Abstract
On 24 April 1841 the dismembered and trampled body of a newborn baby was discovered in the pigsty of a farm belonging to Pierre Bonnet in the village of Cassaniouze.1 Part of the jaw and both hands and feet had already been consumed by the pigs but according to the doctors who carried out the autopsy, the baby was neither stillborn nor premature and showed signs (bruising round the neck and a knife wound) of having been killed by violence. The suspected mother, Cécile Bouygues, 30, a distant relation of Bonnet’s, was shortly indicted on charges of infanticide and sent before the departmental assize courts.
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Endnotes
See B. Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838, (London: Heinemann, 1990), pp. 137–50, on abortion and infanticide as a possible contributory factor to low fertility.
See the comments on this in A. Soman, ‘Deviance and criminal justice in Western Europe, 1300–1800: an essay in structure’, Criminal Justice History, Vol. 1, 1980, p. 23.
L. Jordanova, ‘Children in History: Concepts of Nature and Society’ in G, Scarre (ed.), Children, Parents and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 8.
L’Enfant et la Vie Familiale sous L’Ancien Régime (Paris: Ploy, 1960), translated into English as Centuries of Childhood (New York: Vintage Books, 1962).
See, for example, E. Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (New York: Basic Books, 1975); L. Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (abridged edn., London: Penguin, 1977); J.-L. Flandrin, ‘L’attitude à l’égard du petit enfant et les conduites sexuelles dans la civilisation occidentale’, Annales de Demographie Historique (1973), pp. 143–205; more recently, F. Lebrun, La Vie Conjugale sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Armand Colin, 1985).
E. Badinter, L’Amour en Plus (Paris, 1980, translated as The Myth of Motherhood: a historical view of the maternal instinct (1981).
E. Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village (London: Penguin, 1980), Chapter 13.
N. Z. Davis, ‘The reasons of misrule: youth groups and charivaris in sixteenth-century France’, Past and Present (1971), p. 50.
A. Wilson, ‘The infancy of the History of Childhood: an appraisal of Philippe Ariès’, History and Theory, XIX, 2 (1980), p. 153. For an overview of Ariès’s work, see also R.T. Vann, ‘The Youth of “Centuries of Childhood”’, History and Theory, XXI (1982).
S. Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 1.
Amongst the most interesting examples are P. Besson, Un Pâtre du Cantal (Aurillac, 1914); E. Guillaumin, La Vie d’un Simple (Paris: Stock, 1943); and P.-J. Helias, Le Cheval d’Orgueil: mémoires d’un breton du pays bigouden (Paris: Plon, 1975).
E. Carles, A Wild Herb Soup: the Life of a French Countrywoman, translated and introduced by Avril H. Goldberger (London; Gollancz, 1991), pp. 6–7.
W.L. Langer, ‘Infanticide: a historical survey’, History of Childhood Quarterly, I (winter 1974), pp. 354–55.
K. Wrightson, ‘Infanticide in European History’, Criminal Justice History 3 (1982), pp. 3–4.
See K. Wrightson, ‘Infanticide in earlier seventeenth-century England’, Local Population Studies (autumn 1975); R.W. Malcolmson, ‘Infanticide in the eighteenth century’ in J.S. Cockburn (ed.), Crime in England, 1500–1800 (London: Methuen, 1977); R. Mitchison and L. Leneman, Sexuality and Social Control: Scotland, 1660–1780 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 210–14; O. Ulbricht, ‘Infanticide in eighteenth-century Germany’, in R.J. Evans (ed.), The German Underworld: Deviants and Outcasts in German History (London: Routledge, 1988); and S. Wilson, ‘Infanticide, child abandonment and female honour in nineteenth century Corsica’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 30 (1988).
R.C. Trexler, ‘Infanticide in Florence: new sources and first results’, History of Childhood Quarterly, 1 (1973), p. 114.
M.-J. Laperche-Fournel, ‘Les enfants indésirables: l’infanticide en Lorraine au XVIIIe siècle’, Cahiers Lorrains, 1 (1989), p. 26.
See A.R. Higginbotham, ‘“Sin of the Age”: infanticide and illegitimacy in Victorian London’, Victorian Studies (spring 1989), p. 319.
M. Tribut, ‘La criminalité dans les Hautes-Pyrénées de 1830–1852’, Annales du Midi, XCIII (1981), p. 423.
J.-C. Farcy, ‘Les archives judiciaires et l’histoire rurale: L’exemple de la Beauce au dix-neuvième siècle’, Revue Historique, 524, (octobre–décembre, 1977), p. 334.
Ibid., p. 333.
See R. Price, A Social History of Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1987), p. 73.
On the lung test, see Lalou, p. 193; Vallaud, p.481; M.-C. Phan, ‘Les déclarations de grossesse en France (XVIe–XVIIe siècles): essai institutionnel’, Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, XXII (janvier–mars 1975), p. 83; and Malcolmson, p. 200.
See M. Segalen, ‘Le mariage, l’amour et les femmes dans les proverbes populaires français’, Ethnologie Française, 5 (1975) pp. 134–35.
E. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France 1870–1914 (London: Chatto and Windus, paperback edition, 1979), p. 175.
