904.22 Fiction and real cases share stereotyped elements : a feud between a peaceful family of peasants and a powerful bully enjoying strong connections with the local administration leading to the almost complete annihilation of the former by the latter’s Mafia-like clan. Among the details of spectacular violence that inundated the public media, the most revolting was the high numbers of victims : nine in the 18th century case that was turned into a novel, twelve in the Wang Weiqing case, the latter including six children aged between two and thirteen, as well as two women. Both of these blood feuds only turned into legal cases because one single victim managed to survive, and sought justice in the courts. In the real case well as in the fictional account, this became the starting point of a long odyssey, strewn with ambushes organised by the powerful and influential bully, until the nearly-dead plaintiff met his or her savior in the guise of a ‘Clear Sky’, an upright and benevolent mandarin who received the complaint and confronted the villain. As a happy denouement of the fictional plot, the feud is eventually reversed when the villain is executed by lingchi, his kin and followers condemned to death or exile, his wealth confiscated and given to the victim in compensation.

34 In such cases, the legal penalty strikingly mirrored the circumstances of the crime, the State committing a familicide in a bout of retributive justice. This was the only category of crimes for which lingchi sentences met broad popular consensus. The legitimacy of the State was enhanced when it redressed the abuses of the local gentry, and repressed feuds by turning their own methods against them. For this type of crime, public opinion and popular culture undoubtedly supported the State’s effort to use terror as deterrence.

35 There is enough evidence to establish that the use of lingchi could not be ascribed solely to the repression of revolts, even though this component was always present and could

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become overwhelming depending on time and location. Even taking into account the potential flaws of our data, it seems reasonable to argue that the majority of lingchi sentences were not pronounced against rebels or armed bandits, but against parricides. Throughout the period under examination, revolts account for hardly one third, while parricides account for more than half of the lingchi sentences, and familicides for ten percent combined with 1.5% of “atrocities”. However, revolts and bandits are dominant for a longer period, when we combine the reigns of Kangxi, Qianlong, Jiaqing and Tongzhi, i.e. 155 years out of 261, while parricides are dominant only at the beginning (under Shunzhi) and, more preeminently, at the end (under Guangxu), whose thirty years’ reign saw more than 40% of all lingchi sentences. Therefore, the predominance of parricides over revolts is established in the very last decades of the empire. In other words, it seems safe to infer a shift from a revolt-focused lingchi toward a parricide- focused lingchi during the 19 th century. This shift occurred in the 1820s, if we take seriously the striking similarity between Daoguang’s and Guangxu’s pie-charts. To explain this shift, let us first consider of the case of revolts, to turn to parricides next.

Lingchi as restoration of public order

36 The idea that lingchi was devised mainly for repressing rebellions and bandits is firmly grounded in famous historical events, such as the dreadful fate of famous Taiping leaders. Our data include eloquent examples of that kind, most notably the repression of a revolt led by Buddhist Bonzes, whose chief was called Snow Field (Xueye). It took place on the sixth year of Kangxi (1667), when the reign was still under the regency of Oboi, two years before he was tried and imprisoned by the young Emperor. This was a period of violent conflict among the ruling elite. Oboi had the entire clan of one of his co-regents executed, a fate that came to haunt him and his kin some years later. This background might account for the merciless treatment of Snow Field partisans, of whom nothing is known otherwise. The memorial to the Board of Punishments reads : The Governor General of Shanxi and Shaanxi provinces and other places, concurrently in charge of military affairs and logistics, vice-president at the Ministry of War, and Censor Lü Chongling respectfully reports in re : the rebelled monk has surrendered. Your Servant has under his control the chief rebel, the monk Snow Field, who connived with Li Faming et al. for printing fake seals and spread libels full of absurd ideas and foolhardy bravadoes. Your servant has proceeded to interrogations and established that Snow Field was the vicious head of a “Complot of Sedition”, punished by dismemberment according to the Law. Those who plotted with him for faking seals and spreading libels, that are [the monk] Illuminating Light and ten others who followed the rebellion and received the libels, as well as Zhou Shaofeng and thirteen others, each being found guilty of participating to a plot of rebellion, all of them (i.e. 27 persons), without distinction between leaders and followers, are according to the Law, condemned to death by dismemberment. There has been no contestation of the sentence. As for those who were aware of the situation, who concealed the prohibited items, or deliberately let escape [prisoners ?], namely Wang Sanye and four others, as well as the members of the family of the chief rebel such like Qi Fengxi and twelve others, they are all condemned to decapitation. (Here follows a list of accessories, sentenced to various non-capital punishments) The wives and the children of the criminals are all, according to the law, confiscated (ruguan)23, as well as their wealth and lands, with specifications detailed in the appended folios.24

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37 This harsh sentence reveals some salient characteristics of lingchi execution against rebels, which can be sketched out as follows : • Collective incrimination conforming to legal key-terms in the statute and sub-statute : “all of them, without distinction between leaders and followers” (jie, bu fen shoucong). Here, the abnormally high number of leaders condemned to dismemberment suggests that the rebellion was considered a serious threat for the dynasty, although the Bonze Snow Field and his unfortunate companions left no other trace in the records. • combination of lingchi for the main culprits and decapitation for accessories, with exposure of the head for both categories ; • ‘chain indictment’ (lianzuo) of relatives and neighbors who were supposedly aware of the plot but did not denounce the plotters to the authorities ; • Derived penalty for wives and children – slavery, for males, or even death, deportation and ‘confiscation’ (ruguan) for females, meaning that they became State slaves.

38 This case is singular because of the high number of lingchi sentences in proportion to other derived penalties. In cases that posed much more serious threats for the dynasty, like the capture of the Taiping general Shi Dakai and his troops in 1863, a greater number of people were executed, but two thirds of the rebels were pardoned, one third beheaded, and only Shi Dakai was dismembered. This great rebellion of the mid-19th century might well mark the end of the use of lingchi against grave political crimes. Under the Guangxu reign, the share of “revolts” in the pie chart is the smallest during the Qing period, with 22%. Moreover, most of these “revolts” were in fact armed banditry, which became endemic throughout the empire at the turn of the 20th century. It is worth noticing that none of the modern revolutionaries who plotted an armed coup to topple the late Qing were condemned to lingchi ; all died in fighting, or were beheaded when captured. The same can be said of the Boxers, whose presumed leaders and supporters were all beheaded, mostly under pressure from the Western Powers.25

39 Therefore, it seems reasonable to infer that the “lingchi against great rebellion” with its apparatus of mass terror, collective incriminations and serial executions, made its last round in the suppression of the Taiping, the Nian and Muslims rebels in the 1860s, and then almost disappeared over the last thirty years of the Qing. The dramatic increase of the lingchi sentences during this period is entirely due to the increase of the parricides, accounting for more than 70% of the total, as the pie chart clearly shows.

40 As shown in table d., the category of “revolts”, banditry included, represents little less than one third of the lingchi sentences for the entire period, a proportion that had fallen to 15% in the last decades of the Qing. By contrast, parricides represent more than half of lingchi cases for the entire period, with more than two thirds occurring during the last decades. For every rebel dismembered for challenging public order, two or three rebellious children or wives were dismembered for breaching the family hierarchy in the household.

Lingchi used for restoring hierarchical order within the family

41 Parricide does not exist as a legal concept, and there is no Chinese word for it.26 Our category is a compound of various crimes labeled and listed in distinct articles of the Qing code. Practically, lingchi sentences for “parricide” split into a dozen of sub-

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categories in our chart (see appendix 2, table d. and related pie chart), which can be outlined as follows, in order of decreasing frequency :

Murder or attempt against : percent of total parricide

1. Husband by his wife (viricide) 25

2. Seniors-elders (zunzhang) by younger relatives 20.5

3. Father 18

4. Mother 17

5. Household Head by slaves or hired servants 7.5

6. Mixed cases 13

Total 100

42 Greek tragedy, Roman Law, and Freudian psychology taught us to construe ‘parricide’ primarily as the murder of a father by his son, or secondarily of a mother by one of her children. In Qing China however, parricide was a much broader category, involving distant relatives, which includes murder or attempted murder by slaves and servants against the household head. The killing of a parent comes only in third and fourth places, after offences against ‘seniors-elders’ (zunzhang). The category covering conflicts between domestic slaves and their master has the lowest number throughout the period, nearly disappearing under the Guangxu reign (just 4 cases recorded, or less than 1%). Yet this was very different by the beginning of the Qing, as we will see below. Most striking is the prevalence of spousal killing, where “offences against husband” comes in the first place with 25% of lingchi. The “parricide”, in Qing China, was primarily a wife killing her husband, or “viricide”.

43 The statistics reveal significant changes throughout the Qing period. Under Shunzhi, in the mid-17th century, the killing of a master by one or more domestic slaves was still the most important category of lingchied parricides, accounting for 47% of all such executions, ahead of the viricides, which already surpassed 40%. Master killings recede gradually along the Qianlong and Jiaqing eras (with 7% and 4%, respectively), and drop to less than 1% over the last thirty years of the Qing under Guangxu. During the same years, viricides reach their peak, with almost one third of the “parricides” (31%), and almost one quarter (22.5%) of all the lingchi sentences. Inasmuch as lingchi sentences reflect the inner conflicts in the household, there is a clear shift from slave-against- master killings toward a wife-against-husband killings, while other parricides do not show any striking change.

44 The sex ratio of the condemned people is highly unusual when compared with studies of other parts of the world, where most executions concern men, in an approximate proportion of 10 to 20 men for one woman.27 In Qing China, of 1140 persons condemned to lingchi, 210 were registered as women, 929 as men, and 59 were of unspecified gender ; this means that women represented 18.5% of the lingchi sentences. This is in itself a remarkable proportion for the harshest form of punishments. Moreover, the

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proportion of women increases sharply during the late 19th century : starting with 31.5% of women under Shunzhi, the ratio falls to 2.4% under Kangxi, and remains between 10 and 15% for the 18th and most of 19th century, with a striking, although erroneous, record showing no woman executed under Xianfeng and Tongzhi. Then comes the horrendous last thirty years, with 114 women out of 446 lingchi sentences, or 25.6%. Of course, this overrepresentation of women is a direct consequence of the prevalence of parricides over the other categories of lingchi sentences, and of the prevalence of the ‘viricides’ in the category of parricides. This double prevalence is overwhelming under Shunzhi and Guangxu, the first and the last reign of our period.

45 In short, lingchi was increasingly used to repress ‘private conflicts’ within the family rather than revolts, banditry, and other ‘public crimes’. Among family crimes the one most frequently punished with lingchi was the viricide, the killing of a husband by his wife. During the last thirty years of the Empire, one in four ‘great criminals’ sentenced to the harshest punishment was a woman who had killed her husband or another ‘superior relative’.28

Spreading deterrence : the spatial repartition of lingchi in the Qing empire

46 Thus far, lingchi as a means of mass deterrence has been evoked in its theoretical, qualitative, and quantitative aspects. The crucial issue remains how deterrence was conveyed in practice from the centers of State power toward the provinces and local communities. Capital executions, notably those applying the harshest forms of violence, involve a particular relationship between the center and the provinces or the non-Han marches of the empire (Mongolia, Tibet, Xinjiang). They suggest regional peculiarities which our data leads us to capture.

47 This is the most challenging issue, however. First, the flaws in the data that obscured changes over time pose even more serious obstacles when we turn to the distribution between regions. Major differences set apart the eighteen provinces of China proper from the immense crescent of Manchurian, Mongolian, Turkestan and Tibetan steppes and mountains that were incorporated through the Manchu conquest of China. Apart from the well-known and persistent differences in climatic conditions, population density, ethnic composition, etc., they constituted two different worlds in terms of institutions and rules. Chinese provinces were ruled for centuries by the imperial administration, and submitted to codified law and centralized judiciary. The outer margins were left to their own aristocratic elites, under the initially loose, but gradually tighter and more intrusive supervision by a special administration, the Court for Ruling the Frontier-Marches (Lifanyuan). Although the majority of its personnel consisted of non-Han, mainly Mongolian, origin, this Court tended to promote the Chinese way of regulation, codified law, and harsh punishments. But this general statement does not explain why Tibet had almost no lingchi sentences, while Mongolia and Manchuria have the highest rate of lingchi executions per capita, although all three were under the jurisdiction of the Lifanyuan. One of the aims of this research project is to gain a clearer understanding on how the legal and judicial components of the imperial state functioned as a coherent system.

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48 The second problem deals with the population. For an evaluation of the effectiveness of deterrence in any given area, examining the numbers of executions is not enough ; an estimation of the size of the population is needed, in order to calculate a ratio between the two figures. There is much uncertainty about population figures for each province during the Qing. For this project we had to rely on data found in Chinese books with relevant information despite their drawbacks and possible inaccuracies.29 We also had to deal with two different sets of figures which were hardly compatible : on the one hand, the population in vast areas numbering millions or tens of millions ; on the other hand, 1,140 individuals executed over 261 years in the whole empire, with two or three dozen people at most for a given province. The ratio can measure the toll of the penalty on the total population – very small indeed. If we focus, not on the executed, but on possible onlookers, the ratio can hint at the deterrence effect, once we take into account those elements impossible to quantify, such as the ‘media coverage’ of the event : its advertising prior to execution, the publicizing and staging of the execution itself, and, more importantly still, the memory of it as kept or emphasized by oral or written accounts and narratives. Admittedly, local memories can vary significantly according to cultural and social factors, but it seems safe to suppose that the ratio of lingchi executions per habitant for a given period has an immense impact on this memory, a basic ingredient of deterrence. But what is the time span for this kind of memory when such deterrence effect loses its impact ? We used imperial reigns like Guangxu, which is convenient for designating the last thirty years of the empire. But for the sake of comparison, we cut the periods into twenty-year blocks, presuming that this was the ‘generation that witnessed or heard about’ any particular execution30. We took the average number of the population reported for each of the periods of twenty years, and calculated the ratio that resulted in six categories, ranging from 1 lingchi sentence for less than 500,000 inhabitants, to 1 lingchi sentence for more than 1,250,000 inhabitants, every twenty years (see maps c, d, e).

49 We start with a rather fragmentary framework for the first two decades 1644-1663, due to the lack of data for many provinces. At the dawn of the dynasty, when its grip on the Chinese territory was still uncertain, lingchi sentences were concentrated in the centers of power : Zhili province, the metropolitan area centered on Beijing ; and Manchuria, that is in fact Shengjing – Moukden under its – which was the original capital of the Qing and kept after the conquest of China as part of its institutional and jurisdictional functions to the exclusive usage of the Manchus. The high rate of Gansu deals either with Muslim resilience that was to influence the province in the following centuries, or more likely with the gradual involvement of the dynasty in Mongolian rule in the northern border. The latter cannot be confirmed, since we have no figures for Mongolia proper. At this first stage, the high rates of lingchi sentences are seen in the Northern region that was directly under the rule of the conquerors, while central China reveals lower rates ; for the South and West there are no data. As will be shown further on the nature of the crimes punished with lingchi, there is no indication of rebellious attitudes of these Northern regions, since “parricide”, not “revolt”, was the most targeted crime.

50 The map for the two decades, 1728-1747 shows a very contrasted picture, with high rates of lingchi sentences in the South-Western regions (Yunnan, Sichuan, Guizhou) singularized by their many ‘ethnic minorities’ and a strong Muslim component in the population. As the “nature of the crime” will show below, these are rebellious regions

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already at this time – the years of the end of Yongzheng and the start of Qianlong rules – and this is confirmed in our second time-unit : the map for 1770-1789 shows high rates of lingchi sentences in Yunnan-Guangxi-Sichuan, and also the adjacent Hubei and Hunan, all regions where the White Lotus rebellion originated, which drained armies and finances of the late Qianlong and early Jiaqing reigns. On the South-Eastern coast, Fujian province and its dependence of Taiwan, reveal high rates, mostly explained by feuds and banditry. But the most striking are the high incidents in the ‘non-Han’ Northern and Western vast crescent comprising Manchuria, Mongolia, and Xinjiang. The grim honor of being the areas that saw the most incidents of lingchi goes to these three areas under Daoguang (1821-1851), and Guangxu, up to lingchi’s abolition in 1905. The blind spot in the middle of the century prevented us from verifying whether the Taiping, Nian and other rebellions augmented the rates of lingchi sentences in the regions which were most affected. One notes, however, that regions where the Taiping originated, like Guangxi, and the regions where they spread, like Jiangsu, Anhui Zhejiang, and the regions where the rebels fled and tried to entrench, like Sichuan and Guizhou, saw higher incidents of lingchi. The high rates in Guizhou are partly explained by the recurrent revolts of the Miao. The clearest case of all is Xinjiang’s, the Chinese Turkestan with its original populace of Uyghurs, prone to rebellion and separatism such as the independent khanate with Russian support. Here, as we will see, lingchi sentences have been a tool for repressing and deterring separatism.

51 The impact of rebellions on the occurrences of lingchi sentences would need further research. However, the category of “revolts” makes for less than one third of the total number for the whole period, and much less still during the last decades that followed the great rebellions. If insurgent spirit and deeds were targeted in places like Xinjiang, Guizhou or Yunnan, this is but one aspect of a more complex picture, as shown in our last category of documents : maps indicating the nature of crimes that were predominant in the lingchi sentence pronounced in each province (see maps f, g, h).

Localizing crimes targeted by lingchi sentences

52 The last three maps all show a sharp contrast between two categories : 1. Provinces where “parricides” are overwhelmingly prevalent, with at least 40% of the sentences ; 2. Province where “revolts” are the most targeted crimes, with at least 40% of the sentences. For the whole period (map f), category 1 is dominant in all the Northeastern region from Manchuria, Mongolia, and Zhili, the metropolitan province, to the lower Yangzi provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, throughout the central provinces, like Anhui, Hubei, down to the Hunan and West to Sichuan. The second category, where “revolts” is the main course of lingchi sentences forms a peripheral arc from the Southeastern coastal provinces of Fujian and Guangdong, up to the North-western Xinjiang, including the ethnically instable Yunnan, Guizhou, and Xizang, that is Tibet. Close to Xinjiang, Gansu has an even greater proportion of “revolts” than expected for a province where an important Muslim minority periodically revolted well before initiating the great Hui rebellion of the 1860s. The adjacent Shaanxi presents a similar picture.

53 Thus a contrast appears between a Southern and Western ‘outer’ China on the one hand, where lingchi was mainly a tool for repressing or deterring rebellions and banditry, and a Northern, Eastern and Central China on the other hand, where

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“parricides” were the main target. These two Chinas are highly unequal in population and density given that the Chinese population is concentrated in the Eastern Coastal provinces and in some central provinces like Hubei or Sichuan, while the peripheral areas are sparsely populated. The prevalence of “parricides” over “revolts” in our data reflects this difference in demographic weight, which should not lead us to overlook the importance of the spatial dimension. If “revolts” amounted to less than one third of the lingchi sentences for the whole empire, they mostly occurred in the vast border areas with mixed and unruly populations, which form buffer marches of great geo- strategic importance for the Empire. In such regions, lingchi was undoubtedly the emblematic manifestation of imperial supremacy, or the tool for its restoration, in other words the State terror device that the term conveys in the Western literature.

54 For most of the provinces of ‘inner China’, however, lingchi was imposed not to affirm imperial supremacy or restore public order, but to restore local and familial order. As for familicides, their general progression, as mentioned above, increased from around 7% to nearly doubling in the last decades of the Qing, as well as their permanence in local life. Geographically, lingchi sentences for familicides are in greater proportion in Northern and Central China : around 45% in Manchuria, 50% in Anhui, 30% in Shanxi, over 20% in Zhili. In the unruly Yunnan province, lingchi sentences are equally shared between parricides, revolts, and familicides. There are stunning bursts of “atrocities”, in Zhejiang or Fujian, meaning that local conflicts lead to inhumane conducts, such as the maiming of corpses or dismembering alive, with statistically significant frequency. Given that parricides were already a major cause of lingchi from the beginning of the dynasty, the progression of familicides appears as a major change, which seems to complement the decline in revolts and banditry. Under the Qing, and particularly in the last decades, lingchi was increasingly employed to deter dominant lineages or local bullies from vanquishing their opponents by exterminating them with their kin, and thus maintain at least the simulacra of peace and order at the local level.

55 The data do not allow us to go further in the geographical analysis. As limited as our survey is at the present stage, it hints at a penal typology of provinces, which would help restitute its spatial dimension to the legal system.

Some tentative comparisons with Europe

56 How should we assess the dismemberment of 1140 people over 250 years, with a frequency of around five incidents per year ? Do these numbers confirm that China lavishly resorted to ‘cruel punishments’, as Westerners would assert increasingly vociferously from the mid-19th century ? How does the Chinese practice of execution compare with the equivalents of the Western countries in the same period ?

57 The comparison is not easy. The first difficulty is that reliable and regular data are hard to find prior to the mid-19th century except on a very small scale : covering one city or town, or at best a whole province. Since the judicial systems of Europe were not centralized to the same degree as the Chinese, historians have to piece together scattered information to reach general estimation on the execution rate in England or France. The second difficulty deals with the quality, rather than the quantity, of the data : the type of execution and the categories of targeted crimes in the West do not coincide with the Chinese ones. For instance, it has been calculated that around 35,000 death sentences were pronounced in England and Wales between 1751 and 1800, of

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which about 7,000 were actually executed. These figures cannot be compared directly with our 1,140 lingchi cases, since the latter number refers only to the particular form of penalties, which occurred much less frequently than ‘ordinary’ capital punishments. A sound comparison could be made only with a general account of all the capital sentences and executions in China, a figure that would be considerably higher than our present data. Producing such statistics is perfectly feasible through a systematic survey of the judicial archives kept in Beijing and Taipei, but it would require much more time and manpower than we have been able to summon until now.

58 If comparing lingchi sentences with the general statistics of death penalties in Europe is not feasible, can we attempt a comparison between lingchi and the forms of particularly cruel executions in Europe ? Indeed, it is tempting to compare lingchi to the French écartèlement, the emblematic tortured agony used against those convicted of lèse-majesté that Foucault famously – and wrongly – presented as the epitome of death penalty in pre-modern Europe, or to the English quartering, which was reserved to public enemies guilty of great subversion or high treason.31 The problem here is that these types of penalties were extremely rare, with no more than one or two dozen incidents found during the 17th and 18 th centuries in Western Europe. As a penalty for lèse-majesté, parricide, blood feuds, individual acts of atrocity as well as revolt or armed banditry, lingchi is yet not comparable with the harshest and most spectacular punishments of Europe.

59 In fact, there is one specific type of punishment in Europe that allows comparisons with lingchi : the wheel. Under the two different forms it was practiced in – to be broken alive with a heavy cartwheel – and in France – to be broken alive with a bar while tied on the wheel – this punishment exhibited many similarities with lingchi. The punishment targeted the most heinous criminals, such as bandit ringleaders, serial murderers, parricides, and other culprits of atrocious acts. Moreover, the ‘breaking’ and ‘slicing’ process were very comparable in their operations and significances : the methodical destruction of the criminal’s body was aimed at symbolizing the eradication of the evil and at inspiring awe and fear to the spectators. We have no statistical data on wheel executions, equivalent to our lingchi data. Yet a recent work of synthesis provides certain elements of comparison. Benoît Garnot, an outstanding historian of justice in France, has gathered together figures from different jurisdictions to reach a conclusion of “an average of two hundreds death penalty per year for the whole kingdom of France (0.74 per 100,000 inhabitants)” during the second half of the 18th century. It is a figure that must be decreased by “at least one third”, to account for pardons, contumacies, etc. So we are left with a general estimation of around 140 criminals executed per year in mid-18th century France.32 So much for death penalties of all kinds. Garnot has also estimated the proportion of tormented executions, in particular “the breaking alive on the wheel”. In 18th century Burgundy, the “wheel is decided for one quarter of all the condemned”, and this rate increased as time went by ; “at the end of the reign of Louis XV, the inflation of the tormented death penalties (l’inflation des supplices) seems to be the rule here and there, to be decreased later”. In Provence, for instance, the “breaking on the wheel” rose to 53% between 1761 and 1770, with a peak of 72% between 1781 and 1790. On the basis of Garnot’s calculation, one can infer that “breaking on the wheels” represented at least one quarter, more likely one third, of the total number of executions in the second half of the 18th century. Therefore, it is easy to deduct that, among the 140 criminals who were executed each year over the second half of 18th century France, between 35 and 45 were

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“broken on the wheel”.33 If these figures are compared with the 60 years of the Qianlong reign (1736-1796), it would result in more than 2,000 deaths by the wheel, almost twice the total amount of lingchi we have found for the whole Qing period. Of course, these approximate figures should not be extrapolated. But they suggest that the use of lingchi was not more frequent than the use of the wheel, in an empire much bigger in size and more populous than France. Interpreted strictly as legal repression and deterrence of the most heinous crimes, the reign of Qianlong may not have been any more ‘cruel’ than the reigns of Louis XV or Louis XVI ; but of course, all this depends on how far the present sample is representative of the lingchi sentences executed under the Qing. This can only be confirmed or disproved by further research.

Conclusion

60 Lingchi was from its origin an anomaly in Chinese law : belatedly and imperfectly codified, loosely and expeditiously handled, excluded from revision procedure. It was applied to criminals for their presumed crimes and attempted crimes without consideration of their intent, in complete contradiction with the sound principles of the regular legal system. An enclave of extraordinary law from the outset, lingchi had been shaped for the defense of the Confucian “Three bonds” (sangang), in which the two last bond – the father-son and the husband-wife relationships – are modeled on the first, the sovereign-subject bond. For centuries, the assimilation of regicide and parricide that authoritative commentators read into the Annals, one of the Five Classic of the Confucian tradition, was mainly a doctrinal justification of political power. Those who challenged the dynasty or the public order by rebellion or treason committed an attempt of regicide-parricide, and thus were doomed to lingchi and the extermination of their clan.34 An anomaly from a legal point of view, lingchi conformed to a logic that recommended using mass terror against public enemies. The primary interest of our

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data is to show the dramatic shift of a mass terror device from the public to the private sphere. Under the Qing, less than one third of the lingchi sentences targeted crimes threatening State power while more than half targeted crimes committed within the family, with 15 to 40%, depending on regions, aimed at limiting the extermination of rival families.35 In the last decades of the empire, lingchi was still used as deterrence against rebels in remote border areas, but in most of the Chinese provinces it targeted chiefly rebellious children or wives, as well as local bullies prone to kill any opponent together with his family.

61 Even at this initial stage, our investigation in penal geography promises an important outcome in charting out for the spatial dimension of law. The Qing had a well- developed legal system, highly systematic in labeling crimes and apportioning punishments ; but the system could live and grow only by its interrelation with local realities through a complex institutional network that is most aptly seized when restored in its spatial dimension. The Qing code provides us with only a list of crimes liable to lingchi, but in order to know what kind of crimes were effectively targeted by lingchi, we have to delve into the archival cases, and into their spatial repartition and evolution through time. Beyond the sheer figures about harsh punishments, and the comparisons of the level of cruelty between China and Europe that these data seem to reveal, a key interest of such an enquiry is to map the penal agenda of the State throughout its territory. The present data and the maps we drew from them as well as the associated analyses are intended as an invitation to further and more ambitious research into the central archives in Beijing and Taipei, as well as in local archives that become more accessible each year.

62 Figures are cold abstraction, however, which need to be fleshed out by this illustration of the subject most targeted by the harshest penalty, the arch-enemy in the late Qing : the wife who plotted the killing of her husband with the help, or under instigation, of her lover. Here she is, as shown in an illustrated handbook on the “Five Punishments” that circulated in the 1900s (see appendix 3), logically subjected to lingchi. This beautiful, desirable young woman languidly contemplates her severed limbs, while her lover is waiting to be beheaded at the background. In all its suggestive crudity, this illustration comes, not from a popular titillating novel, but from a stern legal handbook.36 For a reader trained by reading Bodde & Morris, and so many authors, to face violent rebels and bandits, it comes as a disconcerting dismay. One feels like a moviegoer who expected to watch Spartacus and is shown The Postman Always Rings Twice instead. The dismay is instructive, however. The fact that instead of the Great Traitor – Chiyou, the Archetypal Rebel who was defeated and dismembered by the Founding Yellow Emperor in the great myth on the origins of the Chinese civilization – we find a fragile, though unfaithful and murderous wife is like a parody of the Confucian great project of total governance. It is as though the majestic progression schemed in the Great Study : Governing the Self, Ruling the Family, Pacifying the World, had shrunk back, as though the chaos that had shaken the State to its foundation had gained the very core of the family, the spousal couple, that was indeed to get through some turbulences in the century to come. This is the threat that lingchi sentences were supposed to conjure, a threat against the dogmatic foundation of the Confucian order, much more serious than social upheavals or political protests. This is, however, where Chinese Law originated its raison d’être and dynamics and where its meaning and progress must be sought.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anonymous, Jinshan xian baojia zhangcheng : Fu quanjie tiaokuan, Zuiming tushuo [Commented charts of Crimes and Punishments, appended as articles of exhortations and warnings to a Regulation on the local police of Jinshan district], ca.1900.

Bastien, P., Une histoire de la peine de mort. Bourreaux et supplices 1500-1800, Paris, Seuil, 2011.

Bodde, D., Morris, C., Law in Imperial China : Exemplified by 190 Ch’ing Dynasty Cases, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1973 [orig. publ.1968].

Bourgon, J., Abolishing “Cruel Punishments” : A reappraisal of the Chinese Roots and Long-Term Efficiency of the Xinzheng Legal Reforms, Modern Asian Studies, 2003, 37, 4, pp. 851-862.

Bourgon, J., Supplice chinois, Bruxelles, La Maison d’à côté, 2007.

Bourgon, J., Obscene Vignettes of truth. Construing photographs of Chinese executions as historical documents, in Henriot, C., Yeh, W. (Eds), Visualizing China. Moving and Still Images in Historical narratives, Leiden, 2012a, pp. 39-91.

Bourgon, J., Lapsus de Laïus. Entre régicide et parricide, l’introuvable meurtre du père, Extrême- Orient, Extrême Occident, 2012b, 1, pp. 313-339.

Brook, T., Bourgon, J., Blue, G., Death by a Thousand Cuts, Cambridge MA., Harvard University Press, 2008.

Buoye, T., Manslaughter, Markets, and Moral Economy : Violent Disputes over Property Rights in Eighteenth-Century China, Cambridge, CUP, 2000.

Cao S., Zhongguo renkou shi – di wu juan : Qing shiqi [A History of the Chinese population : 5. The Qing Period], Shanghai, Fudan daxue chubanshe, 2001.

Carlitz, K., Genre and Justice in Late Qing China : Wu Woyao’s Strange Case of Nine Murders and its Antecedents, in Hegel, R.E., Carlitz, K. (Eds), Writing and Law in Late Imperial China ? Crime Conflict, and Judgment, Seattle, University of Washington Press, 2007, pp. 234-257.

Chaunu, P., La pesée globale en histoire, Cahiers Vilfredo Pareto, 1968, 6, 15, pp. 135-164.

Evans, R., Rituals of Retribution. Capital punishment in Germany 1600-1987, Oxford, OUP, 1996.

Foucault, M., Discipline and Punish. The Birth of Prison, New York, Vintage, 1977.

Friedland, P., Seeing Justice Done. The Age of Spectacular Capital Punishment in France, New York, Oxford University Press, 2012.

Garnot, B., Histoire de la justice. France, XVIe-XXIe siècles, Paris, Gallimard, 2009.

Gatrell, V.A.C., The Hanging Tree : Execution and the English People, 1770-1868, Oxford, OUP, 1994.

Hevia, J., English Lessons : The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China, Durham, NC., Duke University Press & Hong Kong University Press, 2003.

Lauwaert, F., Le meurtre en famille. Parricide et infanticide en Chine (XVIIIe-XIXe siècles), Paris, Odile Jacob, 1999.

Lee, J., Homicide et peine capitale en Chine à la fin de l’empire. Analyse statistique préliminaire des données, Études chinoises, 1991, X, 1-2, pp. 114-134.

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Meadows, T.T., The Chinese and Their Rebellions, Viewed in Connection with Their National Philosophy, Ethics, Legislation, and Administration, London, Smith, Elder & co., 1856.

Rowe, W.T., Saving the World. Chen Hongmou and Elite Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century China, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2001.

Spence, J., Death of Woman Wang, London, Penguin, 1979.

Spierenburg, P., The Spectacle of Suffering : Executions and the Evolution of Repression : From Pre- industrial Metropolis to European Experience, Cambridge, CUP, 1984.

Suzuki, H., Gong Qing Wang Ming— Kyôsei ômei kô : Shindai shikei saiban ni okeru ‘kengi’ to ‘teirei’ [Gong Qing Wang Ming : A study of capital sentence under the Qing, from “expedients” to “established rules”], Hôseishi kenkyû, 2003, 53, pp. 47-80.

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APPENDIXES

1. Sources a. The “archives of the Grand Secretariat” (neige daku dang’an) include a collection the memorials sent by provincial authorities to the Central boards for revision and transmission to the emperor for all kinds of administrative affairs, among which were capital cases. These archives are kept in Taipei, in the “Old Palace” (Gugong) Museum, where parts of the documents that were primarily in Beijing have been moved. Their digitalization provides us with 357 persons dismembered in 338 executions between 1644 and 1854. b. Judicial reviews of the Shenbao (or Shanghai News). The Shenbao was the first modern news journal in Chinese daily published in Shanghai from 1872 up to 1949, with interruptions due to civil war and Japanese aggression. Right from the first year onward, the journal systematically reproduced abstracts of the ‘Beijing gazette’ (jingbao), an unofficial copy of official documents – mostly legal and judicial– issued by the central boards in Beijing. Until very recently, researchers had to use a facsimile of the original format, whose general layout made its reading quite laborious and a statistical surveys almost impossible. Its recent digitalization and online access has permitted to find accounts on 453 people executed in 453 executions between September 1872 and April 1905. c. The “illicit sexual intercourse” were a part of the “Routine memorials of the Penal service of the Censorate” (xingke tiben). The sentence transmitted to the Board of Punishment were routinely reviewed and archived by a service of the Censorate specialized in penal affairs. This bureaucratic process has produced millions of documents now stored in the Archive n°1 at Beijing’s Forbidden city. In recent years, the Institute of History and Philology of the Academia Sinica in Taiwan has copied important samples and made them available online. d. Leading cases from the ‘Board of Punishments’ (Xingbu) part of the ‘Official administrative collected compendium with cases and rules of the Great Qing’, (Qinding

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Da Qing huidian shili) covering the Guangxu reign (publ. 1899). This was a huge collection of all texts that constituted the central services at the capital. The part devoted to the ‘Board of Punishments’ included the Qing code, and a selection of precedents or shili that were likely to be inserted into the code as sub-statutes or tiaoli, and thus become new laws enforced on a particular matter. e. The ‘Comprehensive compendium of penal cases’ (Xing’an huilan) is a huge collection of judicial materials, including cases adjudicated at the local level and transmitted to the ‘Board of Punishment’ by the provincial judiciaries as well as memoranda exchanged between services of the Board. The original collection in 60 volumes covers around ten years from 1823 to 1834, and has been followed by many sequels and reprints up to the 1890s. Our cases are abstracted from a PDF version of the recent edition by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Institute of Legal Studies. f. The ‘Veracious registers’ (Shilu) is an official day-by-day record of the decisions taken by the Qing emperors in connection with their ministers and subordinate services. There is one ‘Veracious register’ per reign, giving a total of ten for the Qing, all available in PDF and searchable with OCR devices. Death sentences reviewed by the emperor were cursorily registered therein.

