Societal Breakdown and the Rise of the Early Modern State in Europe: Memory of the Future

Societal Breakdown and the Rise of the Early Modern State in Europe

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Societal Breakdown and the Rise of the Early Modern State in Europe Memory of the Future Dmitry Shlapentokh

SOCIETAL BREAKDOWN AND THE RISE OF THE EARLY MODERN STATE IN EUROPE

Copyright © Dmitry Shlapentokh, 2008. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–60375–2 ISBN-10: 0–230–60375–0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: February 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

CONTENTS

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Introduction: Revolution as Disintegration; Meltdown and the Rise of the Strong State; Major Theorists and Framework of the Work

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Background to the Early Modern Era

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Crime in France in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries

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Medical Implications: Asocial Process and Disease

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Persistent Danger: Asocial Behavior in the Sixteenth Century

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Conclusion: The Rise of the Despotic Government

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Notes

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Index

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C

H A P T E R

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4 INTRODUCTION R E V O L U T I O N A S D I S I N T E G R AT I O N ; M E LT D O W N A N D T H E R I S E O F T H E S T R O N G S TAT E ; MAJOR THEORISTS AND FRAMEWORK OF THE WORK

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great deal of research has been done on the reasons for revolutionary changes in societies and nations, but there are fewer studies on the meaning of revolution as a phenomenon. There is not much diversity in defining revolution. It is usually seen as radical change. This image of revolution is, however, comparatively new. It emerged in the eighteenth century and implied a linear vision of history. In earlier times, revolutions were seen as rotations embedded in a cyclical vision of history. There was often an implication that a strong government would reemerge at the end of a revolutionary cycle. Observers were not so much concerned with the transition from one order to another as with the collapse of order. Consequently the primary concern of new emerging elite was reestablishing basic order. This drive for basic order provided the major justification for the governments of many non-Western and premodern regimes. It led rulers to confront not a segment of the population but the entire society, and the confrontation provided these regimes with characteristics quite similar to those of totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century. This role of totalitarian governments and similar regimes in the past has not been understood by most Anglo-American political scientists, due mostly to the fact that in the West asocial behavior, crime in particular, never reached such a scale as to draw massive intervention from a repressive state. Some social scientists did hold the view

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that brutal totalitarian type regimes might be necessary in case of societal breakdown, but their publications were marginalized and tended to disappear from Western intellectual discourse. In fact, they often later marginalized their own ideas. This, for example, was the case with Pitirim Sorokin, the seminal American sociologist of Russian extraction. Sorokin sometimes openly saw the rise of totalitarian regimes—which he found not just in the present but in the distant past—as the only antidote for the destructive asocial drive, but he did not stress this theory in most of his works. In general he saw the antidote for asocial behavior not in repression but in the Christian type of altruistic love. All this provided an additional reason for most Western pundits to marginalize the role of asocial processes in shaping global history and the role of totalitarian-type regimes in preserving basic order. This volume will show that asocial processes constitute a major, if not the most important, force in many non-Western and premodern revolutions and that these processes contributed a great deal to shaping regimes with features of totalitarian governments.

T HE M ODERN D EFINITION

OF

R EVOLUTION

According to Hannah Arendt, “revolutions, properly speaking, did not exist prior to the modern; they are among the most recent of all major political data.”1 The definitions of revolution vary.2 Most twentieth-century social scientists regarded revolution primarily as change.3 Some, such as Arendt, assumed that overall patterns of change were discernible; others cautioned that the reasons for these changes could vary from one society to another and that the patterns could be different.4 Yet, although recognizing diversity in the revolutionary experience, social scientists still assumed a basic definition of revolution as a phenomenon usually implying radical change from one political and social order to another. Most social scientists who dealt with revolution as a social phenomenon saw the destructive and constructive sides of revolution as interrelated. It was in this context that revolution was defined by Theda Skocpol, regarded as one of the major authorities in the field. According to Skocpol, “revolutions, above all, are not more extreme manifestations of some homogeneous type of individual behavior. Rather, they are complex conjunctures of unfolding

INTRODUCTION

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conflicts involving differently situated and motivated (at least minimally organized) groups, and resulting not just in violent destruction of a policy, but also in the emergence of new sociopolitical arrangements.”5 Chalmers Johnson elaborated on the work of the prominent sociologist Ted Robert Gurr, who made violence an essential aspect of revolution. At the same time, Johnson advised, “violence is not an emotional urge toward destruction, but rather a rational strategy intended to accomplish change involving societal reconstruction along with destruction.”6 Political and social change was regarded as an essential aspect of revolution but not the only one. Most researchers implied that revolution meant victory for the downtrodden masses, at least for groups that opposed the elite, so they saw it as connected with the notion of mobilization and collective actions.7 In these cases, revolution was implicitly seen as an attack against the prevailing elite. For this reason, Skocpol accepted Lenin’s statement in The Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution that revolutions are “the festivals of the oppressed and exploited. At no other times are the masses of the people in position to come forward so actively as creators of new social order.”8 Many social scientists followed this interpretation, which implied that the paramount role of the downtrodden masses was the overthrow of the old order and incorporation in the new revolutionary state machinery, at least in the first period of the regime’s existence.9 Skocpol among others saw the major reason for revolution as a problem with the state and elaborated theories in which statecentered, top-down problems initiated the process of revolution, whereas it was the masses that actually engaged in unfolding the process of change.10 According to Skocpol, with each new regime there has been much greater popular incorporation into the staterun affairs of the nation,11 at least in the first period of its existence; the masses would be more involved in the work of the state than before. The new order is thus a product of radical change, mostly bringing power to the masses, at least in the initial stages of revolutionary development. Yet lately, on solidification of the order, these breakdowns have actually reinforced the power of the state. According to Skocpol, “the new state organizations forged during the revolutions were more centralized and rationalized than those of the Old Regime.”

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Still in the long run, this rise of state power was related not to the increasing push for totalitarian ossification but to the rise of the democratic tradition. The rise of the West since the eighteenth century coincided with the spread of democratic institutions, the new political and social order. And this order—Western democratic capitalism—provided the powerful élan for expansion of European states. This order might be praised or condemned depending on social scientists’ views and political inclinations, but the notion of the novelty of the new system has never been challenged. Thus, because revolution is visualized as a process of change and the nature of the modern social sciences implies the historicization of social phenomena, which places them in the context of historical development, revolutions are implicitly connected with drastic change. This model of explanation for revolutions was usually applied whenever changes took place, whatever their cultural context. Yet, this definition of revolution and linear vision of history can be applied precisely only to very few social phenomena, mostly in the context of modern Western history.

A NCIENT R EVOLUTIONS IN THE C ONTEXT C YCLICAL V ISION OF H ISTORY

OF THE

In ancient times, revolutions were seen not in the context of a linear vision of history but as embedded in a cyclical model. Revolution was accepted as a literal rotation, and political revolution was related to similar processes in nature. The natural course of cosmic development was seen as engaged in endless “revolutions.” This revolution could be seen in all grand philosophical systems of ancient time. The circle was an essential model for cosmic processes in Hinduism and Buddhism. It appeared in Heraclitus’s ideas of the emerging cosmic fire that consumed the universe just to produce it once again. The same model could easily be seen in the Stoics’ vision of the cosmos. One might expect the situation to change with the advent of Christianity, with its assumption of a new world that was not only the beginning but also the end, so that restoration of the old would not be possible. Yet the explanation of cosmological processes in the context of rotation continued to be popular at the beginning of the modern era, when the word revolution was actually coined. “The word ‘revolution’ was originally an astronomical term, which gained

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increasing importance in the natural sciences through Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus orbium coelestium. In this scientific usage it retained its precise Latin meaning, designating the regular, lawfully revolving motion of the stars, that, since it was known to be beyond the influence of man and hence irresistible, was certainly characterized neither by newness nor by violence.” This vision of cosmological processes and of nature in general continued to provide models for understanding the historical process. In this case, the revolutionrotation of the planets was directly related to the explanation of revolutions in history. “The word revolution entered the domain of political thought proper by way of natural philosophy [science].”12 The structural analogies between cosmic and historical rotation were well-known to ancient people, and the development of science provided more affirmation: “The growing importance of the word [revolution] for astronomy and for science, generally, coupled with an inclination to fit each change of the heavenly bodies into an astrological or scientific scheme, helped to make the word revolution an ever more popular term, and paved the way for its introduction into the language of politics.”13 Like natural phenomena, political revolutions did not bring many changes. The cyclical vision of the historical process could be seen in Aristotle and later in Polybius’s cyclical theory of revolution “from the collapse of monarchy and aristocracy through a more and more democratic republic to military dictatorship, and back to monarchy.”14 For him, revolution was simply an appointed, recurring cycle. The relationship of change to the cyclical vision of the cosmic and historical process could be supported by examples such as the way the Greek states and later Rome evolved. Arendt notes that “modern revolutions have little in common with the mutation rerun of Roman history,” or with the civic strife that disturbed the Greek politic.15 The medieval vision of historical processes was also bound to the vision of history in classical antiquity. The stress on rotation and the actual stability of the historical process could be found among thinkers of the Middle Ages who, more than anybody else, seemed to be propagating the linear vision of history. “Christian philosophy, it is true, broke with the time concept of antiquity, because the birth of Christ, occurring in human secular time, constituted a new beginning, as well as a unique, unrepeatable event,” Arendt stated.16 Yet,

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this linear vision of history was actually an illusion, and the cyclical vision of history remained intact: The Christian concept of history, as it was formulated by Augustine, could conceive of a new beginning only in terms of a transmundane event breaking into and interrupting the normal course of secular history. Such an event, Augustine emphasized, had occurred once, but would never occur again, until the end of time. Secular history in the Christian view, remained bound within the cycles of antiquity— empires would rise and fall as in the past, except that Christians, in the possession of an everlasting life, could break through this cycle of everlasting change, and must look with indifference upon the spectacles it offered.17

The assumption that revolution was just the restoration of the old was so strongly ingrained in social thought that even the revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which appear to us to show the spirit of the modern age, were intended to be restorations. The model seems to work even for revolutions such as the English Revolution of the seventeenth century, and the definition of revolution as rotation prevailed until the French Revolution. “Before 1789, the meaning of the word ‘revolution’ in political discourse was, in the words of the Académie Française, ‘vicissitude or the great change in fortune in the things of the world.’ As an example of its use, the dictionary gave the following sentence: ‘The gain or loss of a battle causes great revolution in a state.’ A revolution was, thus, any sudden change in a state or anything from a fundamental reordering of a state’s constitution to the mere loss of a battle, or fall of a ministry. Before 1789, the word also had connotations of recurrence.”18 This vision was deeply connected with the very nature of premodern non-Western revolutions.

P REMODERN R EVOLUTIONS Ancient non-Western revolutions were qualitatively different from modern Western revolutions. Disruption did not lead to broad changes. The regimes that emerged as the result of revolution were concerned not with novelty beyond changes in the composition of the elite but rather with the restoration of the old structures. This

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was because the breakdown in these civilizations was not an actual transformation of the social/political order but the meltdown of order per se, related to, among many other things, the proliferation of crime. The rise in criminal activity is related to the weakening of order, a term that must be explored. The problem of order can be explored from a structuralist point of view. This approach detemporalized the social system (i.e., disregarded its position in the historical chronology, its place in time), seeing in the system structural elements that allowed a comparison of the systems of different periods and cultures. This approach also implied that a stable value system was important for the stability of society. Here, several seminal sociologists developed various models of existing society. Sociological theories actually saw two major ways of constructing order. The first was based on unwritten rules of behavior, not essentially formalized in any legal code. The second was based on legalistic discourse and was in many ways impersonal. It was most likely Ferdinand Tönnies who made the division between two types of society clear. David Bayley noted that “Tönnies coined the terms Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft to denote differences in the salience of face-to-face relations and the vitality of primary groups” and pointed out that similar ideas could be detected in other sociologists: “Durkheim recognized the same dichotomy when he spoke of ‘mechanical’ as opposed to ‘organic solidarity’; Redfield in the notion of a ‘folk-urban continuum’; and Sorokin in ‘familistic,’ ‘contractual,’ and ‘compulsory’ social relations. Max Weber was speaking from the same insight when he said that what makes neighborhoods unique is the ‘reciprocal personal acquaintance of inhabitants.’”19 Some sociologists assumed that certain orders were more stable than others. In Durkheim’s view, “organic solidarity” (gesellschaft) in modern capitalism was much more cohesive and implicitly self-controlled than the “mechanical” solidarity of premodern society. From this perspective, his vision of “anomie” is worth reviewing. For Durkheim, anomie is the force that confronts the holistic order of the “organic” solidarity of the modern West.20 In his view, discord could be reduced to a minimum. As a matter of fact, there was no reason for discord, for all parts of social body reinforce each other. For this reason, anomie is marginal for modern Western society, cohesive in its very essence.

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One might question that the gesellschaft order of modern Western capitalism is stronger than the gemeinschaft order of traditional society. Yet in both cases a society preserves the vital aspects of the structure that keeps it together. In the gesellschaft society, this is respect for the law. In the gemeinschaft society, these are traditions, or unwritten rules of social interaction, and the traditional social and political structure. If these elements of society started to crumble, and the central authorities were weak, this usually signaled trouble, leading to social and asocial problems. And it was the proliferation of asocial processes that marked the advent of early revolutions. For some sociologists, the collapse of order is not specific to premodern Western revolutions but is an essential trait of any revolution. In this case, the definition of revolution is reduced to the manifestations of the worst side of the human character: sheer brutality and violence. In these interpretations, revolution is nothing but a pathological manifestation of what could be described as the normal course of social process. These interpretations of the revolution could be found in the works of Pitirim Sorokin. His vision of revolution was presented in The Sociology of Revolution, originally published in 1925, and directly influenced by the experience of the Russian Revolution.21 The goal of the work was ambitious—a model for revolutionary development in all civilizations at all times. Sorokin stated that his task was different from that of a historian, who provided descriptive details. “The task of a sociologist is considerably different: In all social phenomena, only those traits are interesting for him, which are general for all facts of the same type, whenever and wherever they may have happened.”22 Sorokin sees revolution as a triumph of “sensate culture,” which in his view was nothing but the culture of license.23 He emphasized this by divorcing revolutionary phenomena from the previous prerevolutionary periods in order to delegitimize the revolution. He made this clear when he stated that his book was in many ways inspired by political developments he witnessed at the beginning of the century. At this time, “after many years of peaceful ‘organic’ evolution, the History of Mankind had entered again into a ‘critical period.’”24 The majority of observers of the revolution, he implied, had not taken the asocially destructive aspect of revolution seriously into account. In his view, the crux of the problem was the attempt to see revolution as the organic and inevitable outcome of the

INTRODUCTION

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historical process, and by this historical legitimization provide a positive image of it. “The real nature of revolution is very different from these romantic representations of it, which are usual among its apologists.”25 Here he presented revolution as just a liberation of people’s worst instincts—not merely a socioeconomic breakdown of the existing order and the manifestations of social hatred,26 but atomization of the society in which individuals, rather than groups, were fighting asocially. These traits were shared by upper and lower classes alike. In a sort of libidinous drive, society exploded where all other restraints were lifted. “Revolution does not tend to socialize, so much as it tends to biologize the people; does not only increase but also reduces the sum of liberties; does not improve alone, but also impairs the economic and spiritual state of the working classes. Whatever gains, its yields are purchased at a prodigious and disproportionate cost.”27 He admitted that this sort of vision and definition of revolution would not find too many supporters; indeed in his view, “many of its traits pointed out in this book may appear to them as offensive, while disfiguring ‘the beautiful face of revolution.’ Therefore, they may find ‘reactionary mind’ in my book.” Sorokin had elaborated the same views in Man and Society in Calamity.28 The book was published in the midst of World War II, which undoubtedly stimulated Sorokin, from the perspective of past and present. He showed how the pressure of the war and famine had led to social disintegration and eventually to a terroristic state backlash of the state, in order to normalize society. Although Sorokin was right in the sense that he saw anarchical elements in any revolution or calamity in general, this push for anarchy was especially strong in premodern and non-Western revolutions. The spread of asocial behavior, the destruction of order in the holistic sense of the word, implied a certain pattern of development in premodern societies. One could understand why the regimes that emerged as a result of these revolutions were, in many ways, restorationist. Their major goal and immediate task was restoration of basic order, which would lead to the emergence of another central authority, one often extremely brutish and alienated from the majority. In a society primarily concerned with maintenance of basic order, revolution as understood in the modern world would be impossible. Modern revolution (e.g., the French Revolution) implies a change from one political organization to another. In transition from

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premodern to modern society, such changes would reduce state control over society. If society could not maintain basic order without a strong state, it would lapse into anarchy, giving the revolution its old interpretation (as a rotation where the old elite is replaced by a new one to reestablish basic order). The collapse of order could be caused by a variety of forces, but the roles of the state and elite were the most crucial. The state is crucial in all societies and exists as an independent force in political interplays. Indeed, “states are neither more instruments of dominant class forces, nor structures simply shaped by the objective economic restraints. Rather, states are fundamentally administrative and military organizations that extract resources from society and deploy them to maintain order at home and compete against other states abroad”—the role of the state even more importantly in premodern and non-Western societies.29 The problem is that modern civil society did not exist in premodern states in which society defined its rulers as the governing elite. In modern Western states, the political elite play a comparatively small role in the stability of society. In the United States, major crises involving top executives (e.g., Clinton and Nixon) did not affect the stability of society at all. In the Clinton scandal, the American economy continued to rise, and Clinton was strong enough to win the war in the Balkans. The situation is rather different in premodern and non-Western cultures. In the latter, the state and ruling elite were not the only forces that promoted changes, especially if an acceleration of these changes was needed, but they were often the only forces that actually defined the existence of a society. The role of the state became even more important when traditional society started to crumble. Without the elite, the state would fall apart. For example, Richard Pipes in his analysis of Russian society admitted that it was not society that defined Russia; rather, the existence of the Romanov dynasty made the existence of Russia as a country possible.30 He made an appropriate comparison between the peasants’ vision of Russian society and a patrimonial household. The very existence of the family was defined by the existence of the patriarch in charge. Without him the family would inevitably fall apart. In the peasants’ view, the state was maintained because of the existence of the czar, the “little father.” When the ruler disappeared, the state would disappear until the new czar emerged.

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Such an approach to political reality was not uniquely Russian and could be found in other premodern and non-Western societies. For example, in China, the family existed because of the male head of the household. Society was modeled after the family of the emperor, the “son of heaven,” who was the father of the subjects, and Confucianism emphasized the cardinal importance of the ruler as a source of stability. Hence perpetuation of the dynasty was of great concern in premodern societies. The birth or nonbirth of an heir (in most cases required to be male) was of the greatest importance, so important that in some cultures commoners could watch the birth of royal offspring. The end of a dynasty could lead to anarchy, and slow erosion of order could lead to a rise in criminal activity. Restoration of order (usually through harsh measures) was the most important and immediate task of all new rulers if they were to emerge from the chaos as a unifying force. This implied the eradication of criminal behavior and also the end of social resistance, such as peasant uprisings. The very nature of policing made the two tasks interdependent, more so if we remember that the border between social protest and criminal behavior was quite weak. The rebel could well be seen as a criminal, and vice versa. The other immediate task was to secure the borders from foreign troops and maintain and restore an infrastructure, such as channels, roads, and other essentials, for the functioning of the bureaucratic bodies. These would prevent the spread of not only crime but also other maladies that plagued society through premodern history, such as famine, pestilence, and invasion. Recall the biblical story in which God, upset with David for his misdeeds, decided that not only the king but also his people needed to be punished. This assumption stemmed from the belief in collective responsibility and that both elite and populace benefit from order and stability. Pestilence and invasion were major problems, and a king who emerged after years of chaos should regard dealing with them a critical task. Thus the essential restorationist aspect of a major upheaval (typically related to the end of a dynasty) explained the vision of the historical process that dominated premodern thought. It implied that collapse and disorder must be followed by consolidation and re-creation of strong authorities, lest society disappear. The restoration of basic order was thus the essential job of any government. For this reason, new regimes were essentially the same as the old. This fact

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can be explained in that similarities in the structures of premodern regimes implied a certain uniformity of governments, including not only absolute power but also a sometimes all-embracing intervention in the life of society, which made such governments quite similar to totalitarian regimes.

T HE N ATURE

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RULER

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L EGITIMACY

The restorationist aspect of premodern revolutions implied the absolute power of the ruler and the very nature of his legitimacy. The premodern monarchy had legitimacy from above (the population received legitimacy from the king, who received legitimacy from God). Coronation assigned certain types of religious sanctions to the ruler. These legitimizations, from above, not below, have usually been explained by historians by the fact that the rulers represented the interests of the elite. These regimes have also been seen as excessively oppressive. An array of historians elaborated on the great misery of the common folk and the splendor of the elite. Attempts to legitimize the rulers from below would immediately lead to the regime’s demise and the creation of a government “of the people” and “by the people.” The reasons why this did not happen varied according to the interpretation of the events. One often-stated reason was that the populace did not know how to create new societies. The Enlightenment was seen as crucially important in the emergence of the new “discourse,” the set of ideas that transformed the modern polity. The role of ideological discourse has been widely used to explain the great European revolutions, such as the French Revolution. One of the foremost authorities on the French Revolution, Keith Baker, applies the linguistic turn to the problems related to the origins of the French Revolution.31 The others related the inability to create a democratic government to the economic weakness of the middle classes. Their economic maturity and accompanying increased political pressure led to the final destruction of the autocratic regime. This theory also implies that the middle classes shared the democratic tradition, and their representatives demanded a change in the system of legitimization. Instead of the government providing legitimization for the subjects, the subjects provided legitimization

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for the government. Although all these theories had a good point, they failed to provide a comprehensive explanation of the events. The theory that related the rise of democratic ideas with the rise of affluent middle classes does not explain why fear of lower class uprisings prevented the middle classes from being selective in their choice of regimes. They could choose a democratic or an authoritarian regime, so why for centuries did the middle classes and other groups not see alternatives to absolutist rulers? Fear of a total uprising of the masses could be an explanatory model in some cases but not always. The class struggle, at least in the form visualized by Marx (where comparatively well-defined social forces collided with others), was not too often a phenomenon in history. The change of attitude could also hardly be understood by the new intellectual trends. Even less satisfactory would be the explained rise in the popularity of ideas of democratic rule as a result of the spread of the ideas of the Enlightenment. This theory implied that people of the past were backward, lacking the scientific knowledge of the modern advanced generation and the knowledge of democracy, becoming “enlightened” only by the seventeenth century or so. This theory requires further scrutiny. People of the past did not understand many natural processes, but they had a firm set of social ideas. The fact that they couldn’t prove the validity of these ideas coherently and scientifically (from the modern point of view) does not mean that in political and social decisions they were absolutely naïve and acted contrary to their best interests. We shall regard this as an explanatory pattern when we try to explain why for centuries the populace assented to absolute monarchy. We will elaborate here on the patterns of behavior of the premodern populace, especially peasants. World history has experienced a number of successful peasant uprisings. In China, for example, the peasants replaced the dynasty several times. Yet there were no attempts to replace the monarchy with another type of institution. The peasantry expressed the desire to have a “son of heaven” (China) or a “little father” (Russia) and to replace one with another in case of major upheaval. The same could be seen in premodern Western Europe, where the populace and the elite, while experiencing reservations about various rulers or rising against him, never questioned the importance of the ruler as a force that received legitimacy from a force outside their control. Although the populace defined various kings as “good,” the goodness of a ruler did not

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imply excessive leniency. Excessive leniency, or humanism as modern observers could define this, was a rather dangerous sign. Rulers, especially oriental despots, had implicitly seen their subjects as slaves, as part of their patrimony. One should once again raise the question of why the populace and members of the elite (especially in oriental societies) would accept such arrangements. This sort of collective acceptance of power from above, the absolute power of the ruler, can be understood if one would remember that this type of state was often compared with a family and the ruler with a father. This was not just a product of imaginative discourse on the part of members of society that had been shared by the lower classes and, to some degree, even by the elite. These comparisons had quite important political implications. First, this implied the extreme sense of danger and weakness of the subject. As in the case with small children, or to be precise, any young one of an animal world, and in the social context, a subject would perish from physical danger unless unprotected. The second implication of this comparison implied that the subjects could not understand their own fundamental interests and, even more so, act responsibly even if these interests were well understood. Although their long-term interests implicated the preservation of the basic order of society, they could engage in behavior that would destroy themselves and society. This implied that the subjects’ internal sense of order and respect for the “ten commandments” in their universalistic meaning was weak. They could not be a source of societal stability, and it would be inconceivable that they would try to elect a leader. The very process of election would mean the end of order, unleashing an anarchy that would engulf them. Translate these general statements into concreteness, the following picture can be seen. Several types of dangers were issues for society. First, food supply was clearly a concern. In the oriental case, this problem was related to maintenance of an irrigation system. In the residents’ minds agriculture was based on irrigation. The connection between the power of the emperor and the stability of the irrigation system was firm. This was one of the major reasons for the stability of oriental despots. However, the solution of economic problems through the application of absolute power was only in societies based on irrigation. There was no direct relationship between crop failures and state power in other societies.

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Second, asocial behavior is a problem, with crime one of its salient manifestations. Such behavior was often extremely violent and a direct danger to the life and health of the individual. Physical violence, accompanied with plunder and rape, was apparently a constant element of life. In contrast to social conflicts and the threat of invasion, criminal elements were permanent parts life in society. Here the power of the ruler, often absolute, was required. Crime could be related to the gamut of other calamities, such as the spread of disease. It was this protection of society from itself (criminal onslaughts) that legitimized the power of the ruler, not from below but from above, God. In these situations, power actually legitimized itself. Many members of society accepted this mechanism of power. Rebellion could lead to the end of a particular king or dynasty but not question the nature of power. Changes in attitude toward power, assumptions that legitimization should arise from below, and visions of power as abusive could emerge only when society started to internalize the “ten commandments” of human interaction and accept the role of self-policing. In these situations, the absolute power of rulers was transformed into the absolute power of society, and the nature of crime started to change. Instead of direct physical violence, less violent and thus less dangerous crimes started to dominate the social milieu. This was happening by the eighteenth century as society took on self-policing and violent crime decreased considerably. Until then, absolute government was often essential for the very survival of society. As Sorokin noted, “totalitarianism is not created by Pharaohs, monarchs, and dictators; the Stalins, Mussolinis, Hitlers, and other führers are merely the instruments of deeper, underlying forces that decree an increase of totalitarianism during signal calamities.”32 Thus the major findings of this study are as follows. Asocial processes (directed not against various sociopolitical orders but against order) were essential forces in the premodern era and in nonWestern societies and often constituted the essence of the erosion of traditional family values in the “long durée” of European history. These asocial processes, with crime as an essential manifestation, defined the restorationist aspect of revolutions and explained the absoluteness of the ruler’s power. These arrangements also explain the brutality of the rulers and the nature of their legitimacy, which came from above, not below.

