BLOWS AND SCRATCHES, SWORDS AND GUNS:
VIOLENCE BETWEEN MEN AS MATERIAL REALITY AND LIVED EXPERIENCE IN EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY LOWER CANADA
Donald Fyson, Université Laval (donald.fyson@hst.ulaval.ca)
A paper for the 78th annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association, Sherbrooke, June 1999
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I. INTRODUCTION
The history of interpersonal violence(1) in general, and of violent acts by men in particular, has undergone a considerable efflorescence in recent decades, with for example major studies by European and North American scholars. Interpersonal violence has been studied as a general socio-cultural phenomenon,(2) and also, by feminist scholars, in the context of violence by men against women.(3) More recently, violence between men has been examined as a specifically gender-based phenomenon, linked to masculinity, honour and aggression.(4)
Two broad approaches have characterized the study of the history of interpersonal violence. The first approach follows a fairly standard social-science model, inspired largely by sociology or criminology, whose most important feature is the analysis of aggregate statistics.(5) For example, the debate over the decline of violence in society in England from the middle ages to the present is based in large part on an examination of the frequency of murders.(6)
The problems with quantitative studies of the history of violence are well-known. For example, most such studies use aggregate statistics drawn from official sources, such as court, police and prison records. These sources are deficient on at least two counts. First, for everything but murder (and even then), violent crime statistics drawn from official records are notoriously inaccurate reflections of the actual level of violence in a society. This is true even in the twentieth century: as one brief example, official statistics suggest that the rate of less serious violent crime in Quebec increased six-fold between 1961 and 1990, hardly credible as a reflection of actual violence in Quebec society.(7) It is even more true in the nineteenth century and earlier. Secondly, the official legal categories used in quantifying violence are often very broad. In English common law, for example, assault and battery covered everything from grabbing someone by the clothes to smashing them over the head with a stone,(8) so that a study of the rate of assault and battery indictments is at best a crude measure of violence.
Partly in reaction to these problems with objective quantitative analysis, and also as part of the larger turn in history towards meaning and representation, a second approach has developed to the study of violence. Drawing on cultural anthropology, Foucauldian or feminist theories of power relations, discourse analysis and deconstruction, and other elements of post-modern theory and methodology, the goal is largely to reconstruct, uncover or unpack the larger socio-cultural significance of individual acts of violence, such as unequal power relations, attitudes towards institutions like church and state, and the like.(9) Unlike the quantitative analyses, violence itself is not the central object of these studies, but rather, the meanings that surround and underlie violence. The best example is probably the vast literature on violence against women, where violence is taken to symbolize the asymmetrical power relations that flow from patriarchy.
Both of these approaches are eminently useful; the first has allowed us to grasp and compare, in broad terms, the level of violence in different societies at different times; the second, to elucidate the larger socio-cultural meanings hiding behind violent acts. But both have come at the price of shifting the focus away from the material reality of interpersonal violence, the first by adopting a realist approach which erects violence into an autonomous abstract category, the second by focussing on meaning rather than reality. As a result, both have downplayed an important part of the experience of the people involved in violence: the violent act itself, as lived physical experience.
This is not to say that the historiography of violence has entirely neglected the physical act itself. Historians of violence against women, in particular, have always worked from the concrete experiences and stories of battered women, and included discussions of, for example, the importance of the sheer physical strength of husbands compared the wives they beat. However, this concentration on the act itself has had less resonance for those who have examined violence as a general cultural phenomenon,(10) and, paradoxically, even less for those who have approached violence between men from a gendered perspective.
This paper is an attempt to address this other aspect of the history of violence by approaching violence between men as material reality and lived experience. Why violence between men, rather than violence in general, or even male violence in general? Simply put, as other scholars have shown, male violence is very different from female violence, and violence between men is different from male violence against women or children.(11) The paper begins with a discussion of the reconstruction of violence as material reality and past experience. It then concretizes this by presenting the results of a preliminary examination of court cases and newspaper reports that reveal violence between men in Lower Canada in the first half of the nineteenth century, most notably the records of the Courts of King's Bench (covering more serious crimes) and of Quarter Sessions (covering less serious crimes) in the districts of Quebec and Montreal.(12)
II. APPROACHING VIOLENCE AS MATERIAL REALITY AND LIVED EXPERIENCE
Violence can be many things, and the word is often broadened to include not only physical acts but also threats of physical acts, mental aggression, even economic imposition.(13) Without stepping into this important but complex debate, my focus is on that subset of violence comprised of physical acts involuntarily imposed, or attempted to be imposed, by one individual on another: blows, pushes, scratches; objects thrown, guns fired, swords slashed; spitting, grabbing, kicking. All of these physical acts were embedded in deeper meanings; they all represented broader tendancies; but they were all also lived, experienced physically, in the body, both by the aggressor and the victim. Put simply, a fist struck by one person against another certainly bore a whole series of cultural signifiers, and resulted in a statistic that may allow us to measure the level of violence in that society; but it was also a physical phenomenon experienced by both the hitter and the hit. If the fist became a stick, the whole physical phenomenon and lived experience changed, even if the cultural significance and the statistic often remained the same. If the stick became a sword or a bayonnette, the cultural significance changed fundamentally, and often too the statistic, but so did the physical experience.
But beyond the importance of the material reality of violence, which is relatively straightfowards, there lies the question of violence as human experience. Most detailed analyses of the history of violence that go beyond simple statistics are based at least in part on the archives of the judicial system: case files, trial testimony, pardon requests, and the like. We commonly think of judicial archives as serial sources, but large chunks of them are not serial in the same way as a census, an annual police report or even a prison register. Case files are more of the nature of a massive anthology, a collection of stories. They are certainly not stories in the sense of constructed narratives, with a beginning, middle and end, like Natalie Zemon Davis' pardon tales.(14) They are short stories, usually, often very short; but very personal stories, purporting to be small glimpses of lived experience.