2. Statistics and diagrams

2.a. Yearly frequency of lingchi per reign, with account of “blank years”

Lingchi Yearly Year count with “blank Reigns sentences average years”

Shunzhi (1644-1661) 54 3,0 18

Kangxi (1662-1722) 82 1,4 61

Kangxi blank year deducted 3,9 40 years deducted from 61

Yongzheng (1723-1736) 6 1,7 13

Qianlong (1737-1796) 236 3,6 59

Jiaqing (1797-1820) 176 7,7 23

Daoguang (1821-1851) 124 4,1 30

Xianfeng (1852-1861) 12 3,0 5 years deducted from 9

Tongzhi (1862-1874) 2 0,5 8 years deducted from 12

Guangxu (1875-1908) 446 13,5 33

Year unknown 2

Whole period (1644-1905) 1140 4,4 261

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Whole period minus 65 “blank 5,6 205 years”

2.b. General trend of lingchi sentencing 1644-1905

2.c. Four categories of lingchi sentences for eight Qing emperors reigns

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2.d. Share of lingchi sentences for each category of crimes (whole period)

Cause Count share (%)

Revolts 369 32,4

Familicides 124 10,9

Atrocities 18 1,6

Parricides (total) 629 55,2

Nature of parricides Pv (viricide) 167 26,6

Pse (senior-elder) 128 20,3

Pm (mother) 110 17,5

Pf (father) 109 17,3

P (unknown) 55 8,7

Phh (household head) 48 7,6

Pc (combined) :

P (father and mother) 6 1,0

P (father and household head) 1 0,2

P and revolt 2 0,3

P (viricide and senior-elder) 1 0,2

P (viricide and senior-elder and familicide) 1 0,2

P (viricide and father) 1 0,2

TOTAL 1140

2.e. Nature of the parricides

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Nature of parricides for the whole period (1644-1905)

Nature of parricides : Shunzhi (1644-1662)

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Nature of parricides : Qianlong(1736-96)

Nature of parricides : Guangxu (1875-1905)

3. Maps

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3.a. Rate of lingchi sentences by province for 1644-1662

3.b. Rate of lingchi sentences by province in 1728-1747

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3.c. Rate of lingchi sentences by province, 1770-1789

3.d. Rate of lingchi sentences by province 1821-1850.

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3.e. Rate of lingchi sentences by province 1875-1905

3.f. Nature of the crimes leading to lingchi sentences in each province for the whole period (1644-1905).

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3.g. Nature of the crimes leading to lingchi sentences in each province under Qianlong (1736-1796).

3.h. Nature of the crimes leading to lingchi sentences in each province under Guangxu (1875-1905).

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NOTES

2. Lee (1991). 3. Lee (1991, p. 124). 4. Buoye (2000). 5. Lee (1991, pp. 116-117), Buoye (2000, pp. 238-239). 6. Chaunu (1968). 7. On this swift procedure of execution, see Suzuki (2003). 8. Bodde, Morris, (1973). 9. Bodde, Morris (1973, p. 112, n.51). 10. Meadows (1856, pp. 655-656). Quoted in Bodde, Morris (1973). 11. Bodde, Morris (1973, p. 111) – (my italics). 12. For reflections on this silence, see Bourgon (2007) ; Brook, Bourgon, Blue (2008, chapter 1). The short eyewitness report of Wang Weiqin’s execution by the hydraulic engineer Li Yizhi evoked in this chapter does not make a real exception, since Li depicts the arrival of the condemned, the place and the crowd, but has not a word about the actual execution. 13. The legal term in such case was not “putting to death by dismemberment” (lingchi chusi), but “slaughtering the corpse” (lushi), a nuance that we can ignore for the present purpose. 14. On the abolition decrees of 1905, see Bourgon (2003, pp. 851-862). 15. Law against Robbery or banditry (“Qiangdao”, art.261 in the Qing code) did not provide for lingchi sentences, but only decapitation with immediate execution (zhan lijue), with possible exposure of the head (xiaoshou) for the ringleader. However, a gang of a certain magnitude in number and criminal records could be assimilated to a rebellious scheme, just like dissident groups for political or religious purposes. Our focus on State conceptions and practices justifies the grouping under the single category of “Revolt” of what could be termed “crimes against the public order”. They generally fall under art.254 : “Plot of Rebellion and Great Sedition” (Moufan dani), and art.255 : “Plot of High Treason” (Moupan). 16. Art.287 : “Killing three persons in a same family” (Sha yijia sanren). The term “familicide” is currently used for crimes committed by a spouse, commonly the husband, killing the other spouse with the children. But the term also includes the killing of a family by strangers, which is common for our Chinese cases. 17. Art.284 : “Plot to kill grand-parents or parents” (Mousha zu fumu fumu) ; art.286 : “Plot to kill the parents of one’s deceased husband” ; art.314 : “Slave beating the household head” (Nubi ou jiazhang) ; art.315 : “Spouse or Concubine beating their husband” (Qie qi ou fu). 18. Art.287, last paragraph ; and art.288 : “Picking up parts of the body of a living person” (Zhaisheng zhege ren). 19. This old classic may seem outdated in the Qing, but its meaning had been revived under the Ming, and placed at the core of the statecraft current by Qiu Jun’s ‘Complement to the extended meaning of the Great Study’ (Daxue yanyi bu), which had a deep influence on Qing statecraft activists, such as Chen Hongmou. See Rowe (2001, p. 117). 20. Spence (1979, pp. 89-98). 21. See Carlitz (2007, pp. 234-257). 22. A sketch of the Wang Weiqin case appears in the introduction of Brook, Bourgon, Blue (2007). 23. For the wives and children of the condemned ‘being confiscated’ meant to be deported and reduced to slavery. 24. Neige daku, Archives of the Grand Secretariat, ‘Basic material’ (jiben ziliao) 065912-001. 25. On the Boxers’ execution, see Hevia (2003) ; and Bourgon (2012a). 26. See Bourgon (2012b).

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27. Women represent less than 10% of the executed in 18th century London, according to Gatrell (1994, p. 8) ; Richard Evans (1996), give similar rates for Germany, apart from bouts of repressive fury against witches, and later against infanticide mothers in the mid-18th century. 28. This squares with James Lee’s observations that “le seul ‘supérieur’ contre lequel se dressaient massivement les femmes était leur mari”, see Lee (1991, p. 127). 29. Zhao, Xie (1984) ; Cao (2001). 30. Here we took example on recent studies of executions in modern and pre-modern Europe : Gatrell (1994) ; Evans (1996) ; Bastien (2011). 31. See the famous description of Damiens’ écartèlement in Foucault (1977) and its critique in Friedland (2012, p. 2013). 32. Garnot (2009, pp. 479-480). 33. According to Pieter Spierenburg (1984, p. 213), there were 40 executions by breaking on the wheel in Amsterdam between 1651 and 1750, i.e around 0,4 per year. Estimating the average population to around 200,000, this makes a rate twice higher than in France, and much higher than the rate of lingchi in China according to our data. 34. On the etymological and legal meanings of lingchi, see Brook et al. (2008, chapter 3) ; Bourgon (2012b). 35. Striking cases of ‘familial crimes’ have been collected and aptly commented by Lauwaert (1999). 36. Anonymous (n.d., ca. 1900).

ABSTRACTS

Although the Chinese empire applied a sophisticated codified legal system for centuries, very few attempts have been made to measure its impact on society. Digitization now provide for data to be collected on a scale wide enough to allow assessment on how the penal system operated in practice. As a blueprint for further research, the scope of the present study is limited to the executions by dismemberment (lingchi), the most deterrent form of death penalty, as it is the best-documented and easiest to find in the archives. A data-set of around 1,140 lingchi sentences executed over 260 years under the Qing dynasty provides the statistical basis for examining the frequency of this punishment, as well as its evolution over time, its repartition across the territory, and the nature of the crimes targeted. While the original purpose of this penalty was to deter crimes against the State, such as rebellions or banditry, our data show that lingchi was increasingly employed to strengthen the hierarchy within the family by primarily targeting unfilial children and murderous wives. Instead of being the rudimentary instrument to crush social upheavals, as claimed by many historians, lingchi functioned as a sophisticated device to maintain a complex Confucian agenda.

Quoique l’empire chinois ait employé un système de codification juridique sophistiqué pendant des siècles, on a très rarement tenté d’en mesurer l’impact sur la société. La numérisation offre la possibilité de collecter des données à une échelle suffisante pour évaluer les pratiques pénales. Cette recherche constitue l’esquisse de recherches futures, et se limite aux exécutions par démembrement (lingchi), forme la plus dissuasive de la peine de mort, car elle est la mieux documentée et la plus aisée à retrouver dans les archives. Une base de données d’environ 1 140 sentences de lingchi exécutées sur environ 260 ans sous la dynastie des Qing permet l’examen

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statistique de la fréquence, de l’évolution dans le temps, de la répartition géographique et de la nature des crimes concernés. Initialement, cette peine visait les crimes contre l’État tels que la rébellion ou le brigandage, mais nos données montrent que le lingchi fut employé de manière croissante pour conforter la hiérarchie interne à la famille, en visant les enfants indignes et les épouses meurtrières. Plutôt que l’arme rudimentaire servant à écraser les soulèvements souvent décrite par les historiens, le lingchi constituait un dispositif sophistiqué de soutien d’un projet confucéen complexe.

AUTHORS

JÉRÔME BOURGON After studying and passing grades in history departments, Jérôme Bourgon specialized in Chinese history. In 1994, he defended his Ph.D thesis in ‘History and Civilization’ at the EHESS, with a study of Shen Jiaben, who introduced Western law in late imperial China and was the last jurist and historian of the Chinese legal tradition. Hereafter, Bourgon researched various aspects of Chinese law, such as the questionable relationship between ‘customs’ and civil law, the various genres of legal books in imperial China, and penal law as seen through the ominous ‘Supplice chinois’ [http://turandot.chineselegalculture.org/]. He published two books on this topic. Since 2011, he leads an international project aimed at a complete and accurate translation of the Qing dynasty penal code, as well as a new understanding of law through its differentiated implementation on the various parts of the empire territory, hence its title “Legalizing Space in China” [http://lsc.chineselegalculture.org/]. He is currently writing a general history of penal law in China, in which this study on lingchi takes place.

JULIE ERISMANN Julie Erismann has a doctorate in geography (Univ. Jean-Moulin, Lyon, France) – She is responsible for the statistics, diagrams and maps in this article.

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Violence in Ming-Qing China : An Overview

William T. Rowe

1 Let us begin with a basic fact : the level of violence in late imperial China was probably as high as that in any historical society in the world.1 Obvious as this may sound, it is easy to miss it. The entire central message of the package of literati values that we refer to as ‘Confucianism’, and especially after its elaboration into the so-called ‘school of principle’ or ‘neo-Confucianism’ (lixue) after the eleventh century CE, was certainly more energetic than most elite cultures in esteeming civil (wen) over military (wu) values, in condemning violent behavior, and establishing peaceful, ordered, harmonious social behavior as a moral imperative. The monotony of this message has led many historians (including me) to see this constructed norm as reflective of reality, whereas in fact it was a coping mechanism for dealing with a world which, as its inhabitants well knew, was violent and disorderly.

2 Some have argued that there was a class dynamic at work here : whereas genuine literati would abhor violence, the lower class population was free to develop its own counter-culture, with more vigorous and combative strains. There is some truth to this, I think. There clearly was something of a ‘civilizing process’ underway in imperial China is which elites progressively abandoned blood sports, hunting, and the duel. But as Barend ter Haar has pointed out, the elite’s progressive eschewing of violence was very selective : those literati who would not think to shoot an animal would not hesitate to beat their servants and, at times, their wives.2 Terminology describing violence was strongly and nearly uniformly condemnatory (bào, hàn, měng, héng, kuáng), but the possibility also existed to invoke these terms against the grain. A ‘mad’ dog was kuang, but so too might be a painter of wild originality. As early as the third century BCE the Grand Historian Sima Qian used ‘baokuang’ to describe popular uprisings that were brutal and violent, but also morally warranted.

3 Late imperial China, of course, was witness to several of the most hair-raising bloodbaths in human history. During the last years of the Ming (1368-1644), for example, very large-scale rebel movements cut swaths of slaughter across the empire ; the rebel Zhang Xianzhong – ‘the butcher of Sichuan’ – is said to have depopulated that

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large and densely inhabited province by half, so that nearly a century later the governor reported that fully 80% of the population were still settlers from other provinces who had replaced the exterminated locals. The Taiping rebellion of 1851-1864, which killed by conservative estimates some thirty million people, was almost certainly the bloodiest civil war the world has ever seen. But it is not these events that will be my concern in this paper. Rather, we will concentrate on cultural, political, and social factors that contributed to the persistence of violence in the more routine ‘prosperous times’ (shengshi). Literally hundreds of thousands of cases of murder made their way up to the Qing Board of Punishments for review of the sentence, and clearly this only represented the tip of the iceberg.3

Cultural underpinnings of late imperial violence

4 Numerous cultural features of late imperial and modern China conditioned acceptance of violence as a normal part of life. Butchering of animals, bloody religious sacrifices, executions in pubic marketplaces, and the display of severed heads, were all encountered as routine processes of childhood socialization. I personally remember leading my young children through a market in Taipei just as a butcher was cutting heads off chickens, who ran around frantically before collapsing in a pool of blood. (I feared that my children would be traumatized for life, but instead their reaction was a thrilled “Can we see that again ?”) The sociologist Yang Su describes an event from his early childhood in Guangxi province, in which a crowd of farmers armed only with blunt farm tools slowly beat an old ox to death in the field ; it was, Yang claims, a life- altering event for him.4

5 Among the most ubiquitous cultural tropes in late imperial Chinese culture – elite as well as popular – was that of the yuxia (‘knight-errant’/ assassin), the silent killer who operates by his own strict personal moral code. The trope again goes back at least to the ancient historian Sima Qian, and has its modern avatars in such figures as Toshiro Mifune’s ronin samurai and Clint Eastwood’s ‘man with no name.’ A more universally accessible version of the yuxia was the haohan (‘tough guy’) : an affable sort characterized by his indifference to sex and money, immunity to pain, and love of murderous violence, sometimes for righteous reasons but as often simply because it is just good fun.5 An enormous literature sprang up concerning the tough guy, eagerly consumed not only by young males, but, to a lesser extent, females as well. The countryside was strewn with martial arts academies and boxing associations (quanshe), as well as scenes of former battles and uprisings, old bandit lairs, and other ‘sites of memory’ commemorating violent heroes and villains of the past. A graphic ‘unofficial’ historiography (yeshi), aided by the emergence of cheap commercial publishing, reinforced these stories and memories.

6 A yet more basic cultural element in late imperial China was the ‘demonic paradigm’, argued by ter Haar to be probably the oldest stratum of Chinese popular religion.6 Dead souls may in select instances become gods, or in cases where they are well tended to by living descendants become benign ancestral spirits (shen). The remainder become ghosts or demons (gui). These demons inhabit the material world in countless numbers. They have an insatiable hunger for human flesh, especially internal organs. Constant human effort must be devoted to warding off these hungry demons, via talismans and exorcistic rites, and to killing or smashing these supernatural predators wherever

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possible. (Indeed, many a local bandit in late imperial and modern China advanced his career by styling himself a ‘demon-slayer’.) Thus, human beings not only have a right, but an obligation based on self-preservation, to engage in constant ongoing violence against demonic forces.

7 Demons are shape-shifters, and regularly appear in human form. This has several implications for social behavior. For one thing, condemned criminals in late imperial China were frequently physically abused or their clothing torn so as to make them appear demonic prior to execution. More ominously, unidentified outsiders, suspicious drifters, and even the local underclass might come to be seen by the established population as predatory demons demanding violent treatment. This could and routinely was implied to any person or groups against which one stood in opposition – they are demons, and thus their violent extermination is a moral imperative. (Ter Haar provocatively argues that this line of thinking was effectively invoked to legitimate violence against ‘class enemies’ during the Cultural Revolution.) The demonic paradigm was embedded in a complex corpus of Grimm-like children’s tales. Scapegoating of suspicious persons as demons seems to have occurred with ever greater frequency and scale from the Ming on, invoked to identify human targets of vendetta action. In celebrated instances, the demonizing process was turned against foreign missionaries (accused of eating internal organs of Chinese children) in the so-called ‘Tianjin massacre’ of 1870, the series of violent anti-foreign crowd actions in the Yangzi valley in the early 1890s, and murders of Chinese Christian converts during the Boxer uprising of 1900.

8 David Johnson’s impressive research on north China popular exorcistic drama in the late imperial era shows how this paradigm was continually reinforced and reproduced over generations. Typically as part of the New Year’s celebration in rural villages, demons would come on stage, covered with blood and wearing animal parts as their costume. They would leave the stage and run through the crowd, splattering blood on members of the audience, and stealing pieces of raw meat from local storefronts. Then they would return to the stage, where they were appropriately beheaded – e.g. a pumpkin filled with animal blood was smashed over the actor’s head. It was a performance suitably terrifying to all observers.7

The state and violence

9 The late imperial state contributed to the culture of violence in a variety of ways. It was itself a major practitioner of extreme violence, for example in the criminal justice system, in which torture was a routine and precisely legislated part of the process. Normally, the more severe criminal penalties could not be imposed without a confession, and that confession was most often acquired as a result of judicial torture. These penalties themselves included a class of ‘tormented punishments’, including most notoriously the ‘death by a thousand cuts’ (lingchi), studied by Timothy Brook and his colleagues.8 Tormented punishments were designed to achieve destruction of the body and hence carry the punishment over into the afterlife. They were imposed highly selectively, and constituted the terrorist-coercive component of the imperial state’s tripartite strategy of rule, along with material nurturance of the people (yangmin) and moral and ritual indoctrination (jiaohua).

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10 In its practice of warfare and counter-insurgency the state generally divided strategy into two approaches. The first was ‘pacification’ (fu), in which the goal was to capture and execute key opposition leaders and then issue amnesty for the rank and file of their presumably deluded followers. The second was ‘extermination’ (jiao), which entailed annihilation of all real or suspected enemies and their family members to several decrees of relationship. For example, the loyalist general (and later high official) Li Hongzhang in 1864 summarily slaughtered at least twenty thousand Taiping prisoners of war in recaptured Suzhou.9 Extermination might even be undertaken pro-actively : upon hearing of the Taiping capture of Nanjing in 1853, the Qing governor-general at Guangzhou, several hundred miles from the battlefront, conducted a mass execution of tens of thousands of suspected rebel sympathizers in his jurisdiction – men, women, and children included. One Western observer commented on the efficiency of this process, counting some sixty-three beheadings in a single four-minute span.10 Another favored counter-insurgency technique, in increasing use after the White Lotus rebellion of the turn of the nineteenth century, was that of (jianbi qingye), herding all trusted inhabitants of a war zone into a network of fortified villages and burning all settlements and fields outside their perimeter, to starve out the enemy.

11 The Qing was also a highly successful expansionist empire, by most accounts roughly doubling the territory ruled by its predecessor the Ming. This process entailed securing control over interior or frontier regions that had long been assumed to be part of ‘China’ but had not been effectively occupied or administered by any Chinese state – areas such as Taiwan, island, the southwest, and mountainous areas within central China itself, all occupied largely by indigenous peoples against whom new settlers and imperial administrators asserted their claims in the face of varying levels of resistance. Expansionism also took place on the borderlands, as huge territories such as the Manchu homeland itself, large stretches of Mongolia, Muslim central Asia, and Tibet were newly claimed as part of the empire. Much of this expansion was accomplished either by negotiation or by conquest of a relatively bloodless sort. But there were periodic exceptions, when a frustrated Qing state resorted to genocidal policies to speed up its incorporation project. In 1735-1736, for example, the Qing governor Zhang Guangsi decided, largely on his own, to exterminate some 18,000 men, women, and children of an indigenous population in Guizhou who had the temerity to rise in resistance to his sinification policies. In the northwestern Mongol proto-state of Zongharia, the Qianlong emperor, fed up with the protracted warfare between Zonghar and Qing from the 1690s to the 1750s, opted for the final solution : he sent in a massive military force which killed more than half a million people, deliberately emptied the land for new colonization, and effectively eliminated the Zonghar people from subsequent human history.11

12 Pieter Spierenburg suggests that Western European states in the early modern era ever more effectively claimed a monopoly on the use of violence within their territories.12 Was this true of imperial China as well ? Clearly not to the same extent as in the West. The state continued to sanction private violence in a variety of ways. For one thing, private exaction of blood vengeance was legitimated by both the Ming and Qing Codes, though in highly specified and restricted circumstances. In certain times and places, lineage headmen were empowered by the state to impose both corporal and capital punishments on their deviant members. Most ubiquitously, although the state did formally claim a monopoly on military organization, local elite-led militia were

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tolerated in practice throughout the Ming and Qing for the primary purpose of defense against the local bandits with whom the militia formed something of a stable equilibrium. Beginning with the Qing’s suppression of the -led Lin Shuangwen rebellion in Taiwan in the 1780s, and ever more fundamentally in the White Lotus campaigns of the turn of the century and the Taiping campaigns of the 1850s and 1860s, the Qing state relied upon such private militia to fight its own wars for it. One scholar, indeed, has argued that the White Lotus war might have ended years before it did if the state had been able to exert control over local private militia who were in the profitable business of claiming victories over increasingly imaginary rebel armies.13

13 At the same time, the Qing state in particular did maintain an impressive, very costly, highly sophisticated, and expanding mechanism for the resolution of civil disputes, at least in part for the purpose of deterring private violence. As the archival record makes clear, the amount of litigation heard on a daily basis by the all-purpose county magistrate rose progressively over time, becoming far the most time-consuming aspect of his duties. Everyone in the bureaucratic system bewailed this fact, but none seriously proposed that the state refuse to hear such disputes, and instead numerous remedies were proposed to help clear up the growing backlog of cases in all jurisdictions. As Philip Huang has demonstrated, one increasingly routine expedient was for the magistrate to convene an initial hearing for each piece of litigation, suggest what his decision might be, then propose to the litigants that they might get a more favorable settlement if they brought the case to a local elder for resolution ; only if that failed would the magistrate hear the case in detail and resolve it personally.14 With the recognition that the Qing state willingly devoted such an enormous percentage of its energies to seeking peaceful and socially acceptable solutions to private disputes, one scholar has suggested that our image of that state ought to be revised from that of the harsh and arbitrary paternal disciplinarian of the ‘Oriental Despotism’ school, to that of a beleaguered father trying patiently to keep the peace among his sibling children.15

Violence and social change

14 The Ming and Qing eras, especially the three hundred years after the mid-sixteenth century – the period often referred to as early modern China – was one of wrenching social change. Such changes included rapid demographic growth, unprecedented levels of geographic and occupational mobility, expansion of the polity to include regions both internal and external in which the local population was other than ‘Chinese’, and a frenetic process of private association-building and formal social organization.16 Each of these changes had marked impacts on structures of conflict and levels of violence within the society.

15 The empire’s population grew at least threefold over the course of the Qing alone, and most likely fivefold over the late imperial era as a whole. As James Lee and Wang Feng have demonstrated, this population growth was not exactly unplanned : it was a direct function of more relaxed social attitudes in response to perceptions of increasing economic opportunities, leading to ‘preventive checks’ on increased household size. Lee and Feng are keen to point out that there were several types of ‘preventive checks’ employed by the Qing population, including increased spacing between procreation activity, but it is also clear that the most important check was on the violent practice of infanticide. Infanticide was usually – though not exclusively – inflicted on of females. It

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was practiced routinely, although more extensively in times of short-term economic crisis, and was systematically adjusted as a response to changes in structures of economic opportunity.17 It is not unreasonable to estimate that, at least ten percent of newborns in the Qing empire were murdered at birth, in spite of perceptions that this was a ‘prosperous age’ (shengshi).

16 The remarkable population growth during the early-modern era was well recognized by contemporaries, both within and outside the administration, and in a number of ways it contributed directly to incidence of interpersonal violence. Thomas Buoye, for example, has carefully documented the correlation of increasing population-to-land ratios with murder rates in various regions of the empire ; specifically, as population pressure grew, notions of property rights became hardened, and disputes over the way these newly-conceived – and increasingly state-enforced – rights impinged upon ‘moral economy’ notions of patrimony and birthright, led to fatal disputes.18 Another byproduct of population growth, even in an era of somewhat relaxed practices of female infanticide, was an increasingly skewed sex ratio. The sociologist Ted Telford has demonstrated that among even relatively affluent males there was an increasingly evident inability over the course of the mid – to late Qing to fulfill the moral imperative to find a wife and carry on the patriline.19 In other words, Qing society included an increasing percentage of unmarried males – the so-called ‘bare sticks’ (guanggun) who were, by virtue of their lack of family obligations, prima facie a threat to a social and political order that was so explicitly based on the domestic unit. These figures, with nothing to anchor their moral behavior (wulai) and no one to whom to be held accountable (wuzhu), increasingly developed a bachelor sub-culture of their own. As chronic under-employment worsened over the nineteenth century, and especially with the massive military demobilization following the great mid-century rebellions, these rootless types increasingly formed an urban underclass of ‘thugs’ (pigun), engaging in intimidating street-corner martial-arts displays and public brawls. In late Qing Tianjin, they emerged as a self-conscious cultural type known as the ‘hunhunr’, with distinctive oversized clothing and stylized ways of walking – a group reminiscent of the ‘Apaches’ in turn-of-the-century Paris or the ‘zootsuiters’ in early twentieth-century American cities.

17 The increasing occupational specialization of the late imperial economy contributed in some cases to new incidents of collective violence. In one rural area of central China, for example, large groups of fishermen and farmers, both organized by lineage, fought protracted and often bloody battles for decades over the issue of whether to construct a dam at a key water outlet : the dam convenienced the fishermen but threatened flooding to the fields of the farmers.20 In cities, groups of porters and carters, finely specialized in types of carriage, fought recurring turf wars over rights-of-way and control over the cargoes at individual piers.

18 Yet more provocative of collective violence was the ethnic conflict brought about by much higher incidence of geographic mobility in the late Ming and Qing. Part of this was due to migration and conflict over land use. For example, south China was famous for the continuous warfare between ‘Punti’, who saw themselves as earlier settlers of the region, and ‘Hakka’, a distinctive cultural and linguistic group who were portrayed by the Punti as late-arriving interlopers. This lingering animosity was an important contributor to the outbreak of the Taiping movement – the first Taiping being largely Hakka – in the mid-nineteenth century. A more generalized social type – not as

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culturally distinctive as the Hakka, but like them practicing shifting agriculture and other upland occupational specialties – were the so-called ‘shed people’ (pengmin), who were in constant warfare with their lowland neighbors over issues such as deforestation and topsoil runoff.21

19 In the empire’s increasingly cosmopolitan commercial cities, several scores of local- origin diaspora groupings of sojourners, both long and short-term, coexisted uneasily. Capable of impressive cross-ethnic cooperation in times of economic, social, or military threats to their common host city, they also found routine provocation for individual and collective violence. One representative example occurred in the wake of a wine- shop argument in Hankou in 1878 between two well-lubricated customers speaking different local dialects : mushrooming numbers of recruits joined the eventually bloody fray, coming to the aid of their fellow natives merely on the basis of shared local dialect.22 In cities where a particular local origin group dominated the local economy, and especially where the dominant group was outsiders and the subjected one consisted of local natives, there was even more likelihood for lingering ethnic tensions to turn violent. In the Hunan rice-exporting city of Xiangtan in 1819, for example, a spike in grain prices on the local consumer market prompted native Hunanese to riot violently against the Jiangxi merchants who controlled the export trade.23

20 In the Qing empire, of course, the greatest latent ethnic animosity was between the majority population which saw itself as ‘Chinese’ (Hua or, later, Han), and the Qing conquest elite.24 Historians differ over the question of whether or not the latter group genuinely constituted a ‘Manchu’ nationality prior to the conquest, but most would concur that by the nineteenth century, at least, Manchu bannermen cordoned off in garrison compounds within selected cities both self-identified and were identified by their Chinese hosts as ethnically or even racially different. Under stress, animosity between the two groups could lead to violence. For instance, as British troops sailed up the Yangzi toward Nanjing during the Opium War of 1839-1842, they passed through the garrison city of Zhenjiang ; stirred on by panicky administrators on both the Manchu and Chinese sides, local people of each group attacked each other, scapegoating their counterparts as potential sell-outs to the Europeans.25 The rising tide of Social Darwinist-inspired Han nationalism during the final decade of the Qing brought this racial hatred ever more threateningly to the surface. Memories of ‘atrocities’ and ‘massacres’ of local Chinese populations committed during the seventeenth century (relatively few, in fact, and often undertaken by the Qing’s Han- Chinese allies) were reawakened by republication of witnesses’ diaries over the empire’s final decades. When the revolution finally broke out in late 1911, the enfeebled and encloistered garrison-dwellers made ready targets for ‘national revenge’ pogroms. In one of the worst cases, an anti-Manchu genocide in the garrison city of Xi’an in October 1911 claimed the lives of an estimated ten thousand men, women, and children of the long-established local banner population.26

21 A direct consequence of the increased opportunities and heightened competition of the mid-Qing era of economic prosperity and population growth, I would argue, was an explosion of association-building that took many forms, but all of which were designed, at bottom, to provide their members the numerical solidarity with which to take better advantage of their changing social environment. The archetype of Chinese association- building was the lineage organization, the numbers and sizes of which grew rapidly in this era. Lineages were useful for a nearly inexhaustible range of mutual-benefit

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functions, but violence and coercion were prominent among them. In the lightly- governed Fujian and Taiwan, for example, lineages engaged in protracted armed feuds, often led and instigated by professional martial arts teachers. In the commercialized rice agriculture of Guangdong’s Pearl River Delta, powerful armed lineages managed to effectively enslave their tenant workforce, frequently itself organized into lineage organizations for self-defense.27 Another form of popular association was the work gang (bang), organized on the basis of occupation and/or local origin, of the sort we have already seen fighting over turf and right-to-work in commercial cities. Those superfluous males unable for whatever reason to organize on the basis of kinship, trade, or local origin, gradually evolved forms of fraternity or society (hui, she), in most cases initially for self-protection, but also for violent predation, smuggling, and other forms of racketeering. Sometimes but not always these associations added a sectarian religious component to cement their solidarity. Often initially very localized and ad hoc, the most successful of these organizations – including the Triads (), the Society of Elder Brothers (Gelaohui), and the Green Gang (Qingbang) – came to effectively govern major cities, regions, and transport routes, and became the progenitors of the criminal underworld of twentieth-century China.28

22 Finally there were bandits (tufei). Bandits came in a wide spectrum of scales, goal- structures, and intended permanency. They were to a certain extent a function of the agrarian ecology : springing into action in times of bad harvest and retreating into agrarian practice in better times, and plying the borders between county jurisdictions. Some more ambitious bandits developed persona as ‘demon-slayers’, as we have seen, or Robin Hood-like ‘social bandit’ ideologies. As David Robinson has demonstrated, tufei in practice effectively worked out a more-or-less stable equilibrium – an ‘economy of violence’ – in tandem with government troops and local militia and, indeed, as Elizabeth Perry has demonstrated for the ecologically fragile Huaibei region of north China, the boundary between bandit and local militia – between predator and protector – was highly conditional and permeable.29

23 The protectionist counterpart of the tufei was the tuhao, the local strongman. Large landholders with martial inclinations, strongmen in many isolated parts of the interior constructed hilltop forts (zhai or bao), for retreat in times of danger. Often they would invite their neighbors to join them, and temporary populations of such forts might reach the thousands. The forts might endure for centuries : some in the Dabie Shan mountains on the Hubei-Henan border were first built during the bloody Yuan-Ming transition, were inhabited again during the chaos of the late Ming and the Qing conquest, again during the Taiping invasions, and can still be observed today. Forts in the Dabie Shan also formed alliances – the ‘Forty-Eight Fort League’ – spanning a relatively large geographic area, and constituted in effect an autonomous region during the prolonged troubled times of the seventeenth century.30

Violent protest

24 Late-imperial urban protest assumed its most spectacular and violent form during the final reigns of the Ming, especially in the hyper-developed, increasingly socially complex, and mal-administered cities of the lower Yangzi region. Urban uprisings in this era erupted in dozens of larger and smaller cities, grew out of a wide range of grievances, and focused on differing targets, but one of the distinguishing features

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common to many of them was the unusual alliance against the forces of the state and of mercantile wealth on the part of lower-strata literati and urban artisans and laborers, especially in the textile trades. Three of the best-known cases can serve to illustrate this. In Hangzhou in 1582, apparently encouraged by a wage-protest mutiny in the city’s military garrison, a broad alliance of workers and other renters led by a local schoolteacher rose up in protest of the labor service requirements imposed on them for service in the nightwatch, impositions from which degree-holding gentry and most property holders were exempt. Over the course of five days they raided the homes of particularly hated patricians, in several cases murdering their entire families. In 1601 in Suzhou, like Hangzhou one of the empire’s major silk-producing cities, in response to the imposition of new production taxes by a local administrator, and the resulting closure of many handicraft workshops by their proprietors, newly unemployed weavers and dyers, joined by lower gentry members and students of the Imperial University, rampaged through the city attacking the homes and murdering a range of officials and clerks involved in the tax-collection bureaucracy. Finally, again in Suzhou in 1626, agents of the hated court Wei Zhongxian moved in to arrest a celebrated local dissident scholar, and were greeted violently by a crowd comprised not only of the scholar’s literati allies but also of workmen and the urban underclass who took this excuse to resist the hated local public security authorities.31

25 Protest activity was not as spectacular in the high Qing as in the tumultuous late Ming, but, despite that era’s reputation for peace and harmony, it hardly disappeared altogether. Indeed, a team of scholars from Chinese People’s University combing through the Qing palace archives discovered some 58 cases of violent tax resistance and no fewer than 312 cases of rent resistance between the 1660s and the 1790s, and these counted only collective actions ; individual acts of violent tax and rent resistance were surely much more numerous.32 Uprisings by agrarian bondservants helped ignite the rebellions that toppled the Ming, but echoes of these continued throughout the Qing, as vestigial pockets of unfree farm laborers, often responding to rumors of imperially- declared emancipations, inflicted violent reprisals on their masters.33 Food riots were more numerous, but, as in the West, tended to be somewhat routinized, and hence less violent, if all parties kept to the customary script : seize grain from perceived hoarders, sell it publically at a ‘fair price’, and go home. Local officials, often privately siding with the rioters, concentrated on restoring social harmony rather than making criminal examples of hungry people. A late exception was the massive protest against the inflationary downriver export of Hunanese rice in Changsha in 1910, which forced the provincial governor to flee, drew overstrained Qing military forces to the city to put down the violence, and contributed to precipitating the successful anti-dynastic revolution the following year.34

Cultural responses to violence

26 Qing administrators, elites, and commoners responded to the alarming reality of violence among them in a variety of ways. Most ubiquitous was the propaganda barrage exhorting adherence to the values of Confucian harmony – for example, mandated fortnightly public recitations of the imperial “Sacred Edict” (shengyu) instructing subjects to get along with their neighbors, pay their taxes, and be economically productive. The very routineness of this political ritual must have fostered

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complacence or even ridicule (though some enterprising professional Sacred Edit readers seem to have developed a repertoire of entertaining stories to illustrate each of the Edict’s major points35). Yet the rhetoric of paternalistic ‘instructing and civilizing’ (jiaohua) had real cultural power. In an episode deeply enshrined in local history, for example, the model prefect Yu Chenglong in 1674 rode out to confront a rebel force alone, on a mule, and entreated them : “This year, hasn’t the rainfall been adequate in these mountains ? Haven’t the crops been growing well ? If so, why have you good people turned to rebellion ? Why have you invited so much butchery and slaughter upon yourselves ? The weather now, in midsummer, is extremely hot. At this time of year you should be attending to your aged parents, and your wives and children, in the cool comfort of your homes, rather than acting in this rash and suicidal way.” The rebels, we are told, wept and laid down their arms.36

27 A different kind of response to massive violence was exorcism. In the wake of the Sino- Japanese War of 1894-1895, a panic spread within the population of the southeast coastal city of Quanzhou that vast armies of Chinese war dead, killed on the faraway battlefields of Manchuria and Korea, would descend as hungry ghosts to devour local citizens. An enormous city-wide exorcistic procession (jiao) was organized, led by an unusual collaboration of Confucianized imperial officials, Buddhist and Daoist clergy, and headmen of the various local commercial and artisanal guilds. It seems to have worked.37

28 A common means of sublimating chaotic violence was by ritualizing it. A much-cited example is the annual rock fight held in nineteenth-century Lugang, a major port city in Taiwan through which much of the trade to the mainland was funneled. On a set day, members of the four leading lineages in the city would line up on separate sides of a field at the edge of town and hurl rocks at each other, leading to injuries but rarely deaths, and then go home at the end of the day ready to live in tense but peaceful competition for the next year.38 In many central and southern Chinese cities, annual dragon boat races were held. Originating in an ancient aboriginal ritual in which the losers of the race were deliberately drowned, by the nineteenth century the dragon boat race had become a fully sinicized event in which boatmen and longshoremen from a city’s various piers – frequently of differing local origins – would compete to construct the fastest boat to race across the harbor. As a competition among diverse sub-ethnic groups for which the rules were shared and collectively understood, the dragon boat race contributed to a greater sense of pan-urban communal solidarity, at least among the maritime workforce.39 But that solidarity might cut two ways : in the 1819 Xiangtan riot mentioned earlier, it was the occasion of the dragon boat festival that united the local Hunanese workforce to riot against the outsider Jiangxi merchants that dominated the local rice export trade.