See E. Claverie and P. Lamaison, L’Impossible Manage: Violence et Parenté en Gévaudan, XVIIe et XIXe Siècles (Paris: Hachette, 1982), p. 219.
See for example, J. Klaits, Servants of Satan: The Age of the Witch Hunt (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press 1985), particularly Chapters 3 and 4.
See O. Hufton, ‘Women and the family economy in eighteenth-century France’, French Historical Studies, IX (1975); and ‘Women, Work and Marriage in eighteenth century France’, in R.B. Outhwaite (ed.), Marriage and Society: Studies in the Social History of Marriage (London: Europa, 1981). Also O. Hufton, The Poor in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), particularly Chapter 12.
Domestics of all kinds represented anywhere between 2 per cent and 12 per cent of the total population in eighteenth-century rural France and the large majority of these were female: see C. Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies: Servants and their Masters in Ancien Régime France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), p. 2; Malcolmson, p. 202, suggests that up to 50 per cent of unmarried women between the ages of 16 and 25 were servants in eighteenth-century England. Laslett has produced figures indicating that 27 per cent of all women in the 15–19 age group, 40 per cent in the 20–24 age group, and 15 per cent in the 25–29 age group were ‘life-cycle’ servants in pre-industrial England (P. Laslett, Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 34). For servants in France, see also P. Guiral and G. Thuillier, La Vie Quotidienne des Domestiques en France au XIXe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1978), p. 11.
See, for example, F. Lebrun, La Vie Conjugale, pp. 97–98; Hufton, The Poor, pp. 320–21; M.W. Flinn, The European Demographic System, 1500–1820 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp. 81–82.
A. Poitrineau, La Vie Rurale en Basse-Auvergne au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1965), pp. 59–60. See also Aleil, pp. 307–33.
C. Fairchilds, ‘Female sexual attitudes and the rise of illegitimacy: a case study’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 4 (spring 1978), p. 633.
See J.T. Noonan, Contraception: A History of its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists (Harvard: Belknap Press / Harvard University Press, 1966), pp. 438–39.
On the condom, see ibid., pp. 347–48; N.E. Himes, Medical History of Contraception (New York: Gamut Press, 1963, pp. 186–202; and Lebrun, La Vie Conjugale, p. 161.
‘Faire comme le meunier: décharge sa charrette à la porte du moulin’, quoted in A. Maclaren, ‘Abortion in France: women and the regulation of family size, 1800–1914’, French Historical Studies, 10 (1978), p. 469.
E. Van der Walle, ‘Illegitimacy in France during the nineteenth century’, in P. Laslett et al. (eds), Bastardy and its Comparative History (London: Edward Arnold, 1980), p. 265.
Dr de Ribier, ‘Les enfants abandonnés à Aurillac à la fin du XVIIIe siècle’, Revue de la Haute-Auvergne, 1933, pp. 122–23.
On the plight of enfants trouvés in the 1790s see A. Forrest, The French Revolution and the Poor (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), pp. 116–37.
In the Haute-Vienne, for example, 71.5 per cent of the 12,862 children abandoned between 1810 and 1842 died before the age of ten (A. Corbin, Archaïsme et Modernité en Limousin au 19e siècle (Paris, 1975), p. 520.
On abortion, the following sources were used: Flandrin, ‘L’attitude à l’égard du petit enfant’; J.-L. Flandrin, ‘L’avortement dans l’ancienne France (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles)’, L’Histoire, 16 (1979), pp. 33–34; J. Gaillard, ‘Le Médecin et l’avortement au XIXe siècle’, L’Histoire, 16 (1979), pp. 35–37; A. Maclaren, ‘Abortion in France: women and regulation of family size, 1800–1914’, French Historical Studies (spring 1978), pp. 461–85; A. Fine, ‘Savoirs sur le corps et procédés abortifs au XIXe siècle’, Communications, 44 (1986), pp. 107–36; and J. Dupâquier, ‘Combien d’avortements en France avant 1914?’, Communications, 44 (1986), pp. 87–106.
See R. Schulte, ‘Infanticide in rural Bavaria in the nineteenth century’, in D. Medick and D. Sabean (eds), Interest and Emotion: Essays on the Study of Family and Kinship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 84.
The phenomenon of denial, according to researchers into modern infanticide, who distinguish between ‘neonaticide’ (killing of a newborn child within 24 hours of birth) and ‘filicide’ (murder of an infant over one day old), plays a key role: in destroying the infant, the murdering parent kills an object whose very existence may have been effectively denied. There has been no advance preparation for either the care or the killing of the child. This absence of relatedness may account for the lack of remorse commonly encountered in the offending parent after the crime of neonaticide. See I.L. Kutash, S.B. Kutash et al., Violence: Perspectives on Murder and Aggression (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1978), p. 175.
See C. Damme, ‘Infanticide: the worth of an infant under law’, Medical History, 22 (1978); and K. O’Donovan, ‘The médicalisation of infanticide’, Criminal Law Review (May 1984).
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© 1995 Department of History, U.W.I., Mona, Jamaica
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Dalby, J. (1995). Women and Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century rural France. In: Shepherd, V., Brereton, B., Bailey, B. (eds) Engendering History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-07302-0_18
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