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The study also explores the reasons for the transition to modern democracy. It could happen only when society could police itself without a ruler. In short, the study demonstrates the legitimacy of control and, if needed, the brutal application of power, taking European, more precisely French history, as an example. The study also provides legitimacy to despotic power, which confronted not various groups but society in general. The role of the despotic state as the only antidote against the disintegration of society and the push for anarchical behavior could also shed light on the rise of at least some twentieth-century totalitarian societies. Sorokin made this clear enough. The book also demonstrates the fact that even self-policed Western society could be vulnerable to the collapse of order in the holistic sense, which could lead to the emergence of a state with the attributes of totalitarian regimes. From this perspective one could state that the “protototalitarian” states of early modern Europe could serve as models for what one could call “posttotalitarian” states—states that might appear or evolve from the chaos that could emerge in the post–cold war era.

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A ssumptions about the existence of “anomie,” the criminal in

society, and criminal behavior in the life of society are certainly not new in criminology and related social sciences. In this study I emphasize that not only particular individuals but also an entire social group can acquire anomic characteristics, at odds not with specific political and social organizations but with order. In some cases, an entire society can acquire such characteristics. The process of “anomization” not only affects all groups of society but also has implications for all aspects of human existence, from social to biological. I describe the state response to this meltdown and sense of profound instability, and how in these processes of “normalization” the early modern French monarchy acquired characteristics that made it similar to the modern totalitarian state. I conclude that an abrupt rise of instability in the modern West could lead to a similar result—the transformation of the state along totalitarian lines. Most modern social scientists choose one of two views concerning crime and chaos in general: they either marginalize its role in shaping the historical process or view asocial elements rather positively as a justifiable response to oppressive political and economic systems. Consequently, the system of control, especially if related to violence and absolute power over society, including the masses, has usually been viewed negatively. Praise for the strong repressive state as a force of order in the holistic meaning of the word as the only antidote to anarchical meltdown is hardly popular among political scientists in the West. Such a

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regime is usually connected with a group’s desire to maintain power over other groups and classes or for foreign exploits, usually related not so much to the protection of the country as to imperial aggrandizement. This approach is due not only to the historical experience of Western societies, where anarchy played a crucial role in historic events only in the distant past, but also to trends in present Western social and philosophical thought. Intellectual trends—how social scientists describe particular events—are deeply connected not only with scholars’ personal experience but also more broadly with society’s collective experience for the last several generations. During this period, Western society has never experienced prolonged episodes of social decomposition that threaten the very existence of societies. Conflicts were between social groups and states, and most cases of anarchy were fleeting and localized. Society was usually able to restore basic order without dramatic interventions involving repression and control; when these did happen, they were usually brief and localized. These patterns shaped the paradigmatic framework for explaining events in terms of interaction of social bodies, not of atomized individuals. Most social scientists accordingly did not understand the role of strong repressive government as the antidote to anarchy, and even those who did were not consistent in their views. The experience of some Russian scholars in the Russian Revolution and Civil War demonstrated to them the danger of anarchy. But the appalling brutality of the Soviet regime made them reluctant to praise it as the antidote. Sorokin clearly demonstrated this; it was not the repressive totalitarian government but rather the altruistic transformation of humanity in which he saw the passé ways of the “sensate” culture. Social conditions shape the way social scientists perceive social reality and are at the roots of the inability to see the asocial process as a powerful force in certain periods of history. But scientific and cultural paradigms cannot be reduced to just the socioeconomic context in which they operate. Intellectual trends, as is well-known, have their own momentum and logic, and it would be vulgar Marxism to see them as simply a direct reflection of the societal process. Intellectual history enjoys a well-defined autonomy. Therefore, the inability to see asocial behavior as a powerful force in certain periods of history is also related to specific intellectual trends in Western thought. The point is that the image and behavior of asocial groups,

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especially criminals, was in constant transformation, and here postmodernism in the Leftist tradition played an important role. By the end of the 1950s the emphasis was on criminals as victims of societal injustice. Later the notion of criminality as a force hostile to society as a whole was discarded completely. Criminals were often dissolved into the lower classes, and criminal activity was seen as a form of social protest, of class struggle, or “alternative culture.” The notion of criminality was seen as a “label” imposed by the elite on the lower classes. Finally, the notion of criminals as a social group disappeared completely in the context of the “linguistic turn.” Emerging in France, postmodernist interpretations of reality became extremely popular in the United States. In this context, the notion of criminal or deviant, along with all other social categories, was transformed into “discourse” with no relationship to real social process. The very notion of social reality was seen as the way the ruling elite imposed power over the oppressed or, at best, as a manifestation of epistemological naïveté. Criminality became just a cultural and political construction. This part of the study shows that asocial behavior, crime in particular, was not a marginal phenomenon, not just a “discourse,” but a manifestation prolonged over a period of time to become an essential part of reality. It played a crucial role in shaping events in the modern and especially the early modern West and many nonWestern nations. Many changes in this period cannot be understood unless asocial behavior is taken into account as an extremely potent force. These asocial forms of behavior occurred in a sort of self-destructive drive; these groups were engaged in “illogical” behavior in that their behavior could be contrary to their own interests. Another point is that criminal activity as part of general chaos can be the greatest challenge to society as a whole. There are several reasons why late medieval/early modern France is a good example for study of the asocial process and society’s response to it. To start with, for several reasons this era was one of the most “anomic” periods in European history, a time when the asocial process was extremely strong and in many ways defined broader sociopolitical changes. The disintegration of societal structure was one of the most drastic in European history. It was true that during the preceding Dark Ages and Great Migration, anarchy had reigned in a good part of Europe, and warriors looted, killed,

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and raped at will. But this period cannot be described as one of absolute anomie. The bands were anomic toward one another and the rest of society; that is, they recognized very few norms that might restrain their activities. But members were firmly attached to their respective groups—the tribe as the band—and here they followed strict norms. Even in dealing with the outside world they could preserve some norms that transcended the narrow confines of the tribe. The barbarians, like most other premodern people bound by gemeinschaft arrangements, usually followed hospitality and did not easily break treaties. The story in the late medieval/early modern era was different. Social and moral atomization had destroyed any restraints in dealing with the outside world. Contrary to the tribespeople of the Great Migration, the organized criminals of this era often had only pragmatic, fleeting relationships to one another. Although the process of social anomization could be seen in most of Europe and beyond, the French case had definite characteristics. During the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, France experienced dynastic crises that considerably diminished the role of the state as controlling force. The Hundred Years War was definitely the most important event. During the course of the war, France became extremely weak and even lost symbolic meaning when several pretenders were fighting for the crown. This weakness of the central authorities provided atomization a great boost. When the state finally reasserted its control over society with a vengeance, it constructed a system with features strikingly similar to some totalitarian regimes. The asocial process affected French society on various levels. In the societal context, criminals, although breaking the norms of society, still operated in and engaged with society, albeit as a destructive force. The biological consequences, such as widespread promiscuous behavior and ignoring basic rules of hygiene, accelerated the spread of pandemic diseases such as syphilis and plague. The combination of asocialism with the biosocial process was exemplified by the spread of rape, which in turn bred related crimes, such as murder, and facilitated the spread of venereal disease. Asocial behavior was one of the common types of social interaction in late medieval/early modern France. There were actually two types of criminal behavior. First were the career criminals, with highway bandits as one of the most prevailing and dangerous forms, who regarded crime as a full-time professional activity. The

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second category combined criminal activities with straight jobs; these “part-time criminals” were quite widespread. They saw their societal existence (when they functioned as part of some cohesive social structure attached to this or that political system) as a fleeting phenomenon. Most of the time the groups existed as criminal gangs that confronted not only political and social order but also society. A mercenary, for example, could in certain stages of his career be a member of a regular army and incorporated in that particular structure. But most of the time he would live like a highway bandit and his detachment could well be transformed into an armed gang. The fact that criminality was a way of life led to social fluidity for these people. They could be soldiers, or bandits and soldiers at once, or take up a civilian trade, easily combining a straight job with criminal activities on a regular basis. This was the case not only with soldiers who looted as part of their work as mercenaries but also with such seemingly peaceful groups as students and clergy. The persistence of criminal behavior (the assumption that violence, looting, and rape were normal) led to a situation where all members of society, lower and upper, had these values. In this peculiar social and psychological arrangement members of the refined feudal elite could communicate and socialize with mercenaries of low origin. The reason was that they had the same values—of violent déclassés. This phenomenon was particular to the period and could be found neither earlier nor later, when strict societal boundaries marked the elite and low classes. Thus this period of French history was witness not so much to “revolution” in its modern sense, transition from one socioeconomic order to another, as to the collapse of order. This revolution as disintegration was related to what Sorokin calls the triumph of “sensate” culture. It affected all aspects of human existence, and all groups were engaged in asocial behavior. This situation could be a threat to both the lower and upper classes. Personal security became as important as economic security and benefit, which according to Marx is a major concern for all segments of the population. Fear of instability led all segments of the French population to contradictory views on the slowly emerging centralized government. There was hatred for the government for taxation and abuses. The same populace usually supported strong government. A long period of instability had taught them that the

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king’s army and bureaucracy with their brutal punishments were the only real antidotes to asocial behavior. This concern for broad security, which led to the emergence of the strong, absolutist state in France, also requires reevaluation of the totalitarian/authoritarian state and the state called oriental despotism. In all these systems, legitimacy of power came not from below, through the social contract, as is the case in the West since the French and American revolutions, but from above (from God or other superhuman forces; the Chinese used the term mandate of heaven). The absolute power of the government was essential for establishing basic order. Moreover, in all these systems the government would actually confront the entire society or most of its segments.

F ROM R OMAN E MPIRE TO D ARK A GE The emergence of periods infested with various manifestations of asocial behavior could be found from the beginning of written human history. Possibly the first recorded major event characterized by the rise of asocial behavior is found in Roman civilization. In the first centuries, the Roman Republic was a rather traditional society with comparatively strong systems of self-control. The policing systems were in many ways not independent from the traditional controlling mechanism and were embryonic at most. This might explain why “the great Roman chronicles” provide little information on the subject. The crumbling of the Republic was a period of global, social, and political transformation. Asocial processes became a major manifestation of this breakdown. Changes in political and social structure accumulated and would require changes in the pattern of policing. “In Rome, it was commercial aggrandizement, urban scale, and population heterogeneity that weakened policing based on kin and neighborhood.”1 Crime also proliferated due to the displacement of a considerable part of the population. A large part of the population lost its land and was transformed into what Romans called a proletariat. A call for the redistribution of land spurred the Gracchi brothers’ unsuccessful revolution aimed at redistributing public land among the people. The state did try to solve the problems of the landless and unemployed in two major ways. First was the extension and transformation of the army. By the time of the Empire, the Roman

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legions contained several hundred thousand people. Fresh recruits were always needed, and the army could employ a considerable number of free Romans. Many legionnaires died from wounds and disease, but veterans who lived long enough to retire received land for farming, which had been taken from subjugated people. Second, endless successful wars and exploitation of provinces led to an accumulation of land by members of the elite and other wealth by the state. This wealth was shared with the unemployed proletariat; it was mostly distributed to urban plebes who, especially in Rome, were living on what was described as a welfare system. This system was rather effective in addressing the needs of many individuals. It provided residents of Rome with not only essential commodities and foodstuffs but also entertainment. It was known that the battle cry of the Roman plebes consisted of the slogan, “Bread and Circuses.” A considerable sum of money was spent on gladiator fights and circus performances. The government addressed in its welfare policy the most intimate needs of the masses. There was even a special ration card for free sex from Roman prostitutes.2 Another outlet was emigration. It certainly was not an invention of the modern era, but ancient Greece and Rome shifted the “surplus” population in various directions, and able-bodied free people were encouraged to explore, colonize, and conquer new land. Yet, there were limitations. The army and the outlying regions of the empire could only absorb a limited number of unemployed persons. Banditry was among the few other options. When the army was defeated it disintegrated, and many soldiers became criminals. Loss of control and collapse of traditional values accelerated considerably after the beginning of the civil war, which accompanied the death throes of the republic in the second century BCE. “Violence was common in Roman life from at least 131 B.C., most of it inspired by politics”3 and crime increased. At the same time the old systems of control collapsed. “Courts and assemblies were frequently disrupted by mobs, their judgments coerced.” Citizens raised private guards to protect themselves. “Vigils were a substantial force from 6 A.D.”4 Only after the beginning of Augustus’s reign was some stability restored. Perhaps Augustus should be credited for the creation of the modern police force. For “the first time Rome had a truly public police—executive agents of physical constraint paid and directed by supreme political authority.” It was centralized machinery that

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included a centralized army maintained at the expense of the state that ensured the stability of order in the empire. “The key element in this police organization was the post of Praefectus Urbi, filled by appointment from the highest ranks of the Senate; who had responsibility for maintaining public order executively and judicially. The staffs of the Praefectus Urbi, including the Praefectus Vigilium— chief of police—were paid by Augustus.”5 At that time, the political repressiveness of the regimes of the first Caesars was accompanied by increasing control over asocial elements, which led to heavy policing. In Rome, “there were more police per unit of population in the first century CE than in 1913 or 1975.”6 Augustus’s achievements in bringing order and stability into the society, which suffered from continuous civil strife, were definitely appreciated by his contemporaries. Some of them were instilled with optimism concerning the future of the empire. For example, Virgil “believed in Roman ‘imperium sine fine’—empire without end.”7 In addition, this optimism had gained some ground: although the Roman Empire was not eternal, it had survived almost five hundred years after Augustus’s death in 14 CE. The end of the Roman Empire led to an increase of insecurity: “The collapse of the Roman Empire destroyed state policing and forced people into desperate reliance on private mechanisms for ensuring security.”8 These new law-enforcement systems, however, were not able to protect society from the rapid and catastrophic spread of violent crime.9 The spread of crime was mostly the result of activity by those the Romans called barbarians, mostly Germanic tribes. For all of them, looting was the most preferable employment, for “among many primitive peoples armed robbery is held to be superior to honest payment.”10 Looting was not just an enterprise in which able-bodied men engaged, but rather the collective actions of all the tribes. Looting and wholesale murder were activities in which the entire tribe, including children, played a most active role.11 It was thus not surprising that the barbarian invasion in Europe in general and France in particular was a “gigantic pillage” and the manifestation of sheer savage brutality.12 The destruction caused by the invasion was increased by famine.13 The period from 406 to 613 in France was nothing but endless “massacre and pillages, civil and external wars, epidemic and famine.”14 In the ninth century, the Normans followed suit. The Vikings felt at ease in France, and in 882 they occupied

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Aix-la-Chapelle, the former capital of Charlemagne’s empire,15 and engaged in looting. Pirates continued to be a scourge near the French coastline in the seventh century and of the Western world for centuries to come.16 Eventually society reached a new equilibrium. The society of the Great Migrations, with all its brutality and drive for pillage, was not actually a society of the anomies. Each member of this society, while at war with others through tribe or clan, was fully controlled by the group. The individual was not an anomie and was dissolved in the group. Simmel made quite perceptive descriptions of those who invaded the Roman Empire, who were both anomie and nonpersonalities for the outsiders: “The most elementary stage of the social organization which is to be found historically, as well as in the present, is this: a relatively small circle almost entirely closed against neighboring foreign or otherwise antagonistic groups, has however within itself such a narrow cohesion that the individual member has only a very slight area for the development of his own qualities and for free activity for which he himself is responsible.”17 In this situation, the problems for society were not the chaotic groups of bandits (anomie), but the well-defined tribal or clan groups, which were in anomic relations to each other and conquered people. Yet, as time progressed they finally established a network of relationships with each other and reached a sort of equilibrium. The Middle Ages brought a society with a value system that included a stable traditional political/social structure that had its way of dealing with crime. It existed until the advent of the modern era, when social and political structures started to crumble once again.

T HE C LASSICAL M IDDLE A GES : S TABILITY AND THE P REPARATION FOR THE S PREAD OF B ANDITRY By the classical Middle Ages, European society in general and French society in particular had reached a level of comparative stability, at least in comparison to what had been before and would be after. The knight of the classical Middle Ages was not a template for the mercenaries of noble origin who would proliferate at the time of the Hundred Years War. With all their similarity to the bandits of the fourteenth and fifteenth century, the medieval knights were still in a category by themselves. The French knight of the classical Middle

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Ages was not an absolute anomic like the warriors of the Dark Ages and Great Migration. His behavior would follow the rules of the gemeinschaft society. Knights were a much more cohesive group than the bands of the future, with much more intergroup solidarity and loyalty to the superior (king), endlessly emphasized in lore, as in the Song of Roland.18 These groups based on quasi-family relations were not fleeting and, in most cases, did not disintegrate as easily as would bands of mercenaries and bandits in the Hundred Years War period. The knights, to be sure, could easily kill noble prisoners, and the prisoners would be well tortured. But there was a sense of caste solidarity and respect. The French knight, like other knights, was concerned with the caste rank of those with whom he dealt. Solidarity was strongest among the members of the group with whom the knight was directly associated (fellow knights in his detachment), but it had a broader implication. An enemy knight was to be treated decently by other knights. Warfare was conducted according to rules, and violence among elites was ritualized. The existence of tournaments testified to this. It is true that “these tournaments often differed little from real war.”19 However, noble prisoners were not killed or mutilated but kept for ransom (at least rules of social interaction enforced this). Even Elias, who emphasized the uncontrollable bestial side of the knights, agreed that only the low classes were mutilated and killed, and nobles in most cases were kept alive.20 He stated that “knights were not often killed in battle. If captured, they were rarely slain; indeed they might be treated as guests. I grant that they were often kept alive for ransom.”21 Monetary considerations played a modest role; noble prisoners were kept alive mostly because it would be considered wrong to treat a fellow knight like a commoner. As in the fourteenth and fifteenth century, violence in the classical Middle Ages was not monopolized by the state. Still, violence was not private because weapons were the privilege of the elite. At the same time, however, knight warriors of the Middle Ages, in France and elsewhere in Europe, laid the foundation for the later spread of banditry. The Middle Ages shaped the tradition that finally related violence to high social position and saw in it the direct manifestation of social superiority. The classical Middle Ages separated the feudal elite from the rest of the population, in France in particular. Possessing and handling weapons and war started to be seen as the role of the elite. War was essential to the nobles not only because they were professional

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warriors, but also because direct violence was the very foundation of their economy. They lived on rent from the populace; the amount mostly defined by custom. If tradition failed, there were mechanisms of direct pressure to enforce payment. Knights regarded violence as quite appropriate for dealing with the peasantry, and military or similar enterprises were often essential.22 One might state that only for knights did the culture of violence become all embracing. The culture of violence was not born in the classical Middle Ages or even the Dark Ages. Acceptance of killing was an essential part of the life of any peasant, who might rarely if ever engage in war and definitely did not regard war as his calling. Most ancient Greeks, barring Spartans, were not professional warriors. Yet even in these cases, “gruesome pitched battles between bloodstained men on foot was second nature between men who had killed game, slaughtered livestock and dug earth.”23 Still, except for Spartans, training in war and the development of the culture of brutality/violence was just one side of Greek life and training. Even for the Persians, who were the major geopolitical enemies, the culture of violence was not the only aspect of training. It was true that Persian boys were trained for war, and it was for this reason they were taught horsemanship and archery. At the same time they were also taught what Herodotus called “honesty,”24 which could be interpreted as obedience to the law and internalization of social obligations. It was not only the emergence of the professional military class that made training in violence and brutality an essential prerequisite of professional existence, but also this was the case with the medieval knights. It would be wrong to assume that the culture of violence and brutality was an attribute only of knights. It could be found in various classes outside the Western tradition, from Assyrians to Mongols. It was apparently part of the culture of both Spartans and Roman legionaries, professional warriors. One also must remember that chivalry was supposedly also a part of the knight culture. Yet, taking all aspects of the knights’ life into consideration, one could safely state that more than chivalry defined the knights’ behavior. The image of the noble knight could be the reverse of real life. Roman soldiers and Spartans were as brutal as knights, but their approach to words and their thinking and lifestyles are not as wellknown to us. Moreover, they were not much engaged in the glorification of brutality. War and brutality existed as actions but

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not in the poetic/philosophical outlook, not codified or culturally institutionalized. From this point of view, we can assume that the culture of violence became fully institutionalized on the various levels of discourse only with the appearance of the knights. “The warrior of the Middle Ages not only loved battle, he lived in it. He spent his youth preparing for battle. When he came of age he was knighted, and waged war as long as his strength permitted, into old age. His life had no other function.”25 Training, behavior, dress code (permanent presence of the weapon, mostly a sword on the belt), and position on horseback (only nobles had the “right to fight on horseback”26) were all designed to provide the opportunity for attack. Psychological training prepared the elite to be killers. Kindness might be attributed to monks of the lower ranks and even more to the lower classes. These people were averse to cruelty, but this was only due to their inferior position. The cult of brutality was so much related to the warrior culture and, therefore, to the elite position that even noble women eagerly engaged in acts of brutality. A monk from Sarlat in France provided vivid pictures of a noble who killed and the mutilated one hundred fifty men and women “whose hands he had cut off or whose eyes he has put out.”27 The chronicle added, “And his wife is just as cruel. She helps him with his executions. It even gives her pleasure to torture the poor women. She had their breasts hacked off or their nails torn off so that they were incapable of work.” These people, at least those who could be considered role models, had only one fear: “The only threat that could instill fear was that of being overpowered in battle by a stronger opponent.” The warrior mentality was a state of permanent vigilance and aggressiveness, for he could well become a victim. Personal security was always on his mind and never taken for granted. So his dwelling place was a watchtower, a fortress against attack. From this perspective, the life and mentality of these warriors was quite similar to that of bandits in the future. “Leaving aside a small elite, rapine, pillage, and murder were standard practice in the warrior society of this time, as noted by Luchaire, the historian of thirteenth-century French society.” Indeed it is clear that “the majority of the secular ruling class of the Middle Ages led the life of the leaders of armed bands.”28 If knights were not engaged in war or banditry, they were engaged in a sort of ersatz war: hunting. Hunting was seen as an essential part of military

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training and maintaining essential skills in all societies where professional warriors were held in high esteem.29 The culture of violence was also reinforced by the spread of the notion of justice as a private affair. “Vendettas were common in medieval societies. Death by murder required the death of the killer, and entire families (for vendettas were and still are essentially family affairs) engaged in the quest for ‘justice.’”30 Finally, the culture of violence was reinforced by “private warfare,” which a medieval king had no resources to stop.31 Private wars and banditry contributed to the spread of crime in the Middle Ages. It was not surprising that when people visualized the ideal Christian kingdom, one of its essential features was the absence of crime.32 The culture of violence was directly related to high social position, but it was extremely important for the spread of criminality in the future. The violent culture of the knight did not lead to massive criminality in general or banditry in particular. With their entire penchant for violence, the knights were not anomie. Quite a few had a strong feeling of caste obligation. The spread of crime required social change. The development of criminality was directly related to the disintegration of social structures in the Middle Ages. There was a specific period that quite possibly was one of the most criminal periods in modern European history.

