The civilizing process entailed promoting desirable behavior and anathematizing undesirable conduct. Vengeful yet measured violence was part of peasant sociability and a familiar means—along with infra-judicial methods of peaceful dispute resolution—of addressing conflict in a society of status. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, Church and Crown in France launched a joint campaign to properly Christianize and civilize society. Fifty years ago, Michel Foucault noted that “the constitution of an absolute monarchy and the intense Catholic renaissance during the Counter-Reformation produced in France a very particular character of simultaneous competition and complicity between the government and the Church.” Working in tandem, they attempted to break the populace's age-old addiction to violence by initiating a campaign designed to teach people habits of self-discipline and to accustom them to resolving disputes through legal channels.

An integral part of the elite campaign to control violence and sponsor legalization was, of course, the punishment of a wider assortment of sinful acts that were newly classified as illegal. As described by Zoë A. Schneider, lower-level royal courts (bailiwicks and sénéchaussées) were instrumental in this development: “As sins were gradually redefined as crimes, the men on the benches of the ordinary courts were left to regulate the morals and the conformity of the king's subjects (albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm and rigor). By the seventeenth century, they did so with far greater reach and independence than they had ever done before, poaching the jurisdictions of the officialités (church courts) and minor civil courts alike.” This chapter evaluates the success of this dual campaign to suppress behavior that was once considered sinful and shameful but subsequently criminalized. According to the new civility propounded by civil and religious hierarchies, sex was not to be discussed openly in polite society and was to be practiced discreetly within the confines of marriage—following the rules laid down by the Church. In practice, however, elite libertines in Paris consciously rebelled against the new moral order; in the Sarladais, peasants also managed to ignore many of the sexual directives of their curés. They did, nonetheless, actually welcome the reformed marital ethic that reinforced the strictures of a culture of honor.

In traditional societies, the demands of the honor code weigh especially heavily on women, whose primary (but not only) honor-related duty is the maintenance of sexual modesty. In the eighteenth-century Sarladais, sexual honor was an all-or-nothing virtue; once lost, it could never be recovered. Therefore, if a woman failed to uphold the most deeply held values of her family and community, she could expect to suffer the consequences.

Although the judicial records contain no mention of “honor killings” per se in the eighteenth-century Sarladais, a young woman who violated the code by conceiving out of wedlock had to be prepared to experience less extreme but very real sanctions. Honor remained a collective obsession. Young women who served as domestic or agricultural servants were particularly vulnerable and risked losing what honor they could claim when they were cajoled, pressured, intimidated by threats, or actually coerced into extramarital sexual relations. Others may have entered voluntarily into consensual sexual relations after receiving assurances of marriage, whether sincerely given or falsely proffered. Still others may have made the calculated gamble that an alleged or actual pregnancy would convince a reluctant lover to act honorably. At times, the stumbling block that ruled out the possibility of marriage was the disparity of social status between the man and woman. If he was of higher social status (as was often the case) or already engaged or even wed, marriage was out of the question. In that case, a woman's only real options were abortion, abandonment, or infanticide.

Bourgeois and noble families were especially wary of social-climbing young peasant women who might ensnare their sons; therefore, sons were forewarned about possible entrapment. In cases where a son did not heed parental warnings and was willing or even eager to marry beneath himself, the family might intervene because it intended its son (especially if he were heir to the family fortune) to make a better match than one with a lowstatus girl of little fortune. One way of settling the affair and avoiding the publicity of legal proceedings was for his parents to convince some other young man, someone more “suitable,” to marry the expectant mother and accept the child as his own—often in exchange for appropriate compensation.

In honor cultures, violence—even lethal violence—can be a normative part of human relations. The imperatives of honor dominate people's behavior, and all words and gestures are variables that factor into the endless calculation and recalculation of the total of a person's honor. As a culture of honor slowly erodes, however, people become less inclined to utilize direct action themselves or permit others to do so. In early modern Europe, Muchembled contends, the level of violence gradually decreased with each generation:

The effect first became apparent on the streets of the larger urban centers of France and England, where it was most evident among the upper and middle classes.

Such was undoubtedly the case even in prerevolutionary Sarladais, where official justice was beginning to replace private justice not only because it was successfully imposed from the top down but also because demand grew from below. An expanding segment of the population (the “legal community”) came to view the personally enforced, quasi-judicial methods of private justice as unsatisfactory. Analysis of the socioeconomic status of plaintiffs before the Sénéchaussée of Sarlat during the last two decades of the eighteenth century suggests that this small segment of the population was becoming appreciative of the judicial services provided by the court, which, after all, afforded a more formal, anonymous, and predictable alternative. The authorities had by then managed to curtail revenge killings and had turned their attention to property crimes, but the great majority of the peasantry was still immersed in what was basically a culture of honor. In other words, they continued to opt for unofficial justice with its private means of recalibrating honor via nonlethal measured violence and its emphasis on infra-judicial dispute settlement to handle personal affairs.

