VIOLENCE BETWEEN MEN AND FAMILY MATTERS BEFORE THE MONTREAL COURTS
IN THE LATE EIGHTEENTH AND EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURIES
Donald Fyson, Université Laval
A paper for the Third Carleton Conference on the History of the Family, Ottawa, May 1997
Draft - please do not cite without consulting me (donald.fyson@hst.ulaval.ca)
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Introduction
In October of 1786, William Lenny, the servant of Robert Aird, a prominent Montreal merchant with lands in the rural parish of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, made the following deposition before a Montreal justice of the peace:
finding several pigs in Mr. Robert Aird's potatoe field [at Saint-Vincent-de-Paul], and said deponent leading the said pigs to Mrs. McNiels's house, of same place, who said pigs belonged to, and deponent desiring the said Mrs. McNiel to shut up her pigs that the said pigs would ruin all his master's potatoe field, whereupon the said Mrs. McNiel answered yes she would, that they had got out by accident, and next day the twelfth instant the deponent seeing the aforesaid pigs going again towards said potatoe field he the deponent ran immediately towards said pigs and brought them down to said Mrs. McNiel and telling her as before to shut up her aforesaid hogs, and thereupon the aforesaid Mrs. McNiel began to abuse and ill treat said deponent with a very abusive language and at same time taking up a wooden oven poker and giving said deponent a blow with said poker over the arm, immediately deponent seizing said Mrs. McNiel by the arms in order to take away said poker from her, said Mrs McNiels' son called Joseph Mercier came behind said deponent and gave said deponent a blow over the head which caused said deponent to loose much blood to his great prejudice and bodily hurt.(1)
The description of the initial confrontation between Lenny and McNiel took up the bulk of Lenny's deposition. But it was only the assault by Mercier on Lenny, in defence of his mother (or perhaps mother-in-law), that Lenny brought before the Court of Quarter Sessions the following month, though he dropped the prosecution immediately following an agreement on the part of another relative of Mercier's, Michel Saint-Amour, to pay all costs.(2)
Some sixty years later, in June 1843, Pierre Arielle, a Montreal sailor, complained to the city's police magistrate that James Smith, a Montreal carter, had assaulted him without provocation. Arielle's testimony in police court a few days later fleshed out the details of the conflict: being on the boat of his brother-in-law, Jean-Baptiste Robidou, he saw that Smith "tenoit mon beaufrère parterre, et il alloit le frapper quand je lui ai dit, mon ami, vous ne devrez pas frapper un homme à terre, desuite il m'a frappé sans rien lui dire de plus que cela." Smith confessed, and was fined ten shillings plus costs.(3)
These two cases, generations apart, provide insights into many aspects of Quebec and Lower Canadian society, such as class, gender and ethnic conflict, or the relationship between society and the criminal justice system of the state. But what links them above all is twofold: first, both involved violent confrontations between men; and second, these confrontations were based in large part upon family solidarity. Were it not for the desire of Mercier and Arielle to defend members of their families from outside aggressors, these incidents would likely never have occurred.
The paper that follows expands on the role of family matters in violent incidents between men in pre- and early-industrial Montreal, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It forms part of a larger study of male violence in Quebec and Lower Canada, from the Conquest to the middle of the nineteenth century - more specifically, the causes, the characteristics, the consequences of personal (or, rather, interpersonal) violence between men, as opposed to male violence against women, or collective social and political violence. This paper, it must be emphasized, is not the end-product of an extended research project; rather, it presents some preliminary reflections founded on an initial examination of the available sources.
Violence, masculinity, honour and family: some observations
The literature concerning male violence in pre- and early-industrial Western societies is extensive. Until recently, this literature comprised two principal but separate threads. On the one hand, there were general studies of interpersonal violence, where discussions of violence between men predominated, but where violence was largely discussed in gender-neutral terms: it was simply violence. These studies are numerous: on ancien-régime France, such as those of the Castans;(4) on early modern England, such as the work of John Beattie;(5) the more general reflections on violence in Western Europe of Norbert Elias;(6) for North America, the various examinations of violence in the ante-bellum South(7) or the collection edited by Ted Robert Gurr.(8) On the other, there were the many studies of male violence directed against women and children, as in studies of wife battering and sexual assault, which took a more explicitly gendered perspective on male violence, but not as it was directed against other men.(9) The more recent interest in gender studies, and especially studies of masculinity, has led to works that fuse the two approaches and examine violence between men as itself inherently gendered;(10) but examining such violence from the perspective of masculinity is still relatively new.