T HE C RESCENDO OF A SOCIAL B EHAVIOR : F OURTEENTH AND F IFTEENTH C ENTURIES Modern Westerners can hardly understand the level of crime in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Europe. The reason is simple enough. For generations there has been nothing similar in Western history. It does not mean that European history was peaceful—not at all. Yet most internal conflicts were among different social groups. Asocial forces (violent crime) never constituted a real danger to the fabric of daily life despite the fascination of social scientists, writers, and the public. Therefore, there is a tendency to describe the major conflicts of this era as between emerging centralized states (as in Western Europe) and society or between social groups. Yet, these conflicts cannot be reduced to conflicts between masses and elite or between feudal aristocracy and an emerging middle class. There was another important aspect of the transformation of European society, the

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melting of society, its criminality, where asocial drives confronted the emerging centralized state.33 The dawn of the modern era was the beginning of a strong push for criminalization. The Renaissance was marked by a splash of immorality manifested in various forms of antisocial behavior. “With the advent of the high Middle Ages and the ensuing renaissance. . . . Sensate culture begins to enjoy an increasing number of advocates.”34 Crime had been a sign of the melting of society, and the existence of state power was at stake. The crux of the problem was not social conflict between lower classes and the elite but conflict in the polarity of the state, the holistic order, and the criminalizing society. The criminals were neither defenders of the poor (in most cases) nor members of the elite who preyed on the downtrodden. They were essentially an asocial force, recognizing no law as a universal entity. They were not the product of cultural discourse, not cultural or social labels, which, as some pundits on the Left believe, the social elite attached to people who dressed differently and engaged in spontaneous and uninhibited lovemaking. They confronted society not in a “discursive” way but as a powerful criminal force, the source of such crimes as murder and rape. The rise of criminality was mostly due to changes in the prevailing value system and system of social control, itself deeply connected with the changes of socioeconomic life of the society. In oversimplified terms, this idea could be reduced to the erosion of the gemeinschaft culture, the bedrock of sociopolitical order in the early to late Middle Ages. The Middle Ages were what Ferdinand Tonnies called a gemeinschaft society, based not on legalistic discourse but on personal relationships. A person did not exist as an individual but was part of collective, quasi-family structures with several mutually complementary functions. On one hand, the individual was protected by the group. On the other hand, the group controlled the individual. Personal relationships and quasi-family structures, the bedrock of feudal society,35 meant that comparatively few people were on their own. A person’s position was permanently fixed; chances for either upper mobility or fall were minimal (i.e., it would be quite rare that peasants would become nobles). As the Middle Ages ended, social relationships began to undergo changes related to the development of capitalism. These processes would be centuries long. Most important was the introduction of money, which eroded quasi-family interpersonal relationships and

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led to the emergence of a category of people removed from their social niche. This process of social disintegration was deeply interwoven with the emergence of other social realities, in particular, the rise cities. Urbanization was building a nascent civil society, but it also provided the impetus for the rise of the asocial process, which produces a peculiar type of people.36 These people were alone. They either placed themselves in opposition to society (becoming professional vagabonds) or related to society in a purely contractual way. These contractual obligations did not involve the transcontractual, emotional obligations that, as Durkheim correctly stated, were the essential aspect of the cohesiveness of modern Western society. He also stated that “a state of purely contractual relations would not be order but anomie, that is, chaos.”37 Elaborating on Durkheim’s vision of the relationship between anomie and the collapse of society as a cohesive structure, Talcott Parsons wrote, “Anomie is precisely this state of disorganization where the hold of norms over individual conduct has broken down.” Its extreme limit is the state of pure individualism, which “is for Durkheim as it was for Hobbes the war of all against all.”38 These individuals exist in any society and undoubtedly in modern Western society as well. Only during societal and value breakdown do they cease to be marginal. Their number increased dramatically at the advent of the modern era, when declining traditional values had not been replaced by the legalistic cultures of developed capitalism, whose strong social cohesiveness and deeply internalized sense of the social contract ensured that an individual remains part of the broader society. Often, neither old nor new value systems were present, and purely contractual obligation often produced nothing but anomie. Because of this, destructive and often asocial individualism started to become a visible phenomenon. In this period of societal meltdown, individuals knew no restraint except sheer force, which dominated their lives. Sorokin characterized the situation: “If many members of a given society follow the maxim: ‘Everything is permitted that I please, and that I can do,’ and if they are particularly sensate personalities, the result is in a sense, ‘Bellum omnium contra omnes,’ each person, faction, group, and class trying to procure, by any means whatever, everything for which their sensate wishes clamor. Hence an increase of internal struggles, disorders, anarchy, revolts, riots, and revolutions.”39 The

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sensate, actually anomic, were driven in their activities by the urge to satisfy their desires. In the process, they recognized no restraint besides sheer force. At the same time, the asocial violence generated by these drives could lead these individuals toward self-destruction. “In this tornado of unleashed sensate passion, the whole of sensate culture is being blown to pieces and swept away . . . sensate man is again . . . destroying the sensate house.”40 The proliferation of crime and other manifestations of the asocial process entailed a variety of abuses that were aspects of life in the early modern era. At that time, not only would crime rise dramatically, but also the differences between criminal and noncriminal behavior became blurred. Crime became transsocial and transspacial, affecting all aspects of society. Crime and other forms of asocial behavior can be found in any society, including the present West. Durkheim correctly stated that “crime as a ‘normal’ phenomenon may be taken in this sense. It is not ‘normal’ in the sense of being desirable. However, it is ‘logically implied in the social type’ in the sense that the conception of action in relation to a body of normative rules implies the possibility of their violation. So long as this mode of relation persists, some men will violate such rules some of the time; there will be crime.”41 This phenomenon is still regarded as a manifestation of social pathology. It is assumed that “the pathological is particularly exceptional.”42 This pathological behavior became marginal in modern society for several reasons. First, its numbers were small in comparison to the rest of the population. Second, there were strict social and often spatial lines between the deviant and what was seen as normal society. The common values of the society, mostly those of the elite (middle class in the modern West) influenced all groups. The criminals and majority would be divided by space, for criminals/deviants would live mostly in what were defined as “bad neighborhoods.” None of this would be seen in the early modern era. The behavioral model of all members of the society shared traits usually attributed to criminal or semicriminal behavior—the propensity to commit robbery, violence, promiscuity, and often the complete disregard of the law in any form. These traits manifested themselves differently in various groups, but they could be seen in all groups. Spatial divisions existed, but there were no regions of the city or country where one could be safe from the most dangerous, violent crimes. The assumption that crime and asocial behavior in general are pathological (something juxtaposed to normal society) did not work, for the

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“pathological” was actually normal in various degrees to practically all groups. The spread of the pathological as normal behavior leads to the condition where society ceases to exist as the interaction of a welldefined group and becomes a mob. As characterized by Sorokin, “when individuals interact face to face, in spatial proximity, but have no clear characteristics of organization, they constitute a mob. As a result such groups must be and are chaotic, unstable, disorderly, liable to be swayed emotionally to many surprising actions, and so forth. As a rule, they are short-lived groups, suddenly appearing and as quickly disappearing after having done something usually violent or being dispersed by an organized group.”43 Mobs can be found in any society, but they “flourish and multiply either in conditions of a lack of social organization, or in those of social disorganization when the previously existing system of law and the other meaning-valuesnorms disintegrate in a given group of interacting individuals. The times of revolutions, of great catastrophes and calamities, of rapid decay of the existing organized order with its system of values and meanings are those of rapid emergence and multiplication of various kind of mob and crowd.” These arrangements imply societal space without socialization. The people coexist in common space, in physical proximity. Still, they have no ties to each other, no common values besides fleeting ties (engaging in common looting), and no basic connection with each other. These arrangements and people played a considerable role in late medieval/early modern Europe in general and France in particular. Although the general meltdown of society was an essential aspect of the beginning of the modern era, there was also an opposing process related to the development of capitalism. The emergence of capitalism not only led to the rise of asocial behavior and entailed violence but also created a legal discourse where individual rights (human rights) gained increasing support. Individuals started to demand that the state increase protection from a variety of abuses (e.g., bodily harm, sexual assault, damage of reputation). At the same time, the idea of legal impartiality was taking shape. Murder, theft, and other criminal offenses became subject to prosecution and punishment, regardless of the social position of the culprit. The law had acquired a stronger sense of rigidity and was enmeshed in religion. Judges were transformed into quasi-priestly figures, and the entire procedure of trial and punishment, often quite gruesome,

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was transformed into a semireligious performance loaded with deep moral meaning. Early modern society had created two conflicting life models and cultural/social trends: On one hand, there was liberation from any internal restraints and living according to animal-type impulses. On the other hand, there were strict self-control and the assumption that the “ten commandments” should be rigorously enforced. The latter trend with its stress on the sacredness of law and order increased as society moved from the early modern era to the seventeenth and especially the eighteenth centuries. The asocial elements, such as vagabonds and especially criminals, started to be perceived by society with more apprehension than before. This was not only because of the steeply increasing number of these individuals but also because of the changes in public attitude. Michel Foucault stated that in modern times society became intolerant of deviants, even if they were no direct threat to the population. There was an increasing desire to isolate these persons, and this, Foucault claimed, led to the “birth of the prison.” The emergence of this institution had, for Foucault, a symbolic meaning, for it signaled society’s intolerance to anyone who confronted it, whether hard-core criminal or vagrant. Personal protection became regarded as essential by more members of society (both elite and lower class). It shaped society’s approach to the rise of the absolutist state with its repressive policy. The state was clearly hated by the lower classes as the source of many troubles, especially because of the onerous tax burden. The state presence made the lower classes quite apprehensive. But the same emerging Leviathan also received lower-class approval, for only a strong power could protect them from criminals and anarchy in general and maintain the basic stability of society.

C

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4 CRIME

F R A N C E I N T H E F O U RT E E N T H AND FIFTEENTH CENTURIES

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IN

he rise of antisocial behavior was deeply integrated into the economic, social, and political crises that shook up society by the end of the Middle Ages, in Europe in general and France in particular.1 Some problems were caused by wars or epidemics; others had deeper implications for the future, for they would become entrenched, for example, in “the proletarianization of the lower orders of the peasantry. Until about 1450, agricultural workers had been paid well on account of their scarcity; thereafter, the real value of their wages had declined steadily.”2 This crisis corresponded to deep social changes caused by plucking people from their social niches, which stimulated migration and general displacement.3 These changes, in France in particular, led not only to political and social disorder but also to a general meltdown of the socium, and the resulting asocial process constituted a great danger to society. A strong system of social or state control could have mitigated the consequences, but the old familistic structure of the high Middle Ages was eroding, and there was no strong state. The endless war had made most authority merely symbolic, and even when the state occasionally employed harsh punishment, it was not always effective: “The chronic form which war was wont to take, the continuous disruption of town and country by every kind of dangerous rabble, the permanent threat of harsh and unreliable law enforcement . . . nourished a feeling of universal uncertainty.”4 This combination of social and political breakdown with weak and

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inefficient power made the asocial process a powerful trend. The disintegration and related spread of banditry that affected the whole of Europe had direct repercussions for France. Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century France was a country awash with crime. “Crime was not a ‘marginal phenomenon’ but a ‘menacing reality.’”5 And “the fear of crime permeated French society in the late Middle Ages”; it was one of the things that induced people to think of apocalypse.6 There were many types of crime, but violent crime, especially by bandits, bothered people the most. Bandits were the scourge of France throughout the Hundred Years War, as criminal behavior made a great leap forward.7 “In the fifteenth century, as the depredations of the Hundred Years War increased, crime became a topic to record. And when writers began to tell their audiences about crime, all sorts of other issues became entwined with their narratives. The depredation of the civil war between Burgundians and the Armagnacs, as well as those in the renewed Hundred Years War, had much to do with combining political crimes, theft, homicides, and rape. So common was this recital that it sounds like a litany.”8 And, “France had imprinted on its collective memory the rampage that followed the Hundred Years War.”9 Violent crime in France did not stop with the end of the war but continued to be widespread throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, making France a place of anomie.10 France was a societal place but often not a society, for in a world infested with violent crime there was no socialization as such. Societal space without society can be understood if we turn to George Simmel, who stated that conflicts did not necessarily imply fragmentation of society. It was violent crime that eroded social cohesiveness. “To be sure, there are conflicts which seem to exclude all other elements—for instance, between the robber or thug and his victim. If such a fight simply aims at annihilation, it does approach the case of assassination in which the admixture of unifying elements is almost zero.”11 As uncontrolled violence led to anomie so did anomization lead to aggression. To understand this pattern, one might turn to traditional Chinese society, where aggressiveness was graduated. A person could be aggressive to outsiders but controlled in dealing with the close circle of personal ties. 12 In this case, increasing the number of people with whom a person has no emotional or

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personal connection leads not only to anomization but also to increased violence.13 Violence was also integrated into the fabric of people’s lives because it was private, not a state monopoly as in modern times. “Max Weber pointed out, mainly for the sake of definition, that one of the constitutive institutions required by the social organization we call a state is a monopoly in the exercise of physical force.”14 This was lacking in the late Middle Ages—in France in particular. Furthermore, the culture of violence was substantially different from that in either modern times or classic feudalism. “In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there was still considerable adherence to the idea that to settle quarrels by the use of arms was to appeal to the judgement of God. The duellum or trial by battle existed as a popular spectacle until past the middle of the fifteenth century.”15 In the medieval period, violence was private but at least monopolized by professional warriors, knights, and the elite. By the beginning of the modern era even people of low position regarded violence as legitimate. Another important reason for the spread of violence was the change in the nature of warfare from the prerogative of nobility. Mercenaries, who could be of low social position, had democratized war and also the values of society. In the Hundred Years War, “the armies came to include large numbers of non-noble combatants.”16 From then on, violence became more and more accepted by the entire society. Georges Duby, who saw slow changes in values and in behavioristic models, traced “the gradual diffusion within twelfthcentury northern French nobility of behavior patterns and beliefs earlier reserved for the very highest of the land.”17 Violence was an essential aspect of the life of the nobility, but slowly the other segments of the population, including the low classes, adopted this model of behavior. Another major cause was the ease of obtaining weapons. In the early Middle Ages, even iron tools were expensive. Expensive weapons such as swords were out of reach of the majority because of both social (only nobles possessed this symbol of the elite) and economic considerations. By the early modern era, this had changed, due not only to the “democratization” of war but also to the apparent decrease in the price of weapons. Arming tens of thousands of mercenaries would be unimaginable unless the cost of weapons had fallen sharply.

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Several generations of war helped spread weapons among the general population. Weapons in the possession of the large armies of mercenaries, especially when they were demobilized, were never accounted for. A mercenary often brought his own weapons to the army and kept them when he left (similar to craftsmen, who also provided and kept their own tools). This practice along with general chaos helped spread all types of deadly weapons among the general population. This facilitated the rise in violent crimes where deadly weapons were used.18 Although all types of weapons were employed in violent crimes, the sword seems to have been the most popular. There are no reliable statistics, and evidence is entirely anecdotal, but a sword was employed in 44 percent of crimes according to Gauvard and 25 percent of criminal assaults by other estimates, indicating that the weapon was easily available and carried by many people.19 The sword not only was one of the most deadly weapons but also remained a sort of status symbol. All these changes led to the rapid spread of violent crime. One could hardly escape violent behavior in France, for “violence was the way of life.”20 Most people engaged in violent encounters with their fellows on a daily basis.21 These were not only fistfighting brawls but also often involved deadly weapons, which turned even the most trivial quarrel into a deadly fight, even without intention to kill. “Because men of lower rank as a matter of course carried knives and the gentry swords, any quarrel was likely to end in the shedding of blood, especially since society viewed martial deeds and a willingness to engage in them as a valuable quality in any man.”22 The belief that “proficiency in arms was proof of virility” also stimulated use of weapons.23 Cohen estimates that 70 percent of criminal cases in Europe dealt with homicide. “Hanawalt estimates that between 36 and 52 people for every 100,000 of population were killed in London from 1300 to 1348, and Hammer found in fourteenth-century Oxford an even higher rate of sixty to eighty homicides per 100,000 of population per year. Florentine annual homicide rates varied from 152 in 1352–1355 to 68 per 100,000 in 1380–1383.”24 There is no reason to assume France was more peaceful. Thievery and other crimes against property constituted only 10 percent of criminal cases according to Gaudard; according to Chiffoleau it was 18 percent, sometimes as low as 3.5 percent.25

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In most cases those who were engaged in violence, especially with deadly weapons, were men. Women, due to their physical weakness and the values of society, were more often victims than perpetrators. This did not mean that the culture of violence was foreign to women. Cases of women engaged in violent criminal behavior were not rare. According to some records almost a quarter of those engaged in serious violence were women; others cite 38 percent, when women often used weapons such as the sword.26 Women attacked both men and other women. Materialism and hedonism did not exclude, as in modern society, unmotivated violence, which, due to the pervasive tradition of violence and the carrying of lethal weapons, was much more frequent in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries than today. The perpetrators often confessed that they had no reason for violence but acted “by inspiration diabolic,” or “irato animo,” an irrational violent drive.27 These people could be compared to what psychologists call “a presymbolic child,” who cannot conceptualize or visualize feelings and just responds spontaneously.28 Some researchers state that “medieval men acted in a way which undoubtedly would qualify them nowadays as manic depressives. Their moods swung from exhilaration to despair within minutes, they were subject to fits of weeping alternating with unrestrained tantrums, and in general acted upon their emotions with little control.”29 The drive to kill was also often impulsive. In any case, it seems that most killings were unpremeditated and apparently committed in the heat of fights with various weapons.30 The spread of violent crimes did not demonstrate that people of that era were not interested in material goods or that violence existed unrelated to other crimes. As a matter of fact, mercenaries, bandits, and other criminals were engaged in violence not just for the sake of violence (albeit this aspect must not be ignored) but to satisfy their appetites. Good food, drink, and sex were priorities, and when mercenaries and bandits took cities, they first engaged in finding these things. After satisfying their immediate needs, they often went into the robbery business. Even if we take into consideration the numerous cases of irrational violence, most violence, especially committed as part of other criminal acts (e.g., robberies), was conducted not for its own sake but because it was essential to obtain commodities and pleasure. The criminal mentality (episteme) was not much different from that of contemporary criminals, and the

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appetite for goods was apparently stronger. It goes without saying that they took easily portable valuables such as gold and jewelry along with weapons, as had been done from time immemorial. The famous Bayeux Tapestry commemorating the Norman conquest of England shows knights stripping fallen enemies of their coats of mail. They also seized items that might be ignored by robbers today. Paintings from the time of the Hundred Years War show mercenaries taking anything they could lay their hands on, household utensils, for example.31 Prosecutions concentrated on bodily harm over crime against property because preservation of property was of secondary importance: the state hardly had enough resources to deal with murderers. Authorities were often concerned not with violence as such but only with murder or serious injuries from which the victim could not recuperate. Thus, French society in the late medieval/early modern era was awash with all sorts of crimes that can be found in modern society, and, on top of this, victims had a much greater chance of being slaughtered. The dynamic of crime has important variables. It is hard to assess whether crime, including the most dangerous, violent form, decreased or increased in the period under study. Still, one might surmise that between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, violent crime was on the rise from both a qualitative and a quantitative point of view. The reasons were manifold. The continuous Hundred Years War wrecked the very fabric of society and threw thousands of armed “anomie” bandits into society. It also facilitated accumulation of criminal experience and internal evolution of crime. Bellamy states that in England, “in general terms the fifteenth century was worse than the fourteenth although, as will be seen later, less from the number of bad years than from the more pernicious organization of crime which developed.”32 The situation was probably similar across the English Channel. The spread of criminality in England might provide a clue to the process in France, and the situation in France could help explain what was going on in England. During the Hundred Years War, English kings invaded and controlled part of France, and one could claim that France and England were one state. The asocial drive was as strong in the English part as in France, not only because England had been enmeshed with France in a mortal struggle but also because processes in Britain were essentially similar to those of France.

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Proliferating crime was possibly the most important problem society faced. “In the England of the latter middle ages the preservation of public order was very often the biggest problem the king had faced.”33 There were several reasons for the spread of gangs that were often led by nobles. One was apparently the political upheavals that shook Europe. Foreign wars also had an effect. Proliferation of crime was an essential aspect of British society at the advent of the modern era. “Neither before that time nor since has the issue of public order bulked so large in English history.”34 England was universally viewed as one of the most criminalized nations in Europe: “Late medieval England was known throughout Europe for its high rate of crime, a reputation to which modern historians have frequently drawn attention.”35 The contemporary records were full of complaints of crime: “The chronicler Henry Knighton, under the year 1364, described a wave of theft, pointing out how many churches were entered and robbed.”36 Another chronicler of about the same time was “referring to the large number of men who specialized in violent assault, suggested that unless some drastic step was taken to stop the turbulence open warfare might well result.”37 After the fourteenth century, the situation continued. In desperation, residents of some areas appealed to the king as the only source of help. “The council of the Duchy of Lancaster in May 1482 must have expressed what was in the minds of most people when in reference to the local ‘great strifes, variances, controversies and debates’ it declared they were of such depth that they could be remedied ‘by no person but only by the king himself if it would like his grace to come into those parts.’”38 But it was clear that neither the English nor French king could stop the spread of violent crime.

B ANDITRY AS A R OLE M ODEL IN THE L ATE M EDIEVAL /E ARLY M ODERN E RA There have always been many types of crime. Each period in history has had its major crimes (crimes that bother society most) deeply connected to the dominant culture. Because the dominant culture is intimately connected to the elite, criminal behavior is the mirror image of the elite despite the fact that it comprises a major target of crime. (One could take more from the rich than from the poor.)

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According to Merton, in modern capitalist cultures, the prevailing social Darwinistic values of the elite are often stripped of moral limitations and imply that material success must be achieved at all costs. This goal can be achieved by skillful manipulation of the system through “white-collar” crime. Violence is not excluded from these arrangements, but it is not the major way to reach the goal. Other types of crime are also intimately connected to the capitalist economic and political system and to the capitalists and members of the middle class who dominate it. Drug trafficking and prostitution are capitalist crimes, for they involve selling products (drugs and sex). Thus, modern criminals are a mirror image of capitalists. In the late Middle Ages/early modern era, we see the same picture. The elite of these eras in most Eurasian countries were professional warriors. From this stemmed the crime that dominated the era and constituted the greatest danger to society: banditry, especially highway robbery. If contemporary drug pushers are in a sense descended from Rockefeller, late medieval/early modern bandits were descendants of Arthur and Lancelot. This sdomination of the culture of warriors explained not only the broad involvement of the nobility in banditry but also its popularity among other social groups. Banditry was seen not only as a lucrative job but also as a way to maintain elite status or enter a position of quasi-nobility. Bandits had more in common with the elite than with the masses, regardless of the fact that the elite were their most likely targets. But glorification of the sword as the way of earning a living and solving problems created a culture of confrontation with the law as a universal principle, one adopted also by vagabonds. One might state that the penchant for violence that was regarded as an attribute of the elite would be seen as a desirable quality in the lower classes as well. In the modern West, America in particular, these qualities are desirable only for some segments of the lower classes. “Freedom from external constraint” is regarded as desirable for the low classes, or at least the segment who regard “toughness” as an essential male attribute.39 According to some sociologists, “the concept of ‘toughness’ in lower class culture represents a compound combination of qualities or states. Among its most important components are physical prowess, evidenced both by demonstrated possession of strength and endurance and by athletic skill; ‘masculinity,’ symbolized by a distinctive complex of acts and avoidances (bodily tattooing, absence of sentimentality, non-concern with art, literature, conceptualization

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of women as conquest objects, etc.); and bravery in the face of physical threat.”40 Thus the values of the nobles in the late medieval/early modern era were the same as those of the low classes in the modern West. These similarities reflect the evolution of the systems over the centuries, and also that of the elite, from nobles to professional warriors to middle classes. The nature of criminalization in the past and present was also different. In the early modern era, the rapid spread of violent crime was the result of both the chaotic conditions and the “democratization” of society, as the behavioral models of the elite were adopted by the lower classes. The story is different in other cases as can be seen in modern Europe. In post-Soviet Russia, the dramatic rise in crime, including violent crime,41 was accompanied by a dramatic “elitization” of crime. Criminal behavior and language became part of culture not only for the emerging nouveau riche (socalled New Russians) but also for a considerable part of Russian intelligentsia. The upper classes absorbed the values of the criminalized segments of the lower classes (youth of the poor working suburbs who were prone to swearing, hooliganism, violence, and approaching women with the idea that violence was essential for sexual access).

N OBLES

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B ANDITS

Some historians have assumed that criminal behavior in the late Middle Ages/early modern era was different from what it would be in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. According to Gauvard, the countryside produced the criminal elements that came to the city, whereas in the previous century the city had been the major source of crime.42 He sees the Paris of the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries as the capital of crime.43 These assumptions are only partly true. Paris and other cities were awash with crime, but the most dangerous forms were the products of the army and the nobility that cherished the culture of violence. These provided people the means to solve all problems in their lives: the sword. And it was the countryside where nobles-bandits could engage in their looting exploits. As in the rest of Europe, the French nobility and mercenaries were the major sources of violent crime. For the nobles, “violence had constituted the very essence of his class consciousness.”44 Indeed,

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“Aristocratic criminal activity was common among the continental nobles. Examples of such behavior abound and popular puns—genstue-hommes and gens-pille-hommes—reflected public recognition of the noble proclivity for violence.”45 For these reasons banditry (armed robbery) was often seen as the noble crime par excellence46 and the traditional noble resistance to centralizing encroachments of the state. Many cases of banditry would not have taken place without the organizing role of the nobility.47 The transformation of nobles into highway robbers could also follow a different road. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Grand Seigneurs still had numerous vassals to call on for service48 and who could be easily transformed into highway robbers. Nobles did not engage in robberies only with other nobles: they associated with people from all walks of life, sharing the dangers and rewards of criminal exploits. In their behavior and attitudes, these members of the nobility were in no way different from the criminal class who were often their major associates. The role of the nobility in the proliferation of violent crime could be seen in the fact that many French bandits were soldiers or ex-soldiers. Throughout Europe, the army was a major employer of the nobility. According to some calculations, more that 80 percent of soldiers were of the gentry.49 One might question these numbers, but it is clear that nobility constituted a considerable percentage of the mercenaries. The French army was the hotbed of banditry, and the nobility incorporated into the armed forces were thus of the greatest importance in the rise of violent crime. There were several reasons the French nobility joined the army. One was the emergence of the army as a modern institution. Beside the feudal militia, there were now hired troops who were connected with their leaders through contract rather than gemeinschaft obligation. They were paid soldiers. A young noble or any free sturdy male could join. The emergence of this system was part of the profound transformation of European and, in particular, French society. In classical feudalism, for a French knight to accept money for service would be as degrading as for a woman to take money for love. The warrior was rewarded with land or part of the spoils. Not the contract but the quasi-family attachment to the king as father figure was praised in Roland’s epic fight with the Saracens. This all changed by the end of the Middle Ages. Taking money for service became acceptable, and new relationships based on it could be forged.

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French nobles were eager to join the emerging mercenary armies for other reasons as well. The reign of Francis I (1515–47) “saw the culmination of two important trends in the countryside: a reduction in the wealth and authority of the seigneur and the rise of village aristocracy.”50 It was the decline of wealth that is important to our story. Increasing numbers of young French gentry had no land or other income and no skills except handling weapons and riding horses. Army service for pay was one of the few options, and quite a few young squires would have regarded any other profession as unacceptable. The transformation from knights who fight because of personal attachment to the feudal lord to mercenaries who fight for money often changed them completely, stripping them of moral obligation and restraint. This was not a transition to other social arrangements but the end of any arrangements at all except direct benefit. Mercenary soldiers emerged as absolute anomie. Thus the changes in conducting war indicated profound cultural changes for much of the French nobility. French nobles in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were thus different not only from their later, eighteenth-century version, for whom open and unrestrained violence would not be acceptable, but also from the nobles of classical feudalism, who lived by the sword and engaged in robberies and military expeditions as a way of life but regarded petty stealing as degrading and would not resort to it even in dire straits. Booty was limited in most cases to what was considered appropriate as a military trophy—weapons, cattle, precious metals, and so forth. They were aware of their noble status and would not associate in most cases with people of dubious origin and connections. The criminal activities of the nobility of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were much more open and diversified, ranging from prestigious, or what could be defined as quasi-political, banditry to petty theft.

B ANDITRY

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N OBLES ’ P OLITICAL S TAND

Banditry, especially quasi-political banditry—in which one could regard looting as a way of fighting for this or that cause—was the most prestigious form of criminal activity, particularly among the nobles. It was also the best way to make a fortune or achieve political prominence and advance in the feudal structure. The Hundred Years War provided plenty of opportunities to engage in this behavior.