Observers from modern Western societies in which law and order prevail and the state monopolizes the use of legitimate coercion often misunderstand the role of violence in traditional societies, both current and past. They still tend to see them as incessantly torn by feuds, as “backward” places where lawlessness—indeed, anarchy—prevails, where people fend for themselves in a war of all against all. Limiting one's focus solely to violence and honor in past European societies without viewing them in a cross-cultural context can exacerbate this misunderstanding. Examining the intersection of violence and honor from the wider perspective of cultural anthropology, however, enables historians to gain insight into related behaviors in comparable societies. In the past four decades, Western scholars (including two generations of early modern French historians) have come to appreciate not only that the inhabitants of past (and current) kinordered societies with codes of honor follow culturally prescribed customary rules that govern social relations, but also that such societies maintain relative harmony precisely through reliance on proportionate violence and the threat (or actuality) of the blood feud. Most notably, Mark S. Weiner examines how kin-ordered societies—those that Henry Sumner Maine termed societies of “status” because the relative status of its members depends on their position within the extended family or clan—can be highly effective in disciplining their members and thereby achieve a “rough peace among kin groups.”

The clan's collective interest in guarding its honor exerts powerful pressure on members to conform to their designated roles, restrain their personal behavior, and minimize or settle their disputes informally. But the anti-individualist ethos of kin-ordered societies tends to limit personal freedom, particularly that of women, who theoretically are confined to the traditional role of childbearers to preserve the clan.

Scholars who have read the proscriptions of early modern moralists and playwrights have been inclined to view women—especially those of Mediterranean Europe—as having led lives of seclusion, sexual fidelity, and subjection. They have even repeated the trope used by contemporary moralists that a woman's body was analogous to the walls of a house that had to remain intact.

Historians of early modern France have long recognized that the criminal court archives of the royal parlements and sénéchaussées/bailliages are excellent sources for analyzing the ritualized gestures and insults associated with honor-related violence. “Offensive words were hardly idle or considered harmless, since when hurled in public with defamatory intent they attacked a person's honor,” writes Farr of the seventeenth-century nobility in Dijon. Similarly for non-nobles, the records of lower-level royal courts illuminate instances of delinquency as well as the social situations and contexts in which commoners engaged in competitive interaction, that is, fighting and insulting, mostly over questions of honneur and honnêteté. This chapter examines cases drawn from the Sénéchaussée of Sarlat that illustrate how measured, ritualized, and gender-specific violence (both verbal and physical) was used to adjust the balance of honor. At the same time, the fact that a broader range of plaintiffs was increasingly incorporating recourse to royal justice into their adversarial tactics suggests that they were more inclined to distance themselves from the collectivity and advance their individual interests via the anonymous justice provided by the state.

In French royal courts, the criminal charge in question was most often that of excès or injures. In 1758, Claude-Joseph de Ferrière defines the term excès as a kind of “voie de fait, outrage or wound, mistreatment or insult, done to someone using armed force or some other advantage.” He adds that even if this crime does not result in death, the victim can demand vengeance and that it is to be punished more or less rigorously, depending on the circumstances and the quality of the persons involved. If the excès is committed on a grand chemin or other public place belonging to the king, it is considered a royal case and can be judged only by a royal court; if it is committed on a byroad, however, it is not a royal case and can be handled by a seigneurial court of high justice. The lawyer Dareau, in his 1775 treatise, defines injure in the following terms: “We will call injure that which is said, written, or done with the motive of offending someone's honor, his person, or his goods.”

Following almost a half-century of turmoil after the Revolution had begun, the bishop of the Diocese of Périgueux asked the curés in 1838 to report on the moeurs of their parishioners. In response, curés remarked that the inhabitants of the former province were “peu civilisés” and not very interested in religion; some few conceded that the inhabitants could be remarkably peaceful, honnêtes, welcoming, and hospitable. Overall, however, the experience of most Périgourdin curés inclined them to be less generous; they emphasized that their parishioners’ pugnacious conduct left much to be desired: “In general, the people are very proud and very demanding. Barely civilized in their mores, [they are] often vindictive, and almost always jealous of their relatives and neighbors. Moreover, they are excessively avaricious and never help anyone without expectation of personal gain.” Several curés commented on the peasants’ litigiousness, but the curé of Berbiguières reported that many of his parishioners preferred mediation by the curé or mayor. The curé of Notre-Dame-de-Sanhilac (commune of St.-Pierre-de-Chignac) did not perceive these alternatives as mutually exclusive and concluded, “The moeurs of the inhabitants of Notre Dame are crude, very crude. Envy, jealousy, and hatred dominate them; avarice is their master. Their habits and customs are obviously irreligious. One recognizes among them only a very mechanical observation of religion.” Nonetheless, he acknowledged that they were basically “docile.”