In the more general studies of interpersonal violence, though there are considerable differences between regions and eras, a number of common traits emerge. The first is simply the centrality of interpersonal violence in daily life; a corollary is that those involved in such violence were not "marginals", but rather "normal" members of society, from all social classes. Nevertheless, though "normal", violent behaviour was above all a male trait: it was above all men who fought, who wounded, who killed. One of the basic elements in explaining this prevalence of male violence is the notion of honour, seen as an essential component in the definition of masculinity, from medieval Artois to colonial New-France.(11) This is not to say that the literature explains male violence entirely in terms of honour: other factors are also seen to intervene, both personal (such as alcohol, or disputes over money) and social (wars, poverty, etc.). But honour is generally seen as central; and pushed to its logical conclusion, even the apparent barbarity of ritual combats in the ante-bellum Southern United States, where adversaries literally sought to pluck out each others' eyeballs, can be explained by this sense of masculine honour.(12)
A key component of this masculine sense of honour concerned the family. Defining "family honour" is no small task, and lies far beyond the scope of this paper. Rather, for the purposes of this discussion, I retain two principal ways in which the family entered into the definition of male honour and of masculinity itself. On the one hand, the male as defender of the family, and in particular its "weaker" members, women and children, though also extending to solidarity between men of the same family, such as between brothers, or fathers and sons. And on the other hand, the dominant male as absolute master of the family, source of discipline, pater familias. As Yves Castan has described it, "solidarité sans faille envers l'extérieur, discipline tendue à l'intérieur".(13)
This notion of the defense of family honour as an intimate part of the masculine identity thus becomes a crucial part of explanations of male violence in ancien-régime societies. If we take only France as an example, studies on Britanny, Languedoc, the Artois, all demonstrate the importance of family solidarity, of defence of the family honour, in the construction of the masculine identity.
One last element emphasized in the literature is that incidents that were brought to the attention of the official justice system were extraordinary: they represented only an infinitesimal fraction of actual violent incidents, and almost exclusively those that were special in some way: they became more serious than intended (resulting in serious wounding or death); or they represented a conflict that could not be resolved through "normal" means of informal arbitration, community sanction, etc. Again, the role of honour here is clear. In effect, a last component of male honour, especially with regards to the family, was the absolute necessity of not exposing the family's quarrels or weaknesses before "outsiders", and especially the official justice system: a solidarity not only of action, but also of silence.
Family honour and violence between men in Quebec and Lower Canada
If we turn to the situation in Quebec and Lower Canada, what do the court records tell us with regards to violence between men and the defense of family honour?(14) They certainly reveal cases of men fighting other men for having insulted, threatened or assaulted their wives or their children; wife batterers striking out at other men who tried to "interfere" in what they regarded as their right; fights over seductions of wives or daughters; and many other family matters that resulted in violent confrontations between men. But an impressionistic survey is insufficient. Basing ourselves on the European studies, and also on recent work on New France,(15) we would expect to find evidence in these judicial archives a prolongation of the more general European trends described above. Thus, clear evidence of the importance for male honour of physically defending the family against outside aggressors; a marked reticence to bring cases involving family honour before the courts; and in the court documents themselves, a strong presence of the discourse of honour. But the picture suggested by the judicial archives is more complex.
The paucity of the discourse of honour
On initial examination, the documents in the judicial archives actually reveal a surprising lack of discourse regarding family honour in particular, and honour in general. Whether in the depositions made before justices of the peace by victims of assaults, or the preliminary testimony of witnesses in murder trials, or the detailed testimony of victims and witnesses in summary assault trials, the language of honour, though not entirely absent, is muted. As a rule, cases where family honour is evoked to explain, even in passing, violence between men, are comparatively rare, just as, more generally, the language of honour itself appears infrequently.
On one level, this should not surprise. In the first place, it seems to confirm the notion that cases involving family honour were best kept away from the attention of the official justice system, just as was the case in New France.(16) Secondly, as in most justice systems based on that of England, most of the documents preserved in the judicial archives concern the case for the prosecution, especially depositions of the complainants and statements of prosecution witnesses; and a complainant or prosecution witness had little interest in describing an aggression by another man in such terms as to make it evident that the victim had violated the honour of the other and thus provoked the attack. And finally, many of the documents also involved only the preliminary aspects of the judicial proceedings, where motivation was of little interest. For instance, the formal role of a deposition was simply to prove that an attack had occurred, with the question of motivation to be dealt with at trial; and in the English system, oral testimony at trial was rarely recorded.