29 In a powerful new book, Tobie Meyer-Fong surveys the way the population of the lower Yangzi valley reconstructed (shanhou) their culture and society in the wake of the mind-numbing slaughter the region had experienced during the Taiping wars. They labored at burying the dead, areas of the region being littered with decomposed corpses for years or decades. They compiled painstaking lists of ‘martyrs’, elevating victims of wanton violence into dedicated champions of the victorious Qing cause, and testimony to their locality’s fervent imperial loyalism. They exhibited intense survivor’s guilt, obsessing over loved ones they has lost, and had failed to save. They engaged in a powerful wave of Confucian fundamentalist revivalism, struggling to

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understand how they had sinned, and why a benevolent Heaven would have allowed this holocaust to be visited upon them. Perhaps most importantly they attempted to domesticate the irrational slaughter by historicizing it, reducing it to a coherent historical narrative complete with heroes and villains and lessons to be learned.40 As the literary scholar David Der-wei Wang has argued, containing memories of violence into “the monster that is history” is one time-honored Chinese means of managing the unbearable personal pain of past time as actually experienced.41

Concluding remarks

30 Pieter Spierenburg takes note of a consensus view that the early modern West saw a dramatic, long-term decline in homicide rates – perhaps as much as twenty-fold in England, and yet more in Holland.42 Was the same true of early modern China ? Even lacking reliable numbers, I don’t think any scholar would claim that the parallel was anywhere close. (Certainly, if one considers infanticide as murder, no sharp protracted decline was apparent until the twentieth century, itself a very violent time in other regards).

31 What does this imply about Chinese culture and society ? Several years ago I was presenting on a college campus my research on the centuries-long history of mass violence in the interior highland county of Macheng. A member of the audience, a distinguished anthropologist of Chinese descent, responded angrily : I was resurrecting, she argued, the Orientalist trope of ‘life is cheap’, the greater disrespect for human life in barbaric China versus the civilized West. Taken aback – this had certainly not been my conscious intent – I responded by recounting a televised interview I had seen with the Chinese-American playwright Frank Ching (author of the The Chickencoop Chinaman). Contrary to the anthropologist, Ching was angry about the placidity assigned by outsiders to Chinese culture : whereas male youths of other minority groups were seen as potentially violent and threatening, Chinese-American young men were perceived as polite, peaceable, and malleable. This was a characterization that needed to be corrected by practice, he insisted, if Chinese people were ever to be granted the dignity they deserved. For my part, I hope that by recognizing anew the brutal violence that dogged Chinese history, we can likewise restore the dignity of the populations that suffered through it.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anon. Kang-Yong-Qian shiqi chengxiang renmin fankang douzheng ziliao, Beijing, Chinese People’s University Press, 1979.

Bin Wong, R., Food Riots in the Qing Dynasty, Journal of Asian Studies, 1982, 41-4.

Brook, T., Bourgon, J., Blue, G., Death by a Thousand Cuts, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 2008.

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Buoye, T. M., Manslaughter, Markets, and Moral Economy : Violent Disputes over Property Rights in Eighteenth-Century China, Cambridge, CUP, 2000.

Dai Y., Civilians Go into Battle : Hired Militias in the White Lotus War, 1796-1805, Asia Major, Third Series, 2009, 22, 2, pp. 145-178.

DeGlopper, D., Social Structure in a Nineteenth-Century Taiwanese Port City, in Skinner G.W. (ed.), The City in Late Imperial China, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1977, pp. 633-650.

Elliott, M.C., Bannerman and Townsman : Ethnic Tension in Nineteenth-Century Jiangnan, Late Imperial China, 1990, 11, 1, pp. 36-74.

Fei Z., Li Hongzhang Suzhou shafeng shijian haiyuan, Qingshi yanjiu, 2012, 4.

Haar, B. ter, Ritual and Mythology of the Chinese Triads : Creating an Identity, Leiden, Brill, 1998.

Haar, B. ter, Rethinking “Violence” in Chinese Culture, in Aijmer, G., Abbink, J. (Eds), Meanings of Violence : A Cross-Cultural Perspective, Oxford, Berg, 2000, pp. 123-140.

Haar, B. ter, China’s Inner Demons : The Political Impact of the Demonological Paradigm, in Woei L. C. (ed.), China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution : Master Narratives and Post-Mao Counternarratives, Lanham MD, Rowman & Littlefield, 2002.

Haar, B. ter, Telling Stories : Witchcraft and Scapegoating in Chinese History, Leiden, Brill, 2006.

Huang, P.C.C., Civil Justice in China : Representation and Practice in the Qing, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1996.

Jenner, W.J.F., Tough Guys, Mateship, and Honour : Another Chinese Tradition, East Asian History, 1996, 12, pp. 1-33.

Johnson, D., Spectacle and Sacrifice : The Ritual Foundations of Village Life in North China, Cambridge MA., Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2010.

Kuhn, P. A., Rebellion and its Enemies in Late Imperial China : Militarization and Social Structure, Cambridge MA., Harvard University Press, 1970.

Kuhn, P. A., Soulstealers : The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768, Cambridge MA., Harvard University Press, 1990.

Lamley, H. J., Lineage and Surname Feuds in Southern Fukien and Eastern Kwangtung under the Ch’ing, in Kwang-ching L. (ed.), Orthodoxy in Late Imperial China, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1990, pp. 255-280.

Lee, J.Z., Wang F., One Quarter of Humanity : Malthusian Myths and Chinese Realities, Cambridge MA., Harvard University Press, 1999.

Léong, S., Migration and Ethnicity in Chinese History : Hakka, Pengmin, and their Neighbors, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1997.

Mair, V.H., Language and Ideology in the Written Popularizations of the Sacred Edict, in Johnson, D. et al. (Eds), Popular Culture in Late Imperial China, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1984, pp. 325-359.

Meyer-Fong, T., What Remains : Coming to Terms with Civil War in Nineteenth-Century China, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2013.

Mullaney, T. et al. (Eds), Critical Han Studies : The History, Representation, and Identity of China’s Majority, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2012.

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Ownby, D., Brotherhoods and Secret Societies in Early and Mid-Qing China, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1996.

Platt, S.R., Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom : China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.

Perdue, P.C., Insiders and Outsiders : The Xiangtan Riot of 1819 and Collective Action in Hunan, Modern China, 1986, 12, 2, pp. 166-201.

Perdue, P.C., China Marches West : The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia, Cambridge MA., Harvard University Press, 2005.

Perry, E., Rebels and Revolutionaries in North China, 1845-1945, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1986.

Rhoads, E.J.M., Manchus and Han : Ethnic Relations and Political Power in Late Qing and Early Republican China, Seattle, University of Washington Press, 2001.

Robinson, D., Bandits, Eunuchs, and the Son of Heaven : The Economy of Violence in Mid-Ming China, Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 2001.

Rosenbaum, A.L., Gentry Power and the Changsha Rice Riot of 1910, Journal of Asian Studies, 1975, 34, 3, pp. 689-715.

Rowe, W., Water Control and the Qing Political Process, Modern China, 1988, 14, 4, pp. 353-387.

Rowe, W., Hankow : Conflict and Community in a Chinese City, 1796-1895, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1989.

Rowe, W., Social Stability and Social Change, in Peterson, W.J. (ed.), The Cambridge History of China, Vol.9, Part I, Cambridge, CUP, 2002, pp. 473-562.

Rowe, W., Crimson Rain : Seven Centuries of Violence in a Chinese County, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2007.

Ruhlmann, R., Traditional Heroes in Chinese Popular Fiction, in Wright, A.R. (ed.), The Confucian Persuasion, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1960.

Santangelo, P., Urban Society in Late Imperial Suzhou, in Cooke Johnson, L. (ed.), Cities of Jiangnan in Late Imperial China, Albany, SUNY Press, 1993.

Spierenburg, P., A History of Murder : Personal Violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2008.

Susuma F., Late Ming Urban Reform and the Popular Uprising in Hangzhou, in Cooke Johnson, L. (ed.), Cities of Jiangnan in Late Imperial China, Albany, SUNY Press, 1993, pp. 47-80.

Telford, T.A., Family and State in Qing China, in Institute of Modern History (ed.), Family Process and Political Process in Modern Chinese History, Taipei, Institute of Modern History, 1992, 2.921-42.

Yang S., Collective Killings in China during the Cultural Revolution, New York, CUP, 2011.

Ye X., Ming Qing Huizhou nongcun shehui yu dianpu zhi, Hefei, Anhui renmin chubanshe, 1983.

Wang Mi., Space, Administration, and Territorial Cults in Late Imperial China, Late Imperial China, 1995, 16, 1, pp. 33-78.

Wang, D.Der-wei, The Monster that is History : History, Violence, and Fiction Writing in Twentieth- Century China, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2004.

Watson, J.L., Hereditary Tenancy and Corporate Landlordism in Traditional China : A Case Study, Modern Asian Studies, 1977, 11, 2, pp. 161-182.

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NOTES

1. This article is drawn from a talk presented to the conference on ‘History of Mass Violence in Russia and China’, held in Helsinki in May 2012, and chaired by Pieter Spierenburg and Marianna Muravyeva. I am grateful to the chairs and the conference participants for helpful comments on that talk. 2. Haar (2000). 3. See for example the contribution in this issue by Thomas Buoye. 4. Yang (2011). 5. Ruhlmann (1960) ; Jenner (1996). 6. For various of ter Haar’s explication of the “demonic paradigm,” see ter Haar (1998, chapter 6 ; 2002, 2006). For a particularly detailed case study of the paradigm in practice, see Kuhn (1990). 7. Johnson (2010). 8. Brook, Bourgon, Blue (2008). See also the contribution by Bourgon in the present issue. 9. Fei (2012). 10. Platt (2012). 11. Perdue (2005) Part Two. 12. Spierenburg (2008). 13. Robinson (2001) ; Kuhn (1970) ; Dai (2009). 14. Huang (1996). 15. The suggestion is that of Peter C. Perdue, private conversation. 16. See Rowe (2002). 17. Lee, Wang (1999). 18. Buoye (2000). 19. Telford (1992). 20. Rowe (1988). 21. Leong (1997). 22. Rowe (1989, pp.189-190). 23. Perdue (1986). 24. For a recent examination of the emergence of Han racial self-consciousness, see Mullaney et al. (2012). 25. Elliott (1990). 26. Rhoads (2001). 27. Lamley (1990) ; Watson (1977). 28. Within a rich literature, see Ownby (1996). 29. Robinson (2001) ; Perry (1986). 30. Rowe (2007). 31. Within the large literature on late Ming urban uprisings, see Susuma (1993) and Santangelo (1993). 32. Kang-Yong-Qian shiqi chengxiang renmin fankang douzheng ziliao, Beijing : Chinese People’s University Press, 1979. 33. Ye (1983). 34. Bin Wong (1982) ; Rosenbaum, 1975. 35. Mair (1984). 36. Rowe (2007, p.172). 37. Wang (1995). 38. DeGlopper (1977). 39. Rowe (1989, pp. 201-206). 40. Meyer-Fong (2013). 41. Wang (2004).

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42. Spierenburg (2008).

AUTHOR

WILLIAM T. ROWE Johns Hopkins University Krieger School of Arts & Sciences

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Toward a Global History of Homicide and Organized Murder

Pieter Spierenburg

AUTHOR'S NOTE

This essay is a condensed version of my plenary lecture at the meeting of Finnish historians, Helsinki, October 2012 and my presentation at the project’s (see note 2) fourth meeting in York, 30 November 2012. Written in early 2014, it is updated with publications that appeared in 2012 and 2013. I am grateful to Philip Dwyer and Peter Romijn for their comments on the draft.

1 The three contributions about China in this issue result from a workshop held in May 2012. This meeting formed part of a much larger enterprise that ultimately dates back to a research plan conceived by Eric Johnson and myself in 2006. Our original idea was to combine our respective interests – Nazi terror including the Holocaust and the general history of murder – and to extend the combination with a global perspective without chronological bounds. From the outset we realized that this involved a collective enterprise that needed generous funding. The latter has proven to be rather difficult. We did acquire funds to organize a meeting, in 2007, bringing together a set of experts on violence throughout the history of Latin America. With the additional support of Xavier Rousseaux, Marianna Muravyeva and James Sharpe, we could hold a series of somewhat smaller-sized meetings from late 2010 to the end of 2012.1 Major publications, before this issue of CHS, are a dossier of articles focusing on pre-modern Latin America2 and a collective volume on violence in modern Latin America, both edited together with Ricardo Salvatore.3 For the arguments outlined in this brief essay I must be solely responsible.

2 Given these two sets of articles and the ones in this issue, there is no need to include in the present essay a discussion of the history of either Latin America or China. I will, however, build further on our introduction to the dossier on pre-modern Latin America. Besides sketching a European and global context for Latin American violence,

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that introduction contains several methodological and theoretical considerations. The present essay purports to do three things : to provide an update of the original research question ; to discuss briefly what I think we know so far ; to reflect on the remaining methodological and theoretical problems.

3 The basic idea behind the original research question is the conviction that it is helpful for scholarship to distinguish ordinary from out of the ordinary killing, or homicide from something more massive. Morally, this distinction may or may not be relevant. It suffices that it is relevant for research and our subsequent understanding – an understanding that might be helpful in making plans for reducing violence in the world. The distinction in question is not between a single act and more. Homicide includes multiple murder, by bandits or serial killers for example, and vengeance, in which there are more often multiple perpetrators than multiple victims. When it comes to organized murder, the Holocaust is perhaps the best-known example, and in any case the most extensively researched. Alternatively, we may consider the events of 9/11. The fact that I can write just these two figures, convinced that everyone will understand, underlines the out-of-the ordinary character of this catastrophe. Indeed, the FBI, whose Uniform Crime Reports are a standard source for homicide researchers, kept the 9/11 data from its regular report over 2001 : “The statistics of September 11 are not a part of the traditional Crime in the United States publication because they are different from the day-to-day crimes committed in this country. Additionally, combining these statistics with our regular crime report would create many difficulties in defining and analyzing crime as we know it.”4

4 When ordinary and out-of-the-ordinary murders are kept separate, they must be analyzed separately. We measure the first as annual homicide rates per 100,000 population. In a big city like New York, a homicide happens every day, but society would break down if massive killing occurred anywhere at any time. Or, in more technical terms : any large enough area witnesses a certain number of homicides each year, but we rarely observe annually recurrent instances of organized murder. Hence, the latter cannot be counted in terms of annual rates. I am leaving for later the question which methodology we should apply. In addition, there are at least two theoretical reasons for studying homicide and organized murder separately. The first reason is relatively independent from the theoretical position that a scholar adopts. Whether or not an author agrees with Norbert Elias on the issue of civilizing processes, for example, he or she will consider homicide rates as reflecting the level of aggression in a population. By contrast, this is not necessarily always the case with organized murder. Obviously, even if the perpetrators of the attack on the World Trade Center had been New Yorkers, their actions would have revealed very little about the level of aggression among the city’s population. From a different perspective, many perpetrators of the Holocaust have been described as bureaucrats, not particularly aggressive persons. Note that I am not arguing that organized murder never involves aggression. In contrast with a graph of homicide rates, however, there is no unambiguous answer to the question what an episode of mass killing represents.

5 The second theoretical reason for a separate study of organized murder has to do with another distinction, that between state violence and non-state violence. As I have argued on several occasions, homicide belongs to the category of non-state violence and from the moment that it is possible to distinguish this category from its opposite, homicide can be meaningfully counted and analyzed.5 Of course state violence – like

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executions, police shootings or casualties in war – can also be counted. Unlike with homicide, it is harder to situate organized murder into either one of these two categories. Consider the example of China in 1967-68, during the so-called ‘cultural revolution’. Collective killings were concentrated in these two years. They had been ordered from above, but townships or villages decided on whom to kill, selecting the victims because of their family ties to former landlords and the like.6 In a similar vein, the terror from both the reds and the whites in the Russian civil war of 1917-1920 would have been impossible without a significant popular participation.7 In case of organized murder, we must conclude, the distinction between state violence and non- state violence often gets blurred. Note that this distinction is dissimilar to that between political and other violence. Organized murder often has a political dimension, but some individual homicides, too, are politically motivated.

6 Thus, there are methodological and theoretical reasons for studying organized murder and homicide separately. The two are not intrinsically different ; killing is killing. Yet, the two must of necessity be studied in different ways. The reasons for preferring the concept of organized murder, especially over the alternative of genocide, are explained in Johnson et al. (2012) : the unambiguous, legal character of the latter term is actually a disadvantage for research in the human sciences.8 Genocide both excludes certain cases of organized murder (against members of a specific social class, for example) and includes cases which are not murder such as, in Raphael Lemkin’s original vision, the destruction of a culture9. The UN definition of genocide even includes changing a group’s ethnicity through adoption and by this criterion the seventeenth-century Iroquois have been called genocidal. Although they did their share of killing non- combatants (women and children) from enemy tribes, they adopted most of their captives, some after torture. As a consequence, by the end of the seventeenth century more than half of the Iroquois nation consisted of persons originating from other tribes.10 The related concept of ethnic cleansing also has the disadvantage of including non-lethal activities, notably expulsion.

7 Johnson et al.11 further distinguish four types of reproachable mass mortality, proposing to include into the concept of organized murder two of them : (1) the conscious killing of civilians in times of war but relatively independent of military operations (to which I now add the killing of prisoners of war, who are no longer combatants) and (2) conscious killing without a state of war (but as a rule related to any type of socio-political conflict). It should be noted immediately that, the further one goes back in history, the more likely it is that non-combatants are women and children only. Our restrictive definition of organized murder excludes death in battle and ‘collateral damage’ in military operations as well as ‘man-made’ disasters such as famines indirectly resulting from political decisions.12 I realize that there is no consensus on this. Frank Dikötter’s book on the Great Leap Forward in China, for example, has “great famine” in the title, which in the Dutch translation becomes massamoord (mass murder). Admittedly, some cases of starvation are purely deliberate. In German South-West Africa in 1904, Lothar von Trotha’s troops drove the Herero into the desert after having destroyed or occupied the wells there.13 It would be nonsensical not to call this murder, also in view of explicit calls for the extermination of the Herero. In particular scholars who continue to employ the concept of genocide tend to include all types of ‘man-made’ famines into it. Since the capacity of leaders to issue measures that lead to mass starvation quickly diminishes as we go back in history, inclusion or

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exclusion of this type has a great effect on counting the victims of organized murder over time.

8 Finally, Johnson et al.14 sketch a brief state of the art. For homicide this is the familiar story of long-term decline since the middle ages in many parts of Europe and a less marked decline in . For organized murder, a number of general studies, most of them employing the concept of genocide, were examined. These studies, often beginning with the extermination of the Herero, strongly suggest that genocidal murder belongs especially to the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries. We may additionally allow for a few episodes involving organized murder that began just before 1900, such as the policy of reconcentration in Cuba between 1895 and 1898 that cost the lives of an estimated 10% of the island’s population.15 Consider also the well-researched ‘rubber terror’ in the Congo Free State since 1890, where the number of intentional killings is harder to estimate.16 The starting date for ethnic cleansing in Europe, moreover, is usually fixed at about 1870.17 Taking all this into account, we can maintain that the general literature about mass killing suggests that it was especially prevalent during the last 150 years.

9 This is intriguing, to say the least. The existing literature on the history of homicide and organized murder, respectively, yields two diametrically opposed conclusions. The long-term decline of homicide implies that the middle ages were much more violent than the twentieth century, whereas general studies of mass killing suggest that the last 150 years constitute the most violent period in history. The contradiction is easily explained, since both conclusions are based on incomplete research. As far as homicide is concerned, we know much about Europe and the United States but almost nothing about the non-Western world – including Eastern Europe. With respect to organized murder, for which the non-Western world does get due attention in the literature, the conclusion is based on a relative neglect of earlier periods. That mass killing is a typically modern phenomenon is strongly suggested but not proven. The suggestion, moreover, is implicit mainly in general studies of genocide. If we dig somewhat deeper, as I will show below, sufficient episodes of organized murder in earlier periods can be found. This was of course Eric Johnson’s and my hunch when we started our project.

10 The body of the state of the art in Johnson et al.18 was written around 2010, just before the series of workshops referred to. This state of the art should be updated with some results of the workshops as well as studies published since 2010. In addition, a few works that originally escaped our attention are considered in the following section. For homicide I can report no substantial increase in our knowledge. We still know next to nothing about its incidence in the non-Western world and Eastern Europe going further back than the twentieth century. Available and reliable figures, analyzed in accessible languages, mostly date back no further than the 1920s and often the 1950s. The work of Thomas Buoye, present in this issue, constitutes one of the few exceptions. In an earlier book he had already shown that Chinese killers of the eighteenth century were tried and sentenced as a rule.19 This indicates that, as in Europe, the criminalization of homicide had been achieved in China by then.20 The qualitative evidence for interpersonal violence in the non-Western world before modern times is equally patchy. We know about banditry, for example, in colonial societies such as India and Indonesia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.21 In many colonial societies the factor of race or the institution of slavery contributed to the incidence of homicide.22 Finally, indigenous beliefs played a facilitating role, as in the medicine murders in

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Lesotho, 1895-1969, and the man-leopard murders in Nigeria and Ghana, 1945-48.23 That is about all. The need for a large-scale research project, examining homicide in the long-term perspective in a few selected non-Western countries, is as great as ever.

11 Two indirect routes are available for making at least assumptions about interpersonal violence and homicide in non-Western societies in the distant past. One revolves around honour. The central role of traditional male honour in European violence since the middle ages will be a familiar theme for most readers. We also know that honour and violence were similarly linked in many non-European societies. Hence, if there is evidence for a substantial preoccupation with traditional honour in these societies in the distant past, we may assume correspondingly high levels of interpersonal violence. And the evidence abounds. Traditional male honor was valued throughout the history of Latin America and in many parts of Asia, such as ancient Japan and Indonesia from pre-colonial times.24 For Africa, there is the pioneering work of John Iliffe25 drawing on some forty years of research. Based, among others, on literary sources going back to the middle ages, he documents the importance of warrior-like notions of male honour for the horse-riding elites of the sub-Saharan savannas, the Ethiopian highlands and many other regions. We can conclude that traditional male honor was cherished by nearly all social classes throughout the African continent in precolonial times, in states as well as stateless societies. In addition, Iliffe discusses the survival of this ethos in Africa’s present.

12 The second indirect route takes the world’s most recent homicide rates as its point of departure. We do know that in most of Latin America and Africa and many parts of Asia the modern rates are particularly high, which makes it unlikely (unless the rates were even much more elevated in the distant past) that a long-term decline in any way similar to that in Europe has taken place. Theoretically this presents no great problem. The countries in question usually also lack a history of centuries-long state formation coupled with processes of pacification and economic integration. Taken together, the two indirect routes suggest a very crude hypothesis : Homicide in the non-Western world has always been relatively high from the distant past until today. Of course this hypothesis excludes all possible fluctuations in the past that might or might not be due to temporary state building and state failure. It is well-known, to take a recent example, that the breakdown of the Soviet Union led to an upsurge of homicide rates. Thus, the crude hypothesis does not take us very far. Our ignorance about global homicide over the long term precludes an answer to the question whether Elias’ theory might be creatively employed to account for it or, conversely, might be unhelpful to explain what remains to be found.

13 With respect to the European history of homicide and violence, finally, Gregory Hanlon recently contributed to the theoretical debate in a lengthy review article. The main argument, as far as I can grasp it, is that nearly all historians have failed to take adequate account of the biological factors in human behaviour. Since the brunt of his attack is reserved for those historians, among whom myself, who use Elias’ theory, he is apparently unaware of what Elias and scholars inspired by him write about the biological basis of social behaviour.26 Pinning the label ‘cultural’ on a number of studies, he believes he can discredit these by proclaiming them representative of a ‘world view of 1970’.27 I will resist the temptation to call Hanlon’s essay representative of the age of Lombroso. He accepts the evidence for the long-term decline of homicide, referring to it several times without denying that it happened, yet makes the implicit claim that all

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violence is a function of testosterone and traits that we have inherited from our ancestral primates. Indeed, it is not testosterone alone, because he additionally claims that infanticide has been much more frequent than most historians have assumed and hence women are equally murderous as men : “In fact, the decision of a mother to destroy the newborn or the foetus is something that has changed little over time. Today, women abort between twelve and twenty-five per cent of their pregnancies.”28 This equation of abortion and murder will most certainly be pleasing to American pro- life activists, who will, however, shy away from a biological explanation. Hanlon closes with the incomprehensible statement that we still know little about homicide in various periods, the profile of victims and killers or what is to be found in court records.

14 Proceeding to an update for the state of the art regarding organized murder, my main question is to what extent the relative neglect of the period before about 1870 has been made undone.29 A sociological study by Jacques Sémelin, not referred to in the earlier state of the art, continues the traditional chronology. He focuses on genocide and the underlying drive, as he sees it, for purification through destruction, but he views all this as a special type of the encompassing category of massacre. Considering purification through destruction as characteristic for the twentieth century, Sémelin selects his cases accordingly. He concludes with seven major questions, each subdivided, that deserve attention in future research into massacres.30 For his part, Christian Gerlach31 introduces still another concept, that of “extremely violent societies.” He simply observes these societies almost anywhere in the twentieth century. The implicit claim that this century was the most violent in history is an a priori, not based on comparative research.32

15 In Johnson et al.33 we acknowledged that one general study of genocide by Kiernan34 did devote more than minimal attention to earlier periods of history. However, Kiernan is mainly concerned with identifying a few factors that, according to him, operate in every genocide, instead of identifying long-term trends. Even for him 1900 constitutes a definite dividing line, since the last of his three parts, entitled twentieth-century genocides, covers half of the book. In the 2010s attention for mass killing is definitely on the increase. A six-volume set edited by A. Dirk Moses35 is no new study but an anthology. One volume is entitled genocide before modernity and another, on colonial and imperial genocides, partly covers earlier periods. Thus, the imbalance in favour of the last 150 years is maintained, but the editor has gathered a lot of data from earlier periods that spare other scholars a laborious search. Christopher Powell36 presents a sociological study of six selected – hence no pretension of completeness – cases of genocide. The cases are relatively recent, except for the destruction of Catharism in Languedoc between 1209 and 1321. Powell offers a complex theory, stating that processes of civilization are always accompanied by its opposite, barbarization. In my perhaps too simplified version, the theory implies that, wherever violence is monopolized, it must be periodically unleashed.

16 A collection edited by Philip Dwyer and Lyndall Ryan follows Sémelin in considering massacre a broader category encompassing genocide. According to the editors, “genocide cannot occur without massacre, but massacres do occur without genocidal intent”.37 Ten out of twenty contributions to this collection concern the last 150 years and nine the rest of history (one is general). A collection of essays by Adam Jones38 echoes several times Lemkin’s statement that genocide is of all times, but Jones

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nevertheless focuses almost exclusively on the modern period. Finally, the book by Steven Pinker has already raised considerable debate.39 He uses Elias, with a restricted understanding of the latter’s theory though. Thus, Pinker’s discussion of the ‘rights revolutions’ could easily be integrated into Elias’ theory of decreasing power differentials. Up to now, Pinker is the only author who explicitly argues that humans, at least in the Western world, have become less violent over the centuries. Note that he means overall violence, including every conceivable military activity, civil wars and revolutions. His figures have to be broken down in order to establish whether they show a downward trend over the ages for organized murder alone. Moreover, several scholars express doubts about his statistics. Hanlon’s evaluation is notoriously split, because he has to praise Pinker for his attention to biology and psychology, yet dismisses all his statistics40. This criticism provides an obvious caveat. Yet, in view of all recent studies together, I venture the statement that there is an emerging answer that appears to confirm Eric Johnson’s and my original hunch that it is far from certain that organized murder belongs especially to the last 150 years.

17 Nevertheless, some serious problems of methodology remain. We may start with that of counting and estimating, just raised. A hunch is not yet an exact number. Can we count organized murder at all ? Will we ever be able to arrive at estimates that are more than just guesses ? Doubts about reaching reliable estimates were expressed also during the series of workshops that I organized. David Robinson, for example, discussing the violence with which the first two Ming emperors established their dynasty, finds that several chroniclers mention a suspiciously round number like 10,000 killed. On other occasions, the numbers have earned their standard status in historical scholarship merely from repetition. Yet, he believes that careful research may yield better estimates in the future.41 Perhaps the most reliable estimate, on the other hand, concerning an episode of organized murder well before the last 150 years, is that of the numbers killed in the Vendée in 1793-1794. Based on population counts in 1792 and 1802, Reynald Secher establishes that in the latter year 14.38% of the inhabitants had ‘disappeared’ – a suggestively modern term. Further, based on a few local specifications, we can fix the percentage of combatants among those who perished at well under ten.42 There is no reason to assume a surplus of natural deaths over births during the ten years in question. Hence, 10% of the non-combatant population murdered is a moderate estimate.

18 A minor problem lies in the fact that past chroniclers tend to take the social status of victims into account. This has been pointed out for, among other cases, the religious upheavals in sixteenth-century France and massacres in medieval Russia. The chroniclers were especially outraged, or just astonished, at the killing of persons of ‘quality’. In medieval Russia they considered it a massive loss when ten knights were murdered, which equalled, say, a thousand peasants.43 Hence, when the sources just use words like “many”, we must be sure about what kind of victims they speak. In some cases, finally, an entire event may be doubt. Thus, many scholars dismiss as a fabrication the alleged murder of over sixty thousand Christians by Jews after the Persian conquest of Jerusalem in 614. The story is strange indeed, especially the detail that the Jews first bought the Christians, held captive by the Persians. Yet, Elliott Horowitz, who carefully unravels facts about Jewish violence from anti-Semitic myth- making throughout history, refrains from a pronouncement about whether or not the 614 event has occurred at all.44

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19 As in the Vendean case, demography sometimes can help us out. Population estimates are usually more reliable than murder estimates. However, organized murder often coincides with starvation and disease, while we have no idea what percentage died a violent death. This just happens to apply hardly to the Vendée. Its inhabitants and the Revolutionary soldiers and their ancestors had been, in McNeill’s terms, in the same disease pool for ages. As is well-known, the quick collapse of the Aztec and Inca empires was due, in large part, to the inhabitants’ lack of antibodies against the diseases that the conquerors brought with them.45 It would be ridiculous to confuse death from smallpox with deliberate killing.46 In a similar vein, we know that the population of Congo decreased from twenty million in 1880 to ten million in 1920, but again most of the loss was due to the import of illnesses.47 Only a small part of the ten million disappearances was due to outright murder, and although sufficient cases are documented, the exact number once more is a guess.

20 In view of all uncertainties, it is understandable that several scholars have dismissed earlier efforts at collecting figures for organized murder over long periods of time, in particular those by Rudolph J. Rummel (including figures for deaths in wars).48 Gerlach, for example, calls all of Rummel’s books “sensationalist”, considering their content as “greatly inflated numbers”.49 Nevertheless, Powell relies on these very numbers when discussing the persecution of the Cathars. Pinker, too, partly relies on Rummel, but to a greater extent on the work of Matthew White.50 In each case, White takes the mean figure of all available estimates to be found in the literature, but in view of the above considerations, it is far from certain that this exercise increases reliability. Yet, the question remains whether anyone can do better than Pinker and White.

21 Pinker does provide a definite improvement over most quantitative reflections : he relates the absolute numbers, referring to wars and mass murders, to population figures.51 What struck me most when I first began to read about organized murder was how often, when various cases were compared at all, this was done in terms of absolute numbers alone. Coming from the study of homicide, I considered it self-evident that the raw numbers must be turned into a rate or ratio somehow. Take an example from Antiquity that is usually subsumed under the heading of genocide. In 416 BC the Athenians, hard pressed by the Spartans and wishing to deter other allies, decided on an exemplary punishment for the defection of the small island of Melos. They killed all adult men that they had taken as prisoners of war, numbering 500, and sold the women and children into slavery (estimate based on the 500 Athenian families that replaced them).52 Knowing about the millions of victims made by Hitler and Stalin, should we consider the Athenians much less harsh ? Imagine them in possession of a device for looking into the future. Seeing that a political leader orders the extermination of 6 million people, they exclaim “now, that’s exemplary punishment ; let’s do it too”. Classical Greece, including Epiros, Macedonia and all Egean islands, had just over 3 million inhabitants and another 800,000 (including a majority of non-Greek slaves) lived on Sicily and in Southern Italy.53 If the Athenians had wanted to emulate the Holocaust, obviously, they would have had to reach far beyond their known world. This thought-exercise should be enough to convince readers that organized murder ought to be related to population figures.

22 That conclusion, however, is just the beginning of a new problem. What should be the referent ? With episodes of organized murder in a colony, for example, it might seem obvious that the entire number of native inhabitants is the reference population. But

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when we take the episode as symptomatic of murderous intentions in the mother country, shouldn’t we also take its population into account ? And what about an episode taking place over centuries, such as the extermination of native Americans, that most historians consider as one genocide ? Conversely, the kingdom of Ahom in present-day Assam was plagued throughout its existence (1228-1826) by head-hunting tribes from the surrounding hills.54 In other cases there is no consensus about what belongs to what and which instances of killing we should take together. Thus, Kiernan devotes a few lines to various outbreaks of mass killing in the Ottoman Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century, conveniently considering them as preludes to the Armenian case and hence belonging to a twentieth-century phenomenon. By contrast, Ussama Makdisi analyzes the mutual massacres of Druzes and in in 1860 as a consequence of administrative and social changes during the preceding decades.55

23 When we return to the comparison of Athenians and Nazis, one procedure might be to consider their respective victims as percentages of the targeted population. How many of those they were after did they kill ? Lucy Dawidowitz establishes this for the Jews exterminated in the Final Solution. She puts the estimated number of Jews who perished, from Germany and each occupied country, next to the estimated pre-final- solution Jewish population. The overall estimate of victims comes at 67%.56 If we take the Athenians as targeting all Melians, their killing of adult men only makes them less murderous than the Nazis. However, if we take into account that in Ancient thought the women and children did not really matter, or conversely, that selling a person into slavery is almost as bad, the Athenians come near to 100%. Of course this involves a rather wild comparison of two cases selected for the sake of the argument. Doing a global study over the long term, we should perhaps consider entire continents per century. For each century we could relate the number of people killed in episodes of organized murder to the population of the continent in question, averaged during that century. Of course, the further we go back into history, the larger the likelihood of a dark number of missed episodes.