Faced with this multitude of stories, historians have had two impulses. The first has been to seek the larger impersonal patterns within this mass of personal stories, through quantification. The second has been not to take the stories at face value, but rather to interpret, to unpack, to seek the hidden meta-discourse or meta-signification and, above all, to treat them as fictions; after all, they were stories. Both of these approaches are eminently valid; it is important to know what percentage of murders involved elites, or what it really meant when someone spit in someone else's face. The problem is that both approaches leave little room for individual experience, in favour of, on the one hand, aggregate data that reveals broader trends and, on the other hand, meaning that rises above simple experience. The judicial archives contain thousands of individual stories, about real people to whom real things happened; neither quantification nor discourse analysis provide the tools necessary to understand and appreciate this.
Clearly, it is difficult to separate meaning from experience from context; each informs and is shaped by the other. What I am proposing for this paper is more of a change in emphasis, towards violence between men as lived experience; in other words, as phenomenon. Indeed, though I am not suggesting a strictly phenomenological approach to violence, my wish to go back to the physical experience of the violence itself is inspired in part by the cry of the phenomenologists, «to the things themselves». There is nothing particularly novel about this turn to experience; it is more of a shift in focus, a heuristic device to remind us to place those who experienced it in their bodies at the center of our examinations of violence.
It might be objected that it is impossible to reconstruct and relive experience from words on paper, which cannot reproduce experience. But the degree of detail in the stories in the judicial archives is no impediment to an empathetic reconstruction of the physical experience they involved. For example, in 1840, David St-Hilaire, an apprentice carpenter in Quebec City, made a complaint against Olivier Garneau, a blacksmith; regarding the actual incident, his deposition said only that "he was violently assaulted beat and his face disfigured".(15) And yet, those last four words allow us to make an empathetic link with a youth who was hit in the face, by a man engaged in a highly physical trade, hard enough to mark him up. As physical beings ourselves, we can understand physical sensations such as pain - when I read about a man's nose being bitten off, I can indeed sense what he felt.
But this brings us to another problem: that of truth in the archives. If we are to take a stab at reconstructing past experiences, we have to face head-on the question of whether we are actually grasping past reality - not from the perspective of the sophistic debates over the existence of the past but rather in a more concrete appreciation of what the sources we use can and cannot tell us about the lived experience of past individuals. And there is the rub - did these experiences really happen? And if they did, what can we know about them?
The case of John McNiles is instructive. In March 1826, the Sherrington farmer appeared before the King's Bench in Montreal and related the rather horrifying experience of an assault on him the previous year, on Christmas Day:
[Robert Managh] laid hold of him by the kerchief and choked him, while [Hugh Managh] laid hold of witness by the private parts and called to his brother to pull the bullocks off him ... in the bustle the prisoners bit his fingers. At this time Robert had hold of witness by the private parts, but being forced to let go his hold ... he laid hold of the under lip of the witness with his teeth, and bit a piece of it, he saw the piece in his teeth and the blood dripping from it - the witness then turned himself a little on one side when Robert got hold of the finger of witness in his teeth and bit it very much. That Hugh Managh assisted [Robert] by kicking the the witness while Robert had hold of witness by the bollocks and was ill-using him. Witness had his fingers much bit, and three pieces bit out of his thigh ... that the middle part of his lip was bit off down to the chin, and he has no use of it."(16)
The problem is that, while no-one denied that the fight had occurred, no other witness, prosecution or defence, corroborated its specific details, including the lip-biting; indeed, one of the prosecution's own witnesses stated that McNiles had confessed to him a day later that he had been drunk and did not remember a thing. In a rare move, which renders McNiles' testimony even more suspect, the judges on the bench stopped the trial, declared that the prosecution had "failed in material facts to support it" and directed the jury to acquit. Evidently, McNiles was lacking a piece of lip (proseuctors and judges were not that foolish!); it seems likely that he lost it during this fight (the defense suggested that it had caught on a stump); beyond that, we cannot really say what happened. Our reconstruction of his lived experience must remain at the sheer physical fact of a lip torn off, though even that is a lot.
McNiles story was more than just McNiles' testimony, which is precisely what allowed us to reject large parts of it. Indeed, one thing that distinguishes the stories of male violence in the judicial archives from other fictions is that, as in all judicial documents, the authorship is almost always collective.(17) First, for each piece of testimony, there were at least three authors who intervened to varying degrees - the person describing their experience; the magistrate or judge or lawyer eliciting the responses; finally, the person, usually a clerk, writing down the words (though sometimes these last two were combined, as in the case of magistrates who took down their own depositions). Sometimes this judicial intervention hinders our grasp at past reality, as in indictments and formulaic depositions where the act was rendered into judicial formulae, "assaulted and beaten without any provocation", "with force and arms", etc. which eventually became parts of standard printed forms; but it also acted as a filter on the most egregious of falsities, since magistrates were unlikely to sign manifestly false depositions, or crown prosecutors prepare manifestly false indictments (except, perhaps, in political cases). But the multiple authorship did not stop there, at the level of individual stories. In many cases, particularly civil cases and more serious criminal cases, there were multiple deponents or witnesses, from both sides of the case; the story then became even more collective. Life-experience stories gathered from the judicial archives were thus eminently collective, and that very collectivity of competing voices can often allow us to grasp at reconstructing what really occurred.
