Contenu du sommaire : Violences patriarcales et justice

From Conjugicide to Conjugal Violence or How the Courts Perceived Violence Between Couples
Conjugal violence first became a judicial affair in France in the nineteenth century. At this time, French courts introduced laws that challenged existing marital norms, which had long established the husband as the head of the family while enjoining the wife to submit to his authority. Criminal law was since then applied in domestic disputes, and magistrates did their best to ensure that laws protected the weak against tyrannical forces. After the nineteenth century, however, the savoir-faire of judges was eventually abandoned in favour of family legislation when dealing with what would become known as “domestic violence.”

Judicial Discourse and the Pardoning of Femicide: The Excuse of Adultery in Article 324 of the Napoleonic Code (1810-1975)From 1810 to 1975, the law excused the husband's murder of his wife in certain circumstances. The provisions of Article 324 of the Criminal Code are: a husband who kills his wife and her lover if he catches them in flagrante delicto of adultery in the marital home will have his sentence considerably reduced. This article analyses the background to the adoption of this law and its justification in the legislative and doctrinal debates of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It shows that conjugal femicide was acceptable in legal discourse beyond the provisions of the law. The diachronic perspective shows that indignation about conjugal femicide is a relatively recent shift in the legal paradigm.

The Spirit, Not the Letter: When Judicial Practices Broke from the Napoleonic Code on Adultery
This article focuses on Article 324 of the 1810 Napoleonic Code, which stipulated that in a conjugal relationship, the husband was pardonable for the murder of a wife if he caught her in the act of committing adultery. In place of capital punishment or forced labor for life, he would receive, at best, a prison sentence anywhere from one to five years. While the letter of the law imposed strict statutory conditions, the courts were largely liberal in their interpretation of the law, seeing only the wife's infidelity. Article 324 should thus be analysed beyond its legal parameters, as a window onto patriarchal violence in the nineteenth century whereby the law defended and even pardoned the murder of “a bad wife” by “a good husband”.

Laughing at Adultery to Mock Bourgeois Manners and Laws on Infidelity (1880-1940)In the late nineteenth century, court journalists, or tribunaliers, sat in correctional and appeal courts, transcribing verbal exchanges and recording moments when laughter would break out among the audience. Adultery topped the list of the so-called “funny causes,” [ causes amusantes], to use the phrase of the times. Court audiences joined in laughter to mock bourgeois mores as well as the laws that protected them, especially in cases involving adultery. Some journalists commented on whether adultery should even be subject to penal law. By the interwar period, laughter proved less anodyne, at times leading the charge against the patriarchal penal code. On the other hand, the mockery in the courts by the tribunaliers of husbands whose wives had committed adultery, reinforced the masculine and feminine roles as defined by the Napoleonic Code.

Patriarchal Purges. Liberation or the Repressive Re-establishment of Masculine Power
During the past thirty years, there has been a proliferation of social and cultural studies of political purges in France during the years of Liberation (1944-1945). These studies have underlined the histories of women who succumbed to the violent patriarchal politics of purification. Administered almost exclusively by men, the line between the formal and informal forms of punishment of women during Liberation was often blurred. This article examines recent historiographical advances and puts a finer point on the repressive machinations of masculine power during France's Liberation.

Judicial Collusion: The Doubled Patriarchal Violence against Algerian Women in France, 1950-1960During the Algerian War of Independence, Algerian women were seen as high stakes for both the French government, eager to assert its role as emancipator, and the FLN, keen to promise their liberation. The fall of French Algeria led to the splitting of two opposing jurisdictions: Algerian and French, in 1962. Drawing on a variety of sources including interviews, the daily press, and judicial records, this article shows that behind the façade of the benevolent propaganda diffused by each side, the judicial procedures in Algeria (familial, customary, and revolutionary) and the tribunals (correctional, military and criminal courts) in France remained complicit in the perpetuation of violence against women.

To File a Complaint Against Sexual Violence: The Difficulties of Reporting to the Police and the CourtsThe #MeToo movement has highlighted the complications in the handling of sexual violence by the police and the courts. Through interviews conducted with victims of sexual assault, this article follows the experiences of women who reported their attacks to the police or who brought their cases to the courts. It points out the factors that have hindered these proceedings: the delay in the reporting by the actors involved, and the complexities of the legal process, to name just two. Certain variables affected the degree and intensity of these difficulties, including the rationale behind the filing of complaints and the conditions under which the cases were filed, testified to, and subsequently investigated.

Real and Other Types of Rape: The Hierarchy of Police Investigations
This article examines police investigations of sexual violence in France from 2010 to 2020. Based on ten months of ethnographic research, the article focuses on investigations that specialized in cases of rape involving adult victims. This study shows that most police work, when tackling cases of violence, tends to follow a professional logic, making it difficult to characterize their approach as purely sexist. The article places sociological studies of police work in dialogue with studies that deal with various myths surrounding rape. It shows that during investigations of specific rape crimes, the police take cases much more seriously when these are complicated, involve dangerous predators, or face serious judicial repercussions.  

“ Justice was long in the service of the aggressor. Interview with Christelle Taraud”In this interview, Christelle Taraud revisits the conceptual evolution of the different types of violence committed by men against women (conjugicide, femicide, gynecide, feminicide, etc.). Assuming that justice was long in the service of the aggressor (as in the case of victim blaming), she shows how feminist judges, exceptional tribunals, and international penal courts tried to defeat the patriarchal system and allow women more freedoms by recognizing wartime rape as a punishable crime, identifying the genocidal dimension of witch hunts, and passing reparations acts (economic as well as symbolic) for victims of patriarchal state crimes and doctrinal political violence.