24 Fortunately, we can do more than just counting. As with homicide, the history of organized murder may exhibit trends over time in the form of changing characteristics. For the moment I am distinguishing two characteristics and their corresponding research questions : concealment and legitimation. The first can be easily plotted on an axis with the pole of total concealment from any third party at one end and letting all the world know at the other. Of course the gas chambers of the Holocaust are near the first pole. Frankly admitting organized murder, on the other hand, or even pride in it, have been attested since Antiquity. Caesar, for example, included his orders to kill non- combatants, many of them women and children, as something self-evident in his De Bello Gallico.57 Medieval chronicles, remaining imprecise about concrete events, attest abundantly to genocidal thought.58 Chingis Khan’s warriors were required to send him bags with the ears of the inhabitants of conquered towns as proof that these had been slaughtered. In a similar vein, between 100,000 and 200,000 Korean noses were reportedly sent to Japan at the end of the sixteenth century.59 As a final example let me mention Haiti, 1802-1804, where white-on-black killing was followed by the rare case of a black-on-white genocide. Both racial groups practiced their violence openly in market squares, which Philippe Girard explicitly contrasts with the Holocaust.60

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25 In view of all this, the hypothesis of a long-term trend from advertizing to concealing organized murder does not seem far-fetched. In the words of Dwyer and Ryan : “The tendency to cover up a massacre or mass killing is a relatively recent phenomenon”.61 For Australia, they date it from the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As a further exercise, the factor of concealment can be analytically subdivided into hiding the events from onlookers at the spot and from the home population. Srebrenica 1995, where the perpetrators led their prospective victims away from UN troops, is an example of the first.62 Of course, this possibility does not exist in cases, such as Melos, where everyone at the spot was either perpetrator or victim. The possibility of concealment from the home population applies in particular to organized murder in a colony. As a special case we may consider the behaviour of the perpetrators’ biological or spiritual heirs. Most neo-Nazis, for example, claim that the size of the Holocaust has been exaggerated, while, alternatively, they could have praised Hitler for it. The present Turkish government denies that Ottomans committed a genocide against Armenians and punishes those who say otherwise.

26 In France, by contrast, you can be sentenced for denying the Armenian genocide.63 The hypothesis of increasing concealment obviously refers to the perpetrators and their heirs. The counter-tendency of revealing organized murder stems from those who want to denounce the perpetrators. This tendency may be even more recent. Thus, Totten and Parsons contrast the killing of some two to three hundred thousand Hutus, mainly by Tutsis, in Burundi in 1972 with the events in Rwanda twenty-two years later : “Unlike what happened in Rwanda, the carnage attracted only minimal attention from the media”.64 Elias and Dunning were among the first to suggest that it is not genocide as such which is modern, but the increasing revulsion against it.65 This revulsion arose in the Western world after the Second World War, when the enormity of the Holocaust came to light. Presently, organized murder tends to get denounced wherever it occurs in the world.

27 It is much harder to answer the second research question – in what way perpetrators of organized murder legitimize their actions – in terms of a long-term trend from a to b. Legitimations can be manifold. During China’s Great Leap Forward, for example, party officials felt connected in a comradeship of violence, in which beating a worker, sometimes to death, was justified by his laziness.66 Members of the SS and their who participated in the Holocaust, saw themselves as honourable defenders of their country against a conspiracy of world Jewry.67 Going back in time, we find a black leader in Haiti justifying the murder of whites as necessary to prevent a return to slavery. A decade earlier the slaveholders’ compatriot Robespierre, speaking about the Vendéens, put it like this : “We have to extinguish the internal enemies of the Republic or perish with them”.68 Again some three to four decades earlier the Qianlong emperor justified the extermination of the Zhungars with the argument that the barbarians had become increasingly rebellious and that, if he failed to defend the empire’s borders, he could not face his father and grandfather in the hereafter.69 Finally, a change in medieval Russia, where chroniclers routinely wrote about the mass killing of non- combatants or prisoners of war, may be relevant in this respect. Chroniclers of the tenth and eleventh centuries reported this without emotion as a fact of life, whereas their twelfth-century successors condemned it, always adding that it was an exceptional case.70 It is not clear yet whether this involved a change at the level of

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legitimation or in real frequency. In the field of the legitimation of organized murder, to conclude, more systematic research is needed.

28 Let me end with a comparative exercise that involves both the pure counting of victims and establishing characteristics over time – and that in the European context. I examine three episodes of organized murder, all containing a heavy dose of anti- Semitism, that respectively took place in 1096, 1348-1350 and 1941-1945. Since I am concerned with trends over time, I compare both the first and second episode with the third. I consider the basic facts of the Holocaust as part of general knowledge that needs no reference. My source for the first episode is the work of Robert Chazan and for the second that of Frantisek Graus.71

29 The 1096 episode took place on the eve of the first crusade. Fanatic preachers, considering Jews equally infidel as Muslims, pointed out that the troops on their way to the Holy Land would conveniently pass them by. Their call led to an orchestrated murder of Jews. Contrary to what earlier authors assumed, this episode was not noted for the numbers killed.72 In fact, the coalition of crusaders and citizens attacked, not dozens, but three Jewish communities, those of Worms, Mainz and Cologne. These were almost completely annihilated though, despite attempts at protection by the respective bishops and a few sympathetic citizens. The year 1096 was notorious, in comparison with the Holocaust, for the way in which the murders were carried out. In 1096 there was quite open slaughter in the streets and, after a chase, in the victims’ own homes. The attackers pierced them with arrows and spears. Some Jews reacted with – ultimately unsuccessful – counter-violence, others with suicide, still others with mutual killing to prevent themselves from falling into the hands of the impure uncircumcized. One young mother quietly awaited the crusaders amidst the corpses of her four children whom she had just stabbed to death. For the Jewish survivors this was an example of sincere martyrdom, for the crusaders a sign of Jewish perfidy and one more justification for their own actions.

30 There is less information on the circumstances in which the persons held responsible for the Black Death were killed, so let me compare this episode with the Holocaust on the issue of numbers. We can best denote the victims of 1348-1350 as alleged poisoners of wells, because next to Jews they included a minority of Christians and heretics accused of this crime, while Catalans were the main targets in Sicily.73 This increases their similarity to the group of victims in 1941-1945, who included a number of Romas and gays. For brevity’s sake I denote those killed in the fourteenth and the twentieth century, respectively, as VWPA (victims of the well-poisoning accusation) and HV (Holocaust victims). The geographic scope of the two episodes is also relatively similar. The murder of VWPA began in Southern France, reaching from there into Catalonia and Savoie and consecutively to the Holy Roman Empire as far as Königsberg ; there were scattered pogroms in the Netherlands and Poland. Hence both cases of organized murder took place in large parts of Europe within a few years. However, whereas the Holocaust had been completely organized from above, during the Black Death it was a combination of spontaneous killings by angry crowds and quasi-legal executions, usually by burning. The latter were sometimes instigated by city councils, despite the Pope’s disapproval.

31 Perhaps my quantitative comparison is open to the same criticism as mentioned above, but it is worth a try, also in view of the meticulousness of Graus’ study, relatively unknown among Anglo-Saxon scholars. In the case of the VWPA we are faced with the

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additional methodological problem that, for the population figures, we have to choose between pre-plague and post-plague, which makes a huge difference. Since the accusation obviously surfaced when the plague had already struck Europe, it is fair to take the post-plague population as the referent (in the demographic literature this usually means the estimate for 1400). In any case, the infection struck both perpetrators and victims, as well as non-participants. Moreover, in view of Germany’s central role in both episodes – in 1348-1350 as the heartland of the murders and in 1941-1945 as main organizer – I want to calculate separate figures for the whole of Europe and for Germany alone. Europe at the time of the Holocaust stands for all parts under Nazi influence, while Europe at the time of the Black Death stands for all parts except those hardly affected by the disease (the Balkans and Southern Russia). This means that I am adding a few assumptions to the demographic estimates. The result can be considered as a preliminary exercise. My calculations are specified in the footnote to this sentence, so that others can improve on them.74

32 The results of my calculations from the demographic literature are the following : 64 million inhabitants for Europe struck by the Black Death ; 8 million for Germany at that time ; 400 million for Europe under Nazi influence ; 70 million for Germany at the beginning of the Second World War. The number of VWPA, admittedly, is an extrapolation.75 My estimates, based on Graus, come at a total of 48,800 VWPA, of which 38,800 in Germany. Benz fixes the total number of Jews killed in the Holocaust between a minimum of 5.29 million and a maximum of just over 6 million.76 Allowing for the non-Jewish victims, I am sticking to the traditional figure of six million HV rather than mediating these two numbers. He considers 165,000 German Jewish victims a realistic estimate.77 Again allowing for the others, I fix the total number of German HV at 170,000. Hence, if we consider Germany alone, the well-poisoning scare was twice as bad (0.485% of its total population) as the Holocaust (0.243% of its total population). For Europe this is the reverse. Whereas the number of VWPA amounts to a “mere” 0.076% of the population, that of HV comes at 1.5%. However, several considerations have to be taken into account with respect to the estimate of VWPA in Europe. Graus’ research was most exhaustive for Germany. Moreover, he notes that very few Jews – the main target group – lived in France after an expulsion twenty-fine years earlier. This also applies to England after the expulsion of 1290. Finally, as the case of the Sicilian Catalans suggests, there may have been other scapegoats in various places. For the moment, let us assume that the Holocaust and the well-poisoning scare were in the same category of magnitude.

Conclusion

33 A superficial examination of the historical literature on homicide and organized murder yields two diametrically opposed conclusions, designating the last 150 years, respectively, as the most peaceful and the most violent era ever. In fact, both of these preliminary conclusions are based on incomplete research. The research into the long- term history of homicide has been largely restricted to Europe and North America. There is no sign, unfortunately, that this situation will be remedied soon. With respect to organized murder, on the other hand, enough work has been done recently to cast doubt on the claim that it was especially characteristic for the last 150 years or so. Although estimating its quantitative dimensions relative to population figures over

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time remains a hazardous enterprise, it appears possible to do so with greater precision in the future. Another promising research question lies in identifying, globally, long- term changes in the characteristics of organized murder.

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Hanlon, G., Review article : The decline of violence in the West : From cultural to post-cultural history, English Historical Review, 2013, 128, 531, pp. 367-400.

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Horowitz, E., Reckless rites : Purim and the legacy of Jewish violence, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2006.

Ikegami, E., The taming of the samurai. individualism and the making of modern Japan, Cambridge MA., Harvard University Press, 1995.

Iliffe, J., Honour in African History, Cambridge, CUP, 2005.

Johnson, E. A. et al., Murder and Mass Murder in Pre-Modern Latin America : From Pre-Colonial Aztec Sacrifices to the End of Colonial Rule, an Introductory Comparison with European Societies, Historical Social Research/ Historische Sozialforschung, 2012, 37, 3, pp. 233-253.

Johnson, E. A. et al. (Eds), Murder and Violence in Modern Latin America, Chichester, Wiley (Bulletin of Latin American Research Book Series), 2013.

Johnson, L. L., Lipsett-Rivera, S. (Eds), The faces of honor : Sex, shame and violence in Colonial Latin America, Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1998.

Jones, A., The scourge of genocide : Essays and reflections, London, Routledge, 2013.

Kiernan, B., Blood and soil : A world history of genocide and extermination from Sparta to Darfur, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2007.

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Lemkin, R., Axis rule in occupied Europe : Laws of occupation, analysis of government, proposals for redress, New York, Howard Fertig, 1973[1944].

Livi Bacci, M., The population of Europe. A history, Oxford, Blackwell, 2000.

Livi Bacci, M., A concise history of world population (4th edition), Oxford, Blackwell, 2007.

McEvedy, C., Jones, R., Atlas of world population history, London, Allen Lane, 1978.

McNeill, W. H., Plagues and peoples, Oxford, Blackwell, 1977.

Makdisi, U., The culture of sectarianism : Community, history and violence in 19th-century Ottoman Lebanon, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000.

Mazower, M., Violence and the state in the twentieth century, American Historical Review, 2002, 107, 4, pp. 1158-1178.

Meijer, M. J., Murder and adultery in late Imperial China : A study of law and morality, Leiden, Brill, 1991.

Melber, H. (ed.), Revisiting the heart of darkness : Explorations into genocide and other forms of mass violence, Uppsala, Dag Hammarskjöld Centre, 2008.

Moses, A. D. (ed.), Genocide : Critical concepts in historical studies, 6 vols., London, Routledge, 2010.

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Murray, C., Sanders, P.B., Medicine murder in colonial Lesotho : The anatomy of a moral crisis, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2005.

Parker, G., Global crisis. War, climate change and catastrophe in the 17th century, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2013.

Pinker S., Ons betere ik : Waarom de mens steeds minder geweld gebruikt, Amsterdam, Contact, 2011.

Powell, C., Barbaric civilization : A critical sociology of genocide, Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011.

Pratten, D., The man-leopard murders : History and society in Colonial Nigeria, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2007.

Reybrouck, D. van, Congo : Een geschiedenis, Amsterdam, De Bezige Bij, 2010.

Robins, N. A., Native insurgencies and the genocidal impulse in the Americas, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2005.

Rummel, R. J., Statistics of democide : Genocide and mass murder since 1900, Münster, Lit Verlag, 1997.

Rummel, R. J., Death by government (with a foreword by Irving Louis Horowitz), (Sixth edition), New Brunswick, Transaction Publishers, 2008.

Secher, R., Le génocide franco-français : La Vendée-Vengé, Paris, PUF, 1986.

Sémelin, J., Purify and destroy : The political uses of massacre and genocide, New York, Columbia University Press, 2007.

Shilling, C., The body and social theory, London, Sage, 1993.

Spierenburg, P., A History of Murder : Personal Violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present, Cambridge, Polity, 2008.

Spierenburg, P., Violence and Punishment : Civilizing the Body through Time, Cambridge, Polity, 2012.

Spierenburg, P., Dr. Van Reybrouck, I presume : Over Congo, cultuur en criminaliteit, Tijdschrift over Cultuur en Criminaliteit, 2013, 3, 1, pp. 84-92.

Tone, J. L., War and genocide in Cuba, 1895-1898, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Totten, S. Parsons, W.S., Century of genocide : Critical essays and eyewitness accounts, (3rd edition) New York, Routledge, 2009.

White, M., The great big book of horrible things : The definitive chronicle of history’s 100 worst atrocities, New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 2012.

Zimmerer, J., Von Windhuk nach Auschwitz ? Beiträge zum Verhältnis von Kolonialismus und Holocaust, , Lit Verlag, 2011.

NOTES

1. This series included a separate meeting on European homicide, financed by the GERN, Brussels October 2010 and a set of four meetings under the label The Global Trajectory of Murder and Genocide, financed mainly by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) : Rotterdam, April 2011 ; Rotterdam, November 2011 ; Helsinki, May 2012 ; and York, November 2012. These meetings are referred to in this text as 1st-4th meeting where references to contributions are given.

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2. Johnson et al. (2012) ; Gabbert (2012) ; Dodds Pennock (2012) ; Few (2012). 3. Johnson et al. (2013). 4. [http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2001/01sec5.pdf] (17 February 2014). 5. See, among others, Spierenburg (2008, p. 2 ; 2012, pp. 7-9). 6. Yang Su at 3rd Workshop. 7. Ludmila Novikova at 3rd Workshop. 8. For the moment I am sticking to “organized murder”, but Sémelin’s and Dwyer’s alternative of “massacre” would be worth further discussion. 9. Lemkin (1973 [1944]). 10. Blick in Moses ed. (2010, vol. 2, pp. 299-327). 11. Johnson et al. (2012). 12. The term ‘man-made’ is meant as gender-neutral, even though the role of female politicians in famines is negligible. The prototype of a ‘man-made’ famine, as already mentioned in Johnson et al. 2012, is the Holodomor in Ukraine. 13. Among many other publications : Zimmerer (2011, pp. 40-70). 14. Johnson et al. (2012). 15. Tone (2006). 16. Hochchild (1998) ; Schaller in Melber (2008, pp. 75-93) ; van Reybrouck (2010, p. 109). Compare Spierenburg (2013). 17. This applies, among others to Carmichael (2009), who combines the concepts of genocide and ethnic cleansing. She has a few pages on waves of persecution in Europe since the middle ages, but the real story begins in the late 19th century. 18. Johnson et al. (2012). 19. Buoye (2000, pp. 1-16). 20. This conclusion can also be drawn from Meijer (1991). In the pre-colonial Ashanti kingdom, on the other hand, payment of blood money and reconciliation usually followed on a homicide : Hynd at 4th workshop. 21. Srivastava and Bloembergen at 2nd workshop. 22. Cf. various publications referred to in Johnson et al. (2012) ; Kolsky (2010). 23. Murray, Sanders (2005) ; Pratten (2007). Murray and Pratten presented an update of their conclusions at the 2nd workshop. Stacey Hynd provided additional details at the 4th workshop. 24. On Latin America, see Johnson, Lipsett-Rivera (1998) and various contributions to Johnson et al. (2013). For Japan, see Ikegami (1995) ; and for Indonesia see Cribb at 2nd workshop. 25. Iliffe (2005). 26. See, for example, Elias (1991) ; Shilling (1993). 27. Compare his review of Spierenburg (2012) in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History 44, 3 (2014, pp. 379-381). 28. Hanlon (2013, p. 374). 29. An emphasis on modern times is also apparent in review articles such as Mazower (2002) ; Bloxham (2008) ; Bartov (2008). 30. Sémelin (2007). The original French version was unavailable to me. 31. Gerlach (2010). 32. Compare the review by Andrew Finstuen in American Historical Review 2012, 1. 33. Johnson et al. (2012). 34. Kiernan (2007). 35. Moses (2010). 36. Powell (2011). 37. Dwyer, Ryan (2012, p.xiii). 38. Jones (2013). 39. Here I am referring to the Dutch translation Pinker (2011), which is the one available to me.

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40. Hanlon (2013). 41. Robinson at third workshop. 42. Secher (1986, pp. 253-260). 43. Carroll and Muravyeva at first workshop. On religious violence in 16th-century France, see the set of articles in Past & Present, 214, supplement 7 (2012). 44. Horowitz (2006, pp. 229-247). 45. McNeill (1977, pp. 199-218). See also Livi Bacci (2007, pp. 43-49). 46. Or, for that matter, to blame the Mongols who besieged Caffa for the Black Death throughout Europe. 47. Hochchild (1998, pp. 226-234). 48. Rummel (1997, pp. 14-28), despite the “since 1900” in the title, additionally presents estimates going back to the 30th century BC. See also Rummel (2008). 49. Gerlach (2010, p. 257). 50. White (2012). See Pinker, 2011, p. 208 (calling Rummel’s and White’s calculations about equally careful) and pp. 473-474 (implying that White is more reliable than Rummel). 51. It is not entirely clear to which population figures. According to p.283, Pinker has adapted White’s numbers to the world population at the middle year of the episode concerned. Rummel (2008) provides annual percentages from the total population for individual “democides” of the 20th century, but the main focus is on absolute numbers. Table 2.2 in Rummel (1997) provides percentages per century, presumably from the estimated world population. For an example of meticulous calculations in a global context, see Parker (2013). He, however, does not provide any murder figures (At p. 510 he presents a graph for cases of rebellion and banditry in Ming China but not for numbers of victims). 52. Bosworth in Dwyer, Ryan (2012, p. 22). 53. Corvisier, Suder (2000, pp. 34 & 44) and information from Paul Schulten. 54. Handique at 2nd workshop. 55. Makdisi (2000) ; Kiernan (2007, p. 397). Kiernan does not refer to Makdisi. 56. Dawidowitz (1987, p. 480, appendix B). The real percentage must be a little higher because the pre-final solution figures for Russia and Ukraine, which were not occupied entirely, refer to all of the territory. The definitive count of the absolute numbers of victims is in Benz (1991), to which I am referring below. 57. Isaac in Moses (2010, vol.II, pp. 141-50) ; Bellemore (2012, pp. 38-49). 58. Scales in Moses (2010, vol.II, pp. 173-92) ; Scales in Dwyer, Ryan at 4th workshop. 59. Saunders in Moses (2010, vol.II, pp. 193-220) ; McCormack in idem (pp. 358-360). 60. Girard in Moses (2010, vol.III, pp. 57-80). Compare Robins (2005) who ascribes genocidal intent to native insurgents in the Americas. 61. Dwyer, Ryan (2012, p. xix). 62. [http://www.niod.knaw.nl/en/srebrenica-report] (4-4-2014). 63. Personally, I find laws that condemn the denial of the Holocaust or any other genocide an outrage against the principle that truth in scholarship should be established through free discussion, not decreed legally. 64. Totten, Parsons (2009, p. 323). 65. Dunning (2008, pp. 240-243) discussing the theoretical contributions of Elias and himself. 66. Dikötter (2011, p. 350). 67. Gleichmann, Kühne (2004, p. 46). 68. “Il faut étouffer les ennemis intérieurs de la République ou périr avec elle.” Quoted in Secher (1986, p. 296). 69. Perdue in Moses (2010, vol.II, p. 249). 70. Karachinsky at 3rd workshop. 71. Chazan (1996) ; Graus (1987).

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72. Kiernan (2007, pp. 64-65) echoes the earlier authors, not Chazan. 73. Catalans in Cohn (2007, p. 8). While Cohn is concerned more with motives than numbers, Graus does not include Sicily in his figures. 74. Livi Bacci (2000, p. 6) has 600 million for Europe from Atlantic to Ural in 1950, whereas McEvedy & Jones (1978, p. 18) have, for the same area, 530 million pre-World War II and 515 million post-World War II. Livi Bacci (2007, p. 26) has 393 million in 1950 for Europe without the territory of the USSR. In view of these divergent figures, I put the population of Europe from Atlantic to Ural during World War II at 550 million. From this we have to subtract the population (based on McEvedy, Jones) of the British Isles (53.5 million), Iberia (35 million) and an estimated 61.5 million for Switzerland and the non-occupied parts of Russia and Scandinavia. Hence, the population of Europe under Nazi influence during WW II comes at 400 million. Livi Bacci (2000, p. 6) has 75 million for Europe from Atlantic to Ural in 1400, whereas McEvedy & Jones (1978, p.18) have, for the same area, 60 million in 1400. Livi Bacci (2007, p. 26) has 52 million in 1400 for Europe without the territory of the former USSR. I put the post-plague population of Europe at 70 million and, based on McEvedy & Jones, I subtract 6 million for the Balkans and Southern Russia. Hence, the plague-stricken population of Europe comes at 64 million. Germany during the well-poisoning scare extends from the Alps to Königsberg. McEvedy & Jones (1978, pp. 69-71) have 6.5 million in 1400 for Germany within its present borders, and 12.5 million for the whole of the Holy Roman Empire (including its Italian parts) in 1400. I put Germany’s post-plague population at 8 million. [http://www.tacitus.nu/historical-atlas/population/germany.htm] (8 April 2014) indicates a population in 1939 of 69.5 million for the Reich (within the borders of 1937). This refers to the same area considered as Germany in Benz (ed.) (1991). I round this off to 70 million. 75. Graus (1987, p. 249) lists exact numbers, which he considers very probable, of Jews killed for eight German-speaking towns. The total number of Jewish victims in these towns comes at 5,848. Allowing for a few Christians and heretics accused of well-poisoning, we can round this off to 6,000 which is 750 per town. The eight towns were all big. Graus lists a total of 44 big towns (including a few regions) in Germany where Jews were killed. With 750 victims per town, the total comes at 33,000. Graus lists another 58 small towns, whose average number of victims I put at 100. This puts the total of VWPA in Germany at 38,800. Graus does not specify all non-German areas where Jews were killed. He mentions seven regions and big towns and fourteen small towns in France and five towns in Catalonia. I put the number of non-German VWPA arbitrarily at 10,000. 76. Benz (ed.) (1991, p. 17). 77. Ibidem, p. 15 (p. 64 reveals that this is within the borders of 1937).

AUTHOR

PIETER SPIERENBURG Emeritus Professor of Erasmus University (hosted by Department of Criminology). Program Leader at Institute for War and Genocide Studies (NIOD), Amsterdam. Selected publications : The Spectacle of Suffering : Executions and the Evolution of Repression : From a Preindustrial Metropolis to the European Experience, Cambridge (Cambridge UP) 1984 (reprinted as paperback 2008) ; The Prison

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Experience : Disciplinary Institutions and their Inmates in Early Modern Europe, New Brunswick, London (Rutgers UP) 1991 (reprinted by Amsterdam University Press 2007) ; Written in Blood : Fatal Attraction in Enlightenment Amsterdam, Columbus (Ohio State University Press) 2004 ; A History of Murder : Personal Violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present, Cambridge (Polity) 2008 ; Violence and Punishment : Civilizing the Body through Time, Cambridge (Polity) 2012.

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Forum

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Forum

Review essay Lecture croisée

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Confronting terrorism: British Experiences past and present

Georgina Sinclair

REFERENCES

David Brown, The European Union, counter terrorism and police co-operation, 1992-2007, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2010, 204 pp., ISBN 9 780719 07464. David French, The British Way in Counter-Insurgency 1945-1967, Oxford, OUP, 2011, 283 pp., ISBN 9 780199 587964. Robert Lambert, Countering Al-Qaeda in London : Police and Muslims in Partnership, London, Hurst & co., 2011, 402 pp., ISBN 9 7818 4904.

1 Confronting terrorism has been a principal objective of the United States and other Western governments since the mid-1990s. The watershed of the 9/11 attacks in 2001 harnessed calls for more comprehensive and sophisticated counter-terrorism strategies to be instigated on a global basis. By extension the United Kingdom has a history of confronting terrorist challenges both domestically and overseas, within a colonial and post-colonial context and later in collaboration with its European and US partners. This general theme underpins each of these three excellent books which in turn detail a range of counter-insurgency and counter-terrorist policies and practices developed from 1945 to the present day. Together and from differing perspectives, the three address issues of contemporary history and link these closely to contemporary state practice.

2 In The British Way in Counter-Insurgency, the historian David French presents a revisionist analysis of counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism conducted through the military, policing and administrative lens of ten colonial campaigns from 1945 through to the withdrawal from Aden in 1967. Using an impressive array of primary and secondary sources, French explores the “brutality of empire”, the state’s use of coercive mechanisms as integral to the successful implementation of British policy. Here French aims to redirect our understanding of the management of this era of

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decolonisation – and particularly the traditional view of COIN that remains entrenched within policy-makers and the military – so that present day conflict and hostile environment situations might be approached with greater insight. Considering counter-terrorism in the contemporary period, David Brown’s European Union, counter terrorism and police co-operation scrutinises the difficulties states have faced with the integration of counter-terrorist policies into European Union government structures. As such this book delivers a substantive analysis of pre – and post-9/11 Europe in relation to unfolding counter-terrorism strategies and the building of European-wide police co-operation, considering the “true impact of this event”. Europe’s approach to counter-terrorism as Brown notes has had wider ramifications following the bombings in Madrid in 2004 and in London 7/7 2005 – as well as a host of other incidents. This has led to further changes within the legislation and attempts at police-building across all member states with significant implications for the citizen. The difficulties faced by police officers in delivering effective counter-terrorism at grass roots level are exposed in Robert Lambert’s Countering Al-Qaeda in London. Lambert is a former Metropolitan police Special Branch officer who has detailed the journey taken between 2002 and 2007 to pioneer “controversial counter-terrorism partnership projects” with Muslim communities in London. Lambert has used this memoir to “challenge” British counter- terrorist policy and strategy which he argues has “undermined” the international reputation of British policing. The policing that earned this reputation, he feels, is needed to encourage the government to work with radical but non-violent Muslim organisations.

3 In essence each of these three books chart the state’s – and most specifically the United Kingdom’s – changing (and often hidden) approaches to counter-terrorism from a post- colonial Cold War world to the so-called ‘War on Terror’ today. They provide an opportunity to consider whether a ‘British’ way has had impact not only domestically but within a wider European and international context. They contribute to the newer writings of British counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism which expose the darker sides to that ‘British’ way. As Lambert notes : one of the “many negative unintended consequences of the War on Terror has been the juxtaposition of international policing methods in which the Peelian notion of ‘policing by consent’ has often been overshadowed and eclipsed by the practice of state terror, torture and coercion”. Indeed each of these books serves as a reminder of the uneasy line drawn between the state and the citizen in maintaining a democratic status quo when confronted by acts of terrorism or serious public unrest.

4 A widely held view is that terrorism is essentially a pre-meditated political act which is not simply aimed at specific victims but typically impacts upon a far wider audience. The tactics used by the different agencies – government departments, the military, law enforcement agencies, intelligence agencies, emergency services and any other groups situated within society are essentially in response to a need to impose order and regain sovereignty. In the Western world the range of counter-terrorist measures have been embedded within a wider criminal justice framework. However, the post-1945 era saw the UK, Europe and the wider world increasingly challenged by insurgency and terrorist activities which necessitated a common approach. Twenty-first-century counter-terrorist strategies adopted by the UK have become subsumed within a US global War on Terror. In essence the UK has had to learn how to operate within a multi- agency and multinational environment and to build the necessary relationships. As Al- Qaeda has become identified as the ‘new’ terrorist threat there has been a move away

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from the historic ‘old’ terrorism in the UK which came principally from Northern- Ireland-related organisations.

5 The earlier counter-terrorist strategies that emerged in Northern Ireland stemmed from a colonial root and the earlier British experiences of its small colonial wars. As French points out in The British Way in Counter-Insurgency, a golden age of British counter-insurgency experiences occurred post-1945 including Malaya (1948-1960) ; Kenya (1952-1956) ; Cyprus (1955-1960) and Oman (1965-1975). Each has been held to be a ‘classical’ counter-insurgency campaign contributing to the management of the Northern Ireland conflict. In particular, as French argues, the Malayan ‘doctrine’ as pioneered by Sir Henry Gurney, Sir Harold Briggs, General Sir Gerald Templer and Sir Robert Thompson became a British showcase for classical counter-insurgency warfare that the military in other countries could emulate. As French’s thesis progresses, he demolishes the traditional ‘hearts and minds’ myth that lay at the core of the British way. His analysis of the ‘British’ approach to counter-insurgency as practiced by soldiers, colonial police, security services, administrators and Whitehall politicians demonstrates that many were not “always committed to fighting with kid gloves” when it came to managing the end of empire. This remains an important issue, argues French, and not simply in relation to historical enquiry but in relation to the misunderstandings that have surrounded British counter-insurgency which has continued to inform British military doctrine and practice even to this day. Nonetheless, the British solution to colonial conflict and profound social unrest rested upon the practice of the ‘Malayan Model’ through the concept of the ‘three-legged stool’ : the co-ordination of efforts by the military, colonial police and administration. Whether it could be judged successful, as far as the British were concerned, hinged upon the extent to which this concept was replicated in other parts of the empire and beyond. On the ground, the practical failures that ensued (for example a paucity in intelligence gathering and analysis) necessitated a ‘sledge hammer’ approach towards the local population which included mass-arrests, detentions, cordons and searches and collective punishments. Part of this British way lay in the perception of who constituted an enemy of the state – the ‘Malayan Model’ of counter-insurgency laid emphasis on defeating the military opponents as well as political subversives. In doing so this British way may have failed to fully balance the needs of different communities alongside the ability to detect exactly who was that enemy of the state. In Palestine, for example, French notes how the British faced difficulties in addressing the very different needs of the Jewish and Arab communities. This was also true of Cyprus where 80% of the island’s ethnic Greek population (who sought union with Greece) were opposed by the remaining 20% of the ethnic Turkish population. In both cases the British were hard put to balance the political and military aspirations of the individual parties and often misdirected reappraisals, clamping down on the local population. So “far from accepting their enemies had genuine grievances” the British had a tendency to resort to marginalisation and criminalisation. The paradox to all of this was a genuine belief upheld that the British way was not only the ‘right approach’ but grounded in paternalism.

6 Using coercive approaches, however veiled, was also important, notes French, to maintaining discipline amongst those soldiers and police officers who were often called to make a judgement that their actions were aligned with the rule of law. Here the British approach was to maintain the outward appearance of legality : the 1939 Emergency Powers Order in Council informed both the military and police

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operationally, allowed for the suspension of ordinary law and initially became the legal basis of emergency situations in Kenya, Cyprus and Nyasaland. These emergency powers were then combined with local legislation to frame emergency regulations within a specific colonial environment. In essence emergency regulations were about British forces ‘taking the war to the enemy’, ‘harassing insurgents’ and, if necessary, intimidating the local population. This could include the use of collective punishment (fines, curfews and so on), mass-arrests, and detention without trial, deportation and resettlement. In effect these became ‘control regulations’ which allowed the colonial state to widen the definition of criminalisation and punishment (including the death penalty). This, French notes, may have been legal but was certainly not legitimate and coercive approaches – which amounted effectively to ‘police state controls’ – paved the way for Britain’s ‘dirty wars’ which included unofficial reprisals against the population, the use of ‘death squads’, interrogation and torture and detention without trial. However, the problem with the use of an excessively coercive approach is that ‘hearts and minds’ will not be won. Coercion, therefore, was not the only ‘weapon in the British counter-insurgents armoury’ ; both the insurgents and the civil population were courted through political, economic, social and cultural development. This too, argues French, had a flip side. The use of psychological warfare (or Psychops) to help ‘turn’ insurgents was undertaken through intimidation as well as offering financial incentives. Colonial development programmes underpinned by the Colonial Development and Welfare Acts, were largely funded by the colonies : between 1946 and 1957 approximately £1,000 million was spent on projects intended to develop colonial economies, improve health and education and so on of which 60% emanated from their own tax revenues and a further 18.7% from international loans which became a burden on individual colonies. It was only in the case of far smaller civic action ‘grass roots’ programmes that real aid was provided to local populations but once again at a price. In the wake of the Radfan Campaign, for example in 1964, British troops distributed supplies of flour, oil, grain and tea to the local tribes once peace had been agreed. Promoting patronage at a local level was by then perceived as a necessary approach in the developing world to prevent the Soviets from developing relationships with the Europe’s former colonies. The winding down of Britain’s empire coincided with more serious Cold War threats and the need for effective ‘western’ approaches to both counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism to have global outreach.

7 As Brown clearly outlines in European Union, counter terrorism and police co-operation counter-terrorism involves a range of ‘actions’ which rest upon a changing legal basis as during the earlier colonial period. Informal police co-operation stemmed from the 1970s with the Trevi Group established to tackle international terrorism and then to address other areas of transnational crime within Europe. Following a series of legislative changes, it was not until 1998 that the Europol Convention provided the legal basis for Europol. It has never been a traditional EU agency but described as an ‘international organisation’ with its own legal framework funded by member states. The Convention has been amended three times and this has gradually extended Europol’s mandate to dealing with issues of common interest including counter- terrorism, asylum, immigration, external border co-operation, combating drug addiction and fraud. As Brown has demonstrated, the path to European police co- operation has been all but smooth and Europol has often been held ‘at arm’s length’ in terms of the operational side to policing with a primarily ‘operative’ role. Even with gradual amendments to Europol’s legal framework and the easing of police co-

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operation, it was not until a second protocol was signed in 2002 that the basis for joint investigation teams was established, and then only in 2008 that most association agreements had been concluded. Brown’s fine analysis demonstrates that despite a widely held view that police must cooperate beyond national boundaries to manage rising transnational crime and terrorism, Europe’s progress in this sphere has been painfully slow

8 This raises the question as to the relevance of the ‘British Way’ within wider European (and international) counter-terrorism contexts. When considering the development of a legislative framework for police co-operation and counter-terrorism, Brown notes that following 11 September 2001 the UK had the “most extensive array of counter- terrorist legislation” in all of the (then) fifteen EU member states. The Northern Ireland conflict which had spread to the UK mainland led to the Prevention of Terrorism Act provisions becoming statutory in 2000. In terms of counter-terrorism strategies it should be noted that the military’s institutional memory had been built on earlier colonial COIN and then carried forward to create a Northern Irish legacy. Where it is not entirely clear is the extent to which the European Union ‘added value’ or eroded these principles when rising to challenge of European-wide counter-terrorist policies. It would appear that ‘slippage’ has occurred between EU-state-led proposals and the empirical realities – or the difference between what the decision-makers had argued for and their actual implementation. Clearly the widening and deepening of the European Union has the ability to weaken rather than strengthen multi-agency partnerships whether in counter-terrorism or aspects of transnational crime. This can be demonstrated by Europol’s fragmented approaches to the management of both European and international policing missions including those to the Balkans and further afield in Georgia and . Within this context any attempt at bringing Britishness (not only through Europol but also the Serious Agency) is swallowed up by the wider European rhetoric. The “overall ongoing confusion over the purpose of a greater EU level of police activity” has led to difficulties in reaching agreements in relation to both human and drugs trafficking and terrorism, which may suggest that really effective counter-terrorist strategies are better when home grown.