Indeed, one of the unexpected advantages of focussing on violence between men as physical phenomena rather than on, for example, the motivations of violence, is that in the court records, there was often relatively little dispute over the physical "facts" of the case insofar as the violent acts themselves were concerned. In cases where we hear the defense, the defense seldom questioned that the violent acts had occurred, since the evidence was often manifest. In simple assault cases, it is very rare to find defendants who utterly denied the fact of the assault; in the case of public incidents, with other witnesses present, which were very frequent, this would have been foolish. It is also difficult to imagine a victim complaining of being stabbed but not having any stab wound to prove it; even McNiles must have had a piece of his lip missing. Finally, in murder cases, the accounts of witnesses and the examination of the body by doctors generally agreed on the wounds received, though there were long debates on whether or not these wounds had actually caused the death. Disagreement came about either regarding the involvement of the defendants in the act, in cases where they had not been recognized (there were often questions as to how dark the night was), or in the interpretation of the events: the motivations of the violence, for example, or the chain of events leading up to the violence, with the defense seeking to prove that the violence was justified or provoked.
Fincally, the very serial nature of the sources also protects us. We cannot take a single case in the judicial archives and have any absolute certainty as to its veracity; but across a large number of cases of individual experiences, we can build up a pattern of intersubjectivity, of shared experience, which does allow us to grasp, in some broader sense, the meanings of these individual experiences. There is, of course, no positivist, rational-logical certainty whatsoever in this; perhaps, like pardon tales, judicial records of cases of violence are simply a tissue of lies.(18) But is this sufficient for us to throw the baby out with the bathwater, to deny any validity to the stories in the judicial archives and to do an end-run around past reality by treating them only as fictions? This seems to me to be a less than satisfactory approach. For one thing, it would invalidate many conclusions of research based on court records, including much of the extensive research on violence against women. Even further, from an ethical point of view, it denies the very real experiences of past individuals who lived and suffered. But that is a whole other debate ...
III. VIOLENCE BETWEEN MEN IN LOWER CANADA, 1800-1850
With these issues in mind, and the general orientation of the reconstruction of material reality and lived experience rather than abstract second-order constructs or meaning, we can now turn to the specific example at hand, namely violence between men in Lower Canadian society in the first half of the nineteenth century. To put my later discussions into context, the paper first examines violence in Lower Canadian society from a quantitative approach based on murder statistics, and as portrayed in newspapers; it then turns to the stories of violence themselves in the judicial archives.
1. Violence in Lower Canada: the quantitative approach
Quantitatively, Lower Canadian society was relatively violent for its time. The notion that societies in general, and men in particular, were overall more violent in the past, and that violence gradually declined over time, is a persistent one. It crops up in its most general form in works like Norbert Elias' The Civilizing Process and, more specifically to violence, in works like Jean-Claude Chesnais' Histoire de la violence en Occident de 1800 à nos jours.(19) If we take murder rates as an indication of violence, as most of these studies have, we find that Lower-Canadian society was slower in following this trend: in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, its homicide rates were considerably higher than those of England, France or the northeatern United States at the same time. For the six years 1812-1817, the murder rate for the district of Montreal (based on indictments) was about 2.0 per 100 000 per year; for the district of Quebec, the rate was somewhat lower, staying steady at about 1.7 per 100 000 per year for the period 1794 through 1817.(20) In England in the early eighteenth century, the rate was 2.4 per 100 000 per year, but by the beginning of the nineteenth century it had dropped to 1.5 in Kent and 0.9 in Surrey; in France, the rate for 1825-1830 was about 1.4 per 100 000 per year; finally, in Massachussetts it was a little over 1 for the 1830s and 1850s, though about double that in Boston itself.(21) We might therefore be tempted to conclude that Lower Canadian society was considerably more violent than these others, and conformed more to the image of eighteenth-century England and France, with generalized and wide-spread violence being part of everyday life.(22) This would also fit with recent demonstrations that in terms of public and collective violence, Canadian society was not the "peaceable kingdom" once postulated.(23)
2. The image of violence between men
If we move from quantitative analyses of violence, to the image of violence between men as portrayed in the newspapers of the time, we begin to get a somewhat more nuanced view of violence in Lower Canadian society.
First, the theme of violence between men does not seem to have been an overwhelming preoccupation. The one exception was public violence, especially with political overtones - election violence, group violence between sodiers and civilians, and the like, all reported with intensely partisan rhetoric by the newspapers of the time. If we exclude these, it becomes clear that "private" violence between men was a significant but not major preoccupation: in La Minerve, for example, Montreal's main francophone nationalist newspaper from the late 1820s to the late 1830s, there were perhaps a half-dozen decriptions of non-political violence between men per year. The theme became more popular as the period advanced: in the Montreal Transcript for 1847, for example, there were almost two dozen articles describing murders, assaults, robberies and the like, though in a francophone Quebec City newspaper like Le Canadien in 1850, only a dozen.(24)
Nevetheless, when newspapers did touch on the subject of non-political violence between men, it was generally in the typically alarmist discourse applied by nineteenth-century elites to most perceived social problems. All the usual stereotypes were trotted out. The roving bands of robbers, ready to prey on the unwary: in 1827, La Minerve described the robbery of Jean-Baptiste Betrand, a Sault-des-Récollets habitant, whose five robbers "saisirent violemment Mr. Bertrand à la gorge, le serrant dangereusement et le frappant à coups de baton, et lui tenant une hâche sur la gorge, ils le menacèrent de le tuer s'il ne leur révéloit où étoit l'argent".(25) The vicious madman, horribly murdering his neighbour or employer: in 1845, the Montreal Transcript reported with gusto the "most diaboliocal outrage" that was the axe-murder of a Hemmingford farmer by his neighbour.(26) Depending on the political leanings of the newspaper, the rowdy English soldiers attacking canadien civilians (as in the two who bayonnetted two Montreal watchmen in 1829, reported by La Minerve)(27) or the valiant British soldiers defending themselves against French ruffians (as in the murder of a soldier in 1835, as reported in the Tory Montreal Herald).(28) And so on.
