Contenu du sommaire : La mort au Parlement

From 1789 onwards, the incriminations of “lèse-majesté” and “parricide” served above all rhetorical purposes, as during the murders of two members of the Convention in 1793, Le Peletier and Marat. The idea was to present any attack on a deputy as a crime against the “people's fathers”, and therefore against national sovereignty. However, with the successive purges of this Assembly, the two incriminations became more discreet, before resurfacing in the spring of 1795 with the murder of a deputy (Féraud) within the Convention itself. This violation of national representation triggered a severe repression and a return to the forefront of the two incriminations, which Louis-Philippe remembered in 1830.

The article focuses on the tributes given to the Neapolitan parliamentarian Carlo Poerio at his funeral in 1867, when his death interrupted his mandate as a deputy. Using the parliamentary archives, the tribute literature published in his honour and the municipal archives of Naples and Florence, the paper aims to study the process of edification that led to the recognition of his status as a martyr of Italian patriotism. The orchestration of his funeral and the treatment given to his remains reveal the sacred constructions linked with the cult of illustrious men, which were part of the political pedagogy of the new Italian state.

In 1810, the offence of “violation of burial” was integrated into the penal code to meet the moral obligation of respect due to the memory of the dead. But its lack of precision clashes with reality and shows its incapacity to ensure the protection of the body of the dead. The offence of violation of the integrity of the corpse only entered the law in 1992. The examination of the parliamentary debates shows the difficulties in making the law and the moral requirement coincide when it comes to the dead body.

Léon Gambetta died on 31 December 1882, at the height of his fame, after an illness and an agony that received extensive media coverage. Leaving aside the official funeral, this article examines a particular moment in the mortuary sequences immediately following the death, that of the autopsy, which condenses the tensions between the public man and the medical subject. The invasive gestures and the samples taken on this occasion serve multiple purposes, mixing the political and the scientific; they give rise to diverse interpretations and inaugurate divergent destinies for his mortal remains, the degree of dispersion of which is only belatedly revealed.

The pivotal years of 1915-1916 laid the foundations for the French remembrance politics of the Great War. The first legislative initiatives asserted the need to individualize death in the battlefield by engraving public monuments with the names of fallen soldiers, as well as the will to honour mass bereavement. Unlike the Senate, the French Parliament sought, at the end of war, to associate the commemoration of the dead with the celebration of victory. The parliamentary debate was thus reoriented towards the commemoration of November 11th Armistice signed with Germany. After 1920, and under the growing influence of deputies who had fought during the war, bills pertaining to November 11th Armistice Day emphasized the value of the collective sacrifices and contributions of all the French soldiers to victory. From these debates, two different visions of sacrificial death on the field of battle emerged.

This paper describes the progression of the bill proposed in 1946 by Minister Yves Farge in order to enforce the death penalty for black market traffickers. The latter were then accused to starve the citizens and to attack the “health of the Nation”. Parliamentary debates and the minutes of the Committee on Food Supplies allow to understand why this bill was passed by consensus, the discussions focusing mostly on the extent of the repression and not on the principle of the death penalty.