Domestic Violence: Once Encouraged, Now Unacceptable

He is with a menacing look, his arm raised, firmly grasping the frightened woman by her hair and holding her lying on the ground under the indifferent gaze of the neighbors. Excerpt from the manuscript A romance of rosesBy Guillaume de Lauris and Jean de Meung, this illustration dates from the late 15th century.^e The century eerily echoes a black-and-white painting published four centuries later, in 1899, in the collection Street Songs – an angry man at night about to throw a chair over a poor woman, barefoot, fearfully defending herself. weapon.

The same scene four hundred years apart? The same gestures, in the Middle Ages, as III^e republic? The same fatalism that has haunted women for centuries?

Spousal violence does not always take the same form, but it seems to span the centuries in great succession: in medieval proceedings of separation from bed and board, as well as in 19th-century appeals to criminal justice.^e In the century, in the cases presented to the Paris Parliament, as in the speeches of battered women in the 1970s, the scenarios are often repeated. Insulting, humiliating, hitting…

If actions and words are similar, society’s perception of them has at least changed profoundly. With medieval “customs”—which enumerated the rights, customs, and rules specific to each community and imposed a “duty of correction” on husbands—considered necessary, even legitimate, conjugal violence was no longer recommended but widely accepted. 19^e century, by a society organized around the all-powerful figure of the head of the family. This tolerance has given way, a century and a half later, to strong resentment: today, domestic violence causes moral, social, political and penal abuse.

“Duty to strike”

How do we know that the same gesture was considered a fair and legal practice in the Middle Ages, as a reprehensible but understandable behavior in the 19th century?^e century and as unacceptable behavior in the 21st^e century?

“This change in perspective is the result of the slow evolution of mentalities, Historian Elisabeth Lucet, CNRS researcher, analyzes. In this process, which took centuries, three factors were decisive: the growing opposition to physical violence in the family, the growing legitimacy of state intervention in the private sphere, and, of course, the gradual emergence of equality between men and women. . »