The most important goal of the newspapers was to replace the reader in the context of the violent acts: motivations, meanings, and so on. They spent relatively little time describing the actual experience of violence, except for the physical sequellae of the victim, which were sometimes dwelt on. Still, a composite discourse regarding men's expoerience of violence did emerge. First, the violence that men experienced very often involved weapons; indeed, in 1832, La Minerve asked "Jusqu'à quand permettra-t-on que des assasins parcourent les rues de cette ville, armés de pistolets et de poignards? ... Depuis quelque tems des jeunes gens en portent, même le jour; ils s'en vantent ouvertement, et cependant, on n'y met pas ordre. Il est à espérer qu'on ne permettra pas plus long tems une pratique aussi dangereuse."(29) Second, violence was both extraordinary and ordinary: extraordinary in that its perpetrators, as described above, were ruffians and blackguards, marginal to society; ordinary, in that any member of society might become its victim, at any moment. A description in the Montreal Transcript in 1845 sums this up neatly:
We have received a paper signed by three working men narating a cowardly assault, made on them by a party of ruffians in the neighbourhood of the Bishop's Church, as they were returning quietly from their work ... they were assaulted in the most cowardly way by these persons, who came stealthily behind them, and struck them with stones which they held in their hands ... We had hoped there was an end of these attacks, but it would not seem so.(30)
And as the last example also suggests, violence was group violence. Most of the reports in the newspapers concerned
violence between groups of men, or of groups of men on single men: almost laconically, La Minerve reported
that in an assault on one Savard in 1836, "les assaillans étaient au nombre de six ou sept".(31) Overall, the impression is thus of a very violent society, and one growing more
violent by the year. In 1834, after describing three recent assaults in Montreal, La Minerve declared that
"toutes ces particularités nous annoncent de quels gens nous sommes entourés";(32)
in 1836, the same paper declared that "les vols et les assauts nocturnes font maintenant le fond de toutes
les conversations ... chaque nuit presque feu le met son ample contingent d'attentats contre les personnes et les
propriétés;"(33) and in 1843, the Montreal Transcript
decried the "scenes of blackguradism and violence which have all too often been brought under our notice"(34), and later in the same year, declared that "our once peaceable Colony seems
to be in a bad way", even comparing the situation with "that new Astoria - Texas".(35)
3. The material reality of violence between men: a composite portrait of experience
If we move from the newspapers to the stories in the judicial archives, however, we find something else again. But first, since what we are dealing with is evidently a sample of the vastly greater number of violent acts that actually occurred, a word about the nature of those that left traces in the archives. On the whole, there is no reason to suppose that these were less severe than the norm. Instead, there were at least three levels of filtering that would tend to leave us with more rather than less serious cases. First, the very fact of having been brought to the attention of the official justice system of the State meant that these violent acts were considered important in some way, since it is very evident that only the tiniest proportion were brought before justice. Second, insofar as the lesser instances in the Quarter Sessions are concerned, a large proportion of depositions, certainly more than half, contained only standard formulae such as "was assaulted and beat". This generally meant without the use of any other weapons and without any serious sequellae, since these added to the weight of the charge; but in order to err on the side of caution, I have excluded these stories from my anthology. Finally, again for the Quarter Sessions, the stories come only from the victims themselves, and so are harder to assess than for the King's Bench, where multiple witnesses intervened; but since victims themselves would probably not have a tendancy to underestimate the degree of violence they had undergone, we can at least be sure that if anything, we are erring on the side of seeing violence as greater than it actually was.(36)
In addressing the material reality of violence, we can start with the general tendancies, in order to construct a composite picture of the experiences of men. First, by whom was the violence carried out? In direct opposition to the image portrayed in the newspapers, it was largely by individuals, or at most pairs; less than a tenth of cases involved three men or more as aggressors, and fully three-quarters involved only one aggressor.(37) Men's experience of violence was thus above all individual, one-on-one or two-on-one, which made that very different from, for example, the general brawls that seem to have characterized violence in medieval Europe.(38)
The violent acts themselves were short and sharp. Most depositions complained of a series of one, two or three blows, pushes or grabs. Fights more properly speaking were also often short: in 1821, the skirmish between Cottip Huff, a German soldier, and Peter Divan, at Lachine, lasted all of two minutes of blows and counter-blows, culminating in a blow to the head with a sword which sliced the back of Divan's head and led to his death thirteen days later.(39) Even in cases where both parties agreed to a formal fight, the fights often did not last long: a few blows exchanged, one or the other of the men knocked down, and the violence was over. In general, men did not live lengthy rituals of violence; rather, violence was for them sudden and aggressive.
As for weapons, most acts of violence described to the courts did not involve them, but rather the body itself. Men punched, pushed and grabbed, and far less frequently, kicked. If they used weapons, they were often the everyday objects close at hand - a whip, a rock, a carpenter's plane, a pitchfork, a handful of salt thrown in the eyes. Again, this emphasizes the sudden nature of the violence.
