Contenu du sommaire : Abuser / Forcer / Violer

The criminalization of sexual violence against women was the result of an ongoing evolution in the Roman world: while illicit sexual intercourse had been penalized by law from the first century BCE following the lex Iulia de adulteriis, an edict of Constantine, probably dating from 326, punished raptus (obtaining marriage by abduction) as a distinct crime. The main pitfall of this legislative evolution was a semantic one, since the notion of rape was not legally defined. During the first three centuries of the Empire, the problem was reflected not only in legal discourse but also in the discourse on law used in schools of rhetoric. This study brings the two together, in order to examine key elements of the educational logic by which the Romans analyzed the categories relating to what we would today consider as “rape”. It argues that the society of the High Roman Empire had developed a strong awareness of the most contentious aspects of the phenomenon, and perhaps even a response to the legal challenges that it raised.

Based on the very full records of penal justice in Bologna in the late Middle Ages (the libri malficiorum), this article focuses on acts of sexual violence inflicted by men on girls and women, and positions rape within a range of sexist and sexual acts of aggression. Firstly, it identifies the social status of both accused and victims, and offers an analysis of the stereotypical legal language used to describe this kind of crime, the act of rape itself being defined as “carnal knowledge of a woman by force and against her will and using violence”. The article then provides a survey of the entire range of psychological, physical and sexual attacks perpetrated against women, before and after the act of forced and violent intercourse. Beforehand, these include: forced entry to the victim's home; the uttering of sexist and sexual insults; threats; physical violence (throwing the victim to the ground, dragging her by her hair; striking her); forcing her out of the home to the place where the rape was committed, etc. The aftermath of rape included opprobrium, harassment of the victim and her family; the necessity for the victim to be able to prove her lack of consent, and the difficulty of bringing a case to court. The article concludes by considering those who suffered the consequences of the crime, and the penalties imposed on perpetrators, which were in the main relatively light. Re-situating rape in a long sequence of violence and humiliation undergone by women forces the historian to reconsider, with reference to a given period, what we mean by « sexual violence ».

The crime of marital rape, which has only very recently been made a criminal offence in French penal law, did not exist under the ancien régime. Sex within marriage was defined both by canon and secular law as a sacrament, whose validity was based on the principle of mutual consent, given freely. Consummation of a marriage was seen as confirming this initial consent and ratifying the marriage, but it also imposed on both spouses their conjugal duty. Consequently, the initial grant of consent was deemed to cover the entire life of the marriage, thus eliminating the possibility of marital rape. The absence of a specific crime of sexual violence between husband and wife did not however rule out the possibility of recourse to law by roundabout means. This article, based on a corpus of matrimonial cases brought between 1600 and 1750 (requests for separate residence, or for annulling a marriage on grounds of of impotence or forced marriage) examines the rare testimony and experience of the women victims of such violence, the better to understand what could be defined as violence within marital sexual behaviour, and to reflect on what such behaviour and its repression reveals about the patriarchal gender order of the time.

This article seeks to shed light on the complex modes of thought in Catholic moral theology which associated sexual practices and violence. It takes as an example a specific moment (the 1820s) and a particular location (Malthusian France). The theologian Jean-Baptiste Bouvier is the chief witness in this study: recognizing that the number of pregnancies was in reality limited by the practice of coitus interruptus, he proposed the fictional construct that a wife was not a sinner, since her husband was imposing the practice on her by force. This scenario, devised to remove any feeling of guilt from married women who were faithful to the Church, goes much further than its circumstantial aspect. In fact, it deconstructs a rigorous doctrinal principle, applied officially in France since 1700, according to which in a case of rape, some share of responsibility – and thus of guilt – attached to the woman, if she had not displayed visible, audible or tangible opposition to the violence she was undergoing.

This article aims to provide an overview of the recent development of historical work on child sexual abuse in Europe. It covers all periods, from antiquity to the twenty-first century, addressing a wide variety of themes: pederasty for educational purposes, the question of child innocence or depravity, violence within families, child protection, and the evolution of legislative provisions. The conclusion evokes the contemporary issues at stake in these studies and returns to the historiographical challenge posed by the dilemma between an essentialist and a relativist approach to sexual violence against children.

Cases of prosecution for rape are quite rare in the penal archives of ancien regime Europe. They have neverthless been studied using quantitative methods, which have provided a profile of both the plaintiffs and the accused (social milieu, age, marital status) as well as a typology of the scenarios of sexual violence (places, times, actions). This survey of the present state of research adopts a qualitiative approach to the same sources and more particularly the methods developed to read and interpret the judicial account provided by court officials. Some studies situate the legal description of the crime within the process of criminal procedure, in order to reconstitute the conditions under which it was written, and to specify its exact nature. By so doing, these studies seek to evaluate the way in which courts during the ancien regime, whether inquisitorial or accusatory, took into account the testimony of victims. A second avenue of research aims to interpret the words of the parties present, by laying emphasis on the strategies employed, on what was left unspoken, or passed over in silence. In this approach, the focus is on exploring the representations and the imaginary of sexuality and gender, as expressed through the experience of violence.

Several demotic wisdom texts from Ancient Egypt between the fifth and the first century BCE advise the reader not to have sexual relations with another man's wife. If the negative view of adultery is clear in the extracts studied, what about consent on the part of the woman? Is it possible to establish whether such relations were consensual or not? Analysis of the terminology and the context of these examples, and comparisons with other texts from demotic literature suggest that it is not the partner's consent as such that warrants inquiry, but the way the authors of the texts handle the question of consent. These documents thus provide information about the perception of women's sexuality in Egyptian society in late times.

This article analyses a lawsuit in the court files of the capitouls (municipal magistrates) of Toulouse, brought by Catherine Lespinasse against Jean Gaudens (or Capdeville) on 16 June 1742, on a charge of causing her pregnancy. The plaintiff accused Gaudens, with whom she had been consorting with a view to marriage, of raping her. This case reveals several of the legal obstacles which prevented women victims of rape from bringing a formal complaint about this crime in eighteenth-century France. The case study however shows that, like Catherine Lespinasse, several women knowingly exercised their right to appeal to justice, in order to accuse their aggressor indirectly, by using the mechanism of the complaint of “causing pregnancy”: the latter was essentially a paternalist and coercive legal procedure, obliging unmarried or widowed women to declare an illegitimate pregnancy before the law.

This article explores the moment when women's vocational training, long neglected, became a topic of public debate, under pressure from international and national organizations. Based on the study of a corpus of filmed documentaries and reports broadcast on French television between 1958 and 1973, as well as on archives of the period, it analyses the emergence of a new image of adult women who chose to embark on occupational training at the time: primarily, they were represented as housewives or homemakers, seeking to return to work after a long intermission for family reasons. This figure tends to eclipse any other image, notably of women already in paid employment who undertook further vocational training. The films in question are seen as indicators of ways of thinking about vocational training and those it addressed, in a period of historical transition, when gender roles, particularly those linked to employment, were being questioned.

From the beginning of their relationship in June 1934 until their marriage in August 1937, the French anthropologists Denise Paulme and André Schaeffner exchanged a sustained correspondence. While André Schaeffner's letters are lost, Denise Paulme's are an essential source shedding light on the outset of a woman's academic career in the interwar period. They show how her fieldwork experience laid the foundation for her future legitimacy in academic life, given the centrality of such experiences in the career path of ethnologists. They also highlight how a woman at that time needed to find a way of combining her private and her scholarly life if she was to be accepted in an academic world that women were not usually expected to enter.