La noyade judiciaire dans la République de Genève (1558-1619)

Sous l’Ancien Régime la mise à mort par noyade n’est mentionnée qu’occasionnellement dans les archives judiciaires européennes. Pourtant, de 1558 à 1620, la justice criminelle genevoise recourt régulièrement àcette pratique exécutive pour sanctionner les crimes « contre nature ». Au XVIe siècle, Genève, cité indépendante depuis 1525 et acquise à la Réforme depuis 1536, devient un refuge pour les réformés fuyant les persécutions religieuses françaises ou italiennes. Le durcissement du contrôle social et moral entraîne une sévérité accrue de la part des autorités civiles et favorise l’augmentation du nombre des poursuites pénales contre toute personne coupable de comportement déviant. À la demande des magistrats, des juristes rédigent des « Avis de droit » pour qualifier le crime ou motiver la peine; ces théoriciens du droit se réfèrent aussi bien au jus romanum qu’au Décalogue pour étayer leur argumentation. Exclusion, publicité, exemplarité ou rétributivité : quel que soit le mode d’exécution, la peine capitale condense les caractères spécifiques aux pénalités d’Ancien Régime. Le recours systématique à une nouvelle technique de mise à mort apporte-t-il une dimension supplémentaire à la grammaire visuelle de la peine ? Symbolisme purificateur ancestral, influences juridiques étrangères, exécution miroir du crime ou nouveau vocabulaire pénal à l’attention des crimes indicibles, la noyade judiciaire sanctionne un contentieux criminel de délits « contre nature ». La réflexion pénale dont elle résulte prend place dans un temps de transition entre jurisprudences médiévale et moderne.Execution by drowning is only occasionally mentioned in the judicial archives of Old Regime Europe. Between 1558 and 1620, however, the criminal justice system of Geneva turned regularly to this practice to punish crimes ‘against nature’. During the XVIth century Geneva, an independent city since 1536 and Protestant since 1536, became the refuge for Protestants fleeing from religious persecution in France and Italy. An increasingly severe policy of social and moral control on the part of the civil authorities led to an increase in penal proceedings against deviant behaviour. At the request of the magistrates, jurists prepared legal opinions to define crimes and to prescribe punishments; these legal theorists referred as much to the jus romanum as to the Decalogue for their arguments. Whether the intention was to make an example, to provide retribution, exclusion or publicity, capital punishment encapsulated the specific characteristics of punishment during the Old Regime. Did the systematic recourse to a new means of execution bring an additional dimension to the visual grammar of punishment ? Whether seen as an ancient symbol of purification, the influence of foreign judicial practice, punishment to mirror the offence or a new penal vocabulary, judicial drowning was seen as punishing unspeakable crimes ‘against nature.’ The penal thought within which it originated is situated during the time of transition from medieval to modern jurisprudence

Gender and release from imprisonment: Convict licensing systems in mid to late 19th century England

This paper draws on the research undertaken into the lives and prison experiences of around 650 male and female convicts who were released on licence (an early form of parole) from sentences of long term imprisonment (three years to life) in England in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. Our project confirmed the patterns of offending seen in other studies of female and male offending, namely, that women were committed to periods of long-term imprisonment overwhelmingly for crimes of larceny and sometimes low-level violence (or their criminal backgrounds indicated this type of low-level disorderly behaviour) and only in the minority for crimes of serious interpersonal violence. Similarly, the majority of men were also committed to the convict system for larceny. Yet how male and female offenders were treated by the prison licensing system did differ significantly. The vast majority of all prisoners, male and female, were released early on licence from their prison terms, even those who had committed very serious offences. All licences had several conditions in them and licence-holders were free so long as they met these conditions. Any breach of the above conditions meant that the individual would be returned to prison to serve out the remainder of their sentence.However, a proportion of female offenders were released slightly earlier than their male counterparts, though not directly into the community but on a conditional licence to Female Refuges. Out of the 288 women researched in our project, 200 of them were released in this manner; under further confinement in a refuge. Women stayed in such refuges for on average between six and nine months, before their final release was then approved by the Directors of the Convict Prisons

"Monstrous and indefensible"? Newspaper accounts of sexual assaults on children in nineteenth-century England and Wales