9 Here we turn to Lambert’s Countering Al-Qaeda in London with a structure that uses four London underground stations (King’s Cross, Finsbury Park, Brixton and Victoria) to consider “the geography and chronology of counter-terrorism police work”. Lambert’s charting of his counter-terrorism policing between 2002 and 2007 is the most controversial of the three books and came under extensive criticism from “some of the most influential voices in the British media and their transatlantic allies”. Essentially this criticism reposed upon whether Lambert – and the work of his Metropolitan Police Special Branch (MPSB) colleagues in the Muslim Contact Unit (MCU) – was legitimate as well as effective in combating extremism within Muslim communities in London. This emanated, as Lambert noted, from the view that “a tension was perceived to exist between ‘hard’ investigative counter-terrorism and ‘soft’ community policing in support of counter-terrorism”. Initially Lambert’s approach was simply to encourage dialogue in relation to potential al-Qaeda threats to Britain with Muslim organisations and the representatives of Mosques in London. This developed further with MCU engaging with the Muslim Association of Britain and the Muslim Welfare House to challenge al-Qaeda influences within Brixton which included the Mosque. At no time, however, as Lambert makes clear, was there an intention to recruit Muslim community leaders as “covert human intelligence sources” (informants) aligning with ‘harder’

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counter-terrorist policing, but to work with these ‘London partnerships’ to create a form of ‘soft’ community engagement. Certainly within the post-7/7 counter-terrorism policing context in England and Wales, there have been links forged between community-based and intelligence-centred policing models : more recent neighbourhood policing schemes are reliant in part on intelligence gathering. In these contexts it has been argued that police officers can persuade members of the community of the benefits in working closely with the police in relation to anti-social behaviour and crime, though the evidence that this works in relation to counter- terrorism is more limited and remains problematic. Despite the evidence to the contrary, Lambert reflects that “this case study approach provides compelling evidence that endorses legitimacy and effectiveness of the MCU partnership initiatives in Finsbury Park and Brixton” ; the evidence coming, for example, from the removal of the extremist Abu Hamza and his supporters from Finsbury Mosque.

10 This issue here is that the MCU began their London partnerships’ programme before the UK government’s ‘Preventing Violent Extremism’ had been fully implemented. This counter-terrorism strategy was developed following 7/7 and for example made financial contributions to almost 100 local authorities to help combat terrorism in their local areas whilst being specifically targeted to the al-Qaeda threat. Moreover, MPSB had been absorbed into a great counter-terrorism branch of MPS which was by then confronted by the Home Office and Security Services’ “greater control of intelligence gathering and strategy”. The backbone to this was the 2006 counter-terrorism strategy CONTEST : “to reduce the risk to the UK and its interests overseas from terrorism, so that people can go about their lives freely and with confidence”. CONTEST has four strands : PROTECT (the defence of important buildings and the UK’s infrastructure) ; PREVENT (preparation for the aftermath of a terrorist attack) ; PERSUE (arrest the perpetrators) and PREPARE (stop people from becoming or supporting terrorists). It is the latter – PREVENT – that has formed the basis of a ‘new’ form of counter-terrorism to enable the police to prevent an act of terrorism before it has been committed and has been described as an ‘anti-extremism’ programme which requires police to work in partnership with other agencies and stakeholders within local society. It was within the PREVENT strand that the MCU London partnerships were considered to be working “to a discarded MPSB model that was out of kilter with the Association of Chief Police Officers thinking and the wider War on Terror” and raising questions in relation to the legitimacy of working with potential extremists. Lambert had advocated a ‘softer’ community and indeed truly ‘hearts and minds’ approach within his London experiment. He concludes that just prior to the submission of his research project, the United States General David Petraeus, in a lecture on military strategy in Afghanistan and the importance of tackling the terrorist threat in London, made reference to a decline in need for a ‘hearts and minds’ policing approach in favour of hard edge counter-insurgency and counter-subversive strategies. This, argued Lambert, paved the way for future counter-terrorism policing that would mirror the earlier Royal Ulster Constabulary and colonial Special Branch policing models and paradoxically endorse an older ‘British way’.

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AUTHORS

GEORGINA SINCLAIR International Centre for Crime, Policing and Justice The Open University – Walton Hall

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Forum

Reviews Comptes rendus

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Clère (Jean-Jacques), Farcy (Jean- Claude) (dir.), Le juge d’instruction : approches historiques Dijon, Éditions universitaires de Dijon, 2010, 320 pp., ISBN 9 782915 611687

Vincent Fontana

RÉFÉRENCE

Clère (Jean-Jacques), Farcy (Jean-Claude) (dir.), Le juge d’instruction : approches historiques, Dijon, Éditions universitaires de Dijon, 2010, 320 pp., ISBN 9 782915 611687.

1 « Le juge d’instruction : fin de l’histoire ? ». Dirigé par deux spécialistes de l’histoire de la justice, cet ouvrage collectif répond aux débats suscités par la suppression annoncée du juge d’instruction dans la réforme de la procédure pénale préconisée par la commission Léger (2009). Tantôt redouté pour l’étendue de ses pouvoirs de contrainte, tantôt décrié pour son rôle toujours plus marginal dans l’enquête pénale, le juge d’instruction symbolise, pour ses détracteurs, l’ensemble des dysfonctionnements du système judiciaire. Loin des représentations érigées par la littérature et la presse, le juge d’instruction incarne cependant toute la complexité d’un modèle de justice qui vise à concilier défense des intérêts de la société et préservation des libertés individuelles. La déconstruction du mythe de « l’homme le plus puissant de France » – selon la formule attribuée à Balzac – représente l’objectif initial de ce volume. Examinant les prérogatives effectives du juge d’instruction à l’heure de sa création par la législation napoléonienne, les différentes contributions retracent l’évolution de ses pouvoirs jusqu’à la fin du XXe siècle, au gré des réformes de la procédure.

2 Outre l’actualité de son objet, cette recherche entend combler une lacune historiographique majeure. Alors que l’émergence du parquet, les pouvoirs du ministère public et la figure du procureur font l’objet d’un large renouvellement historiographique1, le juge d’instruction est curieusement resté à l’écart de ces

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nouveaux chantiers, malgré la prépondérance de sa fonction dans la chaîne pénale. Ce volume ébauche ainsi une étude liminaire sur le magistrat instructeur, pour éclairer « ses pouvoirs les plus emblématiques, ses représentations et sa réalité sociale » (p. 6). Il s’agit moins d’une tentative de synthèse que d’une première enquête programmatique. Si l’ouvrage se caractérise par l’interdisciplinarité de ses contributions au vu de la diversité des auteurs – historiens, historiens du droit et juristes –, l’approche privilégiée demeure toutefois fidèle à une histoire du droit sensible à la construction des normes juridiques et à l’interprétation doctrinale et jurisprudentielle. À travers l’analyse fine de l’évolution des prérogatives du magistrat, les onze chapitres du livre évoquent la progressive séparation des fonctions pénales : instituée par la législation napoléonienne, la distinction entre l’autorité de poursuite et la juridiction d’instruction constitue bientôt un principe directeur du modèle judiciaire français.

3 L’un des apports du livre réside dans l’intérêt porté à l’élaboration de la fonction du juge d’instruction sur le long terme. L’ouverture du cadre chronologique aux origines du magistrat dans l’ancien droit relativise ainsi le caractère novateur de la codification impériale. La procédure prescrite par le Code d’instruction criminelle de 1808 (CIC) s’avère en effet largement tributaire du modèle inquisitorial d’Ancien Régime, dont les caractéristiques secrète, écrite et non contradictoire de l’instruction érigent la toute- puissance du juge face au prévenu. Maître d’œuvre de l’instruction criminelle encadrée par l’Ordonnance de 1670 et dirigée par le parquet, le Lieutenant criminel s’apparente, selon la contribution de Benoît Garnot, à l’ancêtre du juge d’instruction, tant par l’étendue de ses pouvoirs coercitifs que par sa souveraineté sur l’enquête. La filiation n’est toutefois pas directe, et la période révolutionnaire marque une nette rupture. La réforme de l’instruction criminelle représente en effet l’un des grands enjeux des travaux de la Constituante. Construit en réaction aux abus de la justice d’Ancien Régime, le « modèle libéral » de justice établi par la Révolution privilégie une procédure de type accusatoire pour garantir la protection des libertés individuelles, comme le montre Emmanuel Berger : en partie publique, orale et contradictoire, l’instruction criminelle est placée sous la surveillance des citoyens par le biais du jury d’accusation. Soumise au principe de légalité contre l’arbitraire des juges, la procédure prescrite par les lois de 1790-1791 démantèle la puissance du ministère public et confie l’instruction à des magistrats non professionnels (juge de paix, directeur du jury et accusateurs publics), dont l’élection garantit l’indépendance vis-à-vis de l’exécutif. Remis en cause dès le Directoire, le modèle judiciaire issu de la Révolution est balayé par le durcissement répressif du Consulat et de l’Empire. La création du juge d’instruction par la loi du 10 avril 1810 et la promulgation du CIC en 1811 s’impose ainsi comme l’aboutissement des réformes initiées par les lois de l’an IX (1801). La législation napoléonienne durcit la poursuite, confiée à un parquet inféodé au Gouvernement, et place l’instruction préparatoire – redevenue écrite, secrète et non-contradictoire – au cœur du procès pénal. Si le juge d’instruction représente dès lors « l’une des figures les plus emblématiques du système judiciaire napoléonien » (p. 21), la fonction illustre l’antagonisme entre deux systèmes judiciaires. Le magistrat incarne ainsi le « compromis » réalisé par la législation impériale, qui tente de concilier le maintien de la sûreté publique avec la préservation des libertés individuelles2.

4 L’analyse des contradictions intrinsèques à l’institution du juge d’instruction constitue un apport important de l’ouvrage. Dans une contribution substantielle qui offre une synthèse complète de l’évolution de l’instruction préparatoire sous le régime du CIC

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(1808-1958), Jean-Jacques Clère évoque ainsi la délicate position du juge d’instruction au sein de l’ordre judiciaire. Nommé pour trois ans par l’État, ce magistrat du siège (tribunal de première instance) est investi seul de pouvoirs juridictionnels sur l’instruction. Son action résulte toutefois de la réquisition du ministère public, auquel il est subordonné en qualité d’officier de police judiciaire. Responsable de toutes les investigations et muni des pleins pouvoirs en matière d’arrestation préventive, le juge d’instruction voit ses prérogatives directement concurrencées par le procureur en cas de flagrant délit. Les « rapports encore mystérieux » entre le parquet et le juge d’instruction font ainsi l’objet d’une attention particulière. Les chapitres respectifs de Vincent Bernaudeau et de Jean-François Tanguy interrogent la collaboration parfois conflictuelle entre les deux instances dans les juridictions de Rennes et d’Angers au XIXe siècle. L’étude systématique des arrêts de non-lieu prononcés par la Chambre des mises en accusation dessine une typologie des antagonismes entre les magistrats. Malgré le rôle régulateur de l’institution créée sous le Second Empire (1856), l’instruction préparatoire sacrifie toutefois les intérêts du prévenu à ceux de la répression, et l’emprise du juge d’instruction sur la procédure pénale demeure considérable. En témoigne l’usage massif des incarcérations préventives effectuées par les magistrats instructeurs selon Angélique Marcel. La pratique du cabinet d’instruction de Montpellier en matière correctionnelle sous la IIIe République s’avère emblématique de la généralisation de la détention provisoire. Parmi l’arsenal des mandats qui mettent les suspects « à la disposition de la justice » durant l’enquête, la généralisation des mesures de contrainte physique au détriment des simples assignations à comparaître indique la dimension coercitive de l’institution. « Véritable Janus du monde judiciaire » (p. 181), le juge d’instruction dispose de la liberté des prévenus selon son intime conviction. Acteur-clé de l’incrimination, il demeure, durant le XIXe siècle, un personnage aussi redoutable que redouté.

5 Le juge d’instruction représente dès lors un bouc émissaire idéal pour les détracteurs du modèle judiciaire hérité de l’Empire. La presse quotidienne et judiciaire du XIXe siècle offre ainsi une image essentiellement négative du magistrat. Successeur inquiétant de l’Inquisition médiévale, glacial bureaucrate de cabinet ou magistrat aussi débonnaire qu’incompétent : les représentations « brouillées » du juge d’instruction évoquées par Frédéric Chauvaud dressent le portrait d’une institution qui dysfonctionne. Les réprobations émanent également de la doctrine pénale libérale, qui décèle dans la fonction une continuité littérale avec l’arbitraire de la procédure inquisitoire d’Ancien Régime. L’autonomie (réelle ou supposée) du juge dans l’enquête comme ses pouvoirs exorbitants en matière de détention provisoire focalisent les critiques des défenseurs des libertés individuelles. Avec l’ensemble des contributeurs, Jean Danet dresse le constat de l’irrémédiable érosion des pouvoirs du magistrat dès la fin du XIXe siècle. La loi Constans (1898) sur les droits de la défense amorce une série de réformes de la procédure pénale qui rabote progressivement les prérogatives d’une « institution sur la défensive ». L’extension des enquêtes officieuses diligentées par le parquet et la systématisation des commissions rogatoires qui délèguent une portion de l’enquête aux institutions policières déchargent le juge des investigations de terrain. Cantonné à un travail de cabinet, il s’érige bientôt en simple « directeur » de l’instruction. La généralisation des comparutions directes en matière correctionnelle réduit en outre considérablement son emprise sur le contentieux pénal : « policier impuissant » ou « juge partial », le magistrat ne connaît bientôt plus que les affaires criminelles et politico-financières. La promulgation du Code de procédure pénale (1958)

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confirme la tendance. À l’orée du XXIe siècle, la police et le parquet ont supplanté le juge d’instruction dans l’enquête judiciaire.

6 La question de l’indépendance du juge d’instruction structure en définitive l’ensemble de l’ouvrage : interrogeant l’impartialité du magistrat dans l’enquête, les différentes contributions questionnent plus généralement les rapports entre la justice et le pouvoir politique. L’évolution des carrières de la magistrature illustre la complexité des rapports hiérarchiques qui se nouent autour de la procédure. La contribution de Jean- Claude Farcy tente ainsi de démasquer l’homme qui se cache derrière la fonction. « Quel juge pour l’instruction ? » : l’examen des dossiers de recrutement des magistrats entre 1815 et 1980 permet d’ les compétences et les qualifications requises pour une charge aussi éprouvante physiquement que lourde de responsabilités. L’auteur évoque ainsi la lente construction du « métier » du juge d’instruction, et montre le processus de professionnalisation et de spécialisation de la magistrature. On cherchera pourtant en vain la matérialité des investigations : loin de la scène de crime et de la pratique quotidienne des magistrats, le volume reste silencieux sur la collaboration du juge avec les officiers de police judiciaire et les experts de l’instruction criminelle. Comme le signale toutefois la conclusion, l’ouvrage s’impose comme une belle « invitation à poursuivre l’enquête ».

NOTES

1. Christian Bruschi (dir.), Parquet et politique pénale depuis le XIXe siècle, Paris, PUF, 2002 ; Jean- Marie Carbasse (dir.), Histoire du parquet, Paris, PUF, 2000 ; Claire Dolan, Les Procureurs du Midi sous l’Ancien Régime, Rennes, PUR, 2012 ; Jean-Claude Farcy, « Le procureur entre l’ordre public et les justiciables : plaintes, procès-verbaux et poursuites pénales à Dijon à la fin du XIXe siècle », Crime, Histoire et Sociétés/Crime, History and Societies, 2005, nº1, pp. 79-115 ; Michel Porret, Le crime et ses circonstances. De l’esprit de l’arbitraire au siècle des Lumières selon les réquisitoires des procureurs généraux de Genève, Genève, Droz, 1995. 2. Chantal Aboucaya, Renée Martinage (dir.), Du compromis au dysfonctionnement : les destinées du code d’instruction criminelle, 1808-2008, Lille, CHJ, 2009 ; Claire Bouglé-Leroux, « Procédure criminelle, France, XIXe siècle : Code de procédure criminelle de 1808 », in Joël Hautebert, Sylvain Soleil (dir.), La procédure et la construction de l’État en Europe, Rennes, PUR, 2011, pp. 603-662.

AUTEURS

VINCENT FONTANA Université de Genève

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Dominique Kalifa, Pierre Karila- Cohen (dir.), Le commissaire de police au XIXe siècle

Antoine Renglet

RÉFÉRENCE

Dominique Kalifa, Pierre Karila-Cohen (dir.), Le commissaire de police au XIXe siècle, Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 2008, 284 pp., ISBN 9 782 859 445959.

1 Depuis plusieurs années, grâce aux travaux de Dominique Monjardet1 rapprochant police et monde du travail, l’histoire de la professionnalisation policière2 connaît un intérêt grandissant. Dans ce renouveau historiographique, la figure du commissaire de police a, jusque récemment, peu retenu l’attention des chercheurs3. L’ouvrage collectif dirigé par Dominique Kalifa et Pierre Karila-Cohen, édité aux Publications de la Sorbonne, vient pallier cette lacune en rassemblant une dizaine de contributions consacrées à cette fonction et aux hommes qui l’ont exercée dans la France d’un XIXe siècle qui s’ouvre à la période révolutionnaire et se termine à la Première Guerre mondiale. S’y ajoute un élargissement par une comparaison avec la fonction de police superintendent anglais et par une mise en perspective sociologique. En grands spécialistes de la France du XIXe siècle et de l’histoire de la justice à cette époque, les deux directeurs de ce livre introduisent celui-ci par une remise en contexte législative, historiographique et culturelle. L’ambition de l’ouvrage est clairement indiquée : il s’agit d’approcher les représentations actuelles et passées ainsi que les origines de cet « homme de l’entre-deux » qu’est le commissaire de police – institution à mi-chemin entre l’État et la société, entre les pouvoirs publics et la rue, entre les élites et le peuple – et qui demeure une pièce maîtresse du paysage institutionnel français. L’ouvrage s’organise en quatre volets successifs. L’ensemble est suivi de plusieurs annexes et d’une bibliographie.

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2 La première partie retrace les évolutions du profil socioprofessionnel des commissaires. Dans sa contribution consacrée aux commissaires de police parisiens sous la Révolution, Vincent Denis décrit la progressive stabilisation d’une institution qui se reconstruit sur les ruines de son ancêtre d’Ancien Régime. Élus entre 1790 et 1795, les commissaires, sous le Directoire, sont nommés par l’administration départementale sur proposition de la municipalité. Après brumaire de l’an VIII, la centralisation est renforcée puisque c’est le ministre de la Police puis l’Empereur lui-même, qui les nomme. Il résulte de cette variation du procédé de sélection un groupe professionnel en constante évolution. Jean-Paul Jourdan propose quant à lui de comparer le profil social des commissaires de police alsaciens, étudié par Édouard Ebel4, avec celui des Aquitains entre 1800 et 1870. Il montre dans une première partie consacrée à leur origine géographique la part grandissante, au cours du XIXe siècle, de commissaires allochtones de même que leur origine urbaine presque généralisée. Dans un deuxième temps, Jean-Paul Jourdan met en évidence la proportion importante d’anciens militaires dans les rangs policiers. Il aborde également la question de la rétribution des commissaires, de leur fortune et de leur notabilité. Pour la même période, Alexandre Nugues-Bourchat analyse de manière précise pour la ville de Lyon, la question, généralement peu évoquée par les chercheurs – y compris dans cet ouvrage –, des rapports entre les commissaires et la population. Le commissaire de police apparaît comme l’acteur essentiel du maintien de l’ordre mais aussi comme le relais entre les gouvernants et les gouvernés. Conscients de ce statut, les commissaires cherchent autant à faire valoir à leur profession une notabilité depuis longtemps acquise par leurs homologues de la justice qu’à remplir les multiples tâches du quotidien qui leur incombent : accueil de la population, rédaction de procès-verbaux, correspondance avec leurs supérieurs, etc. Dialogue, proximité, souplesse et interprétation de la loi semblent dès lors qualifier le travail des commissaires à Lyon au XIXe siècle.

3 La deuxième partie, consacrée à la construction progressive du métier de policier au cours de ce long siècle, s’ouvre sur une contribution de Pierre Karila-Cohen qui s’interroge sur la période de « crise » de l’institution sous la monarchie constitutionnelle. L’analyse d’une dizaine de mémoires de policiers de la Restauration montre en effet que la fonction de commissaire de police connaît à cette époque une crise profonde révélée par l’absence de considération et la précarité dont les policiers affirment faire l’objet. En analysant les révocations au cours de cette même période, John Merriman montre que l’incompétence, la négligence et la désobéissance des commissaires sont évoquées de manière croissante comme raison de destitution, au contraire des sympathies politiques pointées au cours des régimes précédents. Au nombre des motifs de plus en plus invoqués et qui traduisent une professionnalisation accrue de la fonction, il faut ajouter l’alcoolisme, le grand âge et la mauvaise fortune financière des commissaires de police. La reprise en main des polices municipales par l’État se concrétise sous le Second Empire. En centrant son analyse sur le Puy-de-Dôme, Cyril Cartayrade explique que cette période est marquée par un renforcement de la présence gendarmique dans les campagnes au détriment des commissariats. Laurent López montre également que les rapports entre commissaires de police et officiers de gendarmerie, s’ils sont parfois entachés de conflits ou de règlements de comptes interpersonnels, permettent le plus souvent une collaboration efficace. La revalorisation de l’image des commissaires y est manifestement pour beaucoup. Sous la Troisième République en effet, le rapprochement entre les deux corps s’accentue et la professionnalisation des commissaires de police s’impose.

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4 La troisième partie de l’ouvrage met en parallèle deux itinéraires de commissaires. Jean-François Tanguy analyse finement les conflits qui ont jalonné la carrière d’Eugène Court, ex-coiffeur toulousain devenu commissaire central à Rennes sous la IIIe République. La fonction qu’il incarne a pour mission de s’opposer à l’action de la municipalité en matière de police et ainsi de permettre un renforcement de la centralisation et du contrôle politique. Jean-Marc Berlière s’attache de son côté à retracer la carrière exceptionnelle de Célestin Hennion, modeste inspecteur spécial de deuxième classe, qui parvient à se hisser, mission après mission, au poste de directeur de la Sûreté générale puis à celui de Préfet de police. Sa carrière culmine sous l’ère Clemenceau qui le charge de mettre en place les brigades mobiles de police judiciaire, les célèbres brigades du Tigre, véritable modèle incarné d’une police républicaine.

5 Enfin, dans la quatrième partie, deux élargissements sont proposés. Philippe Chassaigne compare ainsi, pour le XIXe siècle, la figure du police superintendent anglais au commissaire de police français. Il pointe tout d’abord la faible attention dont cet officier de police a fait l’objet par les historiens, contrairement au populaire police constable, pourtant son subalterne. Ensuite, il montre que la caractéristique du commissaire de police anglais est d’être avant tout un maillon intermédiaire entre les rangs inférieurs et supérieurs de la police anglaise. Même si sa présence est obligatoire au sein de sa division et qu’il est tenu à des inspections, le superintendent est davantage un superviseur de tâches et un relais administratif qu’un agent de terrain au contact de la population. Dans le deuxième élargissement, Frédéric Ocqueteau pose la question des liens entre le commissaire de police du XIXe siècle et celui du XXIe siècle. Il revient sur chacun des textes de l’ouvrage en pointant, ici et là, ce qui peut surprendre le sociologue ou l’inviter à établir des comparaisons avec le passé. Frédéric Ocqueteau décrit également la fracture que représente l’étatisation de la police en 1941 et l’octroi, avec la loi du 28 septembre 1948, d’un « statut spécial » à l’institution, statut dérogatoire au droit commun. Enfin, il aborde la question de la mobilité fonctionnelle et de la mobilité géographique dans les trajectoires de carrière des commissaires d’aujourd’hui.

6 Au terme de cet aperçu sommaire, il convient de conclure que, même s’il n’est pas une synthèse, l’ouvrage de Dominique Kalifa et de Pierre Karila-Cohen fait utilement le point sur les connaissances actuelles de la profession de commissaire de police au XIXe siècle en réunissant les contributions des meilleurs spécialistes du sujet. Pour cette raison, il sera grandement apprécié par tous ceux qui s’intéressent à des thématiques touchant de près ou de loin à ces questions. Osons toutefois formuler ce regret : les rapports entre les commissaires et la population, de même que leur travail quotidien, ne restent généralement abordés qu’en filigrane des recherches présentées.

NOTES

1. Monjardet Dominique, Ce que fait la police. Sociologie de la force publique, Paris, La Découverte, 1996.

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2. Berlière Jean-Marc et al. (dir.), Métiers de police. Être policier en Europe, XVIIIe-XXe siècles, Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2008. 3. En mai 2012, les commissaires de police sous la Révolution et l’Empire ont fait l’objet d’une journée d’étude organisée à l’Université de Namur (Belgique). 4. Ebel Édouard, Police et société. Histoire de la police et de son activité en Alsace au XIXe siècle, Strasbourg, Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 1999.

RÉSUMÉS

Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 2008, 284 pp., ISBN 9 782 859 445959

AUTEURS

ANTOINE RENGLET Université de Namur/Université de Lille-3

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Simon Fieschi, Les gendarmes en Corse 1927-1934. De la création d’une compagnie autonome aux derniers “bandits d’honneur” Tulle, Service historique de la Défense, 2012, 267 pp., ISBN 9 7821112 90495

Clive Emsley

REFERENCES

Simon Fieschi, Les gendarmes en Corse 1927-1934. De la création d’une compagnie autonome aux derniers “bandits d’honneur”, Tulle, Service historique de la Défense, 2012, 267 pp., ISBN 9 7821112 90495.

1 The inter-war years were not the happiest time for the French Gendarmerie nationale. Many gendarmes still felt frustrated that, for the first time in the history of their force, they had not been able to send a military unit of their own to the front during the First World War. Rather, they had become the butt of jokes among the poilus, notably with comments such as : “The front ends where you meet the first gendarme.” But for the men posted to Corsica in the inter-war period, frustration and embarrassment about the Gendarmerie’s role in the war were the least of their worries. The institution still carried the image of the debonair, moustachioed, loyal, although not terribly bright, Pandore from Third Republic, which might have softened some post-war criticism, but this was largely on the mainland.

2 Corsica was characterised romantically as “un pays des montagnes dans la mer”, but for many gendarmes posted to the island from the mainland it appeared as bad, if not worse, than some of the grimmer colonial postings. The land and the people were poor, and the people commonly looked on outsiders with suspicion. The cost of living was

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high, and the locals were happy to fleece gendarmes as well as any other outsiders. Transport links were tenuous, especially in the more mountainous districts. Malaria was rampant ; and there were the bandits. It was partly as a result of an apparent increase in banditry that, in 1927, the XVth Legion of the Gendarmerie, based in Marseilles, had part of its compliment separated off as an autonomous company to be situated in Corsica. This company consisted of 635 men, twice the size of a normal departmental company, together with other police institutions, including from late1931 some 600 gardes républicains mobiles. This made Corsica the most heavily policed region of France. The compagnie autonome de la Corse and its myriad difficulties are the subjects of Simon Fieschi’s well-researched and lively monograph.

3 Fieschi’s book, which draws heavily on the fragmentary records of the company that survive in the Service historique de la Défense, is divided into three sections. The first discusses the Gendarmerie Company in Corsica. There were difficulties in getting men to serve on the island because of the problems. There was supposed to be around two Corsican gendarmes in each local brigade of roughly six men to help with the language and customs ; however they were often not too keen on the place. Incentives were offered, such as faster promotion and service on the island counting double towards a man’s pension ; but men still tried every way to get back to the mainland. They also lied about doing their ordinary daily service ; they got drunk ; they beat up their women and they amassed large debts. The implication here is that such behaviour was far worse than on the mainland – and perhaps in many parts of the French Empire. Yet more work probably needs to be done to see if this was indeed the case. Much of the men’s dissatisfaction appears to have been related directly to the attitudes of the islanders towards them and the general relationship between gendarmes and Corsicans. This is the subject of the second section of the book. “Nous sommes en Corse”, noted Lt. Col. Delavallade, the company commander from 1929 to 1931, “où le principe fait loi : ‘Tous ceux qui ne sont pas du clan sont ennemis’”. The small Gendarmerie brigades found themselves pressured to support influential during elections ; individual gendarmes, especially NCOs, could be victimised by such clans. Equally difficult was the fact that all the men on the island carried firearms. The gendarmes generally used discretion in enforcing the law against carrying guns, but on occasions – when someone was shot – they had to get involved ; and here they came up against another local problem. Vendetta and blood feuds were still a part of Corsican life. Given his way of life the bandit André Spada may not have been entirely typical of the island population ; but when he declared that he was “un criminel mais non pas un voleur” he was playing up to the Corsican traditions of banditry and violence.

4 Spada, like most of the bandits described by Fieschi, was a nasty individual. Whatever their boasts, these men of honour robbed as well as murdered ; they also indulged in fraud and protection rackets. They were cocky enough to write threats to representatives of the government. They exploited the heroic image of the bandit d’honneur to win sympathy from the local population ; but whenever and where that sympathy faltered they turned to terror and violence. They revelled in opportunities to humiliate gendarmes, and isolated Gendarmerie brigades often preferred not to get involved and not to go out of their way to confront them. The third section of the book chronicles the way in which the Gendarmerie approached the problem of the bandits and, particularly, the military campaign that was launched against them in November 1931. This campaign appears something akin to a sweep against insurgents in a colonial possession after the Second World War. As well as the 600 gardes républicains mobiles the

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gendarmes were equipped with machine-guns and were able to call on armoured vehicles. In addition they were given leeway to pressurise the families and friends of bandits so as to ‘persuade’ them to surrender. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, there were frictions between the different police institutions involved in the campaign as they vied for the credit, and the rewards, in various captures.

5 Fieschi has a fascinating story to tell, and he tells it well. He carefully sets out the sources for his work in an introductory chapter, but thereafter, unfortunately, scholarly apparatus is put to one side. Most seriously, there is no index. Although it is possible for readers to find their way to broad topics, thanks to well-signposted chapters and subdivisions, there is no way easily to find references to individuals like Spada, or like François Bornea, a former gendarme who became a bandit. Similarly, while the principle Gendarmerie documents are discussed in general terms, they are not cited in footnotes so the reader is left to guess where particular quotations may be found, and sometimes it is not immediately clear in what year a report or reprimand was written.

AUTHORS

CLIVE EMSLEY The Open University

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Patricia Fumerton, Anita Guerrini (Eds) (with the assistance of Kris McAbee), Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500–1800 Farnham, Surrey, and Burlington, VT, Ashgate Publishing, 2010, xvi + 357 pp., ISBN 9 780754 662488

James Sharpe

REFERENCES

Patricia Fumerton, Anita Guerrini (Eds) (with the assistance of Kris McAbee), Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500–1800, Farnham, Surrey, and Burlington, VT, Ashgate Publishing, 2010, xvi + 357 pp., ISBN 9 780754 662488.

1 Historians of crime in the early modern period have long been aware of the potentialities of various types of popular literature as sources for attitudes towards crime and criminals and, less certainly and less frequently, as sources of factual information. Initially, therefore, the volume under review here would seem to constitute a welcome addition to our knowledge and important genre within earlier modern popular culture, ballads and broadsides. In general, this initial reaction is justified : there are, however, some problems.

2 This collection is not, of course, purely about ballads and broadsides dealing with crime and punishment, and essays range widely from the advertising of monstrosity in ballads to broadside ballads about political cobblers. The collection begins with three essays focussing on the construction of the ballad genre, and in particular Patricia Fumerton’s essay in this section can be recommended to anybody unfamiliar with broadsides and ballads as sources, the way in which collectors have put bodies of these materials together since the seventeenth century, and the much vexed question of the

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status of the ballad as a product of oral or print culture. Four of the essays, however, are concerned with crime. Three, by Simone Chess, Frances E. Dolan, and Joy Wiltenburg are grouped in one section, entitled ‘The Criminal Subject ; Gender, Law and Emotion’, while the other, Thomas Pettitt’s ‘Journalism vs Tradition in the English Ballads of the Murdered Sweetheart’ is located in a section on ‘Strange News’.

3 Of these essays, Wiltenburg’s is the most important. She addresses some of the key issues, in particular opening up the issue of the emotional content of the ballads, how, while being sensationalist crime accounts, they also invited public interest in the subjectivity of individual lawbreakers (and, above all, murderers), and how the criminal would move from contemplating the crime in question, to committing it, to the feeling remorse over it, and subsequently reacting to their deserved fate on the gallows. Obviously, these sources are open to multiple readings, and these are frequently more ambiguous than a straightforward acceptance on the part of the reader (or listener) to the consequences of lawbreaking. Nevertheless, Wiltenburg’s suggestion that the ballads, in encouraging popular identification with very conventionalised narratives of crime and punishment, and of the perpetrators emotions, ranging from rage against their victim to subsequent remorse prompted by the workings of their own conscience and the realities of state power, present an almost Foucauldian vision of the state’s powers of coercion and punishment as shapers of subjective experience. We are reminded of the need to focus on the relationship between what appears on the printed page, how the audience reacted to it (and as Wiltenburg reminds us, with ballads the potential audience went a long was down the social scale) and how the message in the medium was internalised. Wiltenburg also identifies that constant issue in how popular culture represents crime : how it offers ‘a vicarious enjoyment of deviance, and constantly emphasized the common human feeling that bound the public observer to the inner experience of the criminal’ (p. 186).

4 Simone Chess’s objectives are more limited. She takes four ballads and, as the title of her essay puts it, seeks to show how they illustrate ‘oath making, subjectivity, and husband murder in “murderous wife” ballads’. Her main point is that, by vowing or promising to kill their husbands, the women in these ballads broke the earlier vow of obedience they made when marrying, and hence paved the way for murder by establishing the subjectivity of the women in question and rendering them free agents capable of killing. This premise does rest on an assumption of pre – existing wifely subordination which goes beyond the wildest dreams of early modern patriarchs, and which probably bore little relationship to the reality of marital relationships among the middling and labouring sorts. There are also some fairly major interpretative leaps here. In particular, we find Anne Wallen, after being struck by her husband in the course of an altercation over his coming home drunk, beginning to ‘curse and swear at him’. ‘Cursing and swearing’ is a term current in modern (English) English, and the ‘swearing’ element has no overtones of formal oath – taking. Yet within a few pages, with no evidence, the tentative suggestion that Wallen might be swearing a formal oath to kill her husband (which she eventually did with a chisel) becomes an established fact, ‘a speech act, or a moment in which her speech is a performative act that recreates her as an autonomous subject, and, in doing so, helps her un – swear her wedding oath to couverture’. (p. 135). While accepting the importance of female speech and female verbal violence (which is what we are probably dealing with here) this does seem to be over – reading the evidence, this in turn reminding us of the problems inherent in interpreting popular literature of this type. Francis E. Dolan’s chapter on

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women who had committed petty treason by murdering their husbands, conversely, demonstrates how the evidence provided by ballads can be combined with that drawn from other sources to provide a more complete narrative of the case in question, and raises some interesting methodological issues. Issues of methodology are also raised by Pettitt’s essay, which imaginatively opens up the relationship of the ballads upon which he focuses to broader, indeed international, folklore motifs.

