Dispute and Interpersonal Violence in Languedoc, 1680-1720: Identity, Community, and Authority

This thesis examines the social landscape of early modern Languedoc through the lens of interpersonal violence. This period has been central to ideas of decreasing interpersonal violence in France, in tandem with the expansion of Louis XIVs state. This study contributes to the dismantling of such determinist theories of modernity through its examination of the records of the parlement of Toulouse, Languedoc’s highest appellate court. The parlement’s criminal dossiers, the sacs à procès, exhibit a significant increase in rates of physical interpersonal violence between 1680 and 1720. This study examines a sample of two hundred of these cases, and in doing so reveals the diverse ways in which the monarchy’s fiscal and political policies in the final decades of Louis XIVs reign disrupted social cohesion in communities throughout the province.
Crucially, this study approaches such incidents from the perspective of the disputants. Where state and institutional histories of early modern France underscore the punitive nature of the law, this thesis builds on developments in the fields of legal anthropology and sociology to ask how recourse to the law featured alongside the use of violence in Languedocians’ disputing strategies. In its assessment of the roles of women, the clergy, the petty nobility and the notability in incidents of violence, the chapters in this thesis grapple with themes of authority, identity, and community. They assess the ways in which individuals managed anxieties and tensions concerning their position and their influence within their communities. Ultimately, the study evidences the concomitant roles of violence and the laws in disputing strategies. But where scholars have previously argued that these mechanisms of social control were used for the restoration of peaceable relations, this study evidences litigants’ use of the courts as a forum for the continuation and escalation, rather than the resolution, of their enmities.