This material has been published in Women's Criminality in Europe, 1600–1914 edited by Edited by Manon van der Heijden, Marion Pluskota, Sanne Muurling, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108774543. This version is free to view and download for private research and study only. Not for re-distribution or re-use. © 2020 Cambridge University Press.Popular crime reportage of sexual violence has a long history in England. Despite the fact that from the 1830s onwards newspapers and periodicals – and sometimes even law reports – were increasingly liable to skim over the reporting of sexual offences as ‘unfit for publication’, this does not mean that such reportage vanished entirely. Instead, certain linguistic codes and euphemisms were invoked to maintain a respectable discourse. Given the serious problems with gaps in the surviving archival record for modern criminal justice, newspapers remain an essential tool for understanding the history of sexual violence in nineteenth century England and Wales. Using keyword searches in digitized newspaper databases such as the British Newspaper Archive and Welsh Newspapers Database, this chapter examines the continuities and changes in the reporting of sexual violence against children between 1800 and 1900, and explores what these euphemisms and elisions reveal about attitudes to gender and crime in nineteenth-century England and Wales.Peer reviewe

Côté chaire, côté rue. La Réforme à Genève 1517-1617. Une exposition des Archives d'Etat de Genève

L’exposition aborde la thématique en trois temps. Une première période (1517-1555) retrace l’introduction de la Réforme à Genève. Les prêches de Guillaume Farel (1489-1565) nourrissent l’effervescence religieuse qui s’exprime parfois par l’iconoclasme. La deuxième période (1555-1575) décrit la Réforme vécue «au quotidien». La population s’adapte aux nouvelles liturgies, côtoie les élèves de l’Académie, accueille l’afflux des réfugiés et subit les contraintes disciplinaires. Finalement, la troisième période (1575-1617) voit s’apaiser les esprits et la discipline s’assouplir. Les Genevois trouvent peu à peu un nouvel équilibre et l’année 1617 offre l’occasion de célébrer les cent ans de la Réforme. L'exposition revisite également certains mythes sur la Réforme, par exemple son rapport à la danse, aux tavernes et au théâtre

Girls, young women and crime: perceptions, realities and responses in a long-term perspective

This chapter consists of a literature review of girls’ and young women’s crime and deviance from a long-term perspective. It shows how certain themes have dominated European discourses and realities of female juvenile delinquency across several centuries and up until the present day, and how these various threats and transgressions have been countered by recurrent strategies. In assessing sexual misconduct, theft and vagrancy – three crime categories that were prevalent among prosecutions of young women – it identifies powerful and enduring narratives centering on concerns about girls’ sexuality and independence. Finally, in comparing responses to female juvenile crime and deviance across Western Europe since the eighteenth century, certain ‘solutions’ have proven dominant and very enduring: institutional confinement of criminal and problem girls on the one hand, and the pathologisation of female (juvenile) crime on the other

Female and Male Prisoners in Queensland 1880–1899

Employing a mixed-method approach to quantitative data from the Queensland Police Gazette and qualitative evidence from newspaper archives and government reviews of women’s gaols, this chapter studies women’s imprisonment in Queensland, Australia, at the end of the nineteenth century. It describes the profiles of men and women committed to prison in Queensland from 1880–1899, and the extent to which men and women recidivated. In spite of a number of methodological caveats, women were more likely to be (chronic) recidivists than men during the late nineteenth century in Queensland. This chapter argues that this can be explained in terms of their different social and economic disadvantages and vulnerabilities, related to their stigmatization, policing and institutionalization

Girls, young women and crime : perceptions, realities and responses in a long-term perspective

This chapter consists of a literature review of girls’ and young women’s crime and deviance from a long-term perspective. It shows how certain themes have dominated European discourses and realities of female juvenile delinquency across several centuries and up until the present day, and how these various threats and transgressions have been countered by recurrent strategies. In assessing sexual misconduct, theft and vagrancy – three crime categories that were prevalent among prosecutions of young women – it identifies powerful and enduring narratives centering on concerns about girls’ sexuality and independence. Finally, in comparing responses to female juvenile crime and deviance across Western Europe since the eighteenth century, certain ‘solutions’ have proven dominant and very enduring: institutional confinement of criminal and problem girls on the one hand, and the pathologisation of female (juvenile) crime on the other