5 Overall, then, this collection of essays will be of considerable interest to historians working on the history of crime in early modern England. It will also encourage scholars working on other national experiences of crime between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries to engage with ballads and other sources drawn from popular literature.

AUTHORS

JAMES SHARPE Department of History University of York, United Kingdom

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Ho (Lawrence K.K.), Chu (Yiu Kong), Policing Hong Kong 1842-1969 : Insiders’ Stories Hong Kong, City University of Hong Kong Press, 2012, 299 pp., ISBN 9 789623 72064

Clive Emsley

REFERENCES

Ho (Lawrence K.K.), Chu (Yiu Kong), Policing Hong Kong 1842-1969 : Insiders’ Stories, Hong Kong, City University of Hong Kong Press, 2012, 299 pp., ISBN 9 789623 72064

1 In 1842 the British and Chinese governments signed the Treaty of Nanking and the tiny island of Hong Kong became a British colony. The island was situated on a major entry point to China and, in addition to its population of around 6000, mainly fishermen and charcoal workers, it was also the haunt of pirates. For the British it was to be a major entrepôt for the Chinese trade. But the smooth passage of goods is best served by order and tranquillity ; the pirates had to be dealt with, and the British also considered that a police institution was necessary to enforce and maintain their version of order on the territory and the subsequent additions of new, similarly small territories on the mainland. The development of this police institution is the subject of Ho and Chu’s illuminating and stimulating book.

2 The book is divided into three sections. The first provides a broad chronology ; the second, which slides beyond the closing date in the title, focuses on different branches of the police such as the Criminal Investigation Department, riot squads, and the recruitment and deployment of women officers. The final section surveys the careers of five senior figures in the force and is based largely on interviews with these men. The book was written with both a popular readership and an academic audience in mind. It is copiously illustrated with photographs and with quotation, often isolated from the main text, drawn from interviews with eighty former officers. This tends to privilege

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the second half of the twentieth century in the narrative which may disappoint some of the academic audience. But for those of us with no grasp of Chinese – and a large number of the publications in the bibliography are in Chinese – it is immensely valuable to have an account of the way in which the British sought to police the colony. It might be expected that most senior officers were drawn from Britain, but perhaps more surprising is the way that, for most of the period of the book, the British limited the employment of the indigenous people and recruited men from the Indian subcontinent. When the government of India refused to support such recruitment following independence, the British turned to Pakistan with two campaigns for officers in 1952 and 1961. At one point, at the beginning of the 1930s, they even employed White Russians in an anti-piracy squad.

3 There is not much in the book on how the police dealt with basic, often petty criminal offending. This is a pity since it was probably as a result of this kind of criminality that corruption thrived ; and corruption appears to have been endemic within the force until a major crack-down in the mid-1970s. One of the retired officers whose life history is described, and who is quoted extensively in the final section, also talks about Kowloon Walled City which appears to have resembled something like a cour des miracles that the police patrolled with caution and contained rather than sought to suppress. Elsewhere there is also much fascinating information that cries out for longer and more extensive exposition and assessment. As noted above, for much of the period up until the Second World War, British and Indian police officers outnumbered the Chinese officers. Many of the first Chinese policemen were watchmen recruited at the behest of local community groups and significantly funded by these groups. They were also separate from the Police administration and managed by the Secretary for Chinese Affairs. Europeans in Hong Kong were wary of letting the Chinese police patrol in their districts and, at least initially, of authorising them to carry firearms. Only after 1945 was there a positive effort to increase Chinese personnel ; even so, the last intake of British (or at least English-speaking, white European) junior inspectors for supervisory and managerial roles was in 1994, just three years before the colony was returned to Chinese rule.

4 Equally interesting, and worth an extended study, is the policing of the colony under Japanese occupation. Some of the Indian police were deployed by the Japanese as guards of British prisoners of war. Some Chinese officers continued to serve under the Japanese while other, new men, were recruited ; and this poses interesting issues about the interaction between loyalties and the economic situation on the island under occupation. Turbulence in south-east Asia during the decades after the Second World War also had repercussions for Hong Kong and brought extensive new problems for its police ; the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution led to floods of refugees ; these were followed by fugitives from the nationalist victory in Vietnam, the so-called ‘boat-people’.

5 The Hong Kong Police were in a difficult position during the half century between the Communist take-over in Beijing and the end of colonial status. Alongside British troops they patrolled the frontier where the situation could be explosive ; in July 1967 six police officers were shot and killed by members of the People’s Militia on the frontier at Sha Tau Kok. The marine section of the police fished bodies and body-parts from the sea ; many of the dead appear to have been victims of the violence of the Cultural Revolution in and around Guangdong. The same marine section was also involved in

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semi-clandestine deportations back to the mainland ; the ‘criminals’ and others were given a loaf of bread and some cigarettes and shipped to remote border areas. At the same time the Communist Party in Hong Kong was taking a leading role in agitation within trade unions and around a clutch of economic and social issues such as fare increases, lack of housing and police corruption. The undoubted success of the Hong Kong Police in clamping down on corruption and in handling massive protest demonstrations and riots from the mid-1960s is an area that has been touched on by others, not least because its riot tactics were of interest to police elsewhere, notably in Canada and the United Kingdom.

6 Among the men that the authors interviewed was Dick Lee who joined the force as a Chinese university graduate in 1972 and became Commissioner in 2003. Lee spent two years as an instructor at the United Kingdom’s Police Staff College in the early 1990s. “In the old days”, he recalled, “our colleagues had a low regard for the local service, thinking it wasn’t up to scratch compared to Western counterparts. Two years in Britain laid those biases to rest.” Lee considered that this experience gave him, and his force, the confidence to pursue their own agendas. Ho and Chu themselves might consider pursuing a new agenda when it comes to the broad sweep of police history with which they conclude and within which they seek to situate the Hong Kong force. They tend to accept the traditional British Whig interpretation of London’s Metropolitan Police being the first modern police and the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) providing a model for colonial forces. Yet their description of the origins and development of the Hong Kong force does not suggest anyone pursuing an Irish model. Plenty of British forces recruited outsiders believing it best for strangers to police strangers. And if physical force was the mark of the RIC it is worth remembering that David H. Bayley has argued for force being the distinctive element of all police institutions ; moreover many people living in poor working-class districts or participating in strikes and demonstrations in England since 1829, might be surprised by the suggestion that the ordinary British Bobby was generally mild, polite and in control of his temper. There has been significant rethinking of the British police model in recent years ; this thinking now needs to be extended to incorporate colonial police and their successors.

AUTHORS

CLIVE EMSLEY The Open University

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David Niget, La naissance du tribunal pour enfants : une comparaison France- Québec (1912-1945) Rennes, PUR, 2009, 417 pp., ISBN 9 782753 508521

Briony Neilson

REFERENCES

David Niget, La naissance du tribunal pour enfants : une comparaison France-Québec (1912-1945), Rennes, PUR, 2009, 417 pp., ISBN 9 782753 508521

1 This impressive book, born out of a doctoral thesis conducted jointly at the Universities of Angers and Quebec, examines the complex question of the management and conceptualization of juvenile justice in France and Quebec from the eve of the First World War to the end of the Second. These decades, which witnessed the establishment of juvenile courts and the consolidation of a trans-national concern for the protection of children’s rights, marked a critical period in the formulation of attitudes and policies towards the management of delinquent youth on both sides of the Atlantic (as indeed throughout the Western world, in general). Attempts were made to address the nefarious effects of rapid industrialization and urbanization, of which juvenile delinquency was one, while at the same time cultivating social peace and placating the growing demands of an increasingly politicized working class. Niget explores the comparative fates of implementing a specific branch of criminal justice for juveniles, through a close examination of the two comparable centres of Montreal and Angers (the latter choice justified because of its representativeness of national trends), one based on Common Law, the other on the Napoleonic system.

2 The book examines juvenile criminality both conceptually, as a socio-legal construction, and in reality, through actual judicial practices. Combining quantitative rigour with qualitative richness, his study is based on a remarkable analysis of court documents from which he draws statistical maps showing broad trends as well as

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delving closer, opening up individual cases to perceptive scrutiny. The first half of the twentieth century was a watershed moment in the history of youth, deviant and otherwise. It was in these decades that governments throughout the Western world, building on the foundations established in the previous century, intervened in family life and extended the restrictions governing the autonomy of young people socially, culturally and economically.

3 Employing a panoramic structure, the book is divided into seven chapters, each of them touching on central themes concerning the conceptualization and implementation of juvenile justice practices. The first two chapters follow a chronological sweep, tracing the origins of the juvenile courts in Angers and Montreal, through their implementation up to the close of the Second World War. Chapter one explores the emergence of the juvenile justice system in France and Quebec at the start of the twentieth century, questioning whether it represented a true innovation and demonstrating the extent to which practices and structures were a continuation of the old system rather than a true break with the past. Chapter two traces the halting attempts to introduce a model of juvenile justice based on welfare at a time of constant concern about the breakdown of the nuclear family, especially in wartime. Expanding on these foundations, chapters three to five then examine specific types of offending which aroused the greatest concern, largely because of their symbolic rather than actual significance : , trafficking and fraud ; physical violence ; and juvenile sexuality (especially in girls). Chapter six – the only one to adopt a non-comparative focus, concentrating solely on Montreal – examines the origins of the legal concept of “incorrigibilité” through to the growing awareness of parental responsibility for children’s behaviour – a shift from dangerous to endangered youth. Rounding out the book, the final chapter reintroduces the comparative structure, examining the sentencing and methods of punishment, correction and surveillance applied to juveniles.

4 Young offenders, caught up in a wider concern about regulating poverty and reducing criminality – seen as both sides of the same coin – were dealt with through a mixed concoction of social and penal policies. The period in question witnessed a split of responses to deviant youth (what Niget aptly describes as an “émotion schizophrène”) : sympathy to impoverished children, on the one hand, and fear of disobedient youths, on the other. This split had much to do with changing understandings of appropriate age-defined behaviour, buttressed, in turn, by legislation governing education and labour. As Niget’s work shows, while the State encroached on family life and although there was a growing rhetoric of the need for protection not punishment, there was nonetheless a discernable resistance to implementing long-lasting change.

5 What emerges clearly is that juvenile justice reform, especially in the case of France, was marked primarily by oscillation rather than linear progression. As Niget argues, the progressiveness of the rhetoric needs to be separated from the reality of actual reform. Even when changes were enshrined on paper, time and again the application of those reforms was limited by extraneous factors, such as inadequate funding and under-developed institutional supports. In France the shaky implementation of probation practices and the survival of bagnes d’enfants into the 1930s (despite the vehement campaigns calling for their closure decades earlier) are clear evidence of this. Directing the analysis beyond the confines of Paris is especially illuminating as it demonstrates the shortcomings of a system that relied upon facilities and revenue that

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was more forthcoming in the capital than in the provinces. Actual reform was significantly more pronounced in Quebec where a juvenile justice system was introduced in 1912 with an entirely distinct court over which a single judge presided, supported by a body of staff with specialized (albeit limited) training. Gradually professional probation officers, straddling the private philanthropic and justice sectors, were incorporated into the system. However, low pay and inadequate training significantly restricted their reach.

6 Although much has been written about the history of deviant youth, especially in terms of its institutional management, Niget’s work, which synthesizes a remarkable body of primary and secondary material, makes an invaluable contribution to the field. What is particularly enlightening is the book’s temporal and geographical scope ; it analyses a period which has been surprisingly overlooked and engages in a comparative examination which has not before been undertaken. As such, he issues a corrective to the predominant assumption among historians that the period was simply stagnant or transitional, persuasively arguing that the issue of youth (deviant or otherwise) was central to interwar society. While there was a confluence of attitudes internationally towards child protection at the start of the twentieth century, actual implementation of reform was dependent on highly specific, localized factors. And herein lies the great virtue of the comparative approach employed by Niget : it throws into sharper relief the distinct characteristics of each place.

AUTHORS

BRIONY NEILSON University of Sydney

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Michel Porret, L’Ombre du Diable : Michée Chauderon, dernière sorcière exécutée à Genève / Ulrike Krampl, Les secrets des faux sorciers : police, magie et escroquerie à Paris au XVIIIe siècle

James Sharpe

REFERENCES

Michel Porret, L’Ombre du Diable : Michée Chauderon, dernière sorcière exécutée à Genève, Genève, Georg éditeur, 2009, 259 pp., ISBN 9 7828 2577. Ulrike Krampl, Les secrets des faux sorciers : police, magie et escroquerie à Paris au XVIIIe siècle, Paris, Éditions EHESS, 2011, 302 pp., ISBN 9 782713 223228.

1 6 April 1652 Michée Chauderon, a Catholic washer-woman aged about fifty, was condemned to death for witchcraft by the Genevan authorities. Chauderon’s social profile rendered her an almost ideal type witchcraft suspect. Her sex and her age were two important parts of the mix, she was widowed, and she was a marginal member of the society she lived in, poor, illiterate, and one of those immigrants (in her case a Savoyard) who formed about thirty per cent of the population under Geneva’s jurisdiction. Chauderon, moreover, had already been identified a bad person. In 1639, pregnant with an illegitimate child which had been fathered on her by a recently- deceased fellow-servant, she had been tried and convicted for sexual immorality, ‘ paillardise’. Now, in 1652, she was accused of having made a pact with the devil, of carrying his mark, and of bewitching two girls. And, as was so often the case, the core accusations against the suspected witch came from other women, a group of eight of

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them in his instance. Both Michée Chauderon and the charges on which she was capitally convicted were typical of the witch – trials which afflicted late medieval and early modern Europe. One small mercy was that the judges decreed that she should be hanged until dead, and that her body should then be burnt to ashes, rather than that she should be burnt alive.

2 But Chauderon’s case was an unusual one, in that she was the last person to be condemned for witchcraft at Geneva. This distinction has given her and her trial a prominent place in the francophone history of the witch-trials, and Michel Porret and the twelve others who are named as having co-operated with him in writing this book have done a valuable service in bringing together the numerous references made to Chauderon by later writers and by later interpretations of her case. For somebody coming to Chauderon’s story for the first time (as I do) Porret weaves a fascinating account of how her case has been reinterpreted, and manages at appropriate points, to use these reinterpretations as a microcosm of how the period of witch persecution has been interpreted more generally. Her trial was known about, and discussed, by pre- Enlightenment thinkers at the end of the seventeenth century, but perhaps received its greatest publicity when it was taken up by Voltaire (who renamed its central protagonist Michelle Chaudron) in various of his writings portraying the witch-trials as evidence of the obscurantism of the past. The case was known to several of the psychiatrists who, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries added their own professional slant on the interpretation of the witch trials. Remembering the case took on a new intensity in the late twentieth century. It became the subject of radio broadcasts and plays, the subject of a theatrical production proper, and was also mobilised by the 1970s women’s movement. Chauderon now became one of the oppressed, with some redress being offered in 1997 when a street in Geneva was named after her, as part of a policy of naming streets in the city after distinguished women who had been associated with Geneva.

3 Michel Porret also gives us transcripts of both her 1652 trial and her earlier trial for sexual immorality. The 1652 trial is an excellent example of how a case might be built up against a witchcraft suspect, with repeated bouts of questioning initially without, but subsequently with, torture. Porret devotes a chapter of the book to her trial, and leads the reader expertly through both the Genevan criminal justice system of the period more generally and the specifics of Chauderon’s case. Porret shows us how the various women giving evidence against her built up a convincing account of how she had ‘given evil’ to her victims, confirming their opinion that she was indeed a witch. Their evidence was reinforced by expert medico-legal opinion, this focusing especially on the reality of the sufferings of her two supposed victims. The doctors and surgeons giving evidence also confirmed that, in their opinion, the accused wore the devil’s marks, one on her upper lip, one on her right thigh. Despite some dispute among the experts, a consensus emerged that these marks were insensible, and seemed to be genuine evidence of Chauderon’s status as a witch. After repeated questioning, and being confronted by so many witnesses, the suspect eventually cracked and on 1 April 1652 confessed to all of the charges against her : sentence and execution followed rapidly.

4 This is an excellent book, intelligent, imaginative and meticulously researched, and one which deserves to be widely read. It would therefore seem churlish to raise a criticism of it, but I feel that more depth might have been offered on why there were no more

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witch executions in Geneva after 1652. The last previous execution for witchcraft had been in 1626, following a steady if unspectacular flow of case over the mid to late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This raises questions about why this final trial had taken place and why, indeed, it was Geneva’s final witch trial. To explain this latter point Porret invokes a general shift in western European thinking over the pre- Enlightenment period, and in this he is, on one level surely correct. But more detailed work on some of the later trials in other parts of western and central Europe (eastern Europe was to experience hunts well in the eighteenth century) demonstrate that the potential for witch hunting disappeared more slowly and less absolutely than once would have been thought, and some further reflections on how Geneva’s experience fitted into this general pattern would have been valuable, especially from such a gifted historian as Michel Porret.

5 The survival of belief in witchcraft, and in occult practices more generally, well into the century of the Enlightenment is demonstrated admirably in Ulrike Krampl’s superb study of the occult underworld in eighteenth-century Paris, where ‘faux sorciers’ (a term perhaps best rendered into English as ‘fake magicians’) flourished almost up to the outbreak of the Revolution. Those interested in criminal justice history will note that what is primarily responsible for making Krampl’s study possible are the records kept by the Paris police, a body founded by royal edict in 1667, but transformed into an effective organization under the second lieutenant-general of police, Marc René de Voyer d’Argenson. With the Paris police we obviously have a new mechanism for, and a new vision of, law enforcement and control. Religion and morals were not totally absent from this organization’s concerns, but its main objective in investigating fake magicians was not the rooting out of satanic magic, but rather the exposure and punishing of fraud and trickery, and the consequent financial or material loss of the victims. And although the cases of fake magic coming to the attention of the authorities were not numerous (one suspects, of course, as does the author, that they were the tip of a fairly substantial iceberg), they do bear witness to a widespread accept of the occult : magicians and other occult practitioners were involved in charges of alchemy, of helping find hidden treasure through magic, of conjuration, of fortune-telling and of other forms of divination, and of using magic to uncover assorted secret matters.

6 Krampl is an expert guide to this magical underworld, one which was different from, but not totally unconnected with, the world of village magical practitioners with which Michée Chauderon and every other inhabitant of peasant Europe in the early modern period would have been familiar. The social profile of Krampl’s faux sorciers was relatively high, a number of clergymen, possibly of somewhat precarious status, among them, along with a smattering of foreigners, the age of these practitioners taken together normally being above forty. Their social status was demonstrated further by the fact that most of them, unlike Chauderon and the women accusing her were literate, many of them underlining their expertise by the possession and use of magical books and manuscripts. These included familiar classic works on magic by Albertus Magnus and Cornelius Agrippa, works of demonology by Jean Bodin and Martin Del Rio, the Clavicula Salomonis, a variety of almanacs, and works by, or attributed to, Nostradamus, Paracelsus, Ramon Lull, and Nicolas Flamell. The continued use of such a wide body of occult works is evidence of a willingness to believe in the occult sciences at the very point at which Enlightenment thinking was meant to be gathering momentum.

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7 Krampl’s main concern is with magical mentalities, and thus her work might be thought as going somewhat beyond the usual interests of readers of this journal. But anyone wishing to broaden their knowledge of occult mentalities in the early Enlightenment period will find much that is instructive in this book. The author is especially concerned to understand how magic could continue to function in eighteenth-century Paris, how magicians operated, and how they managed to convince their clients (who were, after all, generally fully disposed to be convinced) of the potential efficacy of the service they offered. It seems, as might be expected, that there social profile was not that dissimilar to those of the occult practitioners whose expertise they sought, further evidence perhaps of the widespread cultural acceptance of the reality of magic. And, of course, there is an important underlying law and order theme : as hinted above, magic and the occult were now being interpreted as deception, as confidence trickery, rather than as satanic arts. This book is excellent in itself, but it also calls out for comparative studies. Krampl is aware, for example, of Owen Davies’s exploratory work on the occult in early modern London, and one wonders how many other eighteenth-century European cities housed occult underworlds replete with fake magicians of the type described in Paris. And possibly the redefinition of witchcraft, magic, fortune telling, alchemy and the rest as trickery and deceit was a European phenomenon : certainly this was one of the main outcomes of the statute of 1736 which de-criminalised witchcraft in England and Scotland.

8 Thus here we are presented with two excellent, if very different, books, both of which help enrich our knowledge and understanding of witchcraft and related matters, topics which have attracted considerable attention from historians over the last two decades but about which, clearly, there are still some important thing still to be said.

AUTHORS

JAMES SHARPE University of York, UK

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Laura Stokes, Demons of Urban Reform : early European Witch Trials and Criminal Justice, 1430-1530 / Orna Alyagon Darr, Marks of an Absolute Witch : evidentiary Dilemmas in early modern England

James Sharpe

REFERENCES

Laura Stokes, Demons of Urban Reform : early European Witch Trials and Criminal Justice, 1430-1530, Houndsmills, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, vii + 235 pp., ISBN 9 784039 86832. Orna Alyagon Darr, Marks of an Absolute Witch : evidentiary Dilemmas in early modern England, Farnham, Ashgate, 2011, viii + 321 pp., ISBN 9 780754 669876.

1 Research and publication on witchcraft in late medieval and early modern Europe continues apace, much of it relevant to historians of crime more generally. The two works under review here, although very different in the chronological and geographical areas they cover, and in their focus, demonstrate this point admirably.

2 Laura Stokes’ Demons of Urban Reform is of special interest in that it deals with fifteenth – century developments, a still relatively uncharted area in witchcraft studies, but an important one, as it was then that the stereotype of the demonic witch was created and ecclesiastical and secular courts had to adapt to the idea that they would, with the demonic witch, encounter a new type of offender. Stokes focuses mainly on the experience of dealing with witchcraft in three towns, Lucerne, Basel, and Nuremberg. She steers her way through recent scholarship on the development of the witch stereotype, paying due regard to late prosecutions of Waldensians that transformed

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into early prosecution of witches, to one of the important early texts, the Errores Gazariorum, a series of trials in the Lausanne region, presided over by Dominican inquisitors, and the input of a secular judge, Claude Tholosan, who demonstrated that witches could be tried by the secular courts. The importance of these elements (and others that she touches on) have been familiar for some time, but Stokes takes an interesting approach to them and weaves them into her broader framework. Above all, she stresses that although there was apparently, despite the gradual emergence of a stereotype, a variety of local beliefs, there was a universal image of the witch as the purveyor of evil magic, and of the witch as a frightening and destructive figure.

3 What becomes apparent when the three cities Stokes focuses on are studied in depth is a variety of experiences, both between the cities and over time within each of them. In Nuremberg, the largest of the urban centres under consideration, despite receiving from Heinrich Kramer an abbreviated version of the Malleus Maleficarum known as the Nürnberger Hexenhamme, the city authorities apparently placed little credence in accusations of diabolical witchcraft, taking a paternalistic attitude which wrote these off as the outcome of popular superstition and ignorance. In Basel, too, the notion of diabolical witchcraft was eventually rejected. At Lucerne, however, a more robust attitude was taken. Although the stereotype took some time to take hold, and witches were still being punished by banishment rather than burning in the 1460s, by the end of the fifteenth century accusations and burnings were more commonplace. Moreover, Stokes demonstrates that a relaxed attitude towards accusations of demonic witchcraft at Nuremberg could coincide with a persecutory attitude towards the area’s Jewish population, who suffered penal taxation on a regular basis, were subject to unusually heavy fines when convicted of a criminal offence, and who were burned in large numbers when rumours of the ritual killing of a Christian child spread in 1475.

4 As this last point demonstrates, the concerns of late medieval urban governments went far beyond witchcraft, and it is here that Stokes makes her most original contribution. She attempts to locate witch trials in the broader concerns of the urban governing elites of the period. She comments very pertinently and interesting on another familiar theme, the reception of Roman law in the German – speaking lands which was to culminate, famously, in the Carolina of 1532. This process, she argues, coincided with shifts in the status and self perception of urban elites, who now found that they had to demonstrate their authority and legitimacy through a new style of governing in which a ‘tough on crime’ stance might be an important asset. ‘In the end’, claims Stokes, ‘the broad transformation of criminal justice in the fifteenth century can be ascribed to the mentalité of the men who governed these cities, to their new identity as a ruling coterie and to their personal sense of responsibility for the good of the community’ (p. 125). Thus the persecution of witchcraft could be regarded as part of a broader thrust towards social discipline which encompassed attempts to suppress a much broader range of conduct – Stokes explores some interesting parallels between the treatment of witchcraft and sodomy, and also stresses the point that the individual witch might have a range of misbehaviour attributed to him or her other than witchcraft per se. Overall, this is an important and well argued book, which is a welcome addition to works on the formative period of the witch hunts.

5 Orna Alyagon Darr’s Marks of an Absolute Witch is a very different exercise, working through the relatively familiar history of English witchcraft accusations from the point of view of a scholar employed in a law school. Her main concern, as the book’s title

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suggests, is the very basic issue of how did judges and juries accept that somebody accused of witchcraft was guilty. Based on an exhaustive study of relevant printed sources, this work covers much familiar ground but develops some distinctive conclusions.

6 After a useful discussion of pre – trial and trial procedures, Darr devotes individual chapters to a number of the ways in which witchcraft court be established under English law and popular practices. Following the publication of a handbook written by the justices of the peace Michael Dalton, ideas on how to prove witchcraft on a legal basis became relatively widely known. Perhaps the most important of these was the witch’s mark, in England usually thought of as the place where the witch’s familiar sucked her blood, in return for which she gained her powers to do evil. And, after the 1604 statute against witchcraft, witches could be convicted on the grounds that they had these ‘imps’ or familiar spirits, he small creatures, half pet and half devil, that were such a feature of English witchcraft beliefs. Added to these legal proofs were a number of popular practices. Of these perhaps the most common was ‘scratching’ the witch. The thinking which underlay this practice and its origins remain obscure, but the basic idea was that if a suspected witch were scratched by her supposed victim, ideally on the forehead, and blood were drawn, the victim’s sufferings would be alleviated. The more familiar swimming test, founded on the assumption that water, as a ‘pure’ element, would reject the ‘impure’ witch, who would float, but allow an innocent party to sink, also receives full discussion. It is noteworthy that neither of these popular practices were accepted as proof at courts of law, although local justices of the peace can still be found condoning them at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,

7 Darr’s work, which also considers the use of ‘experiments’ by interested parties to prove witchcraft, judicial assessments of the narratives and statements made in witchcraft cases, confessions, and the search for reliable testimony constitutes an important and near comprehensive study of the status of various types of evidence, and its use in establishing guilt, in English witchcraft trials. What is really original, however, is her attempt to juxtapose changes in the status of various types of evidence to the overall change in standards of proof in the English criminal trial more generally. Some very interesting points are raised here, but in a sense her overall argument will only be confirmed when the status of evidence in other types of criminal trial have been studied – there is, for example, already some very interesting work on proof and evidence in infanticide trials, and non – infanticidal murder might form another interesting field of study in this respect. And Darr makes another claim which carries considerable conviction : that whatever the theoretical standard of proof in cases of witchcraft, the social and cultural positioning of various participants in a witchcraft accusation or trial would have an impact on their attitude towards evidence. ‘Common – law rules of evidence’, argues Darr, ‘do not necessarily possess real objective value and do not develop exclusively by virtue of their inner judicial logic. Instead, I argue that evidentiary techniques are socially constructed through a symbolic struggle between various social and cultural groups’ (p. 6). The idea that different social groups might have different attitudes to witchcraft is not new, but Darr’s focus on how this affected ideas on evidence is welcome.

8 Thus the two books under review, despite their differences of focus, both add to our understanding of witchcraft in the late medieval and early modern periods, while both

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of them raise important issues for historians of crime, and the relationship of that entity to society, in the relevant periods.

AUTHORS

JAMES SHARPE University of York

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Jacques-Olivier Boudon (dir.), Police et gendarmerie dans l’Empire napoléonien Paris, Éditions SPM, 2013, 240 pp., ISBN 9 782901 952992

Antoine Renglet

RÉFÉRENCE

Jacques-Olivier Boudon (dir.), Police et gendarmerie dans l’Empire napoléonien, Paris, Éditions SPM, 2013, 240 pp., ISBN 9 782901 952992.

1 Publié dans la collection de l’Institut Napoléon, « Police et gendarmerie dans l’Empire napoléonien » rassemble les actes d’une journée d’étude qui s’est tenue à la bibliothèque Marmottan à Boulogne-Billancourt le 10 octobre 2010. L’ouvrage est introduit par Jacques-Olivier Boudon, directeur de publication, qui souligne d’emblée la double direction de l’ensemble des contributions. L’attention est en effet portée, d’une part, aux rouages du système policier et aux hommes qui le font fonctionner et, d’autre part, à la France des 130 départements et à ses territoires extérieurs où le modèle policier et gendarmique s’est exporté.

2 Préalablement, Catherine Denys et Jean-Noël Luc dressent successivement le bilan des dernières années de recherche sur l’histoire de la police et de la gendarmerie de l’époque napoléonienne. Le renouveau opéré depuis quelques années situe désormais l’attention des chercheurs bien « loin des descriptions hagiographiques du régime ou des exécrations de sa légende noire ». Au-delà, c’est le « projet national et impérial napoléonien, la genèse des systèmes policiers, la diversité française et les relations de l’État et de la société » qui sont repensés.

3 Tout en insistant sur les moments fondateurs de l’institution, comme l’année 1801 qui voit la création de l’inspection générale, l’augmentation des effectifs et la mise sur pied de nouvelles unités, Antoine Boulant présente un panorama général de la gendarmerie

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sous le Consulat et l’Empire. Il insiste tout d’abord sur l’importance de l’implantation territoriale de cette force comme principal facteur de son efficacité. Il aborde ensuite les nombreuses activités de la gendarmerie, palette qui comprend des missions de police administrative et judiciaire, des missions ordinaires exécutées d’initiative et des missions extraordinaires effectuées à la demande des autorités.

4 Édouard Ebel consacre sa contribution aux commissaires généraux créés par la loi du 28 pluviôse an VIII. Ces hauts fonctionnaires de police sont chargés de la surveillance des frontières, des côtes et des ports. Compétents dans plusieurs départements, les commissaires généraux entrent en maintes circonstances en concurrence avec les préfets. Édouard Ebel montre que ces hauts fonctionnaires de police utilisent d’importants fonds afin de payer des agents secrets et de donner des gratifications. Ils surveillent aussi les prisons, la contrebande, les loteries, les jugements prononcés par les tribunaux, les hôpitaux, les maisons d’éducation, les spectacles, etc. Selon l’auteur, ces missions font de la police une institution à la recherche constante d’informations et étendant sa surveillance à toutes les strates de la société.

5 Dans la contribution suivante, Aurélien Lignereux suit certaines trajectoires individuelles de commissaires municipaux dans les départements réunis afin de mettre à mal une vision « surplombante de la puissance et de la modernité de l’infrastructure pensée par Fouché ». L’analyse d’un corpus de 616 commissaires de police particuliers des départements annexés nuance grandement la vision d’un corps homogène. Bien au contraire, selon Aurélien Lignereux « l’hétérogénéité est la règle ». Les commissaires municipaux sont surtout recrutés dans le bassin local. Leurs fonctions au service des régimes précédents ne sont d’ailleurs généralement pas ignorées des autorités. Ainsi, la diversité des situations personnelles conduit l’auteur à voir dans « le commissaire napoléonien, l’agent inachevé d’un Empire en construction ».

6 À travers l’étude du commissariat général et des commissariats spéciaux de la Roër, Pierre Horn montre comment un des espaces les plus surveillés de l’Empire n’a pas été pour autant le mieux surveillé. En effet, le commissariat général de Wesel, créé en juillet 1809, doit étendre sa surveillance sur la ligne du Rhin allant de Clèves à Cologne. Dans ce pays réputé difficile et où la population semble peu favorable au régime français, le commissaire général recentre son action sur la surveillance des autorités weseloises et sur l’organisation de réjouissances destinées à gagner la faveur des administrateurs locaux. En 1811, le commissariat général de Wesel disparaît pour laisser place à deux commissariats spéciaux à Cologne et Wesel. Dotés de moyens de surveillance limités, les commissaires spéciaux qui se succèdent dans la Roër n’en sont pas moins des hommes d’une grande capacité professionnelle. Ils semblent déployer une remarquable activité, notamment dans le domaine des grains et des subsistances. Ici aussi, la dérive polycratique de l’administration napoléonienne conduit, selon Pierre Horne, à une difficile cohabitation de ces hauts fonctionnaires de police avec d’autres autorités, notamment les préfets.

7 La contribution d’Olivier Accarie traite de l’activité des commissaires de police de Paris à l’aube du Consulat. À partir de l’étude de 3 000 procès-verbaux pour l’année 1800, l’auteur décrit le détail prosaïque du quotidien de la police de la capitale française. Surveillance de la voie publique, contrôle des vidanges des latrines, contrôle de la qualité des aliments, tenue de registres divers, arrestations de prostituées, noyades et autres morts accidentelles ne sont que quelques exemples de la large palette de tâches qui occupent la police de Paris. Même si le contrôle de la presse et les enquêtes liées

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aux tentatives de conspirations et d’attentats figurent dans cette liste, l’importance de ces missions apparaît plus nuancée.

8 En Espagne, la gendarmerie, étudiée par Gildas Lepetit, joue un rôle déterminant dans le processus d’annexion. Créée spécialement dans la péninsule ibérique par un décret impérial du 24 novembre 1809, la gendarmerie d’Espagne, originellement cantonnée dans un rôle de maintien de l’ordre, est dans un premier temps utilisée, avec ses plus de 4 000 hommes, comme unité de combat. À cette première phase d’implantation de l’institution succède une période de redéploiement des gendarmes dans les régions du Nord de la péninsule et leur réorganisation en légions. Ce processus est brutalement interrompu en 1813 par l’évacuation des autorités françaises.

9 Michael Broers consacre sa contribution aux stratégies de contre-insurrection dans lesquelles la gendarmerie tient un rôle de premier plan. Pour être assurément mise en œuvre, la contre-insurrection doit être organisée dans un contexte militairement stabilisé et à distance sécurisée de toute frontière. Dans les pays nouvellement conquis et intégrés à la France, les révoltes populaires sont généralement attribuées à l’introduction de la conscription et à l’application des réformes religieuses. La contre- révolution se déroule en trois phases. Dans un premier temps, la révolte est affrontée par pénétration, au moyen de la colonne mobile. Deuxièmement vient l’implantation de la gendarmerie qui consacre le passage de la mobilité à la permanence, de la pénétration à la dissémination. Enfin, la troisième phase voit l’établissement de la garde nationale qui, aux yeux des autorités françaises, incarne le « meilleur signe d’un ferme désir de retour à une vie locale normale ». Réévaluant également le rôle de la gendarmerie dans la lutte contre l’insoumission et le brigandage en Italie, Nicolas Bourguinat montre les disparités régionales dans les manifestations de résistance face au régime impérial et conclut, comme Michael Broers, à cette tripartition fonctionnelle de la contre-insurrection.