However, we cannot reduce this absence of family honour, and honour more generally, simply to a question of sources. First, even complainants making a deposition often gave far more than a simple attestation of the facts; but even in lengthy, detailed descriptions of the situations leading up to an incident, family honour is rarely evoked. Further, even in cases where the presentation of the case for the defence has survived, such as trial testimony recording the statements of defence witnesses, voluntary examinations of the accused, or petitions for habeas corpus, there is also rarely mention of family honour as such.(17) And yet, there is every indication that questions of family honour could be a key defence. For example, according to common law, a man could justify an assault (though not a wounding) not only in defence of himself, but also "of his wife, or master, or parent, or child within age"(18). Thus, for example, in 1843 Peter Caisey, the toll-keeper on the Longue-Pointe road near Montreal, got into a dispute with one Joseph Latoulippe the elder over an un-paid toll, and after being seized by Latoulippe, hit him on the head with a stick, cutting him; he was then assaulted by Latoulippe's son, Joseph Latoulippe the younger. The two Latoulippes were charged with assault and battery; but on cross-examination during the trial, Caisey declared that "I believe that the young Latoulippe struck me to prevent me from striking his father - they came with force and violence towards me - I believe that Latoulippe the father and the son both came up to me at the same time - whilst the son held my hands the father seized me by the nose". As a result, though Latoulippe the elder was fined 20 shillings, Latoulippe the younger was discharged, even in a case involving a direct attack on state authority.
One very tentative explanation for the relative lack of language evoking honour relates to the question of class. The documents most heavily larded with questions of honour, including family honour, tended to come from members of the elites. Thus, for example, in 1815 Dominique Rousseau, a Montreal merchant, was charged with challenging Lieutenant-Colonel Jean-Baptiste Hervieux to a duel over Hervieux's having called up Rousseau's son for militia duty; Hervieux refused, and Rousseau condemned him as a coward and swore that Hervieux would either have to fight him or apologize to him on his knees. But the vast majority of cases involving interpersonal violence involved members of the popular classes, who did not express themselves in such terms, but rather in the terms of everyday life, of the material acts of violence themselves.
A more systematic examination of the language used in court documents awaits. But perhaps more importantly, it is not only from the language of complaints that explicitly mention them that we can deduce attitudes towards male violence and family honour. The situations described more generally in cases are far more evocative. To illustrate this, the remainder of this paper concentrates on two types of cases that reveal the complex link between masculinity, male violence and family honour: on the one hand, male violence within the family, which tells us much about family autonomy and privacy; and on the other hand, male violence and family solidarity, involving the male the defense of family honour.
Male violence and family autonomy
The first type of case is that involving violence between men inside of families. Simply put, cases of this nature very rarely appeared before the courts in Quebec and Lower Canada. There were some exceptions: for example, in 1825, Pierre Dubé, of Montreal, complained against his son, François, for having hit and threatened him.(19) But this case was very much the exception; out of a sample of some 1530 cases of interpersonal violence brought to the attention of the justices of the peace between 1780 and 1830, of which more than three-quarters involved conflict between men, only 8 opposed men from the same family.
Does this suggest that men who were part of the same family never had violent conflicts? Probably not, even if we exclude the disciplinary violence of fathers towards their male children. It is instead more likely that, as in Europe and New France, these sorts of cases were not brought before the courts, for fear of exposing publicly the internal quarrels between family members, which, following the code of family solidarity, they should have been able to resolve themselves or, at worst, with the help of the local community. One would still expect more serious cases, such as those involving the death of one of the adversaries, to come before the courts; and yet, in an admittedly limited sample of cases of more serious violence between men brought before the higher criminal courts, including murder, most appear to have involved victims who were not directly related to the accused. Whatever the case, the implication is clear: men did not generally expose their quarrels with other male family members before the courts.
The importance of this silence in the archives is not so much what it tells us (or does not tell us) about violence between men of the same family, but rather the way in which it contrasts with two other sorts of cases. On the one hand, as I have shown elsewhere, men were quite willing to take before the courts even minor quarrels with men outside of their own families.(20) This confirms that the absence of disputes between male family members before the courts (if it was not the result of widespread family harmony) did indeed reflect notions of family autonomy rather than a more general avoidance by men of the criminal justice system. Indeed, this avoidance of the criminal justice system in family matters extended beyond quarrels between men within the same family. Thus, there were occasional cases where men fought the lovers of their wives. For example, in 1825, Dominique Vallière, a master joiner from Saint-Charles, complained against Zéphirin Bernard, also of Saint-Charles, for an assault and battery: Vallières had just discovered Bernard in the attic with his wife.(21) But like fights between male family members, these sorts of cases appear very rarely in the judicial archives: men evidently preferred not to bring this evidence of their lack of control over their wives before the criminal courts, or at least not to mention these circumstances when making a complaint.
But even more importantly, the code of family silence was not shared to nearly the same degree by women: as was the case in settings varying from eighteenth-century Paris to nineteenth-century Montreal, battered wives were not nearly as reticent to bring their husbands to court, with about a hundred such cases in the sample of complaints mentioned above.(22)
The notion of family solidarity before outside intrusions thus begins to seem a far more gendered concept, more firmly attached to masculinity.