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Many political or quasi-political activities of the Hundred Years War in France were criminal in modern terms. One major form was “private wars” between feudal rulers and their bands. These bands, often led by nobles or composed of warriors of noble extraction, could present themselves as legitimate forces that fought for a particular legitimate cause. Cuttler was correct that not all brigands were “mere criminals.”51 In many cases plundering expeditions, especially if led by a noble, were part of military campaigns with political goals. Bandits who attacked Englishmen became, by the logic of events, not just bandits but people who acted in the national interest. They might even have thought of their plundering as patriotic activity to help the king and get rid of his enemy. Despite all the patriotic and quasi-political goals, however, the major reason for the activities of the vast majority of these bands was plunder pure and simple. Other considerations were in most cases of secondary importance, a by-product of the major goal: looting. Cuttler stated that there was a line “that separated private war at its worst from free-bootery.” But he added that it was “a thin line” and an even “thinner line yet separating free-bootery from outright brigandry.”52 The chronicles had no illusions as to the nature of these bandits, characterizing them and military people in general as “sheer beasts, rapists of women and engaged in various other crimes.”53 Gauvard justly questioned the patriotic considerations of bandits who might regard themselves as resistance fighters against the English forces.54 Resistance against the British was often nothing but an excuse for looting. This was definitely the case with two major factions: the Armagnacs and the Burgundians. In 1418 these bands fell on Paris and engaged in wholesale murder and plunder.55 Entering the capital did not provide any inhibitions: “When the Burgundians entered the capital in May 1418, it was littered with Armagnac corpses, ‘piled up like pigs in the mud.’ The Parisians lived through a nightmare time of ‘exhaustion and damnation’ of a ‘world close to its end’ as the poet Eustache Deschamps put it.”56 In 1472 Burgundians put to the torch villages through which they passed.57 “Whether their allegiance was to the Armagnacs or to the Burgundians, these bands behaved like military detachments; they continued to live exclusively by pillage, at the cost of the people.”58 These bands, which in the first half of the fifteenth century were in the vicinity of the wall of Paris, devastated the surroundings.

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Politicized banditry was one of the most prestigious and profitable forms of criminal behavior, but simple banditry with no political strings was not out of business. It was popular and widespread. Indeed “there were many former knights and sons of noble families involved in the armed robberies and military bands.”59 Banditry was profitable and lucrative, and it seems that by the fourteenth century or so, one could see the emergence of a particular type of “noble bandit.”60 In general, banditry “made rapid progress” after 1300;61 and at the beginning of the fourteenth century, bands of nobles ravished everything that they could, including abbeys.62 The beginning of the Hundred Years War provided these criminalized nobles, or bandits who played the role of nobles, additional opportunity for unrestricted, plain banditry, and “a number of strongholds were seized in the course of 1348 by bandit chieftains who proceeded to use them as a base for terrorizing the neighbourhood.”63 The acceleration of chaos provided absolute rein of banditry, as was the case with Rodrigue de Villandrando, who became known for his plundering expeditions.64 These nobles-cum-bandits were in many ways responsible for the calamities of the war, as the country was “ravaged by roving war bands and riven by murderous factional rivalry within the aristocracy.”65 The factional rivalry was seen by the populace as the embodiment of evil. Their bloody trails so horrified the residents that their deeds were remembered for centuries, like those of Seguin de Badefol, “a soldier who fought in Perigor in 1361 and was known as ‘king of the companies.’”66 There were continuous complaints about how banditry disrupted life.67 The same pictures of murder, plunder, and rape were repeated in the chronicle for 1423. Violence and crime, especially banditry, were so firmly embedded in noble culture that women of noble birth could be leaders. For example, when Jeanne de Belleville, a noblewoman, heard that her husband had been executed, “she assembled 400 men-at-arms and massacred the garrison at Brest. Immediately thereafter she took to piracy off the Breton coast.”68 The female noble pirate was as organically integrated into the culture of piracy as the female noble bandit into banditry. In England, problems with nobles as criminals emerged even before the war. Highway robbery was the crime of choice for many

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nobles. “Highway robbery, perhaps the most colorful form of a crime which existed in a great number of varieties, was very common in England of the latter middle ages.”69 Banditry was so widespread that the king could not always protect even important travelers. Several were kidnapped for ransom and robbed. “When he heard of the crime Edward II was furious. His inability to protect ecclesiastical visitors of the highest importance was revealed, and by members of his own household at that.”70 The king tried to marshal his forces and accused those who committed the crime not just of robbery and kidnapping but of high treason, but he did not achieve his goal. The captives were finally released when the ransom was paid, and there was no reason to keep them. Criminal gangs had such resources at their disposal that the forces of law were often powerless even in a direct confrontation. In one episode, government forces defeated a band of robbers and released some captured property, but two men sent to Stafford were “unable to enter the town since confederates of the robbers were posted at the gates.”71 At the end of Edward’s rule, nobles-bandits acted freely, and “a petition in parliament in 1331 referred to those gentry who had banded together in great companies for the purpose of kidnapping for ransom or killing the king’s lieges, churchmen, and royal judges.” Even the king’s household were directly involved. Indeed in “a place called Aycliffe, near Durham, a large band of northern gentry and their followers, led by Sir Gilbert Middleton, a Northumberland landholder and apparently a member, past or present, of the king’s household, stopped the travelers, kidnaped the two Beamonts, and robbed the cardinals.”72 The “banditization” of the nobility became even stronger when England plunged into the war. By 1357 mercenary armies, often led by nobles, accelerated their continuous plunder in France when the great push toward anarchy and the spread of banditry of all sorts probably took place. “With Jean II in captivity, France plunged into anarchy. In spite of the two-year truce signed at Bordeaux in March 1357, the war continued, particularly against Navarrese in Normandy,” and “the free-booting soldiers devastated the countryside everywhere.”73 The pressure of the marauding English troops increased. “In 1357 the district of Crocq was ravaged by AngloGascon soldiers in the first of series of devastating raids.” These were the “darkest years of the reign of Jean the Good.”74 By that time, a considerable part of the country was absolutely devastated, with

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English mercenaries undoubtedly playing a role75: “Petrarch, who visited France towards the end of the reign of John the Good in about 1360, was stupefied. ‘I could scarcely recognize anything I saw. The most opulent of kingdoms is a heap of ashes.’”76 The devastation continued: according to a 1441 witness, “where there had once been fine manors, domains and heritages, towering bushes grew.”77 The mercenaries, English included, continued to plunder what was left. British mercenaries returned home with weapons, skills, and habits of plunder and rape. The experience of the war was traumatic for both the English and French, for the two countries actively employed hordes of mercenaries in fighting each other. The experience of the war would profoundly influence the political culture of the nobility and contribute to the strife of the late fifteenth century, which was often nothing but banditry in various forms. Although the violence of the Wars of the Roses (1455–85) was in many ways stimulated by the experience of the Hundred Years War, internal strife led to the spread of banditry with the nobility playing an important role. This “can be said about the effects of the factional battles between Lancaster and York in 1459–61 and 1469–71.”78 Nobles preferred highway robbery, piracy, and plunder. Successful pillaging could make them rich and famous.79 But they were not limited by prejudices of the past and moved from highway robbery on horseback to the less “prestigious” robbery of houses.80 And one could lapse into plundering the scanty possessions of the poor or just petty stealing. The historian might assume that people of modest means were the usual prey. Indeed “there were no banks or post offices. The houses of the wealthy were well guarded; and the proceeds of taxation were transported from place to place with strict security measures.”81 According to Elias, there was a society of strict social norms in “courtly circles around the great feudal lords” with a “specific code of behavior.”82 He saw the French elite as people with a high sense of elevated social status and self-restraint, who would hardly lapse into petty criminality. This might be the case in classic feudalism, which is a strict caste society. The situation became altogether different when the caste strictness started to fall apart, along with the code of behavior of the medieval knights. By the end of the Middle Ages, only a few of the gentry were prejudiced or imbued with strong caste

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snobbery. People were the sons and daughters of their age, the age of anomie. As Gonthier correctly stated, belonging to the upper class was not a guarantee of good behavior. Quite a few nobles had no scruples whatsoever.83 Thoroughly “democratized” nobles-bandits were not rare during the Hundred Years War. One young noble participated in the battle of Agincourt (October 25, 1415), where the outnumbered British inflicted a crushing defeat on the much superior French. The nature of the massacre and humiliating defeat was possibly one reason he abandoned the army and went to Paris. Soon he was a penniless petty thief who “lived by picking pockets and stealing wallets.”84 Another noble started his career in a bandit gang, although “a noble man and of a noble line.” After eight years, for some reason he abandoned full-time banditry and turned to theft. This transition to petty crime was not, however, widespread among nobles. Some might be ashamed to engage in petty theft. A man in late fourteenth-century France “initially passed himself for a cleric.” He apparently felt ashamed of the degrading nature of petty theft and only “at the foot of the gallows did he reveal his noble origin and his real name.” The behavior of these nobles can be surmised from contemporary books instructing them what not to do. These books not only advised not engaging in spontaneous outbursts of violence without regretting the outbursts afterward, but also admonished them on ways they ate and performed other body functions that made them hardly different from peasants.85 The ease with which French nobles lapsed into crime and the behavior that made them indistinguishable from common folk led to the erosion of caste consciousness, the sense of belonging to a group whose members should treat each other with more care than outsiders. In the future, the caste structure of society would be reinforced, and it would be assumed that gentlemen should treat peers better than commoners. But in the period we are looking at, all enemies were treated more or less alike and could be tortured and slaughtered regardless of rank. These practices were not unknown in the classical Middle Ages,86 but they apparently prevailed to a greater degree later. At Agincourt thousands of French prisoners were slaughtered,87 and quite a few were of noble origin.

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Nobility and Corruption Direct, organized violence, especially banditry, endangered the very existence of society. The nobility, especially the “nobility of the sword,” not only professional warriors but also more educated than the lower classes, were good at organizing and leading bands. They also played a role in the increasing asocial drives of society as members of the bureaucracy. At the beginning of the modern era, European bureaucrats were mostly of noble origin. Increasing numbers of commoners were elevated to the top of the bureaucratic structure, but they usually received nobility. Furthermore, the bureaucratic mechanism at the direct disposal of the king was rather weak, and nobles still functioned in various respects as administrative personnel for their provinces. Administrative officials often engaged in abuses of power that were institutionalized, at least by custom. Their positions were different from those of bureaucrats in the modern West because of the different deployment of the law. Modern capitalist society has the legal underpinning of the social and economic relationship. The law, the ultimate authority, is to be set apart from and placed above all power. The activities of the bureaucracy were firmly placed in the context of the law and restricted by the notion of conflict of interest. The emergence of law as an essential aspect of capitalist society required separation of power and property rights, and consequent changes in the position of the bureaucracy. This concept was almost absent at the dawn of the modern era. In premodern Europe, power and law were often in the same hands. Power was directly related to possession, and the ruler was at the same time the owner. Positions of power were directly related to the benefits the positions brought to the holder. Problems of corruption (using a position for obtaining benefits) did not exist. The nature of the arrangements allowed one to take power for personal benefit, even when entering the service of an autocrat because of a desire to serve the sovereign. It was implied that there was no need to pay this person because he did not need remuneration: he would use power in various ways to benefit himself. The notion that the officeholder should be of high moral standards was not seen as a conflict with the notion that he should benefit from his position.88 In some cases, bribery could be institutionalized. Under the “feeding system” in early modern Russia, the ruler did not provide

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salaries to the bureaucrats. It was supposed that the bureaucrats, mostly governors of various provinces, would be supported by the population.89 The assumption that power should be used for the material benefit of the holder also affected the sexual culture, especially when religion ceased to be an inhibiting force. It was implied that, although male subjects were to share their property with the rulers, female subjects were to share their bodies. This required an interpretation of the female body as having legal existence only as a dependent body, an attachment to various males such as husbands, fathers, and older brothers. The male householder was to share his property with the bureaucrats, and the female was a type of property to be shared.90 The direct connection of power and personal favors of all sorts implied a visual display of the body of the bureaucratic lifestyle, including drunkenness, consumption of food (especially expensive foods such as red meat), lovemaking with different partners, and a rather heavy physical appearance. Status and power were also emphasized by unpolished, rude language. The assumption that power implied the end of restriction and the institutionalization of arbitrariness of all sorts led to a situation in which criminal behavior lost any meaning. Criminals could be incorporated into the nobles’ close circle. In England the judicial system so degenerated that sometimes criminals directly entered a noble’s retenue. Public petitions implored authorities to address the problem. “In 1433–4 the nobility and the gentry were asked to take an oath, as the king’s councillors had done in 1429, promising not to maintain criminals of any sort either by influencing judges or jurors or by taking them into their service.”91 It seems these requests had little impact. Criminals were eager to join the service of powerful people, who “afforded comfort and employment to criminals; thereby crimes of all kind were caused to multiply.”92 The kings were often upset with this corruption, but they too were often guilty of the same indulgence.93 The king’s inability to deal with crime efficiently was due not only to the weak enforcement system but also to the king’s loss of prestige as keeper of law and impartial power. In many cases, the king’s flexible approach to law meant that criminals could escape punishment by rendering service to the king. “In 1343 Edward III, when about to set out to Brittany, ordained that all men accused of homicides, felonies, or robberies

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who embarked with him and served for a year at their own expense, and who sureties for the same in chancery, should receive charters of pardon.”94

Students as Thieves and Bandits Students could be placed in a social category close to the gentry for several reasons. They were definitely not part of the common folk. There were no business schools in the early modern era, so the great majority of students thought about careers in the church or law bureaucracy. In either case they would be directly or indirectly incorporated into the first two estates of the kingdom and would have little in common with peasants, craftsmen, or merchants. Even students who intended to enter the church were closer to the gentry than to the clergy because of how they dressed and behaved. Students often carried swords “that were part of the typical street dress of students, soldiers, and cavaliers”95 and lived the life of bohemians with great interest in both sex and brawls, all of which made them closer to the gentry, actually to military professionals, than to the clergy. And like the gentry, students were actively involved in a variety of crimes, including those that used deadly weapons. One might suggest that this sort of behavior was fully developed by the middle of the fourteenth century, by the time of the Hundred Years War. Paris witnessed the rise of bohemian culture, which did not only disturb daily life but also produced criminals. Students in particular, whether from rich or poor backgrounds, had leisure to engage in hooliganism, drunkenness, the patronization of brothels, brawls, fights, and other asocial acts. “Paris was certainly the largest student center in Europe” and suffered from unruly bands of students who often committed serious crimes such as murders.96 In a world where traditional values were in continuous erosion, strange social combinations would amaze people of the past and the future. The monk of the high Middle Ages would be much surprised to find out that fellow monks or pupils of the schools where the intellectual and spiritual elite were trained engaged in burglary in their spare time. The bureaucrat of eighteenth-century France would be equally amazed to find out that a pupil of a prestigious school, destined to be a highly paid member of the judicial community,

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engaged in thieving on a regular basis. Yet this was the case with fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Parisian students.97 “A striking fact about these robberies is that people from university circles participated in them, and that their participation was neither by chance, nor short-lived.”98 Students engaged in criminal exploits “jointly with professional criminals” and “almost as daily affairs.” That they were involved in lock picking on a regular basis is more instructive than that they engaged in murder. Murder could be explained in terms of the feudal ethic where students were seen as quasi-gentry who carried the sword and should respond to offenses by using it. Thievery was a sign that there was no fixed value system and that students saw any type of crime as legitimate. It shows that many students were anomie. It also indicates that the notion of deviant behavior did not exist for them, because it implied difference from the norms of the rest of the society. If a considerable part of society existed in such a way, the notion lost its meaning.

Clergy as Thieves and Bandits The culture of violence made brigands of a variety of people from different social backgrounds. Most interesting is clergy involvement in various crimes, often of a violent nature. This was also a sign of the sociocultural setting of the era. In the classical Middle Ages feudal orders and professional affiliations were fixed. The job of the knights was to fight, and the job of the clerics was to engage in prayer. Clerics, among the literate few, also represented the intellectual elite. Physical strength and violence were not part of their professional training. Yet even in this period there were exceptions. Church members were often not inhibited when when they realized that plundering and other forms of criminal activity were the gentry’s essential profession. This situation changed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Violent outbreaks involving clergy could be seen from the beginning of the period. The “Babylonian Captivity of the pope” (the transfer of the pope’s residence from Rome to Avignon in 1309–77) had exacerbated tension in Avignon, and clergy apparently participated in an outbreak on July 24, 1314, that involved killing and looting.99 With the outbreak of the Hundred Years War, clerics customarily engaged in beating, murder, and aggressive behavior in general and

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were accused of “many robberies, larcenies and the rape of women.”100 Some became “highway bandits.”101 Criminally inclined clerics were actively involved in stealing church property and engaged in violence even in the church.102 Representatives of monastic orders that professed humility and peace could engage in violent behavior, as when Franciscans killed a person during a funeral ceremony.103 The church as an institution was also directly involved in violent crime in England, and one could assume the same for France. One should not forget the crisis of the church and religious thought in general during the Renaissance. Deep moral degeneration permeated the upper echelons of the hierarchy and provided a powerful spur to the Reformation. It was clear that some segments of the church actively engaged in criminal activity and protecting criminals. “There is evidence of a number of religious houses in the fourteenth century having close connections with bands of criminals, frequently from choice.”104 Criminals in turn were apparently quite useful to the church in several ways. The simplest was sharing booty. Criminals were also “used for such purposes as collecting rents and intimidating ecclesiastical and secular foes.” The church was certainly not the only institution that provided support to criminals, but it was one of the most attractive, for it was the most powerful, especially prior to the Reformation. It enjoyed an element of extraterritoriality, for its sovereign was not the local ruler but the pope. Excommunication was a powerful weapon in dealing with those who still believed in hell and paradise.105

Mercenaries as Criminals Mercenaries in the West preceded the late Middle Ages/early modern era by at least two millennia. Seventh-century BCE Greek sources mention “the bronze men who had come from sea.”106 These Greek mercenaries sailed to Egypt, where they served Psammetichus I. The ancient mercenaries were not just a formidable military force (recall the famous Anabasis, when ten thousand Greek mercenaries cut through the entire Persian empire107) but also a menace on land. The situation was much the same at the advent of the modern era, when organized armed banditry was the most serious problem the state faced.

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In the gemeinschaft culture, warriors were bound to each other by personal relationships. They became quasi-relatives and quasifriends, and leaders had little power to push them to obedience. Medieval lore always emphasized love between a king and vassals because love, the informal ties of a quasi-family relationship, was the only way to keep men together. Premodern society also had very few individuals unattached to any social group, and so there were few individuals to hire as mercenaries. At the advent of the modern era a considerable number of loose individuals were available. Capitalism in various forms was introducing money-based relationships into social life on a large scale. Hiring contributed to the erosion of the interpersonal relationships and cohesiveness of traditional society. Selling and buying land led to eviction and displacement and the emergence of a considerable number of displaced squires and people of common origin without a permanent social niche. For these people, work as a mercenary was sometimes the only work available, and the most prestigious. The mercenary armies required for military expeditions started to compete with remnant feudal armies all over Europe. Mercenaries were paid by the conflicting forces, and usually pay determined their affiliation. A mercenary “might put himself at the service of one prince rather than another, but it was merely a matter of pay.” In the Hundred Years War, “Sir John Chandos, Robert Knowles, and Sir John Falstaff fought for the English; Du Guesclin, Gressart and Cervolle served the house of Valois.”108 The low cost of mercenaries was more important than their low quality. Contemporaries had no illusions in this regard, and such experts as Machiavelli questioned their value: “Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous; and anyone who relies upon mercenaries to defend his territories will never have a stable or secure rule.”109 As soon as they ceased to be paid, they lapsed into banditry. “In the fourteenth century, in the absence of formal enlistment, troops of soldiers commonly engaged in pillage; the history of the great companies make this abundantly clear.”110 Indeed, in the view of the historian, “throughout Europe, armed bands looted shamelessly, obeying only their own captain, their condottiere.”111 Mercenaries were hardly good material for building a reliable military force. But the state had no resources to maintain a standing professional army. “Mercenary armies were convenient, and their services were cheaper in the long run, since they were paid only

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during wartime.”112 The emerging centralized state had no alternative. European kings raised big mercenary armies for a military campaign. Yet (most important) they were not a standing army like the Roman legions and the armies of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The state often disbanded the army without any concern about what the ex-soldiers intended to do. Later, various states tried to develop a standing army. As time progressed, conscription took citizens for varying periods of military service and sent them back to society. Eventually, officials tried to arrange this reincorporation as smoothly as possible. It was even assumed that soldiers would come back to society as better citizens, more disciplined and with training and education for civilian life. The army in this case played the important role of socializer. Nothing of this sort was available at the dawn of the modern era, and many ex-soldiers had no means of support. Often armed and possessing only the skills of fighting and killing, they were easily transformed into well-trained armed bandits. “These demobilized soldiers formed pools of mercenaries available for hire but also engaged in banditry, pillage, rape, and destruction along the way.”113 The mercenary armies also created problems. Having been a scourge in a foreign land, they hardly changed their habits when they returned home. Indeed, “soldiers who were accustomed to live by the sword in the foreign parts were returning home and there was fear for the consequences.”114 Not only groups but also individual soldiers were viewed as a danger to public order. Even begging soldiers were “held to be one of the greatest threats to law and order, even where they traveled not in gangs but singly, usually with their concubine.”115 The numbers of dismissed soldiers and uprooted victims of the wars increased dramatically, creating additional problems for authorities and society in general during protracted wars such as the Hundred Years War. It is clear that mercenaries (often of low origin) were engaged in banditry for very pragmatic reasons. It was an appropriate application of their skills (handling weapons and dispatching humans) and a good way to earn money and engage in drunkenness and rape (the good life in the view of quite a few males at that time). One might explain the popularity and even veneration of highway robbery by the fact that it required professionalism from its practitioners. “Perhaps of all types of robbers, highway robbers were the most professional with reputations which were more than local.”116 Criminal

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activity of this sort was akin to the activity of the nobles as professional soldiers, and the robber was transformed into a noble, especially if he ambushed one. Thus attacking nobles was important not just from a monetary point of view, for it was nobles who most likely had something to take, but also from a status position. By fighting nobles, one became to some degree their peer. This intimate connection of highway robbery to the elite in noble exploits made it quite a popular enterprise in the late Middle Ages.

Mercenaries as Bandits French mercenaries were also a major source of banditry. It was not just nobility, professional soldiers by caste affiliation, who were responsible for the permanence of banditry. As in other European countries, the French military was undergoing steady democratization. Weapons, notably swords, and war as a profession ceased to be attributes of the nobility. “War was no longer an occupation for knights alone, it was turning into a trade which absorbed, permanently or temporarily, young people from poor backgrounds.”117 War and mercenary service were one of the most promising opportunities for young, vigorous males. Personal serfdom in France had started a steady decline during the reign of Louis X.118 As more and more people became personally free, there were “limited opportunities for the poor.”119 Any free man could join the mercenary ranks and be well paid. “At the end of the fifteenth century, a soldier earned about twice as much as a journeyman mason in the town of Zurich.”120 It was not surprising that the mercenaries became a popular profession. Export of soldiers and mercenaries became a trademark for some countries. “Between 1450 and 1850, over one million young men left the countryside or towns of what today is Switzerland to serve as contract laborers in some mercenary army of Europe.”121 Quite a few of them got to France. People became mercenaries in several ways. Most of them probably joined as individuals, but there were also group enlistments. Village lads were “often organized into fraternities, gangs of adolescents,” where they lived, drank, chased girls, acquired a taste for violence, and were “sometimes lured into service as roving mercenaries by the promise of booty and adventure.”122 These incentives have not changed. In the twentieth century, white mercenaries in the

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Congo stated with disarming openness that the major reason they engaged in the enterprise was for “[p]lenty of lolly [money] and plenty of fun.”123 The peasant lads who joined the mercenary armies of early modern Europe would probably respond the same way. One might assume that the “fun,” not the fixed salary, was the major attraction. A salesman in the modern West might receive a fixed salary, but his major income would be from commission. The same held for most mercenaries, who assumed that though the salary was not high, the possibility for looting was attractive, and their expectations were justified. The loss of cohesive authority during the Hundred Years War provided golden opportunities for robbery, looting, and rape, as can be seen in the present when the sudden collapse of the authorities provides the opportunity for looting.124 Salary and other bonuses were also incentives to join. Some played “the dangerous game of desertion and reenlistment whereby one absconded with the enlistment bonus on the way to the mustering place, only to rejoin at another recruiting station for a second enlistment fee, and so on.”125 This practice was undoubtedly in place in the very beginning of the mercenary system all over Europe and continued into future centuries. Mercenaries in Europe became a real threat when war broke out in 1337. As early as 1346 the chronicles reported hordes of bands of soldiers engaged in robberies and looting.126 In France the peasant uprising and city riots were aggravated by bands of mercenaries. By 1365 the country was overwhelmed by mercenaries and bandits.127 Several places were repeatedly ravaged by bands of soldiers over the entire course of the war.128 The chronicles presented the mercenaries as rampaging beasts with a drive for macabre perversion. The 1375 author lamented plunder, murders, and sadistic acts such as “roast the children” in the fire.129 There were rumors of children actually being eaten. One could ascribe these stories to the chroniclers’ penchant for the dramatic. Still, reliable information indicated that information presented in the chronicle was valid. Such a practice is consistent with the long tradition of ritualized cannibalism that seems to exist in the late Middle Ages/early modern era in France as a form of social vengeance.130 Reliable records indicate that they could have been engaged in the most macabre brutalities for various reasons. There was no doubt that mercenaries became bandits of the worst type, for whom murder and thievery were trivialized and could be

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combined with other jobs and macabre monstrosities. A certain Le Brun, who lived at the end of the fourteenth century, was a smith whose life and income did not satisfy him, and he became a mercenary. The job displeased him, not because he had an aversion to killing or feared to end his life badly, but because, like many modern employees, he thought that he was underpaid. He deserted, stealing a charger that he sold for three golden francs. He had also saved fifteen francs. This money allowed him to dress decently and enjoy good food, drink, and sex with prostitutes. “At the end of two years his funds, as he said frankly, almost in Villon’s phrase, had been spent on ‘dez, tavernes et filles.’”131 At that point, “three possibilities presented themselves: going back to being a smith, a soldier, or a bandit: occupations he had previously practiced. He chose the last two.”132 Banditry and soldiery were two professions he altered or combined. He served in the army during one of the numerous campaigns; “the rest of the time he stole and pillaged with chance companions.” The victims were all sorts of people. For example, he “killed a salt merchant, took his horse (which he later sold for 3 francs) and found 7 francs in his bag; he also killed a traveller on foot, in whose bag he found a mere 12 sous.” The women were treated in the same fashion, including prostitutes with whom he had sex in “the Rue Tiron.” He seduced a girl into “the wood of Vincennes, and, by the way of payment, cut her throat and sold her dress on the way back. . . . Each trip left bloody traces.” Later, when caught, “he confessed to murder, theft, and rape on the most incredible scale.”133 He often engaged in his criminal acts with assorted other people with “diverse crafts and trades as a cover for their other, more lucrative activities.”134 Other people engaged in a wider variety of criminal acts, definitely including crimes with weapons, such as poaching, a crime already recorded in the fourteenth century.135 People such as these composed the majority of the commoner mercenaries who comprised a considerable part of the armies. It was no surprise that army detachments of commoner mercenaries were deeply involved in crime and not much different in behavior from bandits controlled by particular political forces. Even the best disciplined troops only dimly recognized any authority, and continued looting forays irrespective of rulers’ arrangements. These characteristics were well understood by the local population, who “called them tard venus (latecomers) because they had arrived after twenty years of fighting,