10 Jacques-Olivier Boudon aborde à la fois l’implantation de la police et celle de la gendarmerie dans le Royaume de Westphalie entre 1807 et 1813. Selon l’auteur, la nécessité du maintien de l’ordre conduit les autorités à l’instauration d’un régime policier. Dans le contexte de guerre, de troubles et de frontières mouvantes auquel est soumise cette région périphérique en un peu moins de six ans, l’expérience métropolitaine des commis du royaume de Jérôme Bonaparte y détermine la configuration institutionnelle de la police et de la gendarmerie.

11 Dans sa contribution consacrée aux espaces coloniaux, Bernard Gainot inscrit l’organisation du maintien de l’ordre public napoléonien dans le prolongement de l’Ancien Régime et de la Révolution. De par la double vocation commerciale et militaire des possessions ultra-marines, l’ordre public colonial de l’Ancien Régime fait l’objet d’un compromis assez instable entre une conception domaniale et une conception impériale. Au cours du XVIIIe siècle, cette pratique policière interventionniste, qui répond avant tout aux principes du mercantilisme et qui cherche à préserver le système esclavagiste de son autodestruction, s’atténue au profit de la « modélisation » progressive des institutions. Malgré la rupture révolutionnaire, le régime impérial napoléonien est l’occasion pour la police coloniale de s’étendre et de se professionnaliser au détriment de son exercice domanial. Consécration d’une évolution ? Bernard Gainot démontre plutôt que cette affirmation de l’appareil policier colonial à l’époque napoléonienne s’inscrit davantage dans une réaction à la législation antérieure.

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12 En guise d’épilogue chronologique, Arnaud Houte livre une contribution sur la gendarmerie des Cent-Jours. La Première Restauration n’est pas l’occasion d’une épuration radicale parmi les effectifs de la gendarmerie. Si la perte des départements annexés, qui oblige les autorités à réduire les effectifs, purge les gendarmes les plus compromis, la volonté des nouvelles autorités est fondamentalement de préserver un outil efficace pour le maintien de l’ordre. Lors du retour de Napoléon, la gendarmerie se rallie facilement à l’Empereur et limite une fois encore l’épuration du corps. En 1815, pour consolider son retour, Napoléon a besoin de renforcer son armée. La gendarmerie est donc nécessaire pour traquer les déserteurs. C’est pourtant contre la pénurie de gendarmes que les autorités doivent d’abord lutter. La nouvelle chute de l’Empire est par contre l’occasion d’une réelle épuration dont le but est aussi de renforcer une institution affaiblie. La gendarmerie semble sortir de cette période renforcée, à la fois par sa résistance aux soubresauts politiques de la chute de l’Empire et par l’épuration qu’elle a finalement connue au terme de cette période.

13 À lire ce résumé, le lecteur devinera aisément la richesse et la diversité des textes réunis dans cet ouvrage qui enrichit assurément la connaissance de la police et de la gendarmerie de l’époque napoléonienne. Si l’on peut regretter que la logique qui a prévalu à la succession des contributions n’apparaisse pas clairement au lecteur, reconnaissons que ces actes ouvrent de nouvelles perspectives et de nouveaux questionnements sur deux institutions à la fois emblématiques et controversées du régime napoléonien.

AUTEURS

ANTOINE RENGLET Université de Namur/Université de Lille 3

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Frédéric Chauvaud, La chair des prétoires ? Histoire sensible de la cour d’assises 1881-1932 Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2010, 384 pp., ISBN 9 782753 510975

Jérôme de Brouwer

RÉFÉRENCE

Frédéric Chauvaud, La chair des prétoires ? Histoire sensible de la cour d’assises 1881-1932, Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2010, 384 pp., ISBN 9 782753 510975.

1 La cour d’assises apparaît comme l’un des parents pauvres de l’historiographie de la justice, tant en France qu’en Belgique. À l’exception de contributions parcellaires, centrées sur le jury, la plus importante des juridictions répressives – en ce qu’elle prononce les peines les plus graves – n’avait pas eu, jusqu’à la publication de l’ouvrage de Frédéric Chauvaud, les honneurs d’une monographie. Pourtant l’étude qui est présentée se distingue de tout ce que le lecteur pourrait attendre s’agissant de la présentation de l’organisation et de l’activité d’une juridiction.

2 C’est sans doute parce que Frédéric Chauvaud a depuis longtemps le goût et l’expertise de l’archive judiciaire qu’il parvient à en déjouer les pièges, à en contourner les balises, pour s’engager dans une autre histoire. L’auteur de La chair des prétoires remarque que « […] pour restituer le fonctionnement de la cour d’assises, […] il existe des sources propres à l’époque contemporaine dont il faut déjouer les effets. […] Il n’est pas rare en effet que les archives ne soient le prétexte à consolider une armature, construite a priori, un peu comme un mannequin ou un épouvantail que l’on veut rendre le plus impressionnant possible. Son squelette est hâtivement façonné. Assez rapidement, il a une certaine allure, nul doute qu’il ne remplisse son office. Une fois dressé, il suffit de le rembourrer, de l’emplir de matière fournie par la documentation, de donner une apparence de chair à la construction du chercheur ». Frédéric Chauvaud n’a pas

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cherché à suivre ce penchant naturel que connaît l’historien de la justice : traiter une structure, son organisation et son fonctionnement, la colorer ensuite par la chair de ses acteurs : « il existe au moins une autre méthode, plus lente et plus respectueuse des sources consistant à les approcher au plus près, à refuser les catégorisations a priori. De la sorte, c’est bien une boule de glaise que le chercheur confectionne. Il pourrait lui donner toutes les formes. Il peut donner vie à un système de gouvernance pénale qui remplit son office : sanctionner des auteurs de certains crimes, ce qui est vérifiable ; il peut aussi évoquer la permanence du rituel judiciaire qui semble résister à l’évolution de la société, ce qui s’avère en partie exact ; il peut encore faire d’autres propositions, mais l’essentiel réside sans doute dans la recherche ‘de la configuration de ce qui est donné, de ce qu’on peut ressentir, des noms et des modes de signification qu’on peut donner aux choses’, autrement dit ‘au partage du sensible’ ».

3 Faisant sien le propos de Jacques Rancière, l’auteur des Mots de l’Histoire ou de Politique de la littérature, Frédéric Chauvaud va tirer tout son suc du matériau dont il use aux fins de faire le tableau de la juridiction criminelle, la chronique judiciaire : « Chaque affaire médiatisée et figée sous la forme d’un compte rendu donne une vision du monde. Assemblées et diffusées, les chroniques des tribunaliers forment bien plusieurs systèmes : idéologique, moral, culturel, émotionnel, tout en contribuant à façonner les représentations du monde social et celle de la place de l’individu ».

4 L’ouvrage est articulé en trois parties. Pour en construire une histoire sensible, Frédéric Chauvaud s’attarde d’abord sur la cour d’assises comme espace scénique et lieu d’attractivité (Première partie : Le théâtre des assises), avec ses caractères, la salle d’audience elle-même et sa géographie, jusqu’à la mise en scène formée par la table des pièces à conviction, cette « morgue des choses », exhibition morbide où sont exposés jusqu’aux vêtements ensanglantés et aux fragments humains. Il s’étend sur l’« écriture de la cour d’assises » et le développement de l’instrument de dramatisation que constitue la chronique judiciaire, il s’attarde sur ceux qui l’animent, les tribunaliers. Après avoir traité le « drame » par la séquenciation, il en livre, à travers les résultats de ses recherches, les atmosphères, ce qu’on y respire, les ombres et les lumières de l’audience. Dans une seconde partie (Les langages judiciaires), l’auteur observe les gestes et les paroles des principaux acteurs qui animent la scène. Il s’agit surtout de mettre en avant les caractères et les variations de l’art oratoire des avocats, de leur éloquence fleurie à une éloquence plus tempérée, accessoirement la parole des représentants du parquet. Parce qu’une histoire sensible bien comprise s’attache aux détails, aux multiples dimensions de la gestuelle, aux interstices, à tout ce matériau que l’historien de la justice traditionnel qui dépouille a tendance à écarter, parfois à regret. Ici, les bruissements et les sourires s’affichent comme objets d’histoire, les murmures et les sanglots, les postures, et jusqu’au jeu des regards. L’ensemble des éléments ténus, parfois infimes, qui forment le réseau des tensions propre à former l’ambiance des assises. Cette atmosphère au cœur de laquelle se noue la suite d’un parcours judiciaire. Il est question enfin, dans un troisième temps, de suivre le développement de ce que l’on appelle communément « le drame judiciaire », au centre duquel se révèle – s’épanouit – la figure de l’accusé (Troisième partie : Le drame judiciaire). Souvent ordinaires et sans éclat, parfois héroïsés, les protagonistes du drame présentés par Frédéric Chauvaud sont soumis au gré d’impressions diverses, attirant tantôt les sympathies, tantôt les haines, parfois l’indifférence. Mais tous semblent conserver leur part de mystère. Approchés, avec les détails présentés par les tribunaliers, jusque dans leur intimité, ils restent pour partie irréductibles à la volonté d’analyse et emportent

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cette clé dont le président ou le public aimeraient pouvoir se saisir : celle qui explique le passage à l’acte, cette insondable « chronologie de l’intime ».

5 Le caractère massif d’une étude qui a pour projet de présenter la Cour d’assises à travers le traitement systématique de comptes rendus d’affaires criminelles ne pouvait toutefois être concrétisé sans s’imposer des limites temporelles. Et ce d’autant plus que son analyse ne s’imposait aucune restriction dans l’espace. L’auteur commence ainsi son étude en 1881, lorsque le législateur supprime le « résumé » présenté aux jurés par le président de la Cour d’assises avant qu’ils se retirent pour délibérer (loi du 19 juin 1881), laissant le dernier mot à la défense et limitant ainsi l’influence du président sur le cours de la délibération. L’étude se clôt en 1932, lorsque le législateur décide d’associer le jury et la Cour dans la délibération sur la peine (loi du 5 mars 1932). Ainsi circonscrite à une époque correspondant à ce qu’il est convenu de nommer la Belle Époque et les Années folles, l’ouvrage de Frédéric Chauvaud n’en apporte pas moins, au lecteur attaché à voir l’histoire de la justice entrer en résonance avec les problématiques contemporaines, une belle contribution à l’approfondissement de la réflexion qui entoure, depuis de nombreuses années, le fonctionnement de la juridiction criminelle, ou encore la question de l’extension du jury populaire aux juridictions correctionnelles dont l’expérimentation avait été entamée sous la présidence de Nicolas Sarkozy. Cette contribution sera d’autant plus bénéfique qu’elle emprunte cette voie de l’analyse sensible, pour couvrir la problématique complexe des assises à travers ce qui la constitue intimement : son espace et ses acteurs, les tensions qui se nouent, à travers des manifestations multiples et parfois infimes, autour d’enjeux qui dépassent le seul exercice de la répression pénale.

AUTEURS

JÉRÔME DE BROUWER Université Libre de Bruxelles

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Frédéric Chauvaud (dir.), Le droit de punir. Du siècle des Lumières à nos jours Rennes, PUR, « Histoire », 2012, 200 pp., ISBN 9 782753 517967

Ludovic Maugué

RÉFÉRENCE

Frédéric Chauvaud (dir.), Le droit de punir. Du siècle des Lumières à nos jours, Rennes, PUR, « Histoire », 2012, 200 pp., ISBN 9 782753 517967.

1 Réunissant douze contributions qui s’étendent du siècle des Lumières à nos jours, précédé d’une solide introduction conceptuelle de Frédéric Chauvaud, ce livre collectif multiplie les approches pluridisciplinaires afin d’interroger l’histoire du droit de punir comme son actualité. À l’aune de leurs compétences respectives, les historiens, magistrats, juristes et psychologues qui collaborent à cet ouvrage examinent les fondements du droit de punir, les fonctions de la peine et la pénalité à l’œuvre selon trois entrées thématiques :

2 I. Le droit de punir en question. Le droit de punir est tout d’abord sondé dans ce qu’il a de plus solennel et intimidant : la peine de mort, bien que maintenue au temps des Lumières, connaît un effritement sensible à partir de 1750, qui témoigne d’une valeur nouvelle accordée à la vie humaine. Libéral et utilitaire, humaniste et compassionnel, selon Michel Porret, ce « socle de la modération pénale » émerge avec l’affirmation d’une philosophie du respect de l’individu et de la personne. Éric Gojosso s’attache ensuite à montrer comment la France parvient à renverser les fondements du droit de punir traditionnel dans la Cochinchine française à la fin du XIXe siècle, tandis que Jean- Paul Jean, en mesurant l’inflation des infractions recensées entre le code pénal de 1810 et aujourd’hui, suit les transformations dans la fonction et la façon de punir. L’intime conviction, considérée en tant qu’élément psychologique du droit de punir, est enfin

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examinée par Alain Ducousso-Lacaze et Marie-José Grihom qui s’intéressent à la part de subjectivité du magistrat dans un dossier actuel de viol par ascendant.

3 II. La volonté de connaître et le désir de pardonner. En revenant sur la volonté de connaître les personnalités des criminels et en restituant l’évolution des théories cliniques de l’aliénation mentale, Marc Renneville constate que la rencontre du droit et de la science de l’homme a engendré un processus d’acculturation qui a façonné en profondeur notre système judiciaire contemporain. Revisitant le contexte de la création des colonies agricoles et pénitentiaires au XIXe siècle, Jean-Jacques Yvorel étudie le « grand enfermement des enfants » et observe une « surpénalisation » des mineurs qui se voient alors plus sévèrement sanctionnés que les adultes. Mais la jeunesse – à condition qu’elle soit repentante – peut parfois provoquer la clémence, comme le montre Edwige de Boer sur la base de dossiers de recours en grâce de jeunes au XIXe siècle. Jean-Claude Vimont conclut cette seconde partie en examinant le traitement réservé aux récidivistes entre 1946 et 1970, et constate l’échec global des politiques de réinsertion des relégués.

4 III. Les cibles de la répression pénale et les limites de la « punissabilité ». Supplantant dans l’imaginaire collectif la figure du monstre jusqu’alors incarnée par le parricide, le criminel sexuel est au cœur des contributions proposées par Anne-Claude Ambroise- Rendu et Jean-Pierre Allinne. La progression des pénalités prévues et les usages successifs des tribunaux révèlent l’émergence de l’intérêt accordé à la victime et permettent d’appréhender la construction de la dangerosité des auteurs de violences sexuelles. À l’heure du « triomphe de l’individualisme juridique, dans lequel la défense de la personne l’emporte sur la défense du projet sociétal collectif », la question du sens de la peine infligée aux agresseurs sexuels et celle de leur guérison se posent avec une acuité nouvelle. La tension entre justice de punition et justice de guérison, comme l’impact des thèses foucaldiennes quant à la notion de dangerosité retiennent enfin l’attention de Jean-Christophe Coffin puis de Michel Massé, lesquels interrogent le principe de responsabilité pénale des malades mentaux.

5 Corollaire de la pluridisciplinarité souhaitée par l’éditeur, le foisonnement des sujets abordés renforce la cohérence de cet important ouvrage en proposant une approche diachronique d’une question qui a régulièrement été et demeure l’objet de controverses, de propositions de loi et de demandes de réformes.

AUTEURS

LUDOVIC MAUGUÉ Université de Genève

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Benoît Garnot, Bruno Lemesle, Autour de la sentence judiciaire du Moyen Âge à l’époque contemporaine Dijon, EUD, 2012, 376 pp., ISBN 9 782364 410282

Elisabeth Salvi

RÉFÉRENCE

Benoît Garnot, Bruno Lemesle, Autour de la sentence judiciaire du Moyen Âge à l’époque contemporaine, Dijon, EUD, 2012, 376 pp., ISBN 9 782364 410282.

1 Depuis 1991, sous l’égide du Centre d’études historiques sur la criminalité et les déviances puis sous celle du Centre Georges Chevrier, Benoît Garnot organise et édite les colloques de Dijon autour des problématiques qui croisent droit, histoire de la justice et sciences sociales pour comparer méthodes et résultats opérés sur les archives judiciaires. Codirigé avec Bruno Lemesle, le nouveau volume rassemble 31 contributions qui inscrivent la sentence dans la longue durée du droit canonique et du droit romain confrontée aux pratiques judiciaires et à la culture politique. Depuis l’Antiquité romaine, la sentence désigne une décision ou un jugement – à valeur morale selon les cas – rendue dans les causes civiles ou pénales. À partir de la mise par écrit de la procédure inquisitoire, la polysémie du terme « sentence » se diffuse dans tout l’Occident chrétien. La diversité des fonds dépouillés par les auteurs et la chronologie des études qui s’étendent jusqu’à l’époque contemporaine permettent de dégager trois paradigmes qui innervent tous les travaux pour penser la sentence judiciaire.

2 La première partie du recueil témoigne de l’imprégnation intrinsèque de la conciliation exercée par les juges dans le processus sentencieux. Parmi les modes de régulation des conflits, on trouve la composition qui diffère de l’amende car il ne s’agit pas d’un montant fixe mais d’un compromis. Le premier constat porte sur un aboutissement plus certain des sentences pénales que celles relatives aux causes civiles, plus souvent absentes des archives selon Isabelle Mathieu : la probabilité que les plaideurs

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s’entendent en dehors du prétoire découlerait du fait que les coutumiers énoncent la procédure à appliquer en cas d’arbitrage. L’autorité qui règle la conciliation constitue une autre focale d’observation comme le soulignent Aude Musin et Bernard Dauven avec les princes du Brabant et de Namur aux XVe-XVIe siècles lesquels s’arrogent le droit de la composition et l’assimilent à un droit de grâce en empêchant leurs officiers judiciaires de la pratiquer ; pour preuve, le terme « composition » devient un délit d’extorsion et il est passible de mort. La conciliation peut aussi devenir une arme politique dans des contextes sociaux sensibles comme celui de la deuxième révolution industrielle où l’augmentation et la fréquence des grèves incitent les législateurs à favoriser l’arbitrage comme alternative à la répression pénale, démarche réitérée à l’époque du Front populaire avec la loi du 1er octobre 1936 complétée par un décret de 1937 où l’arbitrage – jusque-là facultatif – est rendu obligatoire dans tous les conflits de travail relatifs à l’ajustement salarial (Léna Pertuy). Dans cette première section du recueil où les travaux révèlent l’importance des études réalisées sur les affaires criminelles non abouties, Kevin Saule constate que si les procès instruits par l’officialité diocésaine de Beauvais au XVIIe siècle ne semblent pas avoir délivré une sentence contre les curés au comportement jugé scandaleux, c’est parce que l’autorité judiciaire use d’une large clémence dans l’espoir que le prélat fautif s’amende par lui-même ; ainsi, l’arrêt de la procédure relèverait d’un accord passé entre l’autorité judiciaire et le curé, ce dernier s’engageant à changer de comportement. Si au XVIIIe siècle la prison domestique à Genève (Françoise Briegel) semble moins vouée à corriger le délinquant qu’à maintenir une souplesse répressive selon la typologie des accusés, elle ambitionne surtout de contenir l’accusé en stipulant un engagement réciproque, à huis clos, entre ce dernier et le juge lequel interviendra en cas de violation du protocole.

3 L’accord intervenu visant à corriger, voire éduquer le délinquant n’est pas le seul moyen de tentative d’acculturation. La deuxième partie du recueil inscrit la corrélation du crime à la sentence comme un autre paradigme possible comme le montrent les études sur la sentence dans le cadre de la dépénalisation d’un crime : sur la base des 677 jugements contre sorciers et superstitieux par le Saint-Office de Saragosse (de 1497 à 1820), Nicolas Diochon, observe l’évolution de la répression de l’Inquisition laquelle est confrontée au déclin d’une activité qu’elle cherche à transformer : sévères au début du XVIe siècle, les sentences tentent davantage à éradiquer les croyances populaires qui ‘brouillent’ la religion plus qu’elles ne la bafouent à partir du milieu du XVIIe siècle ; la recherche de la marque satanique est abandonnée au profit d’une analyse des problèmes relationnels à l’origine de l’accusation de sorcellerie. Une discipline assortie de peines modestes (Véronique Beaulande-Barraud) et d’une morale qui recherche la cohérence entre le droit et le comportement déviant (Carole Avignon) définissent les objectifs des sentences rendues par l’autorité ecclésiastique du Moyen Âge à l’époque moderne. Ces tentatives peuvent échouer dans le cadre de certains délits comme le constate Matthieu Lecoultre face au décalage entre amendes prévues et montants réellement payés par les propriétaires de débits de boissons qui ne respectent pas les horaires de fermeture. L’exemple nantais comparé à d’autres villes du royaume de France confirme les enjeux économiques de la vente du vin et les traditions de la « culture de l’enivrement » qui débouchent sur des accommodements pécuniaires entre les autorités judiciaires et les cabaretiers. À travers le prisme du délit commis, l’étude de la sentence prononcée permet aussi d’analyser le seuil de tolérance octroyé à la réparation. Si en matière civile, elle est publicisée, la réparation est plus problématique dans les affaires de mœurs telles le stupre ou la séduction où Jean-Christophe Robert

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constate dans son étude portant sur le Roussillon entre 1700 et 1789, que sur 63 procédures engagées, seules 26 sentences sont assorties d’une réparation financière, la sentence judiciaire tenant compte de la condition sociale des femmes agressées pour faire échec aux manœuvres intéressées. Si les représentations mentales constituent parfois le carcan qui empêche la publicisation du crime pour protéger l’honneur de la jeune femme, Anne-Claude Ambroise-Rendu analyse les sentences prononcées dans les affaires d’attentat à la pudeur sur mineurs pour démontrer que la prise en compte répressive de ce crime connaît des non-dits et des résistances jusqu’au milieu du XXe siècle et qu’une plus forte criminalisation des crimes sexuels sur les enfants ne sera effective qu’à partir de la fin des années 1990.

4 En troisième lieu, le volume montre comment, dans le contexte de la procédure inquisitoire, la sentence judiciaire est intimement liée au pouvoir politique ou religieux et peut être un moyen pour éliminer le rival ou l’hérétique comme l’exemplifient les victimes des sentences de l’Inquisition dans le Toulousain au XIIIe siècle analysées par Céline Cheirézy où la condamnation à mort des vassaux et la confiscation des biens est un moyen pour affaiblir ponctuellement l’aristocratie locale qui soutient le comte de Toulouse. Comme le souligne Ghislain Baury pour la Castille entre 1155 et 1312, la sentence est aussi le lieu d’une tension politique entre la grande noblesse et le pouvoir monarchique où les aristocrates utilisent la justice pour se poser en défenseur de l’ordre social mais aussi user de leur pouvoir judiciaire en instrumentalisant les sentences pour crime de trahison afin de soumettre leurs vassaux récalcitrants ou au contraire user de la grâce pour renforcer la solidarité aristocratique. Finalement, c’est bien tout l’arsenal de la répression judiciaire (bannissement, confiscations, grâce, peine de mort) que les rois anglo-normands adoptent pour soumettre les barons anglais en fonction de la conjoncture socio-politique parfois jusqu’aux limites de leurs propres prérogatives royales (Maïté Billoré). La sentence judiciaire peut être instrumentalisée aussi à des fins policières pour maintenir l’ordre public (Olivier Caporossi, Sarah Auspert). Dans son étude des sentences criminelles rendues à charge de femmes (fin XVe siècle, début XVIe siècle), Sarah Auspert constate que les juges de Namur, libres d’appliquer et de moduler les peines, prononcent des sentences pour chasser les femmes indésirables de la cité : hormis les pauvres indigènes qui connaissent des sentences plus douces, les étrangères sont exclues par bannissement ou par mort ainsi que les récidivistes qui sont punies lourdement. L’étude de la grâce princière, convoquée à plusieurs reprises dans cette dernière partie du volume, rappelle que son usage possède une charge symbolique forte comme le révèle le cas génois étudié par Vannina Marchi van Cauwelaert où la grâce octroyée par la République de Gênes aux nobles corses condamnés à l’exil politique – dans la perspective de renforcer le pouvoir génois en Corse – contribue, au contraire, à exacerber les tensions avec l’aristocratie locale. Par ailleurs, les périodes charnières peuvent être un lieu propice pour observer l’instrumentation politique de certains délits comme par exemple avant et après la Révolution où Pierre Légal constate un décuplement des vols de bois enregistrés au tribunal correctionnel de Fontenay-le-Comte (Vendée). Sur la base d’un délit encore peu étudié, l’historien du droit démontre que le renforcement de l’armature répressive vise surtout au maintien de l’ordre dans les campagnes souhaité par les classes propriétaires ce que Catherine Denys démontre à Amiens où ce sont, au contraire, les classes privilégiées qui sont inquiétées par la police révolutionnaire pour défaut de balayage des rues.

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5 Lieu de convergence de tensions sociales ou politiques qu’il s’agit d’apaiser ou de réprimer, la sentence normée par l’écriture et la culture juridique occidentale est un puissant témoin, d’une part, de la distorsion entre norme et pratique et, d’autre part, des tentatives d’acculturation des sociétés chrétiennes via l’appareil judiciaire. Le jugement ou l’absence de sentence ouvrent de belles perspectives de recherches grâce au potentiel documentaire exceptionnel de l’archive judiciaire que ce volume invite à découvrir.

AUTEURS

ELISABETH SALVI Université de Genève

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Klewin Silke, Reinke Herbert, Sälter, Gerhard (eds), Hinter Gittern : zur Geschichte der Inhaftierung zwischen Bestrafung, Besserung und politischem Auschluss vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart / Ammerer Gerhard, Brunhart Arthur, Scheutz Martin, Weiß Alfred Stefan (eds), Orte der Verwahrung : die innere Organisation von Gefängnissen, Hospitälern und Klöstern seit dem Spätmittelalter / Leukell Sandra, Strafanstalt und Geschlecht : zur Geschichte des Frauenstrafvollzugs im 19. Jahrhundert (Baden und Preussen) / Bretschneider Falk, Scheutz Martin, Weiß Alfred Stefan (eds), Personal und Insassen von « Totalen Institutionen » – zwischen Konfrontation und Verflechtung

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Benoit Majerus

RÉFÉRENCE

Klewin Silke, Reinke Herbert, Sälter, Gerhard (eds), Hinter Gittern : zur Geschichte der Inhaftierung zwischen Bestrafung, Besserung und politischem Auschluss vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, Leipzig, Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2010, 297 pp., ISBN 9 783865 832320. Ammerer Gerhard, Brunhart Arthur, Scheutz Martin, Weiß Alfred Stefan (eds), Orte der Verwahrung : die innere Organisation von Gefängnissen, Hospitälern und Klöstern seit dem Spätmittelalter, Leipzig, Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2010 ; 366 pp., ISBN 9 783865 833563. Leukell Sandra, Strafanstalt und Geschlecht : zur Geschichte des Frauenstrafvollzugs im 19. Jahrhundert (Baden und Preussen), Leipzig, Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2010, 349 pp., ISBN 9 783865 84201. Bretschneiderr Falk, Scheutz Martin, Weiß Alfred Stefan (eds), Personal und Insassen von « Totalen Institutionen » – zwischen Konfrontation und Verflechtung, Leipzig, Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2011, 398 pp., ISBN 9 783865 835031.

1 L’intérêt pour les espaces fermés était consubstantiel à un certain renouveau critique des sciences humaines à partir des années 1960 : il suffit de renvoyer aux œuvres d’Erving Goffman et de Michel Foucault. Quatre livres récents publiés par le Leipziger Universitätsverlag réinterrogent le lien entre « séparation, garde et punition », pour reprendre le sous-titre de la collection dans laquelle trois des quatre ouvrages ont été publiés. Les références aux deux auteurs sont nombreuses et parmi les rares articles théoriques, un est consacré à Asiles de Goffman en s’interrogeant notamment sur la conception moderne de « l’institution totale » et son application difficile pour des sociétés prémodernes1.

2 Ces publications sont d’abord le signe d’une institutionnalisation éditoriale d’un projet de recherche commencé dans la deuxième moitié de la décennie 2000 portant sur l’histoire des institutions de l’enfermement en Europe dans une perspective comparative sur une longue durée. Ce projet a été initié par des chercheurs dont plusieurs portent également la revue Crime, Histoire & Sociétés. Fortement imprégnés par une certaine histoire de la déviance qu’ils placent dans la longue durée en allant de la période du Bas Moyen-Âge au XIXe siècle, les auteurs livrent un large panorama d’institutions qui se caractérisent par 1) une séparation de certains groupes sociaux du reste de la société et 2) par une gestion humaine qui mélange contrainte et autocontrainte. Au niveau chronologique, les contributions se focalisent sur les XVIIIe et XIXe siècles. Dès que l’on touche le XXe siècle, la plupart des articles se limitent aux camps de concentration ou à la RDA, ce qui semble un rétrécissement dommageable de la problématique. Ceci est peut-être également lié à l’espace géographique qui est pris en considération et qui se limite essentiellement aux régions germanophones (les deux Allemagne, Autriche, Liechtenstein…). Le regard proposé souffre ainsi d’une double

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myopie, d’un côté par rapport à d’autres traditions de « maisons closes » (Geschlossene Häuser) – titre de la collection et qui ouvre pourtant, en traduction littérale vers le français, déjà sur un tout autre univers – et d’un autre côté vers le monde colonial qui est également complètement absent.

3 Les quatre livres apparaissent comme le prolongement d’une histoire sociale de la déviance qui a commencé à s’intéresser aux espaces fermés depuis les années 1970. La rupture par rapport à cette historiographie se situe dans la volonté de redonner une place aux différents acteurs qui ont longtemps été « invisibles » dans l’approche structuraliste dominante. D’une part, une asymétrie de pouvoir existe entre les différents acteurs mais tous disposent de marges de manœuvres. D’autre part, les différents groupes d’acteurs (p. ex. patients psychiatriques, personnel…) ne constituent pas une unité homogène mais sont traversés par des tensions liées à une différenciation au niveau de leurs tâches, de leur origine sociale, de leur génération… Cette aspiration affirmée dans l’introduction du premier volume de la série nécessite cependant des jeux d’échelles et une descente au niveau micro qui restent parfois difficiles à réaliser. Il n’est ainsi guère étonnant que ce recadrage donne entre autres lieu à une valorisation d’une lecture genrée. Le livre de Sandra Leukel issu d’une thèse soutenue en 2004 part d’un constat certes banal mais peu abordé jusqu’ici : lorsque l’on parle de genre dans les prisons on parle de femmes, jamais d’hommes. Mais dans son ouvrage, les femmes en tant qu’actrices de leur propre histoire restent largement absentes. La plupart des contributions restent confinées à un paradigme plus classique des années 1970. La richesse du changement de regard devient néanmoins apparent dans quelques contributions comme celle de Falk Bretschneider consacrée à l’utilisation de l’espace, celle d’Andreas Fleiter sur l’écriture derrière les barreaux ou celle d’Elissa Mailänder sur les dynamiques de violences à Ravensbrück2.

NOTES

1. Watzka C., « Zur Interdependenz von Personal und Insassen in “Totalen Institutionen” : Probleme und Potentiale von Erving Goffmans “Asyle” », F. Bretschneider, M. Scheutz, A.S. Weiß (hrsg.), Personal und Insassen von « Totalen Institutionen » – zwischen Konfrontation und Verflechtung, Leipzig, Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2010, pp. 25-53. 2. Bretschneider F., « Der Raum der Einsperrung – Raumkonstruktion zwischen institutionneller Stabilisierungsleistung und eigensinnigen Nutzungsweisen », in G. Ammerer, A. Brunhart, M. Scheutz, A.S. Weiß (hrsg.), Orte der Verwahrung. Die innere Organisation von Gefängnissen, Hospitälern und Klöstern seit dem Spätmittelalter, Leipzig, Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2010, pp. 103-130 ; Fleiter A., « Schreiben hinter Gittern. Briefe, Kassiber und Beschwerden von Strafgefangenen als historische Quellen », in S. Klewin, H. Reinke, G. Sälter (hrsg.), Hinter Gittern. Zur Geschichte der Inhaftierung zwischen Bestrafung, Besserung und politischem Anschluss vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, Leipzig, Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2010, pp. 49-64 ; Mailänder-Koslov E., « Mikrodynamiken von Gewalt : Zur Strafpraxis im Frau-Konzentrationslager Ravensbrück », in F. Bretschneider, M. Scheutz, A.S. Weiß (hrsg.), Personal und Insassen von « Totalen Institutionen » – zwischen Konfrontation und Verflechtung, Leipzig, Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2011, pp. 359-379.

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AUTEURS

BENOIT MAJERUS Université de Luxembourg

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Knepper Paul, The Invention of International Crime. A Global issue in the Making, 1881-1914 / Knepper Paul, International Crime in the Twentieth Century : The League of Nations Era, 1919-1939

Jean-Michel Chaumont

RÉFÉRENCE

Knepper Paul, The Invention of International Crime. A Global issue in the Making, 1881-1914, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, 254 pp., ISBN 9 780230 238183. Knepper Paul, International Crime in the Twentieth Century : The League of Nations Era, 1919-1939, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 234 pp., ISBN 9 780230 284296.

1 Voici deux courts volumes qui, ensemble, font non seulement un gros mais surtout un grand livre, un livre qu’il fallait écrire parce qu’il fournit une vision globale très inspirante sur la manière dont « le crime international » – nous dirions aujourd’hui « la criminalité organisée » – a été érigé progressivement depuis la fin du XIXe en un problème crucial dans l’agenda des États-nations et sur la scène internationale naissante. La reconstruction proposée par Paul Knepper de ce processus aux multiples facettes présente l’insigne avantage de lier clairement des phénomènes que l’on connaissait plus ou moins pris séparément mais pas dans leurs articulations réciproques. Ainsi, la fresque que l’on pourrait intituler « l’émergence (vol. 1) et l’institutionnalisation (vol. 2) du crime comme enjeu international » réalise une composition impressionnante d’acteurs et de dispositifs parmi lesquels on notera des progrès techniques dans le déplacement des personnes et des informations,

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l’inquiétude des élites étatiques face à certaines formes d’opposition politique (les anarchistes et la terreur noire), la naissance d’une coopération policière internationale, des croisades morales de philanthropes organisés en puissantes fédérations d’organisations volontaires (les ancêtres de nos ONG) de provenances diverses, des mouvements et des acteurs inédits (les organisations féminines et parfois féministes, l’importance croissante des États-Unis), des craintes populaires suscitées par l’arrivée massive de migrants aux mines et aux mœurs étranges, la création d’arènes « consultatives » et d’instruments juridiques internationaux, la montée de l’antisémitisme, la contestation des démocraties libérales, l’invention et la pérennisation du système des passeports, l’importance croissante des experts et des sciences sociales dans la fabrique des problèmes… : tout cela aboutit à une toile d’araignée complexe qui n’a été voulue comme telle par personne mais qui a autorisé, sous prétexte de protection, un renforcement considérable du contrôle des États sur les faits et gestes de leurs citoyens. Il s’agit bel et bien aussi d’une généalogie lumineuse d’aspects importants de notre présent et c’est un des nombreux mérites de Paul Knepper que de dénaturaliser quantité de dispositions contraignantes qui nous paraissent normales aujourd’hui mais n’avaient rien d’évident avant la Seconde Guerre mondiale.

2 Nous nous proposons de rendre compte des deux ouvrages en deux temps : d’une part, de présenter sommairement leurs tables des matières, d’autre part, parce qu’ils sont les seuls que nous connaissions avec une certaine précision, de discuter plus en détail certains développements consacrés à la traite des femmes.