An examination of male attitudes towards external intervention in cases of conjugal violence, by neighbours, by witnesses, by constables, brings further nuances to male defence of family autonomy. On the one hand, it is clear that wife beaters felt they had an absolute right to discipline their wives, as in the 1820 declaration of Joseph Labadie, a Montreal bailiff and habitual wife beater: though legally separated from his wife, Marie-Françoise Desautels, for the last 4 years, he persisted in threatening her and declared "qu'il etait le maitre de la battre et qu'il la batteroit quand il le jugerait convenable et qu'elle ... ne périrait jamais par d'autre main que par la sienne".(23) On the other hand, these men who beat their wives, who felt that they had an absolute right to do so, did not seem on the whole willing to defend this right physically in the face of external intervention: apart from a few cases, they did not physically resist those who tried to stop them, such as constables or neighbours. Their sense of family autonomy, in other words, did not extend so far as resisting men as strong or stronger than themselves.
There are further nuances to this general picture. In the first place, there were some significant differences between rural and urban society, not so much in terms of men's unwillingness to publicize internal family violence, which was equally strong in both settings, but rather in the difference between men and women. As a rule, as in virtually all pre-modern societies, rural inhabitants were far less likely to have recourse to the criminal justice system than their urban counterparts. Thus, for example, Montreal from the 1780s to the 1820s represented only 10% to 15% of the population of its judicial district, but 50% to 60% of cases brought before the criminal courts. But even with this overall urban bias taken into account, rural women, though not entirely absent, were even less inclined than their urban counterparts to lay complaints before the official justice system.
Further, members of the elites seemed also to conform more to classic models of family honour, and especially the importance of keeping family matters out of the purview of the public justice system. Thus, cases which put in question the male role as pater familias, such as those stemming from conjugal violence, arose almost exclusively from members of the popular classes. Likewise, it seems to have been anglophones who conformed most to the model of keeping closed family affairs. Thus, even if they represented only a handful of exceptional cases, all cases where men complained against other male family members involved francophone families.
Finally, it was not all men who had this sense of the importance of family autonomy. There were even a small number of cases where men complained against their wives for having hit them. Following the traditional logic of the masculine role in the family, this represented an admission of the utmost emasculation: the man who was unable to control, to defend himself against, his wife.
Male violence and family solidarity
If we turn to cases involving violence between men arising from family solidarity and from the role of the man as defender of the family, we find that they were, unsurprisingly, rather more common. On the one hand, there were cases of solidarity between men of the same family: between brothers, between fathers and sons, helping each other to fight others. Thus, in 1799, Pierre Labelle, a habitant from Blainville, accused Albert Ouimet, another habitant of the same place, Augustin Ouimet, Albert's son, and Marie-Angélique Ouimet, Albert's daughter, of assault: "en allant pour séparer le cheval d'Albert Ouimet ... d'avec le sien" Albert hit him with his fists, and then Augustin joined in with fists and a stick, "encouragé par ledit Albert Ouimet son pere qui lui criait souvent 'fesse'", then finally Marie-Angélique joined in, also with a stick.(24) Or further, the case of Jean-Baptiste Citoleux, of Pointe-Clair, who in 1788 described an attack on him at the entrance to the church, by five men of the Valois family, some of whom held his arms and legs while the other hit him with their fists.(25)
There was also male intervention to protect "dependant" members of the family, women and children. Thus, in 1815, François Deseve of Lachine complained against Adam Gordon Johnson and Ellice King, two Montreal merchants: he declared that, after entering his house, they had beaten his daughter, who ran to him for protection, and on his rising to protect her, he was beaten in turn.(26) Or from another perspective, consider the complaint of Louis Sabourin, a Montreal constable, who in 1800 sought to execute an arrest warrant against Archange Lalonde, of the Ile Bizard, wife of Mathurin Fournaise, with three other men to assist him:
que la ditte Archange Lalonde, le voyant arriver, se serais renfermé dans sa maison, qu'alors lui déposant aurois heurté a la porte, en déclarant à la dite Archange qu'il étoit chargé de l'areter au nom du Roy et de la conduire a Montreal, qu'alors est arrivé Mathurin Fournaise a la porte de la susditte maison, qui a repoussé avec la main le déposant, et pris un baton, et lui a fait diverses menaces en l'injuriant, et a, le dit Mathurin Fournaise, commandé, et conseillé, la ditte Archange Lalonde de s'armer d'une hache, et de monter dans son grenier, et de faire main casse sur celui qui se presenterais pour l'arreter et que le dit Mathurin Fournaise a gardé la porte de la maison dans laquelle etait la dite Archange pendant au moins quatre heures, en deffendant l'aproche à quiconque, ce qui a empêché le déposant de mêtre a l'exécution le warrant susdit.(27)
In other words, a classic example of the pater familias physically defending his dependants against outside aggression.