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when England and France had concluded the Treaty of Bretagne,” and people had begun to hope that peace might be returning at last.136 Although the mercenary troops looted during peacetime, they did so with even greater ease during the war. They often did not requisition goods or quarters according to rules but engaged in direct plunder of the local population. It was apparent that quite a few commoners who entered the ranks of the mercenaries thought about their employment as temporary, as a rite of passage to more lucrative banditry. They saw in the army the kind of apprenticeship one could find in the armies of the modern West, where some enlist to attain marketable skills to move back into civilian life at a bigger salary. They joined the army to acquire the skills and stamina needed for the much more profitable life of armed bandits. “The parasitic life they led during the war taught them the habits of hardened old soldiers who lived ‘at war with society.’”137 It also taught them to commit all types of violence with impunity.138 Soldier mercenaries could spend their entire army life anticipating the real job of freebooters. When discharged, they became “the criminal associations which developed all over France as a consequence of the dispersion of numerous armed companies, and of the ‘unemployment’ of people whom war had nourished or who had lived off it parasitically.”139 The army was “a veritable school for crime.”140 Soldiers and mercenaries were transformed into gangs of bandits in two ways. Quite likely the most popular was direct transformation of army units into bandit gangs; the second most popular was coalescence of mixed groups of soldiers and civilians. The biggest bands were detachments of mercenaries who became bandits after being officially removed from military payrolls or recruited by some quasi-political or purely criminal person, usually a member of the nobility. Banditization, so to speak, required no changes: the entire structure often was preserved intact, including ranks and chain of command.141 As their structure became more sophisticated, bands of criminals started to develop a legal organization. “Some criminal bands were bold enough to claim that they operated a law of their own. They were not referring to the gang rules of membership or articles of discipline, if such existed, but to their hegemony over a particular region.” They regarded themselves as independent principalities and engaged in international relationships with each other. Apparently, they engaged in joint military enterprises, and “at this robbers’

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meeting the division of spoil may well have been carried out according to an accepted procedure.” These examples were taken from English history of that time but undoubtedly could be applied to France as well.142 At any point the mercenaries could enter the service of an army and then return to organized banditry. This behavior can easily be seen in modern conflicts under similar conditions, such as the Mexican and the Chinese revolutions at the beginning of the twentieth century. Most mercenaries, some data suggest, operated in the vicinity of their permanent residence.143 But the biggest bands apparently had a much broader range of operation.144 Although some bands developed through banditization of army units, others apparently emerged from grassroots coalescence of individual bandits, following a model similar to that of modern bandits. “The gang is an interstitial group originally formed spontaneously, and integrated through conflict. It is characterized by the following types of behavior: meeting face to face, milling movement through space as a unit, conflict, and planning.”145 The groups might not exist for very long, and the ties between the members might be “short-lived and sporadic,” but these unions could lead to “some longer-lasting organizations” and “the result of this collective behavior is the development of tradition, unreflective internal structure, esprit de corps, solidarity, morale, group awareness, and attachment to local territory.”146 These grassroots groups, composed of people of various origins, provided social mobility. In general, there was not much respect for formal credentials (noble status). It was much more important to be well qualified for the job. For a person with weapons skills, organizational ability, charisma, and plain luck, humble origins would not be an obstacle to a major career leap to chief of the band. One such individual was a certain Crokart, who, according to contemporary sources “had risen from humble origin”147 and was elected to lead a band. Crokart and his fellows in arms had earned their livings in various ways. They were not limited by principles and served the English. They also apparently engaged in the simple looting of anyone in their way. Crokart “stormed any number of towns and chateaux only to meet an undignified end by falling from his horse.”148 The chance for a person of humble origins to make a career as a bandit, and possibly become leader of one of the bands, apparently

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increased during the great peasant revolts, such as the famous Jacquerie (1358), where the peasants created an army led by Captain Guillaume Cale, or Carle.149 The army was defeated and many were slaughtered, but quite a few clearly survived. The uprising uprooted them but provided some military skills and helped transform them into bandits. Some could well be, as Hobsbawm states, “primitive rebels” who looted estates of feudal lords, raping the noblewomen in quasi-social vengeance. Others quite likely were pure bandits. Correlations between peasant uprisings and the spread of banditry were not only French but also could be seen all over Europe. “During the French Jacquerie (also in England, Bohemia, and Germany), a tremendous banditry prevailed. ‘Gangs of robbers gathered into enormous detachments. They robbed, destroyed, burned down the villages and cities that did not buy them off by paying a contribution.’”150 These bands were strong enough to take even fortified cities. In 1383, for example, the chronicle complains about the devastation of Marseille.151 In this environment, full of opportunities for courageous and lucky peasants, a rebel turned bandit could climb rapidly in the bandit structure. He could be a leader of the original bands or make a career in different bands among cutthroats with diverse social origins. Groups of bandits became specialized in particular areas. Some “together pillaged churches.” In 1410, for example, armed men engaged “in pillage, robberies, murder in church and the outside of church.”152 Another group specialized in burglary. Finally, mercenaries, together with the rest of the population, actively participated in other acts of violence, often religiously motivated. The rise of criminality was connected with other looting-oriented violence such as pogroms.153 The external reason for the pogroms was the plague.154 “In another wild misbelief that spread with the plague across Europe, Christians began to blame Jews for causing the plague, and in many cities massacred them. In Basel Jews were burned alive in wooden buildings; in Speyer they were put into wine casks and rolled into the river.”155 But the major outcome and perhaps major motivation was not so much the extermination of Jews as looting. Looting Jews required no specialization, particular skills, or even personal courage. Moreover, it resembled a church activity in which all Christians could participate. Looting Jews could be done in a communal spirit by all members of society, which was predominantly Christian.

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T HE E MERGENCE OF VAGABONDS AS B EGGARS , T HIEVES , AND B ANDITS The fragmentation of the feudal orders into clans engaged in permanent wars or plundering expeditions was an essential aspect of life in the later Middle Ages. Not all these people were absolute anomie; the nobles, with all their penchant for robbery, were still part of the feudal structure. But by the the beginning of the modern era, different groups were coming into play. People plucked out of their social structure were absolutely asocial. The drive of the military elite toward violent behavior and a weakness of both external and internal restraint led many along the road to openly criminal behavior. In prehistorical society, vagabonds were quite a rare social phenomenon. Traditional solidarity implied that poor members of the group or tribe could share the meal of any member of the group. “Among the ancient Semites, the right of the poor to participate in a meal is not associated with personal generosity, but rather with social affiliation and with religious custom.”156 The individual perished if only the group perished; otherwise, he was supported by the group. On the other hand, a person placed outside the group without being incorporated into another group through marriage or by some other way was absolutely defenseless and destined for destruction. The feudal era was in many ways an outgrowth of prehistoric society, and these principles could be applied to the analysis of society in the early and classical Middle Ages. Vagabondage was not part of the political landscape in the early Middle Ages, when a person belonged to a specific social body (e.g., peasant communes, the order of the knights). Individuals existed as part of a group, with whom they survived or perished. The situation became rather different in the early modern era. The disintegration of the medieval social structure under the influence of a market economy, with the beginning of the selling and buying of land, led to a large number of landless people. There were now many people who did not belong to any social group destitute and on their own. The problem of people without land, and therefore without means of support, could be found in ancient Greece and Rome, where free landowners lost their land and became “proletariat.” But only in early modern times was this process launched on a grand scale. The differences between early modern Europe and ancient Rome were manifold. In particular, many residents of ancient Rome

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were slaves who could not be deprived of land because they were property. In early modern Europe a majority of the peasants were free. They could lose their land but not their freedom, and if evicted they often became vagabonds. Economic crises and famines made the situation even worse. Economic problems and the “subsistence crisis” led to a sharp increase in beggars of all sorts.157 These people had few options. Enlistment in the army required that one be young, strong, and male. Emigrating to the colonies was available only in the sixteenth century and only in a few countries. As a result, a considerable part of the lower classes became migrants and vagabonds. “Vagabonds were not migrants at all, since they lived in the state of almost continuous motion with almost no chance of finding or founding a settled home elsewhere.”158 Continuous migration was not actually new. Traditional society had mass migration, but of entire nations or tribes that move with their social structure undisturbed. Migration at the beginning of the modern era was not of structure but of isolated individuals, fragments of various social groups. Some historians have related vagabonds of the past to their own experience, modeling them after the hippies of the 1960s. These models can also be found among Soviet historians, who were anxious to identify the protoproletariat as far back as possible in history and attributed to these groups all sorts of great qualities that the groups did not possess. Vagrants as a group were far from harmless. Many, if not a majority, as their only chance for survival were involved in criminal activity,159 from petty theft to armed robbery. Overall, the actions of the vagabonds contributed significantly to the rise in criminal activity. In some places, “in almost every case involving a serious offence the criminal was a vagabond or came from another locality.”160 The spread of vagabondage and criminality was related not only to deep-seated social changes, economic crises, war, and other calamities but also to weather. Warm weather reduced the number of calories needed for survival and encouraged people to move from one place to another. “Ranks of beggars and roaming people swell enormously during the summer.”161

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VAGABONDS IN F RANCE : B EGGARS , T HIEVES , AND B ANDITS Like other asocial groups (nobles as bandits, mercenaries as soldiers and bandits), vagabonds spread all over fifteenth-century Europe. The difference in France was perhaps the scale. The devastation of the generations-long war had uprooted more people in France than in other parts of Europe. The spread of banditry led to groups in which vagabonds played a crucial role and engaged in begging, thievery, and occasional banditry. Not just wandering groups of beggars (or groups of bandits or soldiers) could constitute a threat. Any traveler could engage in criminal activities. There was, for example, a record of Jewish tailors from Spain who engaged in stealing during a pilgrimage from one part of France to another. They had no prejudices and stole from Christians and other Jews alike.162 Still, these sort of individuals were rather an exception, and vagabonds were more serious threats to public order. “Massive vagabondage” became a serious problem as the result of the calamities caused by the Black Death and the Hundred Years War.163 By the fifteenth century rising numbers of beggars moved around Europe with other migrants and uprooted people. The group included “persons wandering in search of employment, discharged soldiers, scholars, and employees released form service following the dissolution of the monasteries, as well as a range of individuals and groups for whom itinerancy was intrinsically linked to their means of earning a livelihood, such as tinkers, hawkers, strolling players, chapbook sellers and colporteurs. It also consisted of those who operated outside or in the borders of the law, such as highwaymen, passers of counterfeit coin, fortune tellers (whose activities were only criminalized in the sixteenth century), beggars and vagrants.”164 Vagabonds constituted a considerable number of these displaced people, and a “floating population of ‘vagabonds’” could be seen in many regions and cities such as Toulouse.165 One could see the problem as derived from the values of medieval society. “In medieval society, geographical and social mobility faced obstacles born of the tendency of territorial and social relationship to ossify. Instability was disquieting, and suspect.”166 There was some truth in this assumption, but it would be wrong to attribute fear of vagabonds solely to the values of people perplexed by the sight of people without a regular domicile. Beggars were not just poor wretches who engaged in begging and occasional petty stealing.

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Beggars, pilgrims, and other folk had coalesced into armed bands, with activities criminal in their very nature. In the eyes of French contemporaries, vagabonds “lost all conception of a respectable life” and “engaged in robbery, fought amongst themselves and disturbed the peace of the city.”167 It was clear that “vagabonds, in bands or singly, were the nightmare of law-keepers.”168 In the eyes of the public, vagabonds were symbols of and a breeding ground for various types of disorders, “the threat of crime, moral corruption, seduction and disease.”169 Some bands of vagrants joined mercenary bands. These groups of people displaced from social structures were not uncommon, and were seen by the public as an aggregate. “There are parallels between the mercenary and the roving artisan-craftsman in his journeyman phase. The lot of the poor soldier was bound up with that of tramps, gypsies, beggars, vagrants, brigands, and highway robbers. The term ‘mercenary’ was flexible and applied to all manner of migrant folk.”170 This union of soldier bandits with beggars and similar classes was not without logic: they were united in a symbiosis similar to that in the animal kingdom, where a small bird benefits a large predator by, for example, pecking particles of meat from its teeth. This symbiosis seems to have existed in late medieval/early modern France. “The Hundred Years War had produced fearsome bands of vagabonds and companies of soldiers who intimidated peasants, villagers, and burghers alike.”171 The basis of this union was mutual interest and division of labor. When the situation was propitious, they engaged in looting. When looting was risky or impossible, for example, in a well-armed and defended place, ferociousness was replaced with humble solicitation and appeal to the Christ for succor. The band could function as both predatory bandits and humble vagabonds: “begging was only one activity, and . . . vagrants were only one category amongst several.”172 These bands testified to the “democratization” of banditry, where people of the sword could work with social outcasts. Beggars could engage in banditry without substantial assistance from the ex-mercenaries. Many robbers started their careers as beggars and vagabonds and, as their numbers increased, became real bandits. By the fourteenth century, “there were reports of large numbers of vagabonds congregating in warlike manner, as it was put, and living from ambush and pillage.”173 A sort of criminal army was forming. “Criminal gangs often possessed a considerable degree of internal

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organization. They were more than a collection of men with one or two leaders. The instigator and planner of the band’s activities was sometimes dignified by the title of captain.”174 Some had titles such as “Lord of the Rogues.” Groups entered into relationships that in many ways resembled the feudal societies they confronted: “The conception of a kingdom of beggars organized in sixteen ‘degrees’ which even have their Estates General, i.e., their regular meetings, was certainly influenced by contemporary political thought and social reality.”175 The stability of these groups varied. Aggregations of individuals who were not able to develop relationships with each other were easily formed and equally easily fell apart. There were other, close-knit gemeinschaft groups with strong loyalties to each other. “Two young beggars, for example who were apprehended and questioned by the police in Salzburg in the early seventeenth century, admitted that they had solemnly sworn (‘by their soul’) not to betray each other.”176 These groups could have a long life, and their solidarity, division of labor, and (often) size made them exceptionally dangerous.

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Although banditry was the most dangerous and violent crime in the open countryside, criminals also proliferated in the cities, which were increasing in size by the late Middle Ages. People often wanted the anonymous crowds of the cities. It was no surprise that late medieval/early modern Paris teemed with criminals of all sorts.177 The city milieu much more than the countryside fostered the disintegration of the gemeinschaft culture.178 The city stimulated criminalization not only because it tore premodern people from the protective and controlling structure of the feudal countryside, but also because it created a sense of anonymity. Paris at the beginning of the fourteenth century had about two hundred thousand people179 and, like any big city, offered the opportunity for criminal behavior, partly because it attracted all types of displaced individuals. Indeed, “Paris attracted many of the gens sans aveu, and it was here that the underside of the Kingdom of France appeared most nakedly. Hawking patent medicines, cutting purses, begging, filching, soliciting, and cursing, rootless vagrants somehow survived.”180 People

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decided to engage in criminality for manifold reasons, but economic considerations were most important. Famine, epidemics, and social and economic crises increased the pressure on the part of the population for whom theft was the only way to survive. “Theft was often the consequence of a temporary need—no money in the house, no wine to continue a drinking session, no honest way of earning a living. The difficulties of life in Paris in the first half of the fifteenth century multiplied such circumstances.”181 The situation elsewhere in France was essentially the same. Numbers of destitute people swelled in the frequent economic and social breakdowns, and charity was not able to feed them. Petty thievery was often the only way to live.182 Crime was not always the result of extreme misery and desperation. In many cases the stimulus was circumstances that convinced someone that he or she had little chance of being caught. Theft was often “the work of domestic servants, wage-earners, or the employees of artisans.”183 Dealing with valuables tempted these people to engage in theft. Hostels and inns were often a place for crime. “Communal bed-chambers shared by people who were strangers offered ample opportunities for theft, at the expense of the property of the innkeeper or, more often, the luggage of the guest.”184 Servants were tempted to steal from their masters.185 Workers for wealthier peasants were also tempted, and they could come to Paris to sell their stolen property.186 Paris was crucially important even to those who engaged in crime outside the walls. The capital provided a place for rest. “For the criminal bands, Paris was less a field of operation than a haunt of pleasure, a place to visit, somewhere to spend the winter. It was the culmination of their success, it attracted them with the prospect of a life of merriment, streets teeming with life, and meetings in taverns and brothels.”187 Paris also offered social anonymity. Even the watchful eyes of the local neighborhoods could hardly detect the floating thousands, especially in an era of civil strife and endless war. One could disappear there. Paris was also infested by hordes of beggars dispossessed by the social and political breakdown. In 1363 the bishop of Paris lamented “that a new calamity has struck the streets and squares of Paris: they are over-run by an innumerable crowd of beggars.”188 During some periods they made up a considerable part of the population; according to some, the numbers in fifteenth-century Paris were “as high as

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80,000. This means, if we take the highest figure for the total population, that they would have constituted a third of the inhabitants. It is worth noting that one historian of Paris accepted this proportion as valid for the nineteenth century,” 18 percent.189 It was not surprising that in 1395 Paris faced a “renewed outbreak of crime,” and that in the fifteenth century there was “a renewed outbreak of robberies” by people were quite audacious and “did not fear the rope.”190 Authorities noted a “plague of thefts, brigandage and frauds which raged in Paris.”191 Upon committing robberies, both in Paris and in the vicinity, the perpetrators “made away with whatever they could, then found refuge in the town.” Here they could both sell their goods and engage in a new round of crime. Criminals in Paris mirrored straight society with a society of their own. Because the criminal world is anticontractual in essence, they could easily organize their society on informal obligations and traditions such as a straight society. Parisian thieves, for example, formed their own guilds. “Entry into a particular guild was to be preceded by an examination, the execution of sort of chef-d’oeuvre in the art of burglary, after which the older members assigned the laureate to a given group.”192 Some thieves became virtuosos and were as proud of their abilities as any skillful craftsmen.193 A criminal who was not dispatched was likely to return to his or her old craft. The rate of recidivism could be as high as 60 percent among arrested criminals.194 Like the regular guilds, the criminal guilds in Paris did not advocate free competition but distributed employment opportunities among their members. The guild ensured “that each particular thief received sufficient ‘employment’ bearing in mind that there should not be too many in a particular place.”195 One might assume that the distribution of such perks followed what Thomson called a “moral economy,” taking into consideration not just formal fairness. A thief who experienced serious financial problems or family obligations might receive more favorable conditions for work.196 The early fifteenth century also saw the beginning of social and spatial divisions—dangerous and not dangerous neighborhoods. According to some reports, the part “of right-bank Paris which bordered on the river was the resort of the vagabond and the homeless.”197 Cemeteries were also places were criminals and other asocial elements congregated. “The medieval cemetery was one of the places

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where the urban poor carried on their public life. The cemetery of the Holy Innocents crops up repeatedly in the judicial records” as the meeting place “for prostitutes, profiteers, vagabonds and idlers of every description. It was also a place where all sort of con-men lay in wait for gullible victims. Thieves found specialists in stolen goods in the cemetery and its immediate environs. The proximity of the tombs gave these shady encounters against the background of the Danse Macabre their own very special character.”198 It was also the place were stolen goods were brought for sale.199 Other aspects of criminal activity in early modern Paris would proliferate in the future. There was increasing specialization as techniques improved. One specialization was “burglary with a picklock,” although “[w]e can be fairly sure that the use of the picklock has a much longer history, all sort of iron objects being capable of serving this purpose. This type of theft is dignified by a special name: lock picking (la crocheterie), and its perpetrator is called a lock-picker (crocheteur).”200 The increasing number of inhabitants facilitated pickpocketing. “The type of theft which occurs with the greatest frequency in the pages of the judicial registers was the ‘pickpocket’ type. The medieval pickpocket had an easy job because of the absence of pockets in the clothes of the period. Normal practice was to carry a small money-bag hanging from the belt, or as a precaution against theft, hung from the neck.”201 This exposure provided criminals the opportunity to steal. The major reason for the proliferation of pickpocketing was the anonymity provided by a big city such as Paris. Provincials who were beginning to frequent the capital for business and entertainment became prime targets. One popular method of thievery was to pose as a tour guide. “Parisian pickpockets took ingenuous new arrivals to Notre-Dame, showed them Pepin and Charlemagne in the gallery of kings, and sneaked away their purses from behind.” Gullible and excited provincials were an easy target but were not the only one. The crowds of Parisians made a good place for thieves to engage in their exploits. Pickpockets operated “at the law-courts, where they took advantage of the large audience.” There were other places for stealing; “opportunities for stealing were also provided by the influx of faithful into the church—with a little experience, cutting the thong of a purse was easy.” Markets “provided plenty of opportunity to pinch purses, which explains why Les Halles was a favorite haunt of those attracted by easy gains.” Big public events attracted crowds,

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not just from Paris but also from the provinces. “Any large gathering facilitated this activity. Even the pomp and solemnity of ceremonies failed to discourage robbers. At the reception given at the coronation of Henri VI in 1421 at the royal palace, to which the common people were admitted, there were thieves all over the place.”202 Paris was certainly not the only place infested with crime. Provincial cities such as Lyon were also criminalized. Languedoc in the fifteenth century had an “enormous ‘lock-picking fraternity’ estimated to have 400 members,” with its own “king,” “constable,” and “special slang” (the language for communication among members of the group) that specialized in church robberies.203 In 1359, Avignon was in a panic because of the mysterious “society of thieves,”204 whose activities indicated that lock-pickers were among them. Lock-picking and breaking into premises were not the only ways criminals accessed houses.205 Some set a house on fire and took advantage of the confusion.206 One of the best ways to get into a house was to be a servant or concubine of the master. In many cases the two services were combined, especially if the man was unmarried. The woman provided an outlet for casual sexual gratification, making it possible for the man to explore other amorous adventures. The liaison provided her not only more job security but also the chance to gain more of the master’s trust in order to steal. This was shown to be the case in fifteenth-century Lyon.207 The criminal profession also took professional mobility close to heart. The transition from highway robbery to petty stealing reduced not only income but also prestige. The converse was a step up the social ladder. Some city thieves became highway robbers when opportunities in the city declined. Such transitions were facilitated by the fact that the violence was part of the culture as a whole. “Robbery, fighting, pillage, family feuds—all this played a hardly less important role in the life of the town population than in that of the warrior class itself.”208 In some cases, robbers were joined by respectable folk for parttime employment between legitimate jobs. “During the winter of 1429–30, suffering the effects of the extreme dearness of food in the town, many Parisians left the capital under the pretense of seeking relaxation or work, then ‘tempted by the devil’ formed bands of brigands.”209 People expelled from cities as punishment for a crime were also marginalized with no alternative but to become bandits.210

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4 M E D I C A L I M P L I C AT I O N S : ASOCIAL PROCESS AND DISEASE

B anditry and crime enmeshed in anomistic violence were certainly

not the only manifestations of the chaos that emerged with the disintegration of the structure of Middle Age society. No less important was the spread of disease. The study of disease is a comparatively new field in historical research. But it is quite important, for it shows deep subterranean forces of historical change. To some degree, the effects of disease can be compared to the development of the economy, which, as Marx and Braudel emphasized, represents deepseated forces of change. Diseases have always been a part of human society. They play an essential role in modern society as well, but the toll is much smaller than in early modern Europe, even taking into consideration such deadly diseases as AIDS. One reason is advances in medical treatment. Another, as Elias pointed out, is that modern Westerners have restrictions on their behavior, such as rules of hygiene, that were often lacking at the beginning of the modern era. This lack along with some of the processes unleashed by developing capitalism created a serious biosocial problem of which the spread of pandemic diseases was one gruesome manifestation. Life in the Middle Ages was in many respects freer than in modern society. Foucault and other intellectuals stated that states and societies arbitrarily impose rules on people’s behavior and restrict their freedom. As examples, they gave aspects of personal behavior, dress, hair style, and sexual behavior. But the controlling society that

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arose in the modern era was not focused, at least originally, on these aspects of private life. The concern was unrelated to dress, manners, and similar subjects that change from one period to another and usually do not affect the life of society as a whole. The focus was on basic human hygiene. In the modern West, one can display disdain for conventional dress and haircut or engage in unusual forms of sexual behavior. But basic rules of hygiene (cleanliness of body and appropriate locations for elimination of bodily waste) are not seriously questioned. They have become axiomatic, and this is a major reason modern Western society is able to escape major epidemics. This was not the case during early modern history or at the end of Middle Ages. For most of Europe during these periods, sanitation was not taken into account. People lived an extremely unhygienic life, not only in comparison to modern Westerners but also to their contemporaries in Eastern Europe. The residents of old Kiev in Russia were fond of bathing in hot and cold water. Romans regarded bathing as an important regular activity; social customs prohibited Persians from vomiting or urinating in public.1 This was hardly the case with West Europeans in the late medieval/early modern era. Floors were rarely swept, hands were rarely washed, and “even the rich used corridors and decorative bushes to urinate or defecate.”2 The perfume used to suppress some of these odors did not help much, and “the world stank.” Furthermore, due to rapid urbanization, thousands of people were packed into the very limited space created by building city walls for security purposes. Crowding people into a small area without modern sanitary arrangements and with refuse pouring from windows into the streets provided opportunity for pandemic disease to breed. In the past, the population of a small village would suffer, but now a pandemic could strike a growing metropolis, affecting and even eliminating thousands. Another important cause of the spread of pandemic disease was trade and travel. Trade, developing along with early capitalism and cities, increased contact with different regions and even different civilizations. Travel and contact with people of different areas contributed strongly to the rapid spread of pandemic diseases. Diseases were transmitted also by the groups that were the product of social decomposition (vagabonds, bandit mercenaries, and similar folk). They could be carried more than a thousand miles and, because

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often no quarantine existed, could affect millions of people. These pandemic diseases, in the spread of which asocial forces played an important role, were horrifying and, similar to crime, played an important role in the dynamics of early modern Europe.