Dedicated weapons, such as guns, knives and swords, on the other hand, were rarely part of men's experience of violence. Knives in particular were used surprisingly rarely, being mentioned in the barest fraction of cases. There were, however, two important exceptions to this rule. First, the stick, which was by far the weapon most favoured by men. Men hit men with sticks, of all shapes and sizes: canes, walking-sticks, whip-handles, ox-goads. The second exception was more serious: the weapons of soldiers, especially bayonnettes but also guns and swords. Soldiers, even off-duty, carried and used their weapons, and formed an important, though not in the least dominant, sub-group of violent men. Bayonnette- and sword-wielding soldiers were a regular feature both in the newspapers and in court cases; reworked in terms of what their victims experienced, this became even more important. From the perspective of Jean-Baptiste Castonguay, a Montreal constable, it was only because the two soldiers who attacked him in 1808 had sabres that the blow to his arm "lui a coupé le cartilage et les tendons jusqu'à l'os", according to the surgeon who attended him; a stick would have bruised him and no more.(40)
This lack of dedicated weapons is very important, since it tells us that in general, non-military men did not go about their daily lives armed with knives, swords or pistols, or if they did, they did not use them in fights with other men. The violence they thus faced was far different from that on, for example, the American frontier, or in early modern Europe, where these weapons were commonplace and contributed largely to the high murder rates.
The relative scarcity of weapons also means that these violent acts were acts between bodies: fists, feet, faces, fingers. The experience of violence was thus much more linked to individuals' personal physical prowess, than was the case when weapons such as swords or, more especially, guns, were used. Indeed, though it exceeds the scope of this paper, there were numerous cases where violent incidents arose out of bragging between two men over their relative strength. Further, in dealing with cases of violence, judges and counsel frequently asked witnesses to characterize the relative strengths of agressor and agressee. Thus, the actual physical condition of the parties, whether it be their strength or their weakness, was an important feature of the case presented by the prosecution. Regarding victims: "son fils n'était pas robuste";(41) or, in contrast, "had he not been a strong man he could not have supported the blows he received".(42) Regarding aggressors: "the defendant has the character of being of considerable strength";(43) or again, "he is a man of great strength and used to knock people about a good deal".(44) But these physical characterizations could also be used by the defence: in an 1802 civil case opposing Joseph Laberge and Amable Bissonette, both Varennes habitants, for example, a potent argument for the defence was that Laberge had declared the next day that "le défendeur lui a donné un coup de poing mais que ce coup de poing avoit été donné par un moribond, qu'il nen sentoit aucun mal."(45) Strong or weak, men lived violence directly in their bodies, not only as victims, but also as attackers.
On their bodies, men felt violence in well-defined places. The area most often attacked was the head (face and skull), followed by the torso. The preference for the head was clearly expressed in the statement attributed by Duncan King, a Montreal farmer, to his aggressors during an 1821 assault: "McMillan told Thompson to strike [King] on the head, that was the best place."(46) In this respect, violence had not changed since the middle ages, when the head and face, followed by the body, where also the favoured targets. Once again, we are confronted with the extremely personal and physical nature of this violence: a man lived in his head, especially in his face, and that is where he was most often attacked.
On the other hand, deliberate maiming of the extremities and the body's other vulnerable parts was rare. Elliot Gorn has described fighting in the ante-bellum South as particularly brutal, with eye-gouging, finger-biting, and the like being routine elements of fights between men.(47) This was far from the norm in Lower Canada, with very few instances of this sort of extreme violence. I have come across but one instance of eye-gouging, for example, and that one unsuccessful. Few Lower-Canadian men, it seems, had the stomach to inflict such brutality; but that also meant that few of them experienced the extreme pain and disfigurement that accompanied these acts.
Indeed, the long-term physical effects of these violent attacks were suprisingly mild, especially considering the propensity for blows to the head. Death from attacks was relatively rare; through the murder rate may have been relatively high compared to other societies at the same time, this translated into perhaps six or seven murders of all types per year in the colony in the 1810s, a far cry from the middle ages, where over half of all attacks resulted in death, or the murder-a-day common in some American frontier towns.(48) Apart from murder cases involving broken skulls, few victims seem to have suffered reported broken bones. By far the most common sequellae, if they were mentioned at all, were cuts and bruises.
Overall, examining violence between men from this perspective thus gives us a quite different view of the nature of violence in general than either quantitative analysis or contemporary discourse would suggest. That there was considerable violence between men in this society is beyond a doubt; but looking at the violent acts as material reality suggests that what men experienced was violence at a lesser level than what we might have been led to believe. The difference between the violence men experienced, and the violence they inflicted on their wives, is in this respect striking: in the Lower Canadian courts, wives regularly complained of the most brutal of repeated violence perpetrated on them by their husbands.
4. Ethnic and class distortions of the experience of violence
Lower Canadian society was highly fragmented, among others along ethnic and class lines. Does our composite picture hold when broken down along these lines? Insofar as ethnicity is concerned, La Minerve was categorical; anglophones were more brutal than canadiens:
Voici des faits, entre mille, qui démontrent victorieusement la modération des patriotes et l'horreur que leur inspire un acte de cruauté ... un Canadien désarma un Écossais qui l'attaquait à coups de baionnette; il le repoussa et emporta l'arme meurtrière cachée sous sa redingote. «Pourquoi ne l'as tu pas frappé?» lui demanda quelqu'un. «C'est de valeur que de tuer un homme! je n'ai pu m'y résoudre» ... Dans une autre rencontre ... un jeune Canadien fut frappé à coup de bâton; il désarma aussitôt l'adversaire, jetta l'arme loin de lui, et se défendit avec ses seuls bras.(49)
This assertion does not, however, stand up to examination. Overall, there was little difference between the experiences of francophone and anglophone men. For example, if we take the use of teeth as an example of more savage violence, we find that it was equally francophones and anglophones who participated, both as victims and as aggressors. They used and were hit by similar weapons, mainly hands and feet; they aimed for and were hurt on similar parts of their bodies; their fights turned to murder in similar proportions; in short, in terms of the experience of violence, there was little to distinguish the two populations. In this respect, the comment of La Minerve, in reality, applied equally to both anglophones and francophones in Lower Canada. There are, however, two important caveats. First, as explained above, violence took a particular form in that subset of the anglophone population composed of soldiers, who much more frequently used weapons. And second, if we turn briefly from the experience of violence back to the quantification of the level of violence, we find that in the District of Montreal, where about three quarters of the population was francophone, francophones were less likely to be the perpetrators or victims of murders than anglophones.(50)
If we turn to the effects of class, we find that it had a much greater effect on men's experience of violence. In purely statistical terms, there was very little difference between elite men and men in general: elite men, both anglophone and francophone, participated in violence both as perpetrators and as victims, in the same proportions as men in general. However, elite men did not live violence in the same way as their popular-class counterparts. For one thing, elite men in Lower Canada, both francophone and anglophone, participated fully, with the same ambiguities, in the duelling culture explored so well by Cecilia Morgan for Upper Canada.(51) Here was the drawn-out ritual of violence not present in the experiences of other men in Lower Canadian society. Further, though elite men were also involved in other less formalized violence, their experiences were literally quite separate. Though they might be the victims of other elite men, and though they might be the aggressors against men of other classes, they were very rarely the victims of men from other classes of society.
