Domestic Violence by Another Name: Crimes of Passion in Fin-de-Siècle Paris

Abstract

This article investigates practices of domestic violence behind "crimes of passion" in fin-de-siècle Paris. Professional discourses attributed crimes of passion to a loss of rational control caused by suggestive images in the media and the atomization of modern urban life. Yet far from being symptomatic of social disintegration, this article argues that crimes of passion reveal complex local systems of social control at the household and neighborhood level. Testimony in more than 250 cases of violent crime between domestic partners tried in the assize court of the Seine shows that victims and perpetrators alike were firmly embedded in close-knit urban communities, where neighbors had detailed knowledge of each other's daily lives and readily intervened in domestic disputes. From this perspective, it is possible to construct a social history of domestic violence even in a time and place where the concept was not yet subject to feminist analysis.