T HE PANDEMIC D ISEASES : T HE P LAGUE IN F OURTEENTH - AND F IFTEENTH -C ENTURY F RANCE Pandemic diseases have played an important role in human history. Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie emphasized taking diseases into account: “the first analysis should be of economic movements and structures, of social relationship and more profoundly still of biological facts.”3 In his view, pandemic disease is a purely biological phenomenon defining the ultimate trend of history, French in particular. He thought epidemics were “in actuality an integral part of the ecological system which united man to his biological, bacillary and predatory environment.”4 Fernand Braudel also tended to see biology as one of the most important forces in human history and the history of his native France. For him, biology shaped essential changes: “Man himself is in fact part of the natural world: he lives on earth, under its climate and amid its vegetation.”5 Ladurie and Braudel almost completely biologized the societal process and, like some other historians since Malthus, interpret human action predominately in biological terms, which steadily gained in force almost throughout the nineteenth century.6 Although the biological aspects of pandemic diseases are obvious, one must remember that humans are social animals and diseases do not spread in a purely biological environment; their spread is a complicated phenomenon. Some observers argue that the emergence of the Black Death was very mysterious and to be compared only to that of AIDS: “The origin of AIDS, as with the plague of 1348, remain more mysterious. AIDS too appears to have arisen ex nihilo and—despite the propaganda of religious and homophobic commentators—looks to us, as the plague of 1348 did to the people of medieval Europe, like an inexplicable and horrific exogamous calamity.”7 But the spread of plague, like that of AIDS and other pandemic diseases, can be explained with several layers of reasons. The first was purely biological. The second was connected with changes in

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international relations and the proliferation of trade, in modern terminology globalization. Whether past or present, globalization is not merely a positive phenomenon that generates cultural and economic exchange. Globalization also has negative implications. The spread of pandemic diseases is one of them.8 Third, the cities and their social conditions encouraged the transmission of disease. Finally, the spread of pandemic disease, including the bubonic plague, was the result of what could be defined as asocial processes. The unsanitary conditions accompanying the growth of cities made possible the spread of rats and, consequently, the spread of disease. When towns were small, garbage could be destroyed in a natural way: Domestic animals such as pigs played an important role as “natural cleaners” by eating some of the refuse and garbage.9 Rain and other weather helped cleanse populated areas. As time progressed and towns grew larger, “natural” cleaning became insufficient, but cleaning procedures were rudimentary at best. And these made the cities especially vulnerable. By the end of the Middle Ages, the cities were big enough to generate a considerable amount of refuse and garbage (chamber pots were often emptied into the street). The war had made towns and cities even less functional than before. “The plague did not strike all regions, all human groupings, and all social categories with the same intensity. Population centers were particularly hard hit. The towns, where hygiene was deplorable, suffered much more than the countryside. And in the town social groups that lived crowded together, such as members of the working class and friars of the mendicant orders, suffered most.”10 The way possessions of people who died from plague were discarded also facilitated the spread of disease. Here streaks of asociality, absolute disregard for the others, were clear. Boccaccio witnessed how “the rags of a poor man who had died of the plague” were “cast out into the public way.”11 These rags were deadly. Boccaccio claimed that pigs that played with them died almost instantly, and humans who touched them would also die instantly. The way corpses were handled was also an issue. There were few people to deliver the dead to the cemetery and a lack of concern for the corpses. Sometimes only the stench of rotten bodies indicated to neighbors that the inhabitants of a house were dead.12 Burying corpses in shallow graves provided feasts for wolves and bears and spreading the disease.13

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The Hundred Years War apparently intensified other problems connected with asocial drives. Bathing was not fashionable even among the upper classes. Here the nobility differed, not only from people of classical antiquity but also from other people of the Middle Ages.14 They did not even wash their hands before meals, despite some contemporary authors’ insistence on it.15 Using such implements as forks was seen as an excessive “sign of refinement.” “Five more centuries were to pass before the structure of human relations had so changed that the use of this instrument met a more general need.”16 The conditions of the war made the situation worse. War spread famine, which weakened immune systems and stimulated the spread of disease.17 It also increased the number of dead and disrupted even the most rudimentary burial services. Huge numbers of bodies were not buried at all. Bodies were sometimes devoured by wild beasts and birds, as was depicted in contemporary pictures.18 These pictures may be shocking today, but the circumstance was not unusual; ancient Persians left their dead to be eaten by wild beasts and birds. From the sanitary point of view, it was actually a positive solution. Often, however, the wild creatures could not dispose of the massive amounts of flesh, and the rotting cadavers added to the spread of disease.19 “Disease and pestilence were spread by nomadic carriers,”20 not only merchants who carried ware from one part of the realm to another but also bandits and vagabonds. It would be safe to assume that asocial groups did not put a priority on hygiene. They were usually undernourished, poorly dressed, and subject to noncontagious diseases, leaving them susceptible to contagious diseases, which they carried from one place to another. All these asocial implications of societal disintegration contributed to making the plague so deadly. The Black Death of the fourteenth century was not the first plague of pandemic proportions to attack humanity, though previous epidemics were forgotten because they took place centuries earlier.21 There is information that an outbreak of the plague took place in the second millennium BCE.22 “Plagues of locusts, hail, and other calamities in Egypt as described in the Bible probably occurred about this time. The Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt took place soon after.”23 It was recorded in the West as early as the fifth century BCE, and Athens was probably the first European city to be struck by the plague on a grand scale.24

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The Greek city-state Athens had enjoyed a long period of prosperity when war with its archrival Sparta broke out in 431. Athenians, then ruled by the great leader Pericles, decided to avoid fighting Sparta’s superior armies by withdrawing inside the city’s great defensive walls, while using the strong Athenian navy to engage in coastal raids. But as refugees flooded into the city at the first appearance of the Spartans outside Athens in 430, the populace fell victim to an unexpected enemy within the city’s walls—plague. The sickness was probably eruptive typhoid fever brought by an infected traveler from North Africa. Crowded conditions and poor sanitation helped spread the infection. According to the historian Thucydides—himself a survivor of the Plague—the sickness began with “violent heats in the head, and redness and inflammation of the eyes; and the internal parts, both the throat and the tongue, immediately assumed a bloody tinge, and emitted an unnatural and fetid breath.” The plague moved inexorably through the victim’s body, working its way into the lungs and finally to the stomach. In the seven to nine days it took to kill, the plague tormented its victims. Deep despair accompanied the beginning of the illness, so that the sick lost all desire to recover. Then came the burning fever; the sick often could not bear to wear any clothing and threw themselves into fountains “in the agony of their unquenchable thirst, yet it was the same whether they drank much or little.” As the plague reached the victims’ lungs, they coughed violently or retched uncontrollably. Sores broke out on their bodies.25

The devastating effect of the plague on Athens foreshadowed future pandemics, including the Black Death. “The plague ravaged the city for two years, continuing long after the first Spartan army had withdrawn. Thucydides described the bodies lying on one another in the death agony, and half-dead creatures rolling about in the streets and round all the fountains, in their longing for water. Not even birds of prey would go near the corpses; the few dogs that fed on the corpses supposedly died almost immediately. Funeral pyres for the dead burned throughout the city; in the haste to dispose of infected corpses, some people dumped the bodies onto other families’ pyres and ran away.”26 At about the same time, the plague struck Rome with the same devastating results. “Rome, just about to enter a period of rapid expansion, was suddenly struck by a devastating plague that wiped out much of the city’s populace.” Plague reemerged in the first

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century CE. “Soon after the destruction of Pompeii and Heraculaneum by the eruption of Mont Vesuvius, a terrible plague swept through the Roman Empire. The pestilence reportedly killed upwards of ten thousand people a day at its height.” In a few generations it came back, and in 125 CE “plague swept through much of North Africa, killing eight hundred thousand in Numidia and some two hundred thousand in the region around Carthage. The plague is named after the Spanish theologian Orosius, who wrote a full description of it in the fifth century.”27 The plague struck the Roman Empire once again in the second century BCE. An important aspect of this plague that would be of great importance for the future was the role of the Roman legions in spreading the plague all over the empire. “Roman legions returning from Syria brought back a plague, possibly smallpox or black plague, that had begun in the eastern reaches of the empire in 164. The pestilence, which followed the prosperous reign of Roman Emperor Antoninus, quickly spread throughout the empire, depopulating whole cities.”28 In the third century CE, the plague returned again. “At the height of this plague, deaths in Rome numbered five hundred per day, and before it ended, much of the empire was depopulated.”29 The most massive attack came later, during the reign of Justinian (CE 527–65).30 The toll was horrific. “It was estimated at the time that the number of victims might have reached a total of one hundred million and Gibbon, when scrutinizing the records of the contemporaneous writers, considered this figure as ‘not wholly inadmissible.’”31 The number is especially astounding if one considers that the population of the world was several times smaller than it is now. Although the entire empire was devastated, Constantinople, the capital, was hit hardest. A deadly four-month plague epidemic devastated the Byzantine capital of Constantinople in the spring and summer of 542. At the height of the outbreak, some ten thousand people died each day of the disease, which was characterized by sudden fever and mysterious swelling on the thighs or the armpits, followed by coma, delirium, and death. The historian Procopius wrote that those in delirium often “suspected that men were coming upon them to destroy them, and they would . . . rush off in flight, crying at the tops of their voices.” In any event, the disease—probably the Black Plague—proved deadly. Burial grounds in the city filled quickly, and eventually city officials tore the

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roofs off towers of a nearby fort and filled the towers with corpses. By the time the plague began to abate in August, half the people in Constantinople had died. The other half had to live with the stench. The plague killed about three hundred thousand people out of a total population of half a million.32

Soldiers spread the disease in the second century; merchants spread it in the eighth century. The eighth-century plague was in a way one of the first products of “globalization.” Another plague, possibly carried to Constantinople by slave traders, devastated the population. The disease spread to what is now Italy and Greece, and is believed to have killed some two hundred thousand people.33 “In addition several sources indicate that there were outbreaks of the plague during the Roman period and the early Middle Ages in various parts of Europe.”34 Plague had thus been part of European life for thousands of years, but it became solidly entrenched only in the fourteenth century.35 There is an idea that “Africa was a colony of the Asiatic plague.”36 It probably traveled to various parts of Asia, where “the disease had been present since time immemorial in the areas within or near the Central Asian plateau,” which was most likely “the original home of the infection.” From here the plague was brought to Europe. The bubonic plague of the fourteenth century is one of the most devastating epidemics in world history. It is also, most importantly for our study, a good example of how biological, social, and asocial processes reinforce each other in the increasingly deadly waves of the plague. One essential aspect of the fourteenth-century plague was its panEuropean range. According to Elisabeth Carpentier, “prior to 1348 medieval Europe had known numerous diseases (and even three severe epidemics), but all these had been isolated and due to particular exceptional circumstances.”37 The plague of the fourteenth century, in the view of Le Roy Ladurie, emerged in Central Asia, a place “swarming with infected rats and plague-bearing fleas.”38 He implied that it could have originated in a limited area and been spread by human activity. These areas were “traversed without serious hindrance by silk caravans and by far-ranging Mongol armies, thanks to the political and commercial pacification realized by the conquering khans.” Other historians also regarded the Mongol empire as crucial to the spread of the plague because it facilitated communication between various parts of Eurasia.39

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Although the exact routes of the fourteenth-century plague are unknown, it seems that it first struck China in the early part of the century, by which time China was a part of the Mongol empire: “Mariners returning to Europe in 1346 brought back tales of a deadly plague that left thousands of corpses piled up in cities throughout China and India. . . . The next year the news came in a more ghastly form, as trading ships sailed into European ports with virtually all their crew dead or dying.”40 By the end of 1346, “it was widely known, at least in the major European seaports, that a plague of unparalleled fury was raging in the East. Fearful rumors were heard of the disease’s progress: ‘India was depopulated, Tatary, Mesopotamia, Syria, Armenia were covered with dead bodies; the Kurds fled in vain to the mountains. In Caramania and Caesarea none were left alive.’ But still it does not seem to have occurred to anyone that the plague might one day strike at Europe.”41 In 1347, “the first manifestation of plague appeared in the great Genoese colony of Kaffa in the Crimea, on the shores of the Black Sea” in modern Ukraine.42 It struck the port of Messina, Sicily, in October, brought by a Genoese trading fleet fleeing a Tartar army that had laid siege to Kaffa.43 The Tartars actually threw infested corpses into the city, one of the first cases of bacteriological warfare: “In Crimea a Tartar army afflicted by the plague used it to their advantage in battle. They catapulted corpses of plague victims over the walls of cities they put under siege.”44 They were too successful in their endeavors, for the plague spread not only in the city but also throughout Europe. By the winter of 1347–48, the plague had spread quickly in Italy: “Tradesmen infected with the bubonic plague in the Crimea spread the disease to Sicily, and from there to Africa and to southern Italy.”45 Yet quite a few people seemed to assume the pestilence would avoid their region. Plague struck Europe in several waves. “Within months all of Europe was consumed by the plague, which soon came to be known as the ‘Black Death.’” From the “year 1347 to 1353 the Northern Plague had ravaged the entire Europe.”46 It reached the eastern border by approximately 1353, the year Simeon, prince of the Moscow dynasty, died from plague.47 In France it seems that Languedoc was hit first, “toward the beginning of Lent, 1348,”48 and spread into the rest of the country. “After the first great spate of killing, there followed during the next

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half-century sporadic outbreaks of the plague, which seems to have survived in a latent state almost everywhere.”49 Most of the French territory suffered, including Paris.50 The high mortality in cities was due to appalling sanitary conditions and crowding, which made transmission easy. Similarly, the mortality rate soared in some rural regions where the density of the population was high and the villages were close to each other.51 The plague’s deadly force was exacerbated by other diseases. Leprosy, for example, which seemed to emerge in the Orient during the Middle Ages and was brought to Europe possibly by crusaders, was rather common by the fourteenth century.52 The diseases may have reinforced each other. Any disease would weaken the immune system and make the body more likely to contract other diseases, especially if the body was weakened by malnutrition. Most severe was the combination of plague and famine in 1372–82.53 The plague was especially deadly in regions where the population was underfed. It was assumed that “these various maladies nearly always occurred under the conditions of famine.”54 Due to the ravages of armies and bandits, famine was quite frequent, and the bands of mercenaries deprived those who survived the sword of the basic necessities. “Military casualties in the campaign, by modern standards or when viewed against the size of the French population, were insignificant, but the damage to civilian morale and to the agricultural richness of the country was immeasurable. The luckless villages, whose few possessions had alternately been looted by French and English soldiery, the apparition of the plague seemed merely the culminating phase in a process designed by God to end in their total destruction.”55 The plague was thus an integral part of the disorder and chaos that befell the country as the result of the war. “The protracted disorder resulting from the Hundred Years’ War, the civil war between the Burgundians and the Armagnacs,” was intimately connected to “the increased mobility of the population as a result of war,”56 and France shared with other countries the staggering loss of life. The plague decimated fourteenth-century Europe, each wave taking a heavy toll. In Italy, “half the population of Florence perished within six months.”57 The funerals seemed to be endless, and “the government of Florence tried to prevent widespread despair by prohibiting ringing of bells for funerals and banning the publication of the numbers of dead.” In northern Europe, the first wave (1348)

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eliminated 25 percent of the population in England. Twelve years later the plague returned and eliminated 22.7 percent of the population. The third and the fourth waves came in 1369 and 1375: “Fifty thousand bodies were buried in one mass grave in London.”58 In central Europe, the situation was no better: “In Vienna twelve hundred people died each day.” By 1348 millions of people were dying in England, France, Germany, and Austria.59 When the first wave “finally abated in 1351, an estimated twenty-five million people had died in Europe. About one-third of the world’s population had succumbed. No one was spared, not royalty or nobles, church officials or whole friaries, artisans or patrons of the arts, or Petrarch’s Laura.”60 A good part of Europe was almost depopulated, in some places by 80 percent. “The more we learn of the late medieval collapse in human numbers, the more awesome it appears. Europe about 1420 could have counted barely more than a third of the people it contained one hundred years before.”61 The level of destruction could be measured by the fact that on the eve of the Black Death “the amount of land under cultivation had reached a point not to be matched for another five hundred years.”62 In some parts of Europe the population before the plague was not “reached against until well into the nineteenth century.” The plague had a terrible psychological effect, due not only to the sheer extent of the destruction but also to the speed with which it dispatched people, and the sense that there was no escape. “Spread by fleas on rats, the plague caused black swellings the size of eggs on the armpit or groin. Fevers, headaches, vomiting, and dark spots on the skin followed. In some cases victim’s blood became poisoned even before swellings, known as ‘buboes,’ could develop. These victims spat blood and died within three days. Victims who developed the buboes seldom survived longer than five days.”63 In some cases death struck with even greater speed. “People have been known to die within hours after displaying the first symptoms of septicemic plague. Even today, the fatality (death) rate for this form is high. In the fourteenth century, it was virtually 100 percent.”64 Not just the plague but the unsanitary conditions it created led to mass deaths. “The stench of decaying bodies filled the air in cities, and entire families sickened and died.”65 The combination of disease, famine, and general insecurity provided people of the era with a sense of the fragility of life and the ease with which death snatched

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people into the grave. These feelings are transmitted to our time by the famous “Gaudeamus Igitur,” the medieval student anthem: Our short life ends quickly Cruel death stalks and kidnaps us It will spare no one.66

Not the war but pandemics and starvation killed most of the people.67 “The epidemic of 1348–49 known as the Black Death was a catastrophe for all Europe, but its timing was particularly unfortunate for France.”68 According to some contemporaries, half the population of France was wiped out by the plague; others said the losses were as high as two-thirds.69 Although some assumed that these numbers were exaggerated, they may not be far from the real numbers. Available mortality records in some villages recorded that half the population died.70 The seaports that seem to have been exposed early were hit especially hard. “Within a month, wrote one authority, fifty-six thousand people in Marseilles met their end. The figure seems improbably high but, as in many sea-ports where bubonic and pulmonary plague raged side by side, mortality was greater than in the inland regions.”71 According to Braudel, in some places the losses reached 90 percent of the population.72 In some villages near Rome, the plague wiped out almost entire populations, up to 97 percent.73 The death rate created a problem for burials. “As the space available for burial was taken up, the pope had to consecrate the Rhône River at Avignon so that bodies could be thrown into it. Church bells tolled night and day for funerals.”74 The deaths from disease and famine could have reached ten million; combat losses were small in comparison. The resulting shortages of labor played a key role in the sharp economic decline of many regions and cities.75 Several French cities “reached their peak in the early fourteenth century, before plague and economic depression cut back their population in the later Middle Ages.”76 Plague returned to ravage France in the fifteenth century, during the Hundred Years War. It is likely that the movement of the armies and mercenaries facilitated the spread. Economic and social collapse also played a role. During most of the fifteenth century, the plague never left the country. During ninety-seven years of the one hundred years of war, the country was in the grip of plague. Paris was affected

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quite severely, with twenty-seven plague years in the century.77 The loss of life was enormous, and some cities received considerable privileges because of “great depopulation of the city.”78 When the war ended in the middle of the fifteenth century, the French population had shrunk from 20–22 million to 10–12 million.79 Only by 1600 had the Paris population reached the level of the eve of the Hundred Years War.80 What was the implication of the plague for the social equilibrium? Historians have differing views on this question. LeRoy Ladurie stated that plague eliminated millions of lives and the very memory of was horrifying for generations; its “after-effects would continue to haunt ‘la douce France’ down to the last plague outbreak at Marseille in 1720.”81 Yet with Malthusian and social Darwinian playfulness, LeRoy Ladurie concluded that the plague and other calamities actually had positive and stabilizing implications, helping France reach biological, economic, and social equilibrium. “I simply wanted to emphasize the fact that the long equilibrium which seems to characterize my subject, was fully achieved only in tragic circumstances, that is to say through politics and, therefore, through war. After all, in the animal world too, the ecological system implies the presence of predators.”82 With due respect for Le Roy Ladurie’s authority and the originality of his thinking, one could hardly agree with him on this point. The relationship between the plague and the asocial process was reciprocal in that the spread of the plague stimulated the spread of various asocial phenomena. The connection between crime and disease was in the consciousness of the people. “The connection between the contagion of crime and that of diseases was close, and the congruence of the two threatened the entire society’s future.”83 There were several ways the plague facilitated the asocial process. First, in many cases it destroyed or at least paralyzed societal control. Boccaccio said the plague reduced the controlling power of the authorities in his city. “In the great affliction and misery of our city, the revered authority of both divine and human laws was left to fall and decay by those who administered them. They too, just as other men, were either dead or sick or so destitute of their families, that they were unable to fulfill any office. As a result, everyone could do just as he pleased.”84 Second, the confusion and fear caused by the plague provided opportunities for various criminal undertakings. For example, “with the resurgence of plague during the summer of

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1446, thieves and picklocks invaded Paris.”85 The plague also stimulated banditry and other crimes.86

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Plague was the most destructive pandemic disease to strike Europe. Some observers saw it as mysterious, but, as we have seen, the causes could be reduced to the medical and biological and those rooted in society. The asocial process played an important role. The bandits and armies of the Hundred Years War not only led to killing but also facilitated the crop failures and famine that in turn led to the spread of the plague. The rise of the cities led to the spread of unsanitary conditions and consequently to the spread of disease. In some cases, the asocial process directly caused the spread of pandemic disease and related violence. This was the case with syphilis. There is still debate as to when syphilis came to Europe. Some scholars think it existed in Europe before the modern era, but most still believe it was “imported” from the New World. In this way syphilis was similar to plague because it was imported from the Orient. The difference was that plague had been in Europe for centuries, whereas syphilis was quite possibly a new phenomenon. The spread of syphilis was even more connected to the asocial process because it was directly related to the spread of promiscuity in late medieval/early modern Europe. A central element of the disintegration of the gemeinschaft order was the release of women from the patriarchal control of the traditional society. Loosening sexual mores, social and moral collapse, and endemic violence considerably affected the lives of women in France. But economic misery was the major reason for women to see sex as the only commodity they could provide to the hostile, indifferent world. All this led to the proliferation of prostitution. In traditional society women did not exist independently but were under the guardianship of men: a father, older brother, or husband. With the disintegration of the family setting, many women were alone, especially in the cities. The liberation of the female from male guardianship could be praised by today’s feminists as a step for freedom, but this would be to telescope the conditions of

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the modern era, where a single, well-educated female can live and even raise children on her own. The situation remains quite different for women without marketable skills or inherited wealth, even in the modern West. There were even more problems for such women in the early modern era. These women, deprived of male guardianship, were often in danger of starving. Men were not immune to the same peril. But the situation for women was more serious due to lack of physical strength and fewer opportunities for casual work or stealing. The army, for example, was closed to females. Contemporary pictures represent starving or plague-ridden women in rags that barely cover their bodies. The sense of shame had disappeared,87 just as in concentration camps of the modern era. The sense of shame was also in decline among upper-class women. Sick women were ready to expose their bodies to anyone who would care for them. “Of this abandonment of the sick by neighbors, kinsfolk and friends and of the scarcity of servants arose an usage before well night unheard, to wit, that no women, how fair or lovesome or well-born soever she might be, once fallen sick, recked aught of having a man to tender her, whatever he might be, or young or old, and without any shame discovered to him every part of her body, no otherwise than she would have done to a woman, so but the necessity of her sickness required it.”88 This experience in many cases had profound implications for female behavior. It was stated that the plague, for “those who recovered, was the occasion of lesser modesty in time to come.” Other feelings produced by plague, famine, and the horrors of war included a sense of the fragility and brevity of human life. There were certainly different responses to these feelings. On one hand, there was increased attention to religion. It was assumed that the calamities were punishments from God, and that one should live in accordance with the teachings of the church. This led to the rise of piety and attempts to live moral lives. On the other hand, those who watched the ravages of death could well feel that moral life and prayers would not deliver a person from perdition and that one should enjoy life, for no one knew whether he or she would be alive the next day. These feelings led to interest in the body and in sex as one of the most exciting bodily functions. All these coincided with the deep spiritual changes Europeans had undergone in the beginning of the modern era.