The case of David Stansfield, the son of a Montreal merchant, highlight this dynamic perfectly. In 1811, Stansfield, along with a friend, John McTavish, was the aggressor towards Joseph Dubé, a carpenter and joiner: McTavish and Stansfield horse-whipped him and rode him down with their horses (one of which bit Dubé's arm). Three months later, Stansfield was himself the victim, hit in the face and bloodied by John Boston, a Montreal attorney.(52) In the 1820s, Stansfeld, by now a merchant in his own right, was again involved in violence: in 1820, he was accused of assault and battery by James Dunn, a Montreal labourer; in 1825, he and John Parker, another Montreal merchant, also exchanged blows.(53) There were evidently some exceptions to this general rule, such as the doctor whose client hit him in the head during a particularly painful tooth extraction,(54) or the Quebec City shipbuilder, John Goudie, whose finger was almost bitten off by Hilaire Boucher, a labourer whom he had just fired.(55) But these were very much the exception; in general, elite men could expect violence mainly from men of their own class. Is it perhaps that they simply did not bring other cases before the courts, perhaps due to the dishonour of being beaten by a social inferior? Not really, because even in the most serious cases, of severe beatings, mutilations and murders, where there was a much greater propensity to go to the courts, elite men were generally not involved as the victims of other classes. Even the cases of robbery and highway robbery brought before the Montreal King's Bench, where we would expect to find elite victims, were directed almost exclusively at ordinary Lower Canadian men, farmers, artisans, and the like.
Other aspects of violence involving elite men also set it apart from violence between men in general. For instance, when they were the aggressors, elite men had a propensity for using whips, especially against those they considered their social inferiors. To the experience of Dubé, related above, we can add another example, that of Daniel Delaney, a Montreal labourer; in 1843, while passing through St. Paul St. leading his horse, which was pulling a sleigh full of dung, some fell into the sleigh of Alexander Gibbs, a Montreal merchant; Gibbs got out his whip, cut Delaney three times and knocked him down unconcious.(56) On the other hand, elite men did not use sticks, apart from their canes or walking sticks, nor everyday objects, nor swords, nor guns. This last in particular is surprising, since elite men had ready access to and also carried guns when they felt the need: in 1833, for example, during his testimony in an attempted murder trial, William Ker, a member of Montreal's anglophone elite, declared that "it was not safe to walk the streets at night without some means of defence, and he knew that several persons carried fire arms with them for their protection", referring to the period just preceding the 1832 by-election massacre.(57)
The class bias of the experience of violence is thus clear. Elites may have feared a violent underclass, may have seen it as a symptom of disorder that threatened them, but interclass violence directed at them was nevertheless a minor feature of their experience of violence. They might vent their anger on other classes, they might fight among themselves, but individually, they had little to fear from other classes in society. This may explain why In 1823, for example, John A. Mathison, a prosperous Vaudreuil farmer who later became a hated and tyrannical Justice of the Peace,(58) was unafraid enough to approach, alone, and physically confront, a crowd of his neighbours armed with axes who were breaking down a fence he had built across their customary right of way - and indeed, the worst they did was push him roughly aside.(59)
5. Violence as individual experience
The composite picture of men's experiences of violence that emerges from the court records is useful and necessary. But this composite is made up of of individual lived experiences, which, if we want to respect a resolutely experiential perspective, it is essential to take into account. Indeed, what matters as much as the average or general nature of the violence is the range of the experience of violence.
For example, guns, swords and other penetrating weapons, though used in a small minority of violent instances, had a devastating effect, given the ambient state of medical care. In 1816, John Byrne, a Montreal hatter, was shot in the wrist by Bernardin Panet, a farmer living near Montreal; Byrne's arm was amputated by Daniel Arnoldi, Montreal's pre-eminent surgeon, "as the only means to save his life".(60) Byrne was lucky, for he lived; more often than not, deep wounds resulted in death. Victims of violence knew this all too well; a fairly common declaration on receiving a penetrating wound was "I am killed", even if the victim might survive days or even weeks.
Likewise, incidents of exceptional savagery, though rare, did exist and formed a very real part of the experience of their victims. Take the case of Joseph Cooey, a Brome farmer who in 1828 was assaulted by Thomas Sheppard:
... he was struck by defendant, who then laid hold of witness and threw him down, laid hold of his private parts and bit off his lip ... his lip was considerably mangled and a small piece bit off, of the size of the tip of his finger - that a medical man attended him for some time and witness was laid up for about a fortnight - his mouth has been considerably altered by this means.
In other words, virtually the same story as the probable fabrication of John McNiles; except that in this case, both prosecution and defense witnesses confirmed this aspect of the story, and one of the witnesses even brought along the piece of lip that had been bitten off, which he had picked up and kept.