But what is perhaps more surprising among the judicial archives is the number of cases, even more common, that oblige us to nuance this notion of the importance for masculine honour of the defence of the family: cases in which the pater familias did not intervene to defend his family with his physical force.
The most striking example is the relatively large number of cases in which married women themselves complained against men from outside of their families for physical violence: some 150 cases in all, or a third of all complaints made by women, in the sample of 1530 cases of interpersonal violence mentioned above. In almost all of these cases, there is no indication that the husband made any intervention to defend physically his wife, either during or after the incident in question; further, it was the wife and not the husband who made the complaint. In contrast, cases where a man laid a complaint for violence on behalf of his wife were very rare: perhaps four or five in all. These cases are clear examples where notions of masculinity tied to the role of the male as defender of the family must be nuanced; and they remind one of the work of other researchers on the civil justice system, such as that of France Parent and Geneviève Postolec for the 18th century, where women in New France and Quebec were more active than their judicial incapacity would lead us to think.(28)
Some nuances of class and ethnicity are also in order. Thus, elite women, regardless of their ethnicity, were almost never involved in complaints of any sort; likewise, anglophone women, regardless of their social class, were far less likely to make complaints personally against men who attacked them. This suggests either that the masculinity of francophone and/or popular-class men was far less challenged by the public activity of their partners, or that francophone and/or popular-class women were far more assertive than their anglophone and/or elite counterparts.
More generally, it is not rare to find cases where a man, following aggression against himself and his family, preferred to have recourse to the justice system rather than to take the defence of his family into his own hands, and who mentioned explicitly his incapacity to defend his family. Thus, for example, in 1793, Thomas Tully, a Montreal carpenter, complained against Stephen Story, his landlord. Tully's declaration is testimony to his incapacity as defender of his family:
Last night one Stephen Story, in whose house deponent rents a room, assisted with several other persons to him unknown, came into his room and told deponent that he would have him turned out of doors; and threatened to beat and ill-use deponent, but the interfering of a constable put a stop to their proceeding any further. That this morning the said Stephen Story, came into deponent's room, while he the deponent and his wife and children were in bed, and assisted by the aforesaid persons, began to throw his property out of doors, the said Story laid hold of deponent in bed, and in making a blow at him struck his child, dragged the deponent out of bed and threw him naked out of doors, and otherwise ill-used this deponent to his great loss and damage.(29)
Or, in another time and place, in 1820 Jean-Baptiste Had, a Saint-Hilaire farmer, complained against Antoine Desroches, a joiner, for having come to his house, caused an uproar, and insulted and threatened himself and his wife, the latter being so alarmed that she remained sick.(30) For Story, for Had, for others, there was perhaps dishonour, perhaps a loss of masculinity in this recourse to justice rather than the exercise of masculine physical force; but this was a choice they seemed willing to make in face of these aggressions.
In a final example, in a number of cases where a man was assaulted by a married woman or by a married couple, he complained directly against the woman, with or without her husband. For example, in December 1795, at the Côte-des-Neiges, François Saint-Germain, a habitant and the tenant farmer of one Madame Dufy, complained against Jean-Baptiste Perrault for assault and threats and for having set free Saint-Germain's animals, "sous pretexte qu'il agissait par ordre de Madame Dufy". Two days later, François Montmarqué, a labourer in the service of Madame Dufy, declared before a justice of the peace that Catherine Traversi, the wife of François Saint-Germain (the first complainant), came to Madame Dufy's, while he, Montmarqué, was taking care of the animals, accompanied by her husband (François Saint-Germain) and an engagé; that Traversi thereupon insisted that Montmarqué leave "en l'acablant d'injures et en lui faisant les plus grandes menaces nomémant de lui tordre le cou". But despite the presence of her husband, it was against Traversi, and not Saint-Germain, that Montmarqué made his complaint.(31) In other cases, it was the married couple together who were accused, rather than the husband alone. In other words, a man was not considered to be solely responsible for the actions of his wife, as was apparently the case, for example, in the Languedoc of Yves Castan; a fact recognized, though grudgingly, by the common law.(32)
Finally, if we return to solidarity between males of the same family as a source of male violence, though its importance cannot be dismissed, it was a factor in only a minority of cases involving violence between men. The vast majority of accusations for violence, upwards of 80%, were brought against single men; and even among the 20% where the accused were two men or more, only a third involved men linked together by evident family ties.
Conclusion
An examination of the judicial archives of the district of Montreal thus provides an ambiguous image of the importance of family honour in understanding violence between men. On the one hand, it is clear that family honour definitely played a role. Notions of family solidarity, for example, or the importance of keeping out of the courts, of settling oneself, certain family matters, were certainly evident in some cases. But as the preceding discussion shows, they were by no means dominant. And this held for more than just family honour; though it exceeds the scope of this paper, honour more generally seems to have entered far less into the discourse of complaint, to have been less at the heart of violence between men than we would assume.