3 Le premier volume couvre donc la période qui va de 1881 au déclenchement de la Première Guerre mondiale. Il se concentre sur le territoire de l’empire britannique, principalement la métropole, et comporte six chapitres consacrés respectivement… : aux innovations techniques qui ont révolutionné les modes de déplacements et de communication et les inquiétudes qu’elles ont engendrées (chap. 1) ; à l’internationalisation des enjeux aux quatre coins de l’empire – pour ne citer qu’un exemple : comment la question de la tonte des femmes détenues a été débattue et réglée de Londres à Gibraltar, de Natal à Hong-Kong… (chap. 2) ; au souci croissant de la « criminalité étrangère » en général et juive en particulier ainsi qu’aux premières tentatives de contrôler les flux migratoires et prévenir l’arrivée « d’éléments indésirables » (chap. 3) ; à ce qui apparaîtra rapidement comme une forme redoutable de trafic criminel international, la « traite des blanches » (chap. 4) ; à la menace « terroriste » représentée par les anarchistes (chap. 5) et enfin à la constitution des réseaux de criminologues qui seront des promoteurs efficaces de l’internationalisation de ces enjeux (chap. 6).

4 Le second volume (1919-1939) couvre l’entre-deux-guerres et déplace la focale de Londres à Genève, siège de la Société des Nations. Ici aussi six chapitres consacrés respectivement à… : l’appréhension (jamais vérifiée) de « vagues » de crimes après la démobilisation puis dans la foulée des crises économiques (chap. 1), la dénonciation de réseaux criminels internationaux (chap. 2) et la nécessité proclamée de les combattre par l’institutionnalisation de la coopération policière internationale (chap. 3) ; les trois derniers chapitres traitent des « crimes internationaux » les plus discutés au sein des commissions consultatives de la SDN : la traite des blanches, désormais baptisée « traite des femmes et des enfants » (chap. 4), le trafic de drogues (chap. 5) et le terrorisme (chap. 6).

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5 Ajoutons que l’auteur utilise non seulement une masse de littérature secondaire mais aussi des nombreuses sources primaires, documents d’archives et imprimés. Elles lui permettent d’opérer des coups de sonde sur certains dossiers précis qui illustrent superbement les dynamiques générales à l’œuvre. L’écriture est limpide et, malgré de nombreuses coquilles, la lecture est passionnante. Le deuxième volume se conclut de façon significative par la citation célèbre de L’homme, cet inconnu (1935) où Alexis Carrel suggère le gazage, avec humanité, de certains criminels. Autrement dit, Knepper ne succombe pas à l’approche téléologique fréquente (du moins dans les études sur la SDN et la traite des femmes) qui consiste à célébrer l’œuvre accomplie en tant que « jalon » vers l’institutionnalisation du régime international de protection des droits humains institué après 1945 par l’ONU1. « Overall, écrit-il, it would be difficult to conclude that the idea of international crime prevention in the 1920s and 1930s offered a basis for extending human rights or promoting peace. The significance of crime as an international issue must be seen in its capacity for justification of war and mass murder and the most resonant illusions about crime in the interwar period invoked the language of scientific truth » (2011, p. 172).

6 Reste que pour qui connaît le détail de certains dossiers abordés par Knepper, des inexactitudes empiriques sont à relever. Dans l’espace qui nous est imparti, nous nous limiterons à les noter relativement à ce qu’il écrit de l’enquête internationale menée entre 1924 et 1927 sur la traite des femmes, enquête à laquelle il fait allusion dès l’introduction de son premier volume (2010, p. 2) car, comme il a raison de le souligner, il s’agissait de « la première étude d’envergure mondiale de la traite des êtres humains, la première étude sociologique scientifique (social-scientific study) jamais entreprise d’un problème social global » (2011, p. 96).

7 La tenue de l’enquête a bien été proposée en 1923 par Grace Abbot, déléguée américaine à la Commission consultative pour la traite des femmes et des enfants et son financement assuré par le Bureau d’Hygiène sociale fondé à New York par John D. Rockfeller Jr. (qui n’était cependant pas « the research branch » (2011, p. 96) de l’ASHA, l’association américaine d’hygiène sociale, indépendante quoique également soutenue financièrement par le même Rockfeller). Les huit experts ne furent pas tous désignés par le Conseil de la SDN (2011, p. 97), certains furent proposés par leurs gouvernements (Harris, Sugimura et Luisi). Pierre Le Luc ne devint expert qu’après le décès de Hennequin, survenu en 1926 et l’expert japonais désigné était Sugimura, qui se fera cependant plusieurs fois remplacer par T. Suzuki. À l’exception de Snow, nommé président du comité d’experts après le refus de Flexner, les experts eux-mêmes n’ont pas voyagé à l’étranger et la seule visite dans les pays nordiques fut la participation à une conférence internationale de lutte contre la traite à Copenhague durant l’été 1926 (2011, p. 97)… Cependant il est vrai que plusieurs experts (Hennequin, De Meuron, Bandini, Harris…) ont assisté Bascom Johnson dans le travail de terrain « officiel » (pas dans les enquêtes « undercover » dites « officieuses ») dans leur propre pays : dans le cas français par exemple, c’était tout autant pour le surveiller que pour lui venir en aide… Bien qu’ils aient prétendu avoir interviewé 5 000 personnes issues du monde interlope plus ou moins liées à la prostitution (2011, p. 98), leurs enquêteurs en ont en réalité interrogé quelques centaines, ce qui est déjà considérable. Il est exact de dire que le rapport des experts a (néanmoins) bonne presse chez les « contemporary scholars » (2011, p. 193, n. 39) mais il serait grand temps de juger la valeur de leur travail sur base de l’étude des comptes rendus verbatim de leurs sept sessions et non

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plus sur ce qu’ils prétendent avoir fait. Pour juger des critiques adressées aux enquêteurs (2011, p. 101), il convient de réaliser que s’ils ne parlaient pas les langues des pays visités, comme ils parlaient ou se débrouillaient en yiddish et qu’ils ont principalement infiltré la diaspora juive interlope, l’obstacle des langues ne se posait pas vraiment. La réelle raison de bien des critiques gouvernementales au rapport fut l’indignation des autorités mises devant le fait accompli d’enquêtes clandestines ayant révélé notamment des pratiques généralisées de corruption (révélation d’un secret de polichinelle mais tabou). Le refus de Luisi de signer le rapport (2011, p. 102) n’était pas motivé par des désaccords sur les analyses mais par le souci de préserver la réputation internationale, qu’elle estimait injustement salie par la « boue » de la traite, de l’Uruguay et de l’Argentine. Ce n’est pas en raison de l’abondance des informations fournies par les organisations juives de lutte contre la traite que les milieux interlopes juifs furent disproportionnellement représentés dans le rapport (2011, p. 111) mais parce que, dès le début de l’enquête à Buenos Aires, c’est la diaspora juive interlope qui a été infiltrée par Paul Kinsie et que, grâce aux introductions reçues, il a pu explorer ce filon dans quantité d’autres villes d’Amérique latine, d’Europe et du Proche-Orient…

8 Ce ne sont cependant là que des détails qui n’infirment pas l’interprétation proposée par Knepper. Plus conséquente est la grande sous-estimation de ce qui fut l’enjeu premier et perdurant de l’invention du mythe de la « traite des blanches » par des organisations philanthropiques après le scandale des mineures anglaises trouvées dans des bordels bruxellois en 1880 : la lutte initiée en Grande-Bretagne par Joséphine Butler et ses alliés contre la réglementation de la prostitution. C’est là, croyons-nous, le fil rouge qui permet de rendre intelligible l’essentiel de cette sinueuse histoire, de ses détours et de ses débordements : la traite des femmes comme prétexte pour revendiquer l’abolition du « vice légalisé », soit cette réglementation de la prostitution dénoncée depuis les années 1880 comme la cause principale de la traite, lien de causalité que les experts sont censés avoir démontré « scientifiquement ». Knepper a bien vu que la traite donnait prétexte aux policiers pour s’organiser à l’échelle internationale, aux États pour contrôler davantage les déplacements de leurs citoyens, en particulier les citoyennes, aux nationaux-socialistes allemands pour justifier leur antisémitisme mais il n’a pas vu, pensons-nous, que ce furent autant de recyclages intéressés d’un mythe qui avait été créé pour promouvoir la cause abolitionniste. C’est en partie ce qui explique les surprenantes alliances objectives (par exemple entre des féministes progressistes et des antisémites convaincus ou des adversaires déclarés de l’émancipation féminine) que l’on trouve à différents moments de cette histoire. À ses débuts, la cause abolitionniste avait de très bons arguments à faire valoir tant la réglementation de la prostitution était un régime détestable, foulant les droits élémentaires des prostituées. Mais les abolitionnistes crurent stratégiquement utile d’exagérer démesurément quelques faits divers jusqu’à en faire le « fléau » de la traite. Ensuite le prétendu fléau s’est prêté à des réappropriations pour des causes plus douteuses, voire carrément criminelles dans le cas des nationaux-socialistes. On n’invente pas impunément. Knepper l’a bien compris comme, il y fait allusion, certains acteurs eux-mêmes avant lui : « Montefiore [1858-1938, il avait encore présidé la conférence des associations juives contre la traite à Londres en juin 1927] had no trouble finding political support for recognition of ‘Jewish trafficking’ as a problem and he appears to have realized in 1933 that his efforts were of more value to the National Socialists than Jewish women » (2011, p. 169). L’enfer est pavé de bonnes intentions et, pour ce que nous en connaissons, cette histoire est encore plus diabolique dans ses

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effets que Knepper ne le suggère. Il faudrait voir maintenant s’il en va de même sur les autres dossiers qu’il a si brillamment réunis.

NOTES

1. Ainsi par exemple chez Barbara Metzger, « Toward an International Human Rights Regime during the Inter-War Years : The League of Nations’ Combat of Traffic in Women and Children », in K. Grant, Ph. Levine, F. Trentmann, Beyond sovereignty : Britain, empire, and transnationalism, c. 1880-1950, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

AUTEURS

JEAN-MICHEL CHAUMONT Université catholique de Louvain

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Martin Thomas, Violence and Colonial Order : Police, Workers and Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918-1940 Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012, 527 pp., 12 cartes, 8 graphiques, ISBN 9 780521 768412

Romain Tiquet

RÉFÉRENCE

Martin Thomas, Violence and Colonial Order : Police, Workers and Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918-1940, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012, 527 pp., 12 cartes, 8 graphiques, ISBN 9 780521 768412.

1 Avec ce titre des plus ambitieux, Violence and Colonial Order, le nouvel opus de Martin Thomas arrive à point nommé. En s’attaquant au maintien de l’ordre colonial (colonial policing), l’auteur aborde une problématique qui implique le projet colonial dans son entier. Comme en ont récemment discuté Blanchard et Glasman, « maintenir l’ordre n’est pas, en colonie, une question technique, c’est la condition sine qua non de l’existence d’une société coloniale dont l’hégémonie ne fut jamais telle qu’elle put se passer de l’usage d’une force non légitime pour la majorité de la population » (2012, p. 13)1.

2 Dès les premières lignes de cette nouvelle publication, Thomas présente ce qui va être le fil conducteur de cet ouvrage : la connexion déterminante qu’il y a entre l’économie politique et le maintien de l’ordre en situation coloniale. Certains pourraient penser que l’auteur explore une thématique évidente, décrivant comment les forces de sécurité ont été les premiers agents du maintien des intérêts politiques et économiques de l’administration et des entreprises coloniales. Loin s’en faut, l’analyse de Martin

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Thomas va plus loin, disséquant les structures et modes de contrôle de la violence en colonies, et interrogeant ainsi de manière plus large l’efficacité du projet colonial dans son ensemble.

3 Comme l’ont prouvé ses ouvrages précédents, Martin Thomas se distingue par la richesse de son analyse comparative. Cette nouvelle publication confronte en effet, pour la première fois, une pluralité d’acteurs et de méthodes du maintien de l’ordre dans les empires français, britannique et belge. Fondant sa démonstration sur la reconstruction historique de divers conflits du travail dans les empires (étayée par de nombreuses sources et une impressionnante bibliographie), l’auteur révèle les caractéristiques globales de la répression coloniale et de sa représentation.

4 Toute la puissance analytique de l’ouvrage de Thomas réside dans le cadre d’étude adopté. L’auteur utilise en effet l’économie politique comme grille de lecture, interrogeant la relation entre les politiques impériales de répression et les structures économiques des colonies. S’appuyant chronologiquement sur l’entre-deux-guerres, Thomas démontre que pendant cette période, les conflits du travail sont devenus une priorité majeure pour les administrations, et par-là même, pour le maintien de l’ordre colonial. Il analyse en particulier les changements induits par la crise de 1929. Décrite comme une période charnière, la Grande Dépression a ainsi entraîné, dans les empires, une période de croissance rapide à une décennie de stagnation économique et de luttes sociales. Thomas voit dans cette période et les changements qu’elle entraîna, « le repère le plus prégnant du maintien de l’ordre colonial » (p. 325).

5 Cet ouvrage est divisé en deux parties. Le premier axe du livre (chapitres un à trois) se concentre essentiellement sur les approches théoriques du colonial policing. Insistant particulièrement sur les acteurs et les structures (missions, priorités, rôles) du maintien de l’ordre, Thomas démontre que c’est essentiellement dans le cadre de la répression des conflits du travail que les missions des forces de police se concentrent. Par ailleurs, son analyse rappelle au lecteur le caractère exceptionnel des différentes forces de sécurité coloniales : hybrides et distinctes, ces institutions furent modelées par différentes pratiques, de multiples influences culturelles, et d’une pluralité de besoins et de ressources.

6 Ce solide état des lieux de l’historiographie et des approches concernant l’ordre colonial laisse place dans la seconde partie de l’ouvrage à une variété d’études de cas. Les chapitres quatre et cinq se focalisent sur les territoires français du Maghreb (Maroc, Algérie, Tunisie). Dressant le portrait de la gendarmerie, ces deux chapitres démontrent comment la violence coloniale est utilisée pour garantir (plus ou moins avec succès) un ordre social et politique supposé menacé. Les chapitres six et sept doivent être lus de manière concomitante afin d’appréhender au mieux les différences de méthodes entre empires français et britannique. Thomas prend ainsi le cas du Viêt Nam (français) et du Malaya (britannique), pointant les similarités de leurs économies respectives (production de caoutchouc, importance d’industries exportatrices) tout en distinguant dans le détail leurs nettes disparités dans les méthodes et les approches du maintien de l’ordre. Les chapitres huit et neuf nous emmènent, quant à eux, dans les Caraïbes britanniques. Ces deux études de cas sont d’autant plus intéressantes qu’elles se concentrent sur deux territoires peu connus : la Jamaïque et Trinidad. Bien que leurs économies soient fortement distinctes – industrie sucrière pour la Jamaïque et pétrole pour Trinidad – , l’analyse de Thomas dévoile comment la répression coloniale fut de plus en plus intense à mesure que les conditions de travail se dégradèrent, entraînant

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des luttes sociales toujours plus actives. Les deux chapitres suivants s’intéressent aux territoires britanniques de l’Afrique subsaharienne. Que ce soit dans le cadre de l’industrie du diamant en Sierra Leone (chapitre 10) ou des mines au Nigeria (chapitre 11), ces deux études de cas analysent les missions et les objectifs des forces de sécurité, entièrement impliquées dans le maintien des intérêts économiques britanniques. Le dernier chapitre se concentre quant à lui sur le Congo belge et la sauvegarde des intérêts miniers dans la province du Katanga. Là encore, l’auteur démontre en quoi l’économie politique de la colonie fut déterminante dans les méthodes de maintien d’ordre colonial.

7 Tout au long de sa démonstration, Thomas ne cesse de révéler un paradoxe central dans la gestion de la violence coloniale : alors que sur le court terme, la pression policière (impôt, expropriation de terres, recrutement forcé) permit de maintenir un ordre colonial que les empires croyaient menacé, sur le long terme, cette violence s’avéra contre-productive car elle ne cessa d’augmenter la vulnérabilité de l’entreprise coloniale qui dut faire face, jour après jour à une résistance des populations toujours plus vive.

8 Sur ce dernier point, on peut néanmoins regretter que l’auteur ne se soit pas plus focalisé sur les types de réactions des travailleurs. En effet, en discutant les formes de la répression coloniale, Thomas s’intéresse presque uniquement aux mouvements « visibles » qui peuvent être réprimés (grèves, manifestations, etc…). Il ignore ainsi des formes plus « passives » de résistance, difficilement contrôlable et réprimable, qui ont défié jour après jour les contraintes imposées par les administrations coloniales. Il aurait ainsi pu être intéressant de faire une comparaison multi-empire entre deux territoires d’Afrique subsaharienne. Pendant toute la période coloniale, le territoire de la Côte d’Ivoire (français) a été le théâtre de fuites massives vers la Gold Coast britannique, réaction principale des populations aux contraintes coloniales. L’endiguement et le contrôle de ces migrations par l’administration française devint dès lors une priorité centrale qu’il aurait été pertinent d’analyser sous l’angle du colonial policing.

9 Ces remarques, plus que des critiques, ne sont là que pour suggérer de nouvelles pistes de recherches sur un thème que l’auteur a remarquablement analysé. Ainsi, Martin Thomas nous livre une analyse pertinente sur la diversité des cultures policières et ses représentations dans les empires. Plus largement, en pointant les limites d’un maintien de l’ordre en colonies « improvisé et inconstant » (9), Thomas souligne toute la fragilité de l’État colonial (s’il en est) qui, loin d’être omnipotent, fut avant tout le fruit de décisions empiriques et d’adaptations locales.

NOTES

1. Blanchard E., Glasman J., Le maintien de l’ordre dans l’Empire français : une historiographie émergente, in Courtin N., Bat J.-P. (dir.), Maintenir l’ordre colonial. Afrique, Madagascar, XIXe-XXe siècles, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2012, pp. 11-41.

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AUTEURS

ROMAIN TIQUET Université Humboldt de Berlin

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Pieter Spierenburg, Violence and Punishment. Civilizing the Body through Time Cambridge, Polity Press, 2013, 223 p., ISBN 9 780745 653495

John Carter Wood

RÉFÉRENCE

Pieter Spierenburg, Violence and Punishment. Civilizing the Body through Time, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2013, 223 p., ISBN 9 780745 653495.

1 In Violence and Punishment, Pieter Spierenburg presents revised versions of previously published essays and articles, some appearing here in English for the first time. Given Spierenburg’s status as a leading historian of interpersonal violence in Europe, these essays will doubtless (and deservedly) receive significant attention. It will come as no surprise to those familiar with Spierenburg’s oeuvre that they are unified by an approach based on a critical engagement with Norbert Elias’s historical-sociological model of the “civilising process”. Apart from a conceptually oriented introduction and an epilogue with the author’s personal reflections on becoming a crime historian, the book is organised into three sections : “Violence”, “Punishment and Social Control” and “Civilizing the Body in Human History”.

2 The first section, “Violence”, opens with a chapter on long-term homicide trends in Amsterdam from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. Spierenburg argues that the homicide rate in Amsterdam declined from approximately 47 per 100,000 inhabitants in the mid fifteenth century to one that fluctuated between 1 and 1.5 per 100,000 at the beginning of the nineteenth century (p. 37). As in other European countries the rate rose significantly after the Second World War, but Spierenburg emphasises that many homicides in that city now take place within “unpacified islands” related to the criminal underworld and are disproportionately committed by those who “are marginal from an ethnic or cultural point of view” : the effective marginalisation of

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homicide, he argues, still confirms the civilising process (p. 37). The second chapter takes a more qualitative perspective, focusing on shifts in legal definitions and popular attitudes. Questioning the Dutch self-image of a distinctively peaceful nation, Spierenburg’s analysis differentiates among Jewish-Christian conflicts (“whose frequency and intensity exceeded the level observed in most other parts of Europe”), “popular duels” (where the Dutch were in the “median” range among European nations) and “formal duels” (in which Dutch elites comparatively rarely participated) (p. 55). The third chapter compares European violence to that in East Asia and the United States, the latter ultimately standing out as a “thoroughly modern country” with “relatively high homicide rates” (p. 72), a pattern that Spierenburg attributes to a historically incomplete state “monopoly of violence” (p. 64).

3 The section on “Punishment and Social Control” opens with a theoretical discussion comparing the work of Michel Foucault and Norbert Elias. Revising his earlier and decidedly negative evaluation of Foucault, Spierenburg now finds some points of methodological overlap between the French thinker and Elias (notably their historical approaches and common emphases on the omnipresence of power). Spierenburg concludes, however, that Elias came closer to achieving the right balance between recognising the historical agency of “people of flesh and blood” and acknowledging that “people generate processes that are beyond their control as individuals” (p. 91). Building on themes broached earlier, Spierenburg’s fifth chapter returns to the historical shift that raised the threshold for acceptable violence between the early modern and contemporary periods. In earlier periods, “informal social control” – whether violent self-defence or the community punishment of thieves – was broadly accepted ; however, margins of tolerated violent “self-help” have declined markedly, particularly since the Second World War. Discounting explanations based either on “the de-hierarchization of society or industrialization”, the author emphasises instead “the process of individualization which led to a heightened sense of privacy also in working-class neighborhoods” (p. 103). The last chapter in the section turns more exclusively to “formal” social controls as imposed by criminal justice systems through a comparative examination of European and American differences. While acknowledging a key trans-Atlantic difference (the continuing use of capital punishment in the United States), Spierenburg analyses how both Europe and America have witnessed a shift toward greater punitiveness in recent decades.

4 The final section, “Civilizing the Body” turns away from the previous sections’ focus on violence, attending instead to social behaviours such as table manners, public celebrations and rituals related to death. Conduct books, of course, were central to Elias’s original formulations of his theory of the “civilising process” ; here, Spierenburg applies a similar method to Dutch evidence, discovering a process of “aristocratization” (p. 149) among the (largely bourgeois) Dutch elite between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. This process was driven by pressures both “from below” (elites’ desire to differentiate themselves from the middle classes) and “from above” (the struggle for commercially oriented Dutch elites to be taken seriously by other nations’ aristocratic elites) (p. 145). The chapter on festivals features a largely conceptual discussion of key ideas in the historiography and sociology of public celebrations – such as “liminality”, “rituals of status reversal” and “collective solidarity”. Spierenburg also finds the civilising process operating here : “The trinity of sex, food and violence, which was so characteristic of festivals in preindustrial villages and neighbourhoods, gave way to orderly merriment, often carefully programmed” (p. 161). The final main

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chapter examines Johan Goudsblom’s theses regarding the interrelationship of death, magic and the origins of religion.

5 There is a great deal to welcome about this book, not least since Spierenburg is well placed to embed his arguments in a useful and readable synthesis of criminal justice history across national and linguistic boundaries. Despite his recurrent focus on Dutch evidence, what emerges is of European (and even global) relevance. It is much to the author’s credit (and not at all a matter of course in the wake of the cultural turn) that he is willing to make clear and often convincing claims about broad historical trends in actual human behaviour between the early modern and contemporary periods, whether the long-term decline in serious interpersonal violence, growing sensitivities toward physical suffering, shifts from informal community control to formalised state regulation or the impact of “state formation” on everyday behaviour in Europe, Asia and North America (from the intricacies of table manners to the treatment of prisoners). Even if occasionally marred by jarring shifts in register and a few brusque opinions about the work of fellow scholars, the book makes many intriguing and insightful observations, arguing, for example, that increasing punitiveness towards prisoners may be driven not by an overall decline in sympathies but rather their relocation from perpetrators to victims (p. 122) or the situation that “Americans are inclined to a lesser recognition of the existence of a monopoly of force” and therefore “have a lesser inclination to make demands for restraint on it” (p. 124).

6 However strong the book’s methodology when it comes to analysing statistics or cultural “meaning”, I could not help noting what might be described as a psychological void at its centre, one that it shares with much contemporary historical work on violence and crime. This is not to say that psychology is absent : indeed, references to aggression or self-control and desires for dominance, lust and respect abound. However, the human psychology that generates them remains at best implicit : there is little effort to understand how these diverse motivations cohere (and compete) in what might be called a universal human nature (which the book’s globally comparative aspirations would seem to demand) or to make even glancing reference to cognitive or evolutionary psychology or to the neurosciences.1 There are findings and arguments in those fields relevant to many topics addressed here : status hierarchies, identity formation, kinship, group allegiances and sexuality. For example, what Spierenburg characterises as the “riddle” of the “tenacious link” between homicidal violence and male honour would become less mysterious (though no less worthy of analysis) in the light of three decades of work on this topic by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, scholars who additionally provide compelling arguments for the need to separate out blood relatives from other forms of “intimate” relationships when examining violence, a distinction that Spierenburg ardently resists (13).2

7 Although the book’s subtitle is “civilizing the body through time”, Spierenburg’s approach means he’s dealing ultimately less with bodies than with discourses about them. Although the largely philosophical or medical discourses on the body considered here are certainly justifiable as a research focus, it is not always made clear how they are connected to the causes of actual violence (such as knife fights) or to popular attitudes toward violence, the organisation of punishment regimes, the omnipresence of “power” or the content of etiquette books. In addition to its many powerful insights into criminal justice history, Violence and Punishment, therefore, perhaps despite itself,

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makes an eloquent argument for historians to improve our knowledge of actual human bodies, in particular the brains (and therefore minds) they possess.3

NOTES

1. That connecting the civilising process to such psychological perspectives might be useful is suggested by Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature : Why Violence Has Declined, London, Penguin, 2011. 2. Martin Daly, Margo Wilson, Homicide, Hawthorne, New York, Aldine De Gruyter, 1988) : on the topics noted, see p. 17-35 and 123-86. 3. An argument I have made at greater length in “A Change of Perspective : Integrating Evolutionary Psychology into the Historiography of Violence”, British Journal of Criminology, 2011, 51, p. 479-98.

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Nicola Goc, Women, Infanticide & the Press, 1822-1922. News Narratives in England and Australia Aldershot, Ashgate, 2013, 212 pp., ISBN 9 781409 406051

Martin J.Wiener

REFERENCES

Nicola Goc, Women, Infanticide & the Press, 1822-1922. News Narratives in England and Australia, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2013, 212 pp., ISBN 9 781409 406051.

1 Nicola Goc, a young Australian historian, has examined “news narratives” of infanticide trials in England and America in the century between the institution of a new legal severity towards unwed mothers and the legal “modernization” of infanticide law. There has been a good deal of attention in recent years to the “woman’s crime” of infanticide,1 but Goc’s subject is not the crime but the “news narratives” created by infanticide trials. She takes advantage of the advance of digitization to closely examine such narratives for what they can tell us about how Victorian society “made sense” of these shocking acts.

2 Goc focuses on discourse rather than behavior, or more properly, discourse as a fundamental part of behavior. She begins in 1822 “to enable an analysis of infanticide news coverage in the decade before the introduction of the 1834 New Poor Law, » which thrust the legal responsibility for supporting an illegitimate child solely upon the mother – a controversial move which, it was soon charged, probably correctly, led to a sustained increase in infanticide. She closes in 1922, with the nationally-followed trial that helped bring about an Infanticide Act that diminished the criminal penalty and began to recognize the psychiatric dimensions of the killing of new-borns.

3 The book has a somewhat awkward structure of a series of case studies, chiefly on England in the 1820s and 30s, the 1860s and 1922, but also on Tasmania in the 1830s and

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1900s. However, this binational approach has the advantage of exhibiting reactions to the crime in two very different settings and exploring their similarities and differences.

4 Part One shows first how the woman (most often a domestic servant) who killed (or was thought to have killed) her newborn was stereotyped by a patriarchal society, next how her the likelihood of such infanticide was increased by the 1834 PL, which removed the financial obligation of the father of an illegitimate child, and then how a newspaper crusade led by The Times helped change public attitudes towards unwed mothers, eventually making possible, in 1871 and 1872, legislation that supervised nurses taking care of newborns and restored the father’s obligations, beginning a decline in infanticide’s incidence. Goc argues persuasively that while newspaper coverage for the most part stigmatized unwed mothers as duplicitous and dangerous to young men and to social order, it also provided an avenue for their voices, and for a discourse more sympathetic to them, to reach the general public.

5 Part Two moves to the convict colony of Van Dieman’s Land (now Tasmania), and in two chapters explores local press treatment of several notable cases of the 1830s and the early twentieth century, highlighting in the latter the notion of “bush madness” that had by then developed to make sense of infanticide (although the author doesn’t highlight it, related ideas of insanity had become almost standard by that time in explanations of infanticide in the UK). The final chapter of Part Two and of the book takes us back to England, now post-Great War, and the case that led to the 1922 law that radically revised the law on infanticide, seen, as always, through press coverage.

6 This book is valuable in several ways. First, it extends forward the scholarship (like Mark Jackson’s) that has hitherto chiefly focused on the eighteenth century. In doing this, it provides the most sophisticated treatment yet of how the rapidly-expanding and increasingly-influential press, national and local, covered infanticide trials and in doing both reflected and shaped Victorian understandings of the offense. Goc’s impressively “close reading” of newspaper texts – extending even to the choice of verbs and arrangements of sentences – offers insights which are sometimes speculative but always intriguing and usually quite plausible. This reader wearied of the continual referencing of Michel Foucault, and of the “oppression-resistance” political frame in which Goc places her work, yet came to value the guided tour provided through the shaping and interplay of discourses. This tour is saved from over-abstraction by close connection to specific texts. Even scholars not interested in infanticide per se will appreciate the author’s demonstration of the riches lying in freshly available newspaper archives.

7 This tour should convince many readers of how central discourse – in this case about the nature of women and their sexuality – is to the subject of crime and criminal justice. A crucial stop on this tour is the punitive 1834 Poor Law Act, with its bastardy clause placing financial responsibility for illegitimate children solely upon the mother. As others before her have argued, one cannot study the subject of infanticide after 1834 without coming to terms with the influence of this Act. And as she shows, the Act itself was the product of discourses, about the role of government and about incentives, but even more about women and their sexuality. The book succeeds in demonstrating that to explore the incidence of a crime and its social and legal consequences one must understand the web of assumptions and values – sometimes in conflict with one another, as here – within which actions take place.

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8 Although her subject is discourse rather than behavior, Goc sometimes deviates to show how much past newspapers can reveal about the experiences of women and of the poor generally. Indeed, this reader often wished that she would devote more space to exploring these experiences, and the societies, English and Australian, in which they took place. There is no effort here to reach any quantitative conclusions about incidence or even legal disposition of infanticide, other than to accept the apparent upsurge of the crime after the 1834 Act, and its diminution after 1872.

9 It would have been useful to compare Victorian infanticide trials with eighteenth- century ones, which, despite a nominally more severe legal regime established by the 1624 Act that set death as the penalty and placed the burden of proof that a child had not been killed on the mother, almost always ended in acquittal, and thus proved less harsh than the written law suggests. Looking before the rather arbitrary starting date of 1822 might have permitted some evaluation of just when, and why, discourses harmful to the interests of unwed mothers began to form and strengthen. This task remains for others to take up. One also wishes Goc had looked at the press treatment of infanticide by men, of which there were a not inconsiderable number. Still, she has accomplished a good deal in a brief compass, methodologically in showing how much close reading of newspapers can suggest or reveal, and substantially in documenting how exceptionally harsh the early Victorian generation was in its treatment of infanticidal mothers and how this harshness was gradually brought to an end, first by sympathetic juries and ultimately by legislation, while providing a deeper understanding of this harshness and its decline.

NOTES

1. The leading work is Lionel Rose, The Massacre of the Innocents : Infanticide in Britain 1800-1939 (London, 1986), but since its appearance there has been a rush of additional work, usually, unlike Rose, from a specifically feminist standpoint. See, among others, Ann Higginbotham, “Sin Of The Age” : Infanticide and Illegitimacy in Victorian London, Victorian Studies, 1989, 32, 3, 319-37 ; Mark Jackson, New-Born Child Murder : Women, Illegitimacy and the Courts in Eighteenth-Century England, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1996 ; Meg Arnot, Understanding Women Committing Newborn Child Murder in England, in D’Cruze S., Everyday Violence in Britain, 1850– 1950 : Gender & Class, Harlow and New York, Longman, 2000, pp. 55-69 ; Hilary Marland, ‘Getting Away With Murder ? Puerperal Insanity, Infanticide and the Defence Plea’, in Jackson M., Infanticide : Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550-2000, Aldershot, Ashgate Publishing, 2002), 168-92 Josephine McDonagh, Child Murder and British Culture, 1720–1900, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 35-44 ; 178-183 ; Aeron Hunt, Calculations and Concealments : Infanticide in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain, Victorian Literature and Culture, 2006, 34, pp. 71-94.

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AUTHORS

MARTIN J.WIENER Rice University

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Books received Livres reçus

Assmann (Jan), Religio Duplex. How the Enlightenment Reinvented Egyptian Religion, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2014, 246 pp., ISBN 9 780745 668437. Berlière (Jean-Marc), Campion (Jonas), Lacchè (Luigi), Rousseaux (Xavier) (dir.), Justices militaires et guerres mondiales (Europe 1914-1950)/Military Justices and World Wars (Europe 1914-1950), Louvain, Presses Universitaires de Louvain, 423 pp., ISBN 9 782875 582355. Chauvaud (Frédéric), Houte (Arnaud-Dominique) (dir.), Au voleur ! Images et représentations du vol dans la France contemporaine, Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 2014, 318 pp., ISBN 9 782859 447724. Davies (Jonathan), Aspects of Violence in Renaissance Europe, Burlington, Ashgate, 2013, 266 pp., ISBN 9 781409 433415. Denys (Catherine), La police de Bruxelles entre réformes et révolutions (1748-1814). Police urbaine et modernité, Turnhout, Brepols Publishers 2013, 370 pp., ISBN 9 782503 547978. Engammare (Max), Vanautgaerden (Alexandre) (textes réunis par), avec la collaboration de Bierlaire (Franz), L’intime du droit à la Renaissance. Actes du cinquantenaire de la FISIER, Genève, Droz, 2014, 544 pp., ISBN 9 782600 017299. Garnot (Benoît), Histoire des juges en France de l’Ancien Régime à nos jours, Paris, Nouveau monde éditions, 2014, 396 pp., ISBN 9 782365 838610. Garnot (Benoît), Une histoire du crime passionnel. Mythe et archives, Paris, Belin, 2014, 263 pp., ISBN 9 782701 182872. Giuliani (Fabienne), Les liaisons interdites. Histoire de l’inceste au XIXe siècle , Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 2014, 472 pp., ISBN 9 782859 447762. Lemesle (Bruno), La dilapidation, de l’Antiquité au XIXe siècle, Dijon, Éditions universitaires de Bourgogne, 2014, 188 pp., ISBN 9 782364 410848. Luc (Jean-Noël), Médard (Frédéric) (dir.), Histoire et dictionnaire de la gendarmerie. De la Maréchaussée à nos jours, Paris, éditions Jacob-Duvernet/Ministère de la Défense, 2013, 538 pp., ISBN 9 782847 244960.

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Mc Mahon (Richard), Homicide in Pre-Famine and Famine Ireland, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2013, 221 pp., ISBN 9 781846 319471. Nagel (Mechthild E.), Nocella II (Anthony J.), The End of Prisons. Reflections from the Decarceration Movement, Amsterdam-New York, Fits Gibbon, 2013, 229 pp., ISBN 9 789042 036567. Nassiet (Michel), Guerre civile et pardon royal en Anjou (1580-1600). Lettres de pardon entérinées par le présidial d’Angers, Paris, Société de l’histoire de France, 2013, 244 pp., ISBN 9 782354 071394. Pagano (Emanuele), « Questa turba infame a comun danno unita ». Delinquenti, marginali, magistrati nel Mantovano asburgico (1750-1800), Milano, FrancoAngeli, 2014, 216 pp., ISBN 9 788820 484873. Williams (Chris A.), Police Control Systems in Britain (1775-1975). From Parish Constable to National Computer, Manchester and New York, Manchester University Press, 2014, 242 pp., ISBN 9 780719 084294.

Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies, Vol. 18, n°2 | 2014