In Cubjac (Périgueux), the parish priest characterized his parishioners as “proud, irascible and extremely jealous.” These traits “strongly incline them towards vengeance, but their fear of pecuniary fines causes them to search judicial means of gaining satisfaction for their resentments. They are as litigious as Normans, and there are few communes that keep the tribunal at Périgueux as busy as does Cubjac.” Likewise, the curé from Miallet (Nontron) considered his parishioners to be proud, short tempered, truculent, and extremely solicitous of their honor.

The fact that violence in the West has been declining since 1500 has long been recognized by scholars; they have debated the reasons for the shift since the late nineteenth century, when pioneering sociologists like Emile Durkheim and Max Weber posited fundamentally different causes for this shift. Weber provided the dominant paradigm of the middle of the twentieth century, in large measure because the “civilizing process” theory of Norbert Elias had such a broad impact, one easily seen even today in textbook treatments of early modern Europe. Elias wrote his doctoral dissertation under the direction of Alfred Weber, Max's brother. Durkheim's theories have returned to prominence, as the Elias hypothesis has suffered from the empirical research it helped inspire. With respect to France in particular, Michel Nassiet's La violence, une histoire sociale: France, XVI e–XVIII e siècles, as its title suggests, has tried to provide a more holistic understanding of the shift in violence.

More recently, scholars like the psychologist Steven Pinker, from outside the two disciplines most involved in this debate—history and sociology—have entered the fray. Pinker focuses on exogamous forces— essentially cultural—that have led to a decline of violence in the West. As Gregory Hanlon points out, in a review essay, Pinker's thesis builds on a foundation of sand: he relies heavily on Elias’ civilizing process and, far worse, on inaccurate crime statistics for the early modern period Hanlon balances this criticism with a strong endorsement of Pinker's larger premise: that we need to combine research in the social and socalled hard sciences to reexamine historical phenomena. Modern cognitive research, for example, raises fundamental doubts about rational choice theory in economic history. Grand theories built on assumptions about what constitutes “modern” behavior in a “capitalist” economy thus become dubious assertions about why eighteenth-century Frenchpeople changed their attitude toward violence.

Assigning primacy for the decline of violence to a single aspect of a society's evolution—be it intellectual, economic, cultural, or political—is ultimately misguided. In studying such phenomena, Hanlon rightly argues we need a more integrated approach, one that combines behavioral and social sciences with insight from historical investigation.

In a pays characterized by a culture of honor, judicial archives unsurprisingly reflect the inhabitants’ preoccupation with adherence to its all-pervasive code. Criminal court records shed light on the quotidian behavior of its people and illuminate not only the shared values that led them to cohere but also the innumerable tensions that caused relationships to fracture. In short, the inhabitants were united both by what they shared and by what divided them: the prevailing code of honor. Men and women of all social strata participated in a perpetual contest for honor and constantly attempted to decipher and then observe the unwritten rules and regulations meant to govern their conduct. Honor was the cultural currency in which everyone dealt: each party logically demanded what he or she considered his or her rightful share. Even today, most disagreements ultimately involve “face,” or honor, Ruff tells us. Crime remains largely motivated by the desire to save “face” and avoid shame. Although disagreeing on how best to defend honor, reclaim it, or deny someone else’s, all inhabitants of the Sarladais agreed on its worth and participated in the ongoing discourse of honor.

This chapter will examine women's participation in the culture of honor by analyzing their roles in the criminal justice system as perpetrators, victims, or plaintiffs. One must bear in mind, however, that, irrespective of a woman's role in the civil or criminal judicial system, her involvement not only raised legal issues but also focused attention on whether her conduct was considered honorable or shameful for her gender. Viewing female criminality through the lens of gender can be particularly illuminating because physical violence—especially female violence against husbands— was culturally coded. As previously discussed, both women and men actively enacted and enforced society's code of honor via words and deeds that were meant either to protect or enhance their own reputations or to admonish and chastise others who failed to recognize them. Society only begrudgingly granted honor, which was always at risk, always contested, and constantly in need of maintenance.

In eighteenth-century Languedoc, Nicole Castan writes, privileged persons were not the sole possessors of honor; in fact, all “respectable” people were solicitous of their honor, which individuals defined variously as a sense of self-esteem, reputation, pride, self-possession, virility, honnêteté, competence, or moral integrity.

In 1778, when François-de-Paule Latapie, inspector of manufactures, toured the Périgord, he remarked on the persistence of the populace's traditional moeurs in comparison to elsewhere in Aquitaine. What particularly distressed him was the scarcity of elite men who had shed their “antiquated moeurs”:

Shunning luxury and fashion, such men instead conformed to the laws of nature and led lives that were truly human, argued Latapie. Only these enlightened and civilized individuals would be able to “revivify their locales and remedy indigence without even trying.”