How to explain this apparently lesser place of family honour, and of honour more generally, in violence between men, than in Europe up to the eighteenth century, or even New France, where the few existing studies of interpersonal conflict seem to describe a society where interpersonal conflict was above all a question of honour?
There are two possibilities. The first is that the society of Quebec and Lower Canada in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was further advanced in the "process of civilization" described by Norbert Elias than, for example, the southern United States at the same period, or Brittanny or Languedoc a few years earlier. Thus, violence had become less acceptable, less at the heart of definitions of masculinity, thus less "honourable". This would also mesh with the fact that the bulk of incidents of violence brought before the criminal justice system in Quebec and Lower Canada, whether related to family honour or not, were relatively minor: punches and kicks rather than more serious wounding, reflecting perhaps a lower threshold for social toleration of violence.
But at another level, this explanation is less convincing. In the first place, the major changes in Quebec and Lower Canadian society between the 1750s and the first part of the 19th century, that could explain such a decline in tolerance for violence, are not evident. More concretely, there are indications that the society was just as violent in the early nineteenth century as in the late eighteenth, and, overall, more violent than in England at the same time: the murder rate, often used to measure the degree of violence in a society, remained unchanged in the district of Montreal between the 1770s and the 1810s, was the same as in New France and in England at the beginning of the 18th century, and considerably higher than that of England at the beginning of the 19th century.(33)
This leads us to another possibility: even if this society was as violent as those in honour-bound societies, even if violence was as much a part of everyday life and even of masculinity itself, the link between male violence and family honour was perhaps less strong than we may have supposed. Indeed, the language used in the court records is above all the language of aggression, of violence, rather than of honour: from the complainants, from the witnesses, not "that person insulted my (or his) honour" but rather "that person hurt me (or him)". The key element of these documents is thus aggression, and not honour.
It is this which leads me to suggest an alternative perspective on violence between men: the key to understanding such violence is not honour, whether it be the defense of family honour or honour more generally, but rather aggression and the desire to dominate physically another. Violence was undoubtedly at the heart of masculinity; but far more as a function of aggression, than of honour, even if honour was not entirely absent. This, of course, is the approach adopted by feminist scholars with regards to male violence against women: domestic violence, sexual aggression, etc., none of which are presented in terms of honour. But it can equally well be applied to understand violence between men.
In recognizing the importance of male aggression in explaining male violence, it is not necessary to advocate a socio-biological approach, where men are "naturally" aggressive. Rather, male aggression can equally be a social construct, an integral part of a socially constructed male identity. Remarkably, there is very little examination of this component of aggression and violence in the construction of masculinity in the extensive literature on masculinity.(34) Concerned as have been many of these researchers in rehabilitating the masculine, violence and aggression are mentioned largely in passing, particularly since most studies of masculinity have concentrated on the elites.(35)
There are several advantages to such an approach. For one thing, conceptualizing violence between men in terms of dominance and aggression, that is to say, in terms of power relations, permits a closer link between violence between men, and male violence against women, as is common in contemporary studies of violence against women. Thus, for example, Thomas Tully, the carpenter assaulted by his landlord, in the years following that incident seems to have become a habitual abuser of women: not only his wife, who had him imprisoned for habitual violence, but also other women. It also bridges the wide conceptual gulf between understanding violence between men (a question of honour), and male violence against women (a question of power and aggression). And it explains why men seemed more interested in protecting family autonomy than acting as defenders of the family: what they were defending was their patriarchal position, rather than a more general family "honour".