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Observing European and in particular French culture from the Renaissance to the end of the ancien régime, one could easily understand the explosive interest in the human body in all its manifestations. It was not only the final acceptance of human mortality, the body and soul’s disintegration (seen in the continuing importance of death, especially in northern Protestantism), but also the acceptance of sex as an important bodily practice. As duals, the body and death reinforced each other. The sense of the celestial that transcended the body and the history in which the body is placed sometimes disappeared from discourse. The disappearance of the celestial from cultural discourse was noted by the Russian religious philosopher Pavel Florensky.89 His philosophical outlook moved around the philosophical meaning of art, which in his view represented the weltanschauung popular at any given time. He also implied that art conveyed ideas that were often not elaborated on and belonged to a sort of collective subconscious. (He did not use these terms, but they could be deduced from the nature of his narrative.) Approaching art from this perspective, Florensky rejected the idea that reverse perspective, especially in the icon, indicated lack of development in ancient art. In Florensky’s view, ancient art, and the weltanschauung of ancient peoples were much wiser than those of modern people. Ancient peoples were aware of the transient nature of life and saw salvation in the realm of the celestial. This was the reason why icons, and ancient culture in general, routinely used reverse perspective. An icon was not a reflection of reality but was a window to the celestial. The Renaissance art turned away from this artistic principle, and it signified an important change in the global view. Society abandoned the idea of a celestial Jerusalem, the world outside the present, and saw reality only in the transient flesh. Sexuality had finally been released from the prison of religious practices, at the expense of the celestial eternity of medieval Jerusalem. The spread of piety and debauchery were not always separate. One might add that feelings of piety and immorality could coexist. “During the same period that the mystical crisis we mentioned occurred, a wave of immorality shook the entire West,” and “after the great pestilence of the past year, each person lived according to his own caprice,” stated a contemporary author.90 The people “abandoned themselves to debauchery, gluttonously satisfying all their appetites.” According to another observer, “as they wallowed

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in idleness, their dissolution led them into the sin of gluttony, into banquets, taverns, delicate foods, and gambling. They rushed headlong into lust. . . . And without any restraint almost all our city took up this shameful style of life; the other cities and provinces of the world did the same or worse.”91 This contemporary also regarded the time as a great push for debauchery: “Survivors went on wild spending sprees. Many threw themselves into revelry and debauchery, believing that pleasure and happiness helped prevent the infection. As Boccaccio put it, ‘Amid this general lamentation and woe, the influence and authority of every law, human and divine, vanished.’”92 It was a time when men and women engaged in more or less similar behavior and the cliché that only men were predisposed to lecherous behavior did not apply. In the late Middle Ages/early modern era the process apparently went both ways. This assumption can be proven, at least indirectly, by the existence of what is today called ‘feminist’ literature of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance.”93 The focus was equality of the genders, with the implication that if a man could engage in casual sex without damaging his social position, a woman could do the same. This attitude was more widespread among upper-class women, and not only kings but also queens had affairs.94 In some cases, women plotted with their lovers against their husbands.95 It was not just the increasing numbers of women who sold their bodies or engaged in sexual relationships with multiple partners that created the culture of promiscuity. Increasing numbers of men were ready to engage in promiscuous sex and be the customers of prostitutes, especially in the growing cities, where there was a shortage of women at the end of the Middle Ages.96 Yet not only social and demographic factors helped prostitutes find customers. The values characteristic of anomie made casual sex and prostitution as a profession flourish. The approach to prostitution in late medieval/early modern Europe was different from what it would be in, say, the eighteenth century, when it would be permissible or even advisable for some upper-class men to have a mistress. The mistress must also be a woman of quality, and the lovers’ relationship must proceed for some time. A quasi-marriage might be to some degree institutionalized, at least in public eyes. Casual sex with low-level prostitutes and frequent changes of partners, especially with lower-class women,

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would be inappropriate and dangerous, due to the risk of venereal disease. These practices did not stop, but they were seen as antisocial and, if possible, were done in secret. Nor were people of classical antiquity very promiscuous. Their philosophy emphasized that sexuality was not a goal in itself but should be put in the context of a man’s entire life. One should not be obsessive, so as to damage other aspects of life, such as health and relationships with other men. None of these considerations seemed to exist in the male culture of the era. “This was an age of virile friendships in the abbayes joyeuses (Abbeys of Youth), an age of irresponsibility and sexual freedom.”97 Casual sex was as normal as eating. Uninhibited sexuality was often viewed as essential to the chic life, a philosophy shared by a considerable part of the male population, not just marginal groups. Observers of seventeenth-century slaves stated that “they are hot-blooded, they love gambling, wine, eau de vie, and women.”98 The same characteristics were assigned to criminals by Lambrosio, who added violence. These ways of life seem to have been shared by many men in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Prostitutes were “frequently sent to welcome distinguished visitors.”99 Sex was offered to visitors in the same way as food, drink, and a bed for rest. For especially important guests, such as royalty, brothels were available to the entire entourage. Cities sometimes provided unlimited free sex for these dignitaries, and their noble companions could receive special thanks afterward. The popularity of this approach to sex can be demonstrated, paradoxically enough, by the paucity of pornographic literature. It would be rather simplistic to assume that the spread of pornography and sexually explicit literature coincides with the spread of promiscuity and contributes to violence against women. On the contrary, some information suggests the opposite. In Japan, “sado-masochistic pornography” is quite popular, but the “rates of violence against women are at or near the bottom in the industrialized world.”100 The same could be said about pornography and erotic pictures in general. “One reason for the pleasure which men obviously found in these sexual pictures may have been a lack of opportunity to see the organs in real life.”101 And the never-ending stream of published erotica in Western, especially American academia, testifies not so much to looseness but to extreme Puritanism in real life, where endless discussion, publication, and accusations of “sexual harassment”

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as one of the most powerful weapons in the web of intrigue from university campuses to the White House just reveal reluctance for real sexual encounters. The spread of the sentimental, spiritualized, and moralized image of reality might also be deceptive. The spiritualized and divinized images of women for which Renaissance painting is so famous could well be the mirror image of crude sexuality.102

Prostitution As a popular adage states, prostitution is one of the oldest professions. Prostitutes and brothels, at least in the form of “sacred prostitution,” existed already in the ancient Orient.103 Yet in Europe in the early Middle Age it was a comparatively marginalized and rare phenomenon. “Prostitution, in so far as it existed in Carolingian times, was surely an occasional and marginal aspect of village life.”104 A major reason was that the money economy was not highly developed. Neither women nor warriors were paid. Both received would be seen as a gift rather than payment as the term is understood today. There were loose women, characterized by the term meretrix. But “meretrix did not signify a professional prostitute, but rather a women whose sexual conduct betrayed and brought shame on her husband or family.” One might add that the marginalization of professional prostitution could also be seen in other societies without highly developed market economies.105 The disintegration of traditional society led to the spread of prostitution in all classes. It was a logical culmination of the societal disintegration that disrupted sexual life. The seed of this process could be seen in the classical Middle Ages, when men started to part with their wives for trade and military expeditions, a comparatively new phenomenon, and it was different from earlier Great Migrations, a peculiar combination of colonization, conquest, and plundering expeditions. It went without saying that men of that era engaged in routine rapes and treated conquered women as carnal booty. Yet a man’s major sexual-emotional outlet—his family—was always with him. Moreover, captured women could be brought to the family as slaves, where they were additional sexual outlets, free laborers, and peculiar junior family members. In these arrangements prostitution had little chance to flourish. The woman, unless she was the wife,

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was won in war or purchased completely as a slave, not for a limited time for sexual intercourse. When men, mostly merchants and warriors, started to be separated from their families for a long time, the taste for prostitution developed, at first for those of foreign origin. The Crusades were important: The Crusades brought with them an extraordinary increase in prostitution. The pious warriors could face parting from their wives, painful as this was, but complete abstinence, perhaps for several years, seemed to them altogether too hard. The organizers of the Crusades fully understood the impossibility of getting and keeping an army together without women. The ports of embarkation themselves swarmed with women offering themselves to the Crusaders, and many went on board the ships. A calculation by the Templars (the Order which kept accounts of the Crusades) noted that in one year thirteen thousand prostitutes had to be provided for.106

The continuous deep disintegration of traditional society that was becoming evident by the end of the Middle Ages provided a powerful impetus for prostitution. By that time, it was deeply implanted in all areas of life in European and, in particular, French society. In some cases female vagabonds wandered together with male vagabonds and logically provided their bodies as payment for food and protection. The sexual relationship between vagabonds could follow two probable arrangements. The first could be seen as the “harem model,” where the strongest male monopolized sexual access to all females. This monopoly was the same as that on food; the strongest male, usually the leader, gorged himself first. Only when his hunger was satisfied would he allow the others to eat. The females received similar treatment. The strongest male similarly satisfied his sexual desire; and the others could only later approach the females.107 The second arrangement could be called the “promiscuous model.” In this case, most males of the group had easy sexual access to all females. This model was related not so much to the romantic notion of “free love” as to the social stability of the group, which could be endangered by sexual rivalry. The sense of solidarity was essential to high-risk activities (robbery, banditry) that required not just good cooperation but in some cases the sacrifice of one life for another.108 Some prostitutes incorporated into gangs of vagabonds

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served as lovers, pimps, and food suppliers; others, a “small group of the girls,”109 moved from one area to another in search of customers. They also apparently combined the trade with begging, stealing, and so forth. Although prostitution was part of the village landscape at the dawn of the modern era, the city milieu created the best conditions, and it started to proliferate rapidly.110 One reason was that the city was the place to find mercenary soldiers. Even the most disciplined soldiers who had no sexual outlets became patrons of prostitutes, leading to the increase of women who plied the trade.111 The urban environment produced other customers as well. In thirteenth-century Paris, “prostitutes were everywhere in the streets and neighbourhoods of the city, seeking to drag passing clerics by force into their brothels. If the clerics refused to enter, they immediately shouted after them ‘Sodomite!’” Prostitutes were seen as a natural part of the social landscape and seemed to be no bother to people. “In one and the same building, there might be a school upstairs and a brothel downstairs . . . in one part the prostitutes quarreled with each other and their pimps; in the other part the scholars argued on scholarly matters.”112 As a matter of fact prostitutes took any building where they could ply their trade. In fifteenth-century Toulouse, a prostitute “installed herself at the local orphanage” and refused to leave.113 The numbers in Paris continued to swell. “One fifteenth-century observer estimated that there were 5,000–6,000 prostitutes in Paris, out of a population of 200,000.”114 In Paris, prostitution was an established trade, and prostitutes “formed an extremely disparate and diverse group.”115 Some worked in the brothels and seemed to have prostitution as their permanent occupation.116 By the fifteenth century, in Paris and the provinces, the brothels were diversified and apparently ranked, at least unofficially, in a similar way to modern lodging places. There were a number of “small brothels” with few girls employed where poor laborers could quickly satisfy their sexual needs; others were virtual palaces with gardens and other amenities.117 One might assume that they were not only visited by the well to do but also were places where one could invite a guest in the same way one could ask a friend or guest to a good restaurant. The girls there did nothing but engage in sex and were to be pretty and experienced enough to justify the investment.

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For others, prostitution was supplemental income combined with other professions and petty stealing.118 “Married prostitutes were common.”119 There was even a curious attempt to institutionalize breaking the marriage contract. “An ordinance of 1427 even instructed them all to take husbands from amongst young men of humble birth so that they could pass as respectable women. It also allowed them to assume the external signs of respectability, and wear the clothes and ornaments which were forbidden to prostitutes.” The provincial cities also had an elaborate system of brothels, one called the “house of the little whores.” Prostitutes entertained clients in bathhouses and in the street.120 By the fourteenth century there were red-light districts in some French towns.121 “A hundred prostitutes have been identified in fifteenth-century Dijon out of a population of less than 10,000.”122 According to some observers, prostitutes were everywhere. “Prostitutes solicited in taverns, squares, bath-houses, even churches.”123 And “the prostitutes had followed the group of the young males,” especially in their entertainments in taverns.124 The increasing desire of the authorities to regulate prostitution was an additional sign of the proliferation of the trade and in many cases actually facilitated it. In some cases “the town councils decided to make prostitution official ‘for the common good’ or ‘in the public interest.’”125 It is clear that city officials did not want to eliminate prostitution but rather wanted to define the space where it was permitted and receive financial benefits.126 This desire to regulate prostitution and make money from it induced officials in several cities to create municipal brothels.127 “Every town in fifteenth-century France seems to have had a municipal brothel, usually built with public funds, regulated by the town council, and therefore reserved for bachelors.”128 Some prostitutes were even imported from foreign countries.129 The logic was the same as that of importing food or wine. The person in charge of procurement was actually a pimp. Yet his job in no way disgraced him, and he was chosen from among “modest ranking officials who took part in the great ceremonial events of the court.”130 The nobility followed the patterns of the court: “Many other noble and princely households had a similar official.” All this indicated that casual sex with prostitutes was an accepted arrangement. Rather than being ashamed, men bragged about it as a sign of virility. Alcohol also played a role.131

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Open prostitution was not the only sign of loosening sexual mores. Other phenomena that testify to disappearing sexual inhibition include keeping concubines. A concubine could be a woman with whom a man lived his entire life, but if the union was not legitimized by the church, she was seen as a prostitute.132 Clergy, the epitome of chastity, lived with women “in sin,” were major customers of brothels, and also kept concubines, some of them married.133 A cure could have two concubines at once.134 Clerics also participated in rape.135 A woman whose partner died or abandoned her often had no choice but to be a loose woman or prostitute. The rise of promiscuity could also be proved by the lack of inhibitions in the language, which was of concern to the authorities.136

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It would be simplistic to state that prostitution always leads to societal degeneration and increasing criminality. Prostitution has operated freely in several European countries, with the red-light district being an essential part of the urban scene. This is the case with Amsterdam. Yet the Netherlands in general and Amsterdam in particular can hardly be seen as embodying immorality, societal collapse, and violent crime. Quite the contrary, one could regard the Netherlands as one of the safest and most law-abiding societies. Prostitution, like other social phenomena, must be seen in context. In the Netherlands and other Western societies, there is a strict distinction between prostitutes and other women and especially between prostitution and marriage, as well as spatial separation of the red-light district from the rest of the city. A significant police presence prevents violence and other abuses. In this context, prostitution has little negative implication for social stability and may even reduce violence against women by providing other sexual outlets. The situation was quite different in late medieval/early modern Europe, where the legal culture was extremely weak and the traditional culture was disintegrating. Here the spread of prostitution accelerated the disintegration and spread of violence. The sexual and social/political orders were part of the divine order legitimized by the church. Sexual improprieties created the sense that the order had collapsed,137 thus providing an additional impetus for promiscuity. The collapse of the divine order could be conveyed by the famous

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message of one of Dostoevsky’s protagonists: “There is no god, therefore everything is permissible.” There were several direct implications of asocial sexuality, the most serious related to violence, rape in particular.

Rape Rape in this period was part of the general culture of violence that permeated the entire society. Similar to that of other violence-related crimes (e.g., robbery), the rape culture was different from that in the modern West. Sex-related crime along with other crimes is common in modern society. All types of crimes are committed by all types of people, but there is a notion of “blue-collar” and “white-collar” crime, depending on the social position of the criminals. Violent crime including rape would be mostly a “blue-collar” job. Rape is committed by males from all social groups, but upper- and middleclass males mostly get sexual access through indirect pressure— “harassment” (sexual favors as a condition for employment or educational advancement) or promises to marry, usually combined with seduction. Some argue that this sexual access is also rape; it is sexual intercourse without a woman’s full, informed consent. In the more narrow definition, rape implies direct use of violence or the threat of violence, especially a weapon. This most dangerous form of sex-related crime is mostly related to the lower classes. Even the proponents of the theory that sexual harassment is as dangerous as rape understand this. Radical feminists see the universities, big corporations, and government as infiltrated by dangerous sexual predators, but they would enter most of these institutions without fear and definitely not ask for police escort. The same women might be reluctant to walk at night in dangerous neighborhoods, where a woman is more likely to be the victim of rape, in the narrow meaning of the word—sexual intercourse with the use or threat of violence. This difference between white-collar and blue-collar sexual crime can be traced to the eighteenth century, when the sexual culture of the upper classes started to change, and sexual predators started to use seduction and promises. The French seducer, an artful and skillful manipulator usually of upper-class background, was immortalized in figures such as the Marquis de Sade. Violence could be

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present as part of erotic play but would not be the dominant part. De Sade had masochistic and sadistic impulses, but there were no recorded cases of his engaging in brutal rape with the use of deadly weapons. Seduction, persuasion, and money led him from one sexual conquest to another. The situation was different from the late Middle Ages to the early modern era. At that time, violence was interwoven with the collapse of moral value. The sense of collapse of moral restraint and the increase in promiscuity were also stimulated by the Hundred Years War. Late medieval France was characterized by incest and sodomy, the result of the collapse of the traditional church-supported values system. It was often not a way to diversify sexual experience, as in classical antiquity, where sex with boys and girls did not exclude sex with adults, nor did it quench the desire for other sexual outlets. Sodomy was the product of the culture of endless wars and military life. The army was a male enterprise and women were not always available, so soldiers had few alternatives. Sodomy could be either consensual or rape. The latter was not just gratification of desire but humiliation and subjugation. It was apparently quite frequent and “struck at the very heart of society and threatened to tear apart the social fabric.”138 Men could be raped by other men, but most victims were women. The act of violent rape as essential to the erotic game might be traced to prehistoric times. In the period preceding legal discourse, violence was an essential aspect of sexual culture, and the difference between consensual sex and rape was often blurred. In some premodern societies, the approach to women being polite or respectful in modern society would be seen as weak or lacking virility and a reason for rejection. Moderate coercion was seen as part of erotic appeal for women. Violence as an indicator of virility has been preserved since the dawn of written history, for example, in Spartan marital practice. According to some sources, the groom and bride encounter led to “a symbolic rape.”139 This consensual violence did not mean a predilection to loose sexual behavior but indicated to the woman that her husband was a “real” strong and virile man and that he strongly desired her. Spartans who practiced this “symbolic rape” enjoyed “the highest rate of monogamy in all Greece” and “undoubtedly had a highest respect for their women and regarded them as having a

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greater equality than the Oriental approach to be found in Ionia, Athens, or Corinth.”140 Violence as part of the erotic game continued in French culture through the Hundred Years War. But the other form of sex-related violence dominated the social milieu. Direct rape was common. “Looting and rape was never far away in much of Renaissance Europe.”141 Rape was a common phenomenon in some regions of France since the late Middle Ages,142 not consensual violence as a part of the erotic game, but rape as understood in modern judicial practice: the forcible sexual use of a woman’s body against her will. It often led to serious injury or even to death of the woman and also often involved the threat or actual use of deadly weapons (aggravated rape). “Aggravated rape entails one or more of the following elements: the absence of any relationship between the perpetrator and the victim, the use of weapon by the perpetrator, more than one assailant, or some physical harm inflicted on the victim.”143 People engaged in this behavior for various reasons, from accessing sex to releasing frustration and anger. Raping an enemy’s wife and daughters was vengeance and domination. Even kings engaged in rape.144 The culture of the nobility encouraged rape, for it emphasized lack of inhibition in bodily functions and drives. The essence was the discarding of restraints, at least as understood in the modern capitalist West. This absence of restraints can be seen first in verbal culture, where everything was to be quite direct. One spoke with a friend and superior in effective voice and to an enemy with abusive language. The gemeinschaft arrangement was quite direct and, one might suggest, sincere. There was a disdain for manners, and politeness could be perceived as duplicity and insincerity. In premodern society, self-control was essential, but self-control of passion was quite different from that of the modern era. Qualities of machismo have been glorified in portrayals of all ancient Western heroes. Whether David of the Bible, Chulainn of the Irish epic, or heroes of Scandinavian sagas, they were people of exceptional courage who defied death, controlled fear and other weaknesses, and despised material wealth. Riches were taken to be distributed among the hero’s retinue or friends. But these heroes had no intention of restraining other behavior. For example, “a tendency prevails to devour quantities of meat that to us seems fantastic.”145 The fifteenth-century author suggested, “it is unseemly to blow your nose into the tablecloth,” and “to blow your nose on your hat or clothing

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is rustic, and to do so with the arm or elbow befits a tradesman; nor is it very polite to use the hand, if you immediately smear the snot on your garment.”146 Desires of other parts of the body were not controlled either. If the ancient authors reproach the male for lusting over women, it was not because lust was reprehensible, but because it could in some cases contradict the few limitations culture imposed on members of the elite, such as that you must not take the women of your superior or of a faithful warrior. When David, king of Israel, took Bathsheba, the wife of his warrior Uriah the Hittite, it was regarded as reprehensible. So was the behavior of Agamemnon, who took Briseis, the concubine-slave of Achilles. Taking the women of one’s host was also forbidden, for this violated the cardinal virtue of the sacredness of hospitality, which had obligations for both host and guest. This explains Macbeth’s pangs of conscience after killing his guest and king and why the abduction of Helen of Troy was regarded as so immoral as to cause a war. Without these few limitations, there were no inhibitions to sexual desires, except perhaps force or fear of repercussion. Gratification of desire was done in simple and direct ways. Ease of gratification and multiplicity of sexual partners were seen as a sign of high social status.147 The number and variety of sexual partners and lust were similar to gluttonous consumption of expensive meat and fat unavailable to the poor. The notion of sexual restraint was as foreign as that of simple diet. Because sex-related violence was deeply ingrained in military culture, it was not surprising that warriors were among the most notorious rapists. Social constraints define behavioral models; as soon as they are lifted and fear of punishment disappears, soldiers from different cultures and societies behave essentially the same way. For this reason the behavior of Soviet soldiers in defeated Germany can provide a clue about that of troops in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. According to a recent study, many Soviet soldiers “were freebooters who drank and raped quite shamelessly.”148 The desire to rape seemed to increase with time as the soldiers reached the German capital: “By the time the Red Army reached Berlin, rape had evolved into treating women as carnal booty.”149 According to some estimates, “some 100,000 were raped in Berlin, of whom 10,000 died (out of a total of about two million German women raped in

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Soviet occupied Germany).”150 There were numerous cases of gang rapes of “girls under 18 and old women included.”151 The rape spree was not just a way of satisfying the sex drive and asserting masculinity but also a way of terrorizing the population. In recent history, rape as terror was broadly used in such diverse circumstances as the Yugoslavian Civil War, the rule of the Khmer Rouge, and the war in the Congo. This often led to the most macabre type of sex-related violence.152 It was not just in military campaigns where rape and sadistic violence as part of sexual intercourse was seen as a way of punishment. Not only the elite but also the masses engaged in it to terrify their foes and wreak vengeance on them. This, for example, was the case with the peasants engaged in the Jacquerie in France in 1358. “Armed with wooden staves and knives, mobs of peasants wantonly attacked noblemen and their families, vowing to exterminate the entire aristocracy. Rebels committed horrible atrocities; a knight was tied to a stake and forced to watch as his wife and daughter were raped repeatedly, then cruelly tortured and killed.”153 Rape and violence were not punishment but an essential ingredient of sexual pleasure in the view of most males of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Rape with direct violent coercion was often seen as an essential aspect of the erotic game. It was implied that women should either be passive or resist the man’s approach regardless of whether she desired sex.154 This explains why the victims were not just prostitutes. Although rape of prostitutes was common,155 respectable matrons and girls were also raped. The assumption that violence and coercion are essential aspects of the sexual game and that any woman should like it was one explanation of the fact that rape was comparatively rare in the judicial records. It was too common to be reported. Women complained to the authorities only in an especially ugly case. Eighty percent of these rapes were gang rapes, usually committed by several young men, eighteen to twentyfour years of age.156 These “fun-loving boys” (hommes joyeux) were a social alter ego of the groups of prostitutes, “fun-loving girls” (filles joyeuses).157 Group rape was a habitual entertainment. The fact that many rapists were respectable members of society meant nothing to the females terrified by them in such places as Dijon.158 Rather, their sense of horror was intensified by this fact. There were, in some cases, also clear indications that perpetrators saw their actions as a

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way to inflict the utmost suffering on the victims. This was done as a form of vengeance.159 Some of those engaged in perpetual rape had apparently developed a “paraphiliac mental disorder called ‘sexual sadism.’”160 For these men, “violence and sex are fused; for these men, the experience of forcing women to have sex is itself erotic. To these men, violence is sexy. . . . For these men, rape is ‘more exciting’ than ‘normal sexual encounters’ because it involves ‘forcing a stranger.’ Said one convicted rapist, ‘after rape, I always felt like I had just conquered something, like I had just ridden the bull at Gilley’s.’”161 Sexual gratification was a major motivation of sadistic rape, but it was also a manifestation of many other drives, including anger, itself a sublimation of social, racial, and ethnic hatred and anxiety in general. “Sadistic rape goes considerably beyond a simple expression of anger.” It manifested much deeper and broader problems with the individual and with the society in which the individual was embedded. Although some people, most likely soldiers, could be seen as mentally deranged, this was not always the case, and active involvement by males of all social groups indicated that this treatment of women was seen as almost normal.162 These young rapists asserted that they engaged in rape to assert their masculinity or simply to join group festivities, almost as they would join friends for drinks. It was implied that sadistic treatment of women was also the result of the sense of group solidarity, and members who would not participate would be seen as not having a bond of friendship.163 These people apparently did not see much wrong in their activities. As a matter of fact, those who engaged in these rape sprees were not marginals or even soldiers or bandits but average artisans, laborers, and so forth.164 “Eighty percent of the rapes we know about were collective and almost public rapes by the gangs of bachelorsservants, journeymen, apprentices clerks, sons of craftsmen or of merchants.”165 It is important to add that “eighty-five percent of these rapists had no previous criminal record.” Many rapists clearly belonged to what could be called the middle class. One could also assume that some were upper class. The fact that they were not visible is not because they were ashamed of the entire business of rape. The explanation could be that nobles might not be willing to associate with people of middle- or especially

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low-class origin. This was different from times of war, when they willingly joined rape sprees with their soldiers. Some rape sprees corresponded to the end of the agricultural cycle and may have been connected to remnants of the old Roman Saturnalia festival, when “slaves were given temporary freedom to say and to do what they liked” and “certain moral restrictions were eased.”166 But often there was no reason besides boredom and sexual appetite. Group rapes in the cities were often planned as a sort of military exercise, gangs of two to fifteen individuals “having planned their undertaking.” At that time they would “force the doors of a woman’s house” and “rape their prey on the spot, often in the presence of two terrified witnesses.”167 In some cases the women, after being raped in the house, would be dragged from it and pulled “into a house whose keepers were accessories to the plot, where they would do as they pleased, all night long. In four out of five cases, the neighbors did not interfere because they were afraid.”168 It is also possible that some rapists engaged in “gang date,” a well-known practice in the modern West. “One member of the gang would make a date with the victim. Then, without her knowledge or consent, she would be driven to a predetermined location and forcibly raped by each member of the group. One young man revealed this practice was so much a part of his group’s recreational routine, they had rented a house for the purpose.”169 In some parts of the country, gang rapes were a sort of sporting entertainment. They apparently became ritualized as Mardi Gras activities. “Between 1436 and 1486, 125 rapes—80 percent of them gang rapes—are recorded for Dijon, probably only a proportion of those actually committed, because of non-reporting.”170 It was clear that victims were not limited to those who could be suspected as “inviting” rape by their behavior. Half were “in a perfectly normal marital situation (their husbands were absent for a few days or weeks).”171 There were many reasons victims did not complain. First was fear of reprisal. Second was fear of the bad reputation and shame that could permanently damage one’s life. For these reasons, the numbers of actual rapes are thought to be much higher than those that were officially reported.172 The pervasiveness of rape in some parts of Europe led to the notion that it was not regarded as a crime, especially if done by a social equal, “in some cases almost as a part of the

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courtship ritual.”173 One could assume that violence was so integrated into the sexual culture that a man was often unable to get full sexual gratification without it. Although rape provided lads from any background relief from boredom, satisfaction of the sex drive, a bond of group solidarity, and a chance to follow the models of warrior-nobles, it was an additional perk for criminals and an important by-product of their major activities. “Burglary and robbery frequently accompany rape.” This was the case with the previously mentioned “society of thieves” in Avignon in the middle of the fourteenth century. The major reason for this group’s criminal activities was appropriation of material goods, but other pleasures of life were not ignored, especially during night raids. These masked criminals apparently had a special fondness for young virgins, which they deflowered with great delight.174 The experience of rape could have had different repercussions for women. In some cases it led to a strong aversion to any type of sexuality. In others it could have an opposite effect. In many societies, virginity was one of the major differences between “good” and “bad” girls. Loss of virginity could convince the victim that she had irreversibly lost her honor, and everything else would not make much difference. This could stimulate sexually promiscuous behavior.

Infanticide Rape was one of the most widespread manifestations of violence in asocial sexuality, but it was not the only one. Another was infanticide. Infanticide is widely used in the animal world when the mother kills or abandons to definite starvation her weak progeny. It was also used in early human societies; recall the Spartan tradition of throwing weak children from the rock. The fear of stigma (if the child was born out of wedlock) or that she would not be able to feed her child pushed women by cruel logic to the act. Anecdotal evidence indicates that the crime was not rare in late medieval and early modern Europe, France in particular. Contemporaries stated that “the number of mothers who murdered their children, even by infanticide or abortion, was great.”175 These women later provided magistrates information about the way they disposed of their newborns.