Indeed, we can detect a sort of subculture of violence that involved all of the sorts of brutal violence described by Gorn: grabbing and dragging by the hair as well as the genitals, biting off not only of lips but also noses and fingers. Often it was both parties who participated in this: witnesses of the fight between Cooey and Sheppard stated that both had tried to bite the other, had "snap't at each other like dogs".
But we can also go to the other extreme, with the 1840 complaint of Jean Tessier, a Quebec City carter, against Patrick Farrell, another carter, who "jeta deux sceaux d'eau ce qui l'empêche de continuer son ouvrage, vu qu'il est tout mouillié".(61) Or again, the 1820 complaint of Daniel Tuttle, a Barnston farmer, against Ebenezer Bacon, a bailiff, for spitting in his face.(62) Physically, all that Tessier and Tuttle experienced was thus a little water, although even there, the physical experience was different: Farrell's water assault came in mid-December.
How can we validate these individual experiences, without reverting to an unconnected anthology of stories - the antiquarian's approach? One possible avenue is of course that taken by microstoria, where a conscious effort is made to concentrate on only one story, in order to explore it in its broadest possible meanings.(63) The problem with such an approach, applied to the subject at hand, is twofold. First, a microhistorical approach requires exceptional documentation, in order to reconstruct a case in all of its complexity; but for Lower Canada for the first half of nineteenth-century, such documentation does not exist, with one notable exception. There were no inquisitors, there were no sensationalist newspapers - at best, there was Chief Justice Reid, dutifully taking down the testimony of witnesses in his notebooks. The exceptions were cases that involved political violence, some of which which were amply reported and debated in the newspapers. And this brings us to the second drawback with a microhistorical approach: any such cases, with extraordinary records, are inherently out of the ordinary. They can give us a window onto social attitudes, onto power relations, onto gender definitions; they cannot, however, tell us much about violence itself. In short, there does not seem to be any way out of this impasse other than the approach adopted above: first, looking for the norm; second, looking for the verges.
IV. CONCLUSION
Examining the material reality of violence, as lived experience, has brought us to a different understanding of violence between men in Lower Canada in the first half of the nineteenth century. In a society that quantitatively, and according to extant commentators, seems to have been quite violent, it has allowed us to qualify the experience of violence in this society as different, physically less severe, less painful, than these other indicators might lead us to believe, while at the same time recognizing and maintaining the broad range of men's individual violent experiences. This less severe nature of the physical violence they faced may paradoxically have encouraged violence between men. Since two men, even strangers, who fought were unlikely to use weapons to hurt each other, or maim each other, fighting was a less perilous than, say, in the American west, where a gun might appear at any time, or in the South, where fighters ran a significant risk of having their eyes gouged out or their noses, lips or ears bitten off. Indeed, the court records are full of examples of fights between men; the fight in which Cooey lost his lip to Sheppard began as a wrestling contest.
But taking material reality as a starting point can also lead us to a whole series of other questions and ideas. For example, the low level of violence needed before making a complaint suggests to us the extent to which the justice system of the state was integrated into dispute settlement mechanisms. The physical characteristics of violence can lead us to speculate on the motivations for that violence: for example, does the violent act suggest honour, or aggression? what can it tell us about the role of violence in the construction of masculinity? And this brings us back to our starting point. Having focussed on the material reality of these violent acts between men, we can now take them and try to develop their meaning. But that is a different task entirely.
Notes
1. Without going into a long theoretical digression, I am here following the standard historiographical practice of distinguishing interpersonal violence, or violence between individuals, from collective violence. Evidently, the two categories overalp, since collective violence, such as a riot, is often made up of individual acts of interpersonal violence; and indeed, when such individual acts come to my attention, I do not exclude them. But as the historiography has shown, the conceptual and methodological tools needed to deal with collective violence qua collective violence (for example, the treatment of the crowd as a coherent collective entity) are quite different from those applied to interpersonal violence.
2. For example, among many other works, 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); Roger Lane, The Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860-1900 (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986); Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Honor and Violence in the Old South (New York: Oxford UP, 1986).
3. For example, Anna Clark, Women's Silence, Men's Violence: Sexual Assault in England, 1770-1845 (New York: Pandora, 1986); Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence (New York: Viking, 1988); Karen Dubinsky, Improper Advances: Rape and Heterosexual Conflict in Ontario, 1880-1929 (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1993).
4. Especially by American historians; for example, David T. Courtwright, Violent Land: Single Men and Social Disorder from the Frontier to the Inner City (Cambridge, Harvard UP, 1996) or Michael Kaplan, "New York City Tavern Violence and the Creation of a Working-Class Male Identity", Journal of the Early Republic 15(4)(1995): 591-617.
5. An excellent example of the quantitative approach to violence is the collection of articles in Tedd Robert Gurr ed., Violence in America (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1989).
6. 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.
7. Simon Langlois (ed.), La société québécoise en tendances 1960-1990 (Québec, IQRC, 1990): 595.
8. Richard Burn, The Justice of the Peace, and Parish Officer... 16th edition (London, 1788) volume I: 112-113.
9. Most of the works cited in notes 2 through 4 integrate this approach.
10. For example, in three recent studies of violence in France, the physical characteristics of the acts themselves receive only the briefest of mention (Muchembled, La violence au village: 33-39; Gonthier, Cris de haine et rites d'unité: 113-115; Quéniart, Le grand chapelletout: 34-35).