These theoretical considerations aside, there is little doubt of the complexity of the relationship between family honour and violence between men. One case illustrates this particularly vividly. The case concerns Jacques Dorion, a Saint-Eustache merchant, who, in March of 1816, was indicted for assault with intent to murder and with rape. At the end of October 1815, Marie-Geneviève Desvoyan dit Laframboise, the wife of François Fleurant, worked for several days at Dorion's, returning each night to her own home. Both Dorion and Laframboise had children, and in both cases the other partner was apparently absent, though for what reason is not apparent. One Monday night, October 30, when she was about to leave as usual, Dorion prevented her, and told one of his young sons, Edouard, "d'aller chercher les enfants de cette femme pour les amener ici, car cette femme ne sortira pas"; Dorion then took Laframboise upstairs, undressed her, put her into his bed, and raped her. The next day, seeing that Laframboise had not returned home, her brother-in-law, François Audet dit Lapointe, along with his wife (Laframboise's sister) and two other men, went to Dorion's house to find her. On their arrival Dorion declared to Lapointe "qu'il ne la verroit pas [Laframboise], je prendrai dit-il ses enfants avec moi - non lui a repondu le déposant vous ne pouvez garder vos propres enfants comment pouvez vous garder ceux des autres - la femme du déposant en a dit autant à J. Dorion et a ajouté qu'elle voulait voir absolument sa soeur - il lui a dit non et les a mis dehors." During this first encounter, Laframboise had attempted to escape by throwing herself from an upper window into the arms of a man waiting below; Dorion's son Edouard, however, called to his father, who came and prevented her, forcibly drawing her away from the window. The men then withdrew, but returned a short time later, and forced open Dorion's door; but having managed to do so, Dorion appeared and fired at them with a gun, injuring one of them as well as a passer-by. Meanwhile, though, Laframboise had managed to escape: while the men were making their failed frontal assault, "la peur a augmenté chez elle, elle a appellé par la lucarne du côté de la cour, des femmes et leur a dit venez à mon recours, Marichette Lalande a approché le bout d'un échelle à la lucarne a tenu l'échelle solide alors la déposante s'est empressé de descendre et s'est sauvé chez son frère."(36)
The web of family honour and male violence in this case is certainly tangled. First there was Dorion, forcibly trying to create a reconstituted family, consisting of himself, Laframboise, and their children, and when others objected, justifying his violent resistance by declaring that he was "maitre chez lui". This was not an isolated incident: Dorion was a habitually violent man. Earlier the same month, his previous servant, Marie-Louise Lecavalier, a 19-year-old from the neighbouring village of Saint-Martin, had accused him of assaulting and beating her and threatening her life;(37) and the registers of the Quarter Sessions of the Peace show him accused of a half-dozen assaults and other violent acts in the decade preceding the incident. There was also his young son Edouard, already inculcated by his father into the necessity of defending his "family", however illegitimate, though still appealing to his father to exercise the physical force necessary to do so. And there was Lapointe, using his physical strength to come to his sister-in-law's rescue, presumably acting in the place of her absent husband, his brother-in-law. Thus far, all relatively straightforwards examples of male defence of the family, though in this case both sides laid claim to this defence. But the situation was more complex. Thus, it was really Marichette Lalande and the other women who rescued Laframboise, during the failed physical assault by the men. And yet, it is only Laframboise's own testimony that described this part of the rescue; that of the men involved concentrated solely on their attempted rescue. Perhaps even more significantly, the depositions that the men made before the local justice of the peace, all the very day of the incident, did not concern what had happened to Laframboise; they all gravitated around the shots fired at them by Dorion, which were the substance of their complaint. It was only two weeks later that Laframboise came forwards to make another deposition before a justice of the peace, accusing Dorion of rape. In appealing to the justice system of the state, the men, it seems, were more interested in punishing what had happened to them, than what had happened to Laframboise.
Notes
1. Case-files of the Court of Quarter Sessions of the Peace of the district of Montreal (ANQM TL32 S1 SS1, hereafter referred to as QSD), 17/10/1786.
2. Registers of the Court of Quarter Sessions of the Peace of the district of Montreal (ANQM TL32 S1 SS11), 11/1786.
3. Case-files of the Courts of Weekly and Special Sessions of the Peace of the district of Montreal (ANQM TL36 S1), 3/6/1843.
4. Yves Castan, Honnêteté et relations sociales en Languedoc, 1715-1780 (Paris: Plon, 1974); Nicole Castan, Les criminels de Languedoc: Les exigences d'ordre et les voies du ressentiment dans une société pre-revolutionnaire, 1750-1790 (Toulouse: Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail, 1980). The literature on interpersonal violence in France is especially voluminous; recent examples include Robert Muchembled, La violence au village: sociabilité et comportements populaires en Artois du XVe au XVIIe siècle (Turnhout: Brepols, 1989); Nicole Gonthier, Cris de haine et rites d'unité: la violence dans les villes, XIIIe-XVIe siècle (Turnhout: Brepols, 1992); Jean Quéniart, Le grand chapelletout: violence, normes et comportements en Bretagne rurale au 18e siècle (Rennes: Éditions Apogée, 1993).
5. J.M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England, 1660-1800 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986); other studies include J.A. Sharpe, "Domestic Homicide in Early Modern England." Hist. J. 1981 24(1): 29-48; Lawrence Stone, "Interpersonal Violence in English Society, 1300-1980", Past & Present 101(1983): 22-33; J.S. Cockburn, "Patterns of Violence in English Society: Homicide in Kent 1560-1985," Past & Present 130(1991): 70-106.
6. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982).
7. Among others, Dickson D. Bruce, Violence and culture in the antebellum South (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979); Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Honor and Violence in the Old South (New York: Oxford UP, 1986).