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Fearful of punishment, they petitioned the authorities for clemency. “Supplicants were not always passive in the death: As one of them said in 1393, ‘desperate, fearing the vituperation of the world and the blame of her friends . . . [she] tied her garters around the child’s throat and stopped its mouth.’ And another in 1474 said, ‘fearing the shame of the world and the correction of her parents . . . [she] struck the child’s head upon the ground and hid it in the straw.’”176 Killing one’s own child could not happen without psychological repercussions. Infanticide was strongly condemned by the church, so this trauma could instill in the woman that she was “lost” and destined to perdition anyway. Therefore she would have nothing to lose even when she engaged in the most promiscuous behavior.

S YPHILIS

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Asocial sexuality was caused by the asocial disruption of life. Mostly manifested by the spread of promiscuous behavior, it contributed mightily to the spread of crime, including the most violent crime of rape. But the most deadly implication was directly biological: the spread of syphilis. It would be a delayed bomb; the syphilis epidemic would strike France and the rest of Europe in the sixteenth century and beyond. The direct relationship between sexual promiscuity and the spread of pandemic disease was not fully understood by those who launched the sexual revolution in the 1960s. For them, identifying prostitutes or anyone else as the source of health problems was morally wrong—a definition arbitrarily constructed by the elite to suppress the alternative culture and lifestyle. This vision of unrestrained sexuality was not only due to intellectual trends but also deeply related to the environment in which the protagonists of the sexual revolution lived. They thought they could enjoy “safe sex,” not only because the pills prevented unwanted pregnancy but also because it was in most cases safe from venereal diseases. Venereal diseases had not disappeared in the modern West. They remained a part of life in the 1960s as well, but their scope and spread were largely compartmentalized. The rate of the spread of some venereal diseases was the same as that of crimes. In big cities crime mostly spread in the poor neighborhoods that provided the bulk of crime statistics. The same could be said about

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the spread of venereal disease; it was often related to poverty and social marginality. The cases of venereal disease were few in comparison with the past. The decline and social compartmentalization of venereal disease were connected to the rules of sexual hygiene as a part of general hygiene. It was seen as axiomatic, for example, the fact that sexual partners would take showers before and after intercourse. All this medical safety, applied by most participants of erotic play, made the sexual revolution of the 1960s safe. It was a different story in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries when promiscuous sexuality spread widely among all segments of the population. The general unsanitary conditions would prepare the ground for the syphilis epidemic that by the sixteenth century started to compete with the plague in long-lasting effects and loss of life. There is no clear answer as to whether syphilis was known before the great geographical explorations. Yet most scholars agree that the disease originated in the New World. The pattern of spread was quite similar to that of the plague, which was also brought to Europe from the outside. The Spanish soldiers stationed in newly discovered South America might not have found El Dorado, but they found an erotic paradise, at least by their criteria. There were many accessible native women who could be nothing but sex toys. Sex slavery was so widespread that in some regions these women came to be used as a sort of currency. David Rock stated that “native women were used for a time as units of exchange in commercial dealings.”177 Use of living objects as currency was quite an ancient arrangement, such as cattle in Homeric Greece. This time, however, there were repercussions: the Spanish soldiers became infected with syphilis. With terse irony Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie sees syphilis as a “deadly counteroffensive affecting the demography of our own continent.”178 He saw syphilis as revenge for the diseases Europeans brought to the New World and led to “terrible genocide of the American Indian.” Still, “medical historians now think that syphilis had been in Europe for years and that what Columbus’s crew brought back was a new strain to which Europeans were not immune.”179 The Spanish in Italy passed the disease to the native prostitutes.180 Soon “doctors were mystified by the horrible disease, marked by pustules, skin eruptions, leg ulcers, and finally madness.”181 Naples was famous for the promiscuous abandon of its prostitutes.182 The disease spread to the soldiers so quickly that the

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connection of syphilis and soldiers was well understood by contemporary artists. “The known presence of syphilis among soldiers in Naples in 1495 may have been the reason that Manuel juxtaposed the soldier with the prostitute in his Dance of Death series in the church of the Dominicans in Bern. It is even more likely that he had this threat in mind in the remarkable drawing in which death, wearing the tattered remains of a soldier’s finery, embraces a girl with one arm while with the other he lifts her skirt to touch her genitals.”183 From there, syphilis spread into other parts of Europe. The disease first appeared in Italy, and by 1495 was reported in France, Germany, Switzerland, Holland, and Greece. By 1497 it had appeared in England and Scotland, and two years later was reported in Hungary and Russia. As usual, foreigners were blamed for spreading the disease, especially those who were disliked. The Russians blamed the Poles; the English and Turks called it the French disease; the French termed it the Italian illness, and they, in turn, referred to it as the Spanish disease. The Spanish called it the sickness of Hispaniola, declaring it had come from what is now Haiti and was brought back by Columbus’s crew.184

The popular belief that the disease came from outside had factual ground. It was brought to France by the troops of Charles VIII after an Italian campaign (1494–96). By early spring 1496 it was part of Parisian life. The French authorities on March 6, 1496, prohibited admission of people with venereal disease because of the fear of contagion in charitable and medical institutions.185 After entering France, the disease “under various names such as Mal de Naples, Morbus Gallicus and French Pox had spread all over Europe after the 15th century.”186 The public, authorities, and the unfortunate victims were anxious to get rid of the disease. “Treatments were unusual and extreme: boiled vulture broth with sarsaparilla, or serpent’s blood. One army doctor claimed to have amputated the genitalia of five thousand infected soldiers.”187 These methods could hardly work and the amputation of genitals, if this was done, would hardly have been accepted by the majority of the victims. The disease continued to spread throughout the sixteenth century, when an epidemic reached catastrophic proportions that made it a good competitor for the Black Death.

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4 PERSISTENT DANGER: ASOCIAL B E H AV I O R I N T H E S I X T E E N T H C E N T U RY

T

he sixteenth century brought France some relief, as royal authority was solidified and the king’s power spread over the realm. The country experienced crisis and bloody strife, but they could not be compared to the Hundred Years War. The strengthening of the royal power meant that the centralized machinery of the state started to increase, and the king began to use it to quell the various forms of asocial behavior. There were some positive results, including a decline in the huge armies of bandits. With all the banditry the country would have in the sixteenth century and beyond, the problem would not reach the proportions of the Hundred Years War. Apparently fewer nobles, especially the higher strata, became highway bandits as a permanent occupation. Crime, especially violent crime, became comparatively rare among some elements of the population, clergy in particular. These declines in some forms of violent behavior were due to both the increasing power of the state and its repressive police and increasing caste control. At the same time there was a cautious and quite limited civilizing process as defined by Norbert Elias; restraint, at least for some urges, was essential for the nobleman. These notions went along with the assumptions that the nobles should be not only persons of bravery who handled weapons well but also cultured in the broad sense of the word, that is, with some education and manners. There was also a decline in some contagious diseases. The plague continued to be a serious problem, but it never reached

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the proportions of the fourteenth-century epidemic. There are several explanations for the decline of the plague, but it is entirely possible that the controlling and repressive measures of the state and society played an important role. Still, life did not change in a radical way. The asocial process continued to be a conspicuous aspect of life, along with the culture of violence and the assumption that everything from property to sexual access could be taken by force. The upper classes were still associated not with politeness and self-restraint, as would be the case in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but with unrestrained behavior and the ease with which they resorted to force to solve problems. This predilection to violence among all members of society was reinforced by chaotic conditions, including an ongoing dynastic crisis and prolonged strife between Catholics and Protestants. Some problems of the previous centuries were marginalized but others emerged and increased. In some cases, the past had created conditions that made these calamities. This was, for example, the case with syphilis. The spread of the disease was prepared for by the widespread promiscuity and other asocial sexuality during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Furthermore, even if the level of asocial behavior had subsided somewhat in France, this was not the global trend. In some countries of Eurasia, for example, Turkey, the sixteenth century was a time of rampant banditry. Like the previous centuries, the sixteenth century was a period of “war, famine and plague”1 accompanied by all types of crimes, from group rape to murders, with violent crime mostly committed by men. The situation became even more serious in the second half of the century. “As time went on the kingdom was openly carved up among the various contending factions. The powers of the crown were increasingly usurped by the local warlords, and the royal armies were too weak to prevent this loss of control.”2 This bred a strong feeling of insecurity in the general population that continued through the seventeenth century and explained the “obsession with order” that, as James Collins stated, was “so typical of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”3 In addition to these visible shake-ups, there was the continuous disintegration of medieval family structures, producing people with no support and often no skills.4 These people were often an absolute anomie. The sense of displacement was shared by groups such as soldiers and mercenaries and even some members of the nobility. And

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they often employed violence in solving their problems. According to calculations in some regions, violent crime could reach as much as 97 percent of reported crimes from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries.5 As in previous periods, the culture of violence permeated the entire society, not just particular groups.6 In some cases it was “ritualized violence,” integrated into and regarded as normal life and behavior, and was often related to masculinity.7 As in the previous periods, there were many reasons for the spread of violence. Claude Fouret stated that the spread of “violence was the result of the deterioration of the social relations and the increasing gap between the elite and the populace.”8 Social tension is definitely an important part of the explanation; it could not provide the complete explanatory model, especially for criminal violence. Social tensions would continue into the future, where their existence alone did not result in the spread of criminal violence. The spread of this sort of violence in the sixteenth century, as in the periods before, was caused by the relation of violence to the position of free men, actually the elite; the sense of status and freedom that today would be called license.9 It was related also to the general anomization of society and vision of violence as masculine.10 People engaged in violence in various places, though some places stimulated it more than others. It was not surprising that social gatherings in taverns occasioned frequent violent clashes.11 By the sixteenth century, hotels were also widely used for these gatherings, with often asocial implications.12 Violence was also due to the general accessibility of weapons such as swords and knives. There was not much supervision over arms production, and workshops could provide all kinds of weapons to anyone with enough cash.13 Knives were the most popular, at least in domestic quarrels. According to some reports, a knife was used in 54 percent of attacks.14 It seems most men carried either a sword or a long knife. The fact that even rudimentary outdoor lighting did not exist also encouraged crime of all sorts. As Fouret admitted, before the invention of electricity there were few effective ways of fighting the darkness, and as result of night darkness, “violence reigned.”15 It was not surprising in this situation that homicide and attacks continued to be the most frequent types of crime.16 This did not imply that people interested in violence for the sake of violence had no interest in material goods. Violence was often accompanied by

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plunder. As in the fourteenth-century anti-Jewish pogrom, attacks on Protestants led to plunder of their possessions.17 And they were “slaughtered on a grand scale.”18

N OBLES

AS

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The culture of violence and banditry continued to penetrate all segments of society. Despite antagonism and sociocultural differences, elite and low classes had common features, for example, reliance on violence and disregard for the law. The legalistic culture of the middle class, which internalized law in its universal applicability and regarded it as the way to solve problems, was still extremely weak. In many cases the law was respected not because of internalized restraints but because of the fear of punishment. Although the drive of violence was shared by all groups, it continued to be especially popular among the gentry. Gentry values had a dominant role in shaping the mores and behavior of the rest of society. There were indications of changes in comparison to previous centuries. There was the process of the slow occultation of the elite elaborated by Norbert Elias. There was more stress on restraint in behavior, politeness in manners, and general cultural refinement. There were increasing numbers of the noblesse de la robe, who “acquired their rank through holding a high state office.”19 They often engaged in the application of law in its universal meaning and internalized some legalistic ideas. But they were the minority. Most were the noblesse d’épée, who derived their rank and status from their position as warriors. These people retained the predilection to violence. The mere fact that violent behavior could lead to brutal punishment did not stop the behavior. Terror was not a miracle drug that would arrest violent behavior immediately. It would take generations of hard work by the executioners, combined with deepening social change, to alter the attitude toward violence and instill a respect for law. All this explains why sixteenth-century nobles, although not as prominent in banditry as nobles of the previous century, still played an important role. The banditry led by the nobles was in many cases the logical continuation of that of the previous century. The fact that gangs were often led by experienced officers of noble extraction indicated two

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possible scenarios. The first implied that these bandits had emerged in the fourteenth century during the Hundred Years War and proliferated with the lack of central power and the general disintegration of society. The second implied that the bands had proliferated not during the war but when military activity was finished. And it was the end of military activity that was the crux of the problem. The armies of mercenaries were disbanded. Neither commoners nor nobles had a way to be integrated back into society. The length of the war had made the life of violence second nature to these people. Even those with property and wealth could choose to engage in banditry, though they had no immediate need to do so. If this scenario is followed, one could assume that the age of banditry with active participation of the nobles involved the last half of the fifteenth century and extended into the sixteenth century. The bandits cum nobles/mercenaries and mercenaries/nobles cum bandits acted in detachments as big as several hundred men strong. “In the middle of the fifteenth century, and throughout the next decades, there increasingly appeared in France large bands numbering several hundred people whose sole activity was brigandage, pillage and robbery. Their formation was basically due to the existence of roaming armed companies, short of military occupation.”20 In some cases, these armed companies were much bigger, up to five thousand men,21 and strong enough to overpower the resistance of walled cities. It was also clear that the predilection to banditry among nobles did not die out in the course of the sixteenth century. Nobility of blood did not prevent disbanded nobles from becoming highway bandits.22 As during the Hundred Years War, the Wars of Religion provided the opportunity to loot. “Troops and nobles” had free rein and “rampaged through the countryside, whether royalists or members of Ligue.”23 Although the war provided special opportunities for nobles as military leaders to engage in plunder, the peace did not guarantee that all of them would abandon the habit. In some areas, the nobility lived in permanent banditry, as in the century before. In the Pyrenees, society preserved features of the Middle Ages with “violence, rivalry, clans which explain the nature of the banditism of nobility in these region.”24 In this feudal type of banditry, the bands resembled models from the classical Middle Ages or even the Dark Ages, when groups of bandits were tightly knit by

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blood and the quasi-family ties of vassals. This was exactly the arrangement, especially in the border areas.25 The culture of violence had also influenced the other privileged estate: the clergy. In the previous centuries, priests engaged in criminal violence; some even became highway bandits. The strengthening of the church institution, its firm incorporation into the state, and the effect of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation had decreased the number of priests engaged in violent crime. But active involvement violence, including rape, was not uncommon.26 And in some regions “priests would routinely be armed.”27

S OLDIERS

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B ANDITS

Although nobles continued to be an important element in violent crime, especially banditry, their role was much less than in the centuries before. The story was different for the soldiers. It would be wrong to assume that there were no trends to better, more restricted behavior. Occultation and civilization played no role here; it was repression that “normalized” soldiers more than anything else. The emerging terroristic machinery of the state dealt harshly with nobles engaged in criminal violence and was especially brutal with soldiers. Jacques Callot’s prints on the “Miseries of War”28 demonstrated the way authorities dealt with soldiers. In one picture, they hang like grapes from a branch of a tree that served as a convenient gallows. Although Callot depicted seventeenth-century images, they could be applied to the sixteenth. But the repressive machinery of the state had even less effect with soldiers and mercenaries than with nobles in preventing them from being engaged in banditry and semibanditry. Even when the soldiers were controlled by their officers, their behavior was not much different from that of the mercenaries of the earlier age. The nature of the armed forces had changed. In the feudal system, land was given by the higher noble to his knight-vassals, who repaid him in the form of military service, supplying their own weapons and horses. The detachment led by the local noble joined others and in this way formed the kingdom’s army. These detachments still played an important role in the Hundred Years War, but in the sixteenth century the situation started to change. The royal ordinance of 1557 stated that gentry too poor to be fully equipped at their own expense were to pay money instead of service.29 This

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ordinance signaled the end of military service as inseparable from the gentry’s social existence. Paid mercenaries had become the major military force of the kingdom, and they started to play a greater role than in previous centuries. It was the military people who pursued the majority of the bandits. Thus, the decline of the feudal militia with its high percentage of nobles led to the decline of nobles as bandits. The soldiers became the major source of criminal violence. Soldiers were engaged in routine pillage even at the beginning of the sixteenth century,30 which was a period of comparative stability. The situation became much worse in the second part of the century, when the country plunged into the generation-long Wars of Religion. In the first round of these wars, the soldiers behaved well, at least according to some accounts. This good behavior did not last. One contemporary made the point in a colorful way: “And so our infantry lost its maidenhead, and from this illegitimate union ensued the procreation of Mademoiselle Plunder, who since then has grown so much in dignity, that she is now called Madame. And if the civil wars continues on, I have no doubt that she will become Princess.”31 The scourge of murdering troops and pure bandits (themselves often ex-soldiers) reinforced by famine and plague made some areas of the country barely habitable. The reign of criminalized chaos “drove many peasants to seek shelter within the walls.”32 Even if the residents could save their lives from the marauding hosts of mercenaries, economically they were completely ruined. In Burgundy, “a century of warfare (1550–1650) and pillage by mercenary armies that lived off the land had left Burgundian communities deep debt, their communal properties sold or mortgaged, and their finances in disorder.”33 The soldiers and mercenaries engaged in perpetual plunder all over the country but did so in some places more than others. Troops were sometimes sent into border areas with the explicit goal of protecting the borders from both foreign invasion and local bandits. Yet, at least in some cases, the border troops made the situation worse. Their unruly behavior in these more or less permanent border locations provided the local inhabitants with the rationale to keep their weapons, presumably to be used not so much against foreign troops as against French troops engaged in criminal behavior.34 Fear of soldiers as bandits was apparently one major reason that the local population, even when surrounded by a wall and supposedly protected by royal authorities, were in a state of constant vigilance.

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In the town of Dax, “the residents of the local prevote (provost’s jurisdiction) kept ‘watch and ward together continually at all times, by day and by night, both at the gates and on the wall.’”35 If soldiers under the supervision of officers, subject to prompt severe punishment, could lapse into criminal behavior, this was even more the case with those who ceased to be soldiers. The crux of the problem, as earlier, was that most of the soldiers were seasoned warriors with few other skills. “Neither the idea nor the reality of a large standing army existed in sixteenth-century France, and even the knowledge that continued warfare in the future was a near certainty could not offset the tremendous expense of maintaining larger forces in peacetime.”36 These disbanded soldiers, especially if they were wounded, could occasionally receive private charity.37 But charity was limited and usually reserved for those who fought for the faith, for example, a Protestant who fought Catholics. Some old or wounded soldiers could find refuge in the monasteries, a practice recorded by the sixteenth century.38 But this was the exception rather than the rule. For the majority there was no employment, and no institution would devote itself to taking care of them. They received no pension or other benefits and could rely only on their private savings. For many, there were no other alternatives than to lapse into banditry. And as before, the soldiers in mercenary armies with their continuous murder and plunder of the civilians were absolute anomie. They could not live a normal life without murder and rape, even if they had the means to do so. Soldiers as prime material for banditry were certainly not only a French problem, as a glance over the English Channel would reveal. The English state had acquired strong power, but disbanded mercenaries created problems for English society. For example, in 1589, “some of them formed a band of about five hundred people and threatened to loot Bartholomew Fair. It took 2,000 municipal militia men to deal with this danger.”39 Several months elapsed before the fear of unruly soldiers subsided.

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Beggars also constituted a threat to public safety. Social dislocation, wars, and epidemics led to an increase in permanently displaced people. “The incessant civil warfare of the second half of the century

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added to general misery and dislocation. Ravaging armies and murderous religious zealots combined to drive people from their homes and livelihood.”40 Some came to the cities; others could find neither permanent employment nor a permanent place of residence and wandered about. “Refugees, moving on as a result of pestilence and bloodshed, were a perpetual problem.” Most dangerous for public safety were the frequent instances when vagabonds joined with other asocial groups. “The wars of religion multiplied this suspect crowd, which included peasants driven from their farms, disbanded soldiers or deserters, unemployed workers, impoverished students, and the sick.”41 Another dangerous combination was, as before, the symbiosis between soldiers and vagabonds or soldiers as part-time vagabond-beggars and part-time bandits. Discharged soldiers often congregated with full-time vagabonds, who joined the throngs of disbanded soldiers, usually as “servants,”42 which led to the general image of soldier as vagabond or vagabond as soldier. These crowds were as dangerous as the bands of sturdy ex-mercenaries. “The activities of large gangs of vagabonds, who damaged and terrorized the countryside, loom large in contemporary chronicles. Not all were dispossessed peasants; many were troops disbanded after a campaign.”43 These people scared the local population.44 And “the activities of large gangs of vagabonds, who overran the countryside plundering and spreading terror, are frequently mentioned in contemporary chronicles.”45

U RBAN P OOR

AND

C RIME

The bands of bandits and vagabonds were the major scourge of the country, and their violent crimes constituted a threat to the public order. These groups operated in the open countryside, but this does not mean that the city was a safe place. Cities absorbed a considerable number of poor who often bred crime as during the century before. The increasing numbers of poor and socially dislocated were not necessarily the result of a negative process. The positive aspects of the sixteenth century (e.g., the rise in population), even in comparison to the previous century, still had negative implications for social stability. “An unfortunate side effect of the democratic rise was the proletarianisation of the lower ranks of the peasantry. As long as farm

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workers had been scarce, they had been well paid, but as they grew more numerous their wages failed to keep pace with rising grain prices.” Many who had lost all their belongings moved to the cities in search of better opportunities.46 One result of this process was the continuous growth of the cities, which in itself created problems that could be characterized as an “urban crisis.”47 There were already considerable numbers of such people in Paris by the beginning of the modern era. In some cases the rush was extraordinary. According to one estimate, “in only three days in May 1595, 10,000 mendicants poured into Paris, and by the end of the month, the city was forced to close its gates to stop the unabating flood of vagrants.”48 By the time of Henry IV, “the city which had less than 100,000 inhabitants, contained more than 30,000 beggars.”49 Some looked for jobs, but those who could not find any created a rising group of people who were both “poor and ‘dangerous.’”50 The situation was not much different than the time of the Hundred Years War. In the provinces, rising prices and stagnating salaries had degraded the condition of the populace, and throngs of paupers and vagabonds swelled the population of the cities.51 Some might survive without steady income, but their lives were nothing but grinding poverty. In cities such as Lyon, 75 percent of the population paid no taxes because of poverty.52 According to some estimates, up to 80 percent of the urban population lived in poverty, often without any source of subsistence or the most basic shelter. “The homeless were ubiquitous.”53 Leslie Goldsmith, characterizing sixteenth-century Orléans, wrote that the documents presented the poor and displaced as an essential part of the social landscape. “If these documents are to be believed (and the references are too numerous and emphatic to deny), sixteenth-century Orléans, like other cities, was invaded by the hordes of beggars seeking food, work and shelter, and suffering from the pernicious effect of inflation, unemployment, overpopulation, famine and diseases, that is all of the ills common to early modern society.”54 French society was not unique, and in other parts of Europe the cities were stuffed with “infinite multitudes of vagabonds.”55 Sixteenth-century vagabonds were not only wretched but also hardly peaceful individuals. As Natalie Zemon Davis stated, these people “did not remain quietly sick behind closed shutters; instead [they] poured into streets with begging, noise, crime, threat of disease, and rioting.”56 Goldsmith supported the view that these hordes in the

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process of desocialization were transformed into “robbers, brigands and the like.”57 In France as elsewhere in Europe, social conflicts and urban riots were not separate from crime, with looting as a prime example.58

B ANDITRY

IN THE E AST: T HE O TTOMAN C OMPARATIVE F RAMEWORK

C ASE

AS A

We have mostly taken France and to some degree England as examples, but the spread of banditry had little to do with the peculiarities of national tradition. A brief turn to parts of Eurasia and the Ottoman Empire, where conditions were the same, will reveal the identical situation. The spread of banditry as a result of the disintegration of traditional structures could be seen in the Orient and was caused by several social and political processes. First, people were plucked from the land or were unable or unwilling to sustain themselves as traditional agricultural laborers. Second, as in Europe, the emergence of mercenary armies was one of the major causes for spreading banditry. In both cases conflicts between state and society and asocial phenomena were major characteristics of the era. “The central challenge to the Ottoman state during the seventeenth century came not in the form of peasant or elite rebellions but as banditry.”59 As in Europe, the spread of banditry was caused by changes in social structure and economic and technical progress. One of the most important implications of this progress was the fact that firearms became easily available. By the sixteenth century, criminal activity was facilitated by the fact that the criminals were now much better armed. “Beginning with the rebellion of Prince Beyazid in 1559, firearms had become common in the countryside, and peasants found the means to acquire firearms cheaply from artisans manufacturing a surplus.”60 The elite also helped the peasantry. In their struggles with each other, in the case of revolts led by nobles who claimed the throne, the leaders of revolts hired peasants as soldiers and permitted them to acquire arms. This practice became common, and the prices had a tendency to go down, so it seems that peasants, even of modest means, had few problems acquiring firearms. This spread could produce both peasant uprisings and banditry. This “prompted the state

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to issue numerous edicts threatening the manufacture of firearms and enjoining local officials to inspect and collect firearms in the villages.” This effort was not very successful, and the easy availability of firearms helped transform displaced people into bandits. Although accessible firearms were important to the spread of banditry, even more important were certain changes in society. The same social interplays that made it possible for Ottoman rulers to build a mighty state also created problems for that state. As in Western Europe, dismissed soldiers were most likely to become bandits and the most dangerous bandits were ex-soldiers. These soldiers were the product of an Ottoman society that experienced changes that could be found in the modern societies of Europe. They were taken from the traditional framework of peasant life and hired to conduct the endless campaigns of Ottoman sultans. There was a change in the nature of military organization. The crux of the problem was the way of building an army into a modern one. In the period of transition from the Middle Ages to the modern era, warriors were either of a privileged group (the gentry of the European Middle Ages) or, in the early Middle Ages, free peasants. Both groups were securely placed in the structure of society and returned to their original occupations at the end of the war. The gentry returned to their estates and the peasantry to their fields. The situation changed when soldiers could be any free person or even slaves.61 The army was formed not through a web of interpersonal relationships but through hiring, and it was usually displaced persons who became soldiers who later filled the bandits’ rank and file. The situation was essentially the same in Ottoman society. “It is clear that banditry was the result of pooling that occurred when societal institutions such as the military and officials’ retinues (and less so, religious schools) recruited the landless, the vagrant, and the destitute into their midst, training them, providing them with the organization, using them during the campaigns, and demobilizing the masses at the end of war.”62 In this situation, after the end of a campaign, they were often without subsistence and unable or unwilling to go back to their native villages. They were permanently plucked from the world of peasantry. “From being simple peasants they moved to being landless vagrants, soldiers, mercenaries.” Most of them apparently wanted to join other armies. But opportunity in this respect was limited, and banditry emerged as the only plausible occupation.

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Besides the army of the sultan, there were separate armies maintained by local chiefs. In traditional gemeinschaft society, these people would enter the household of the master, after which he had an obligation to support his vassals even when he did not really want them. This situation changed, however, as society was transformed