11. For a discussion, see the articles in John Archer (ed.), Male Violence (London and New York, Routledge, 1994).
12. The paper is based on a preliminary examination of the following sources: the notebooks of James Reid, in which he recorded the testimony of criminal cases he heard in the District of Montreal King's Bench between 1807 and 1837, along with a few sessions from the District of Trois-Rivières (NA MG24 B173; henceforth Reid); the case-files of the District of Montreal Quarter Sessions for every fifth year between 1800 and 1830 (ANQM TL32 S1 SS1; henceforth MQSD); the case-files of the District of Montreal Special Sessions for 1842 and 1843 (ANQM TL36 S1; henceforth MSSD); the case-files of the District of Quebec Quarter Sessions for 1810, 1820, 1830 and 1840 (ANQQ TP12 S1; henceforth QQSD); and the case-files of the District of Quebec King's Bench (criminal) for 1809-1810 and 1840 (ANQQ TL18 S1 SS1 and TP9 S1 SS1 SSS1; henceforth QKBD). Of the thousands of cases that these sources represent, this has yielded thus far about 400 usable descriptions of violent acts between men, of which about 150 from the King's Bench level and about 250 from the Quarter Sessions / Special Sessions level. Additional descriptions have been culled from the case-files of the Montreal King's Bench (superior civil) for 1800-1829 (ANQM TL19 S1 SS1), from La Minerve 1827-1837, from the Journal de Québec and Le Canadien for 1840 and 1850 and from the Montreal Transcript for 1843 and 1845. The data collection and analysis from all of these sources is still in progress, so that results are preliminary at best. This study forms part of a larger examination of violence between men in Quebec and Lower Canada, funded by the FCAR, which I wish to thank.
13. The literature is vast; a good starting-point is Yves Michaud, La violence (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998). For two discussions in works dealing with the history of violence, see Judy M.Torrance, Public violence in Canada, 1867-1982 (Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1986): 3-16, and Jean-Claude Chesnais, Histoire de la violence en Occident de 1800 à nos jours (Paris: R. Laffont, 1981): 27-34.
14. Natalie Zemon Davis in Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford, Stanford UP, 1987).
16. Reid, Criminal Cases volume 3, 3/3/1826.
17. This point is explored by Natalie Zemon Davis in Fiction in the Archives: 15-25.
18. As is indirectly suggested by Davis, ibid.: 3.
19. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982); Chesnais, Histoire de la violence en Occident.
20. These figures are preliminary and remain to be verified by a more exhaustive study.
21. Cockburn, "Patterns of Violence"; J.M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England, 1660-1800 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986): 108); Chesnais, Histoire de la violence: 74; Michael Stephen Hindus, "The Contours of Crime and Justice in Massachusetts and South Carolina, 1767-1878", American Journal of Legal History 21(3)(1977): 218, 226 and author's calculations. This last contrasts with the much higher rate later in the century in other parts of the United States, notably in the South, in the West (where in some towns the murder rate reached over 100 per 100 000 per year; Courtwright, Violent Land: 82), and in the industrializing cities (in Philadelphia in the 1840s, the rate was 3.3; Ted Robert Gurr, "Historical Trends in Violent Crime: Europe and the United States", in Gurr, Violence in America I: 35).
22. Beattie, Crime and the Courts: 74-75; 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).
23. Scott W. See, "Nineteenth-Century Collective Violence: Toward a North American Context", Labour/Le Travail 39(1997): 13-38; also Torrance, Public Violence in Canada.
24. This count excludes the simple description of the verdicts of the criminal courts in cases of violence.
36. An eventual, partial step in assessing these records will be to compare the stories told in all cases with the stories told in the subset of cases in which guilty verdicts were pronouced.
37. Even if we consider only the most serious cases, those that ended up before Justice Reid in the Montreal Court of King's Bench (and for which we also generally have a complete description of the incident), only aboiut 15% involved three or more aggressors, and about two-thirds only involved one aggressor.
38. Gonthier, Cris de haine et rites d'unité: 113-115.
39. Reid, Criminal Cases volume 3, 6/11/1821.
40. Reid, Criminal Cases volume 1, 6/3/1809.
41. R v Beloin, Reid, Criminal Cases volume 4, 2/9/1824.
42. R v Cameron, Reid, Criminal Cases volume 4, 6/9/1825.
43. R v Pigeon, Reid, Criminal Cases volume 5, 5/11/1827.
44. R v Chambers, Reid, Criminal Cases volume 4, 12/5/1823.
45. ANQM TL19 S1 SS1 2/1802 #51.
46. Reid, Criminal Cases volume 3, 17/5/1822.
47. 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.
48. Gonthier, Cris de haine et rites d'unité: 115; Courtwright, Violent Land: 84.
50. Overall, in the Reid notebooks, there are 15 cases involving francophone perpetrators and 13 involving francophone victims, against 20 cases involving anglophone perpetrators and 22 involving anglophone victims. Even if If we remove soldiers, however, the anglophone numbers remain at 18 perpetrators and 20 victims. Again, these remain to be verified with a more exhaustive study of indictments.
51. "'In Search of the Phantom Misnamed Honour': Duelling in Upper Canada", Canadian Historical Review 76(4)(1995): 529-562. The newspapers and court records together report one or two duels per year, though this is undoubtedly far from complete.
52. ANQM TL19 S1 SS1 10/1811 #301 and 2/1812 #62.
53. MQSD 26/6/1820, 15/7/1825.
57. Reid, Criminal Cases volume 7, 28/2/1833.
58. Allan Greer, The Patriots and the People: The Rebellions of 1837 in Rural Lower Canada (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1994): 96.
59. Reid, Criminal Cases volume 4, 28/8/1824.
60. Reid, Criminal Cases volume 2, 2/3/1818.
63. As with Elliot J. Gorn, "Good-Bye Boys, I Die a True American": Homicide, Nativism, and Working-Class Culture in Antebellum New York City", Journal of American History 74(2)(1987): 388-410, which focusses on one murder, that of William Poole.