8. Tedd Robert Gurr ed., Violence in America (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1989); Carol Zisowitz Stearns and Peter N. Stearns, Anger: the struggle for emotional control in America's history (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
9. For an overview of the literature on violence against women, see the bibliography in the Journal of Women's History 3(2)(1991): 163-170; notable works for the pre- and early-industrial period include Elizabeth Pleck, Domestic Tyranny: The Making of Social Policy Against Family Violence from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Oxford UP, 1987) and Anna Clark, Women's Silence, Men's Violence: Sexual Assault in England, 1770-1845 (New York: Pandora, 1986).
10. For example, Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England, 1500-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), or Elliott J. Gorn, "'Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch:' The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry", American Historical Review 90(1)(1985): 18-43.
11. Muchembled, La violence au village; Jean-François Leclerc, "Justice et infra-justice en Nouvelle-France: les voies de fait à Montréal entre 1700 et 1760", Criminologie 18(1)(1985): 25-39; Jean-Philippe Garneau, "Justice et règlement des conflits dans le gouvernement de Montréal à la fin du Régime français", mémoire de maîtrise (histoire), Université du Québec à Montréal, 1995.
12. Gorn, "'Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch'".
13. Honnêteté et relations sociales en Languedoc: 199.
14. The observations in this paper are drawn from the records of the official justice system, and more especially, the records of the criminal courts of the judicial district of Montreal, from the 1780s to the early 1840s. The bulk of the material is drawn from a study of the records of the lower courts, those of the justices of the peace, between 1780 and 1830. The useful parts consist very largely of the depositions of complainants, along with a few statements of witnesses; what this means is that for the most part these sources do not reveal an "objective" attempt on the part of the magistrate to understand the situation, or even the defense of the accused, but rather the discourse of the complainant, though this latter often included a detailed description of the incident in question. Further, these courts dealt only with less serious crimes of violence. To supplement this, I have added a cursory examination of some of the records of the superior criminal court, the King's Bench, as well as, for the early 1840s, a remarkable series of documents which consist of the detailed testimony of victims and witnesses in cases of assault tried summarily before Montreal's police magistrates.
15. Apart from Leclerc and Garneau, cited above, see especially André Lachance and Sylvie Savoie, "Violence, Marriage and Family Honour: Aspects of the Legal Regulation of Marriage in New France", in Jim Phillips, Tina Loo, and Susan Lewthwaite eds., Essays in the History of Canadian Law. Volume 5: Crime and Criminal Justice (Toronto: UTP, 1994): 143-173.
16. Lachance and Savoie, "Violence, Marriage and Family Honour": 144.
17. Further information on the role of family honour as a defence will come from an examination of petitions for pardons, National Archives of Canada, RG4 B20.
18. Richard Burn, The Justice of the Peace, and Parish Officer... 16th edition (London, 1788) I:113.
20. Donald Fyson, "Criminal Justice, Civil Society, and the Local State: The Justices of the Peace in the District of Montreal, 1764-1830" (Ph.D., Université de Montréal, 1995): 263-405.
22. I have explored the responses of victims of spouse abuse in "Women as Complainants before the Justices of the Peace in the District of Montreal, 1779-1830", paper presented to the Canadian Historical Association, June 1996. On Paris, see Alan Williams, "Patterns of Conflict in Eighteenth-Century Parisian Families", Journal of Family History 18(1)(1993): 39-52; on Montreal, Kathryn Harvey, "Amazons and Victims: Resisting Wife-Abuse in Working-class Montreal, 1869-1879", Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 2(1991): 131-148.
23. QSD 4/5/1820; Desautels had also charged Labadie with beating her in 1815, declaring that he had been beating her for some 15 years (QSD 21/1/1815).
28. France Parent and Geneviève Postolec, "Quand Thémis rencontre Clio: les femmes et le droit en Nouvelle-France", Les Cahiers de Droit 36(1)(1995): 293-318.
31. QSD 10/12/1795, 12/12/1795.
32. Castan, Honnêteté et relations sociales en Languedoc: 175-179; Burn,The Justice of the Peace, and Parish Officer...: IV:405-406.
33. For the four years 1778-1781, the murder rate (based on indictments) for the district of Montreal was about 2.4 per 100 000 per year. For the six years 1812-1817, the rate was about 2 per 100 000 per year. In England in the early 18th century, the rate was 2.4 per 100 000 per year; by the beginning of the nineteenth century it had dropped to 1.5 per 100 000 per year (Cockburn, "Patterns of Violence").
34. There are some exceptions; for example, E. Anthony Rotundo, "Boy Culture: Middle-Class Boyhood in Nineteenth-Century America", in Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen, eds. Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990): 15-36, argues that violence and cruelty were an essential component of middle-class boy culture (from age 6 to about adolescence).
35. For example, the recent survey by Michael S. Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996) makes almost no mention of violence.
36. Case-files of the Court of King's Bench of the district of Montreal (ANQM TL19 S1 SS1), 10/1786.