A pan-European code of honor (differentiated by gender) was shared by elites and the populace throughout Europe during the early modern period. The thirteenth-century Castilian legal code, for example, distinguished by gender different kinds of verbal insults: “Women are insulted or outraged by … making lewd proposals to them… . A man may be insulted by a deed, by a kick, by a blow of the hand, stick, or stone, by pursuit with intent to wound, by tearing his clothes or by deliberate damage to his house or property.” As much seems to have applied to the inhabitants of medieval Castile, the artisans of sixteenthcentury Dijon, or the peasants of the late eighteenth-century Sarladais. Honor was traditionally demonstrated by showing deference to others and acknowledging precedence shown toward oneself. These found oral expression in forms of address and physical expression in gestures generally associated with the head—which may be bowed, touched, covered, or uncovered.

Before examining how honor and violence interacted in the late eighteenthcentury Sarladais, we must first consider how European honor culture changed during the early modern period. Honor was an important facet of European culture that encompassed a set of values and practices reflecting society's evolving relationship to its material world. The transformation of traditional honor culture, therefore, occurred in tandem with the fundamental developments that were gradually transforming western Europe into a modern society of contract: the internal dynamic of state building, the monopolization of violence in the hands of royal justice, the spread of capitalism and capitalist relations, the extension and consolidation of Christian (Protestant and Catholic) worship, and the intellectual revolution of the Enlightenment. Cultural adaptations may have occurred first among the “legal community” of professionals, as well as among artisans, tradesmen, and shopkeepers (called “the middling sort” in English towns), but they also occurred (to a lesser degree) among property owners and sharecroppers in the countryside that initially rested on an agrarian base designed more for continuity than for change. But here, too, the cultural consequences were profound. As the early modern world slowly underwent structural modification, its understanding of honor also evolved.

Gestures and Words

Violence was an ordinary part of interpersonal relations in Old Regime society and naturally found expression in words and gestures that have long fascinated scholars. Within recent decades, historians of early modern Europe have paid increasing attention to their importance. Scholars can confirm that by the late medieval period, ritual gestures, formal words, and symbolic objects were vital aspects of interpersonal relations. A new concept of civilité was beginning to emerge and became apparent by 1530, when Erasmus of Rotterdam wrote a short treatise in which he called for the reform of “outward bodily propriety”—especially people's dress, facial expressions, table manners, and gestures—which he considered to be “expressions of the inner, whole man.” In the seventeenth century, scholars and artists subsequently became even more interested in the “language” and “grammar” of gestures. They commented on the variety of cultures that seemed to distinguish, for example, the reserved English from the more effusive and gesticulating French and Italians. This new interest in symbolic interaction was a logical extension of the sixteenthcentury “reform of gestures” that reinforced the overall “evolution of manners” most pronounced in the courts of Italy.

Although stories of peasants who attacked each other's hats, hair, and heads and who insulted one another by questioning their probity and potency may seem quaint and entertaining yet ultimately trivial, we must remember that these ritualized disputes illuminate the workings of the inhabitants’ code of honor and dramatize the shifting fault lines in rural society during the Old Regime. Because insults, gestures, and blows are essentially sociocultural phenomena, the study of such behavior discloses society's norms and values, which emerge in a kind of mirror image held up to life in the Sarladais. Narratives drawn from the judicial archives of the royal court attest to the persistence of a largely traditional society characterized by a shared culture of honor in which verbal assaults and physical violence were still commonplace. More importantly, however, they simultaneously attest to the continuously evolving relationship between the Sénéchaussée of Sarlat and its inhabitants, as a wider range of litigants were willing to involve official justice in the resolution of disputes that they theretofore had handled personally, or infra-judicially, via either mediation or controlled violence according to the unwritten honor code. The character of honor itself was changing as well: society became more “individuated,” and extended kinship networks retracted until centered primarily on the nuclear family. Accordingly, ties of allegiance and loyalty to the extended family became attenuated, leading individuals to feel less impelled to resort to violence in defense of their collective honor. Instead, they now appealed to royal justice to resolve their disputes. Private cases stemming from violent offenses against persons actually increased and constituted a large proportion of the sénéchaussée's criminal caseload. In an apparent paradox, the increase of criminal cases for interpersonal violence may have been linked to an actual diminution in the incidence of violence.

Historians agree that violence declined in the West, but they remain divided about its causes. In the past forty years, scholars have emphasized the role played by exogamous factors such as the “rise of the state” (à la Max Weber), the “civilizing process” (à la Elias) or the general “advance of capitalism.” In emphasizing any one factor over another, however, we must keep in mind that these concepts are inventions constructed by scholars to describe or characterize human actions and their consequences; in other words, they are the analytical tools historians use to organize and relate facts to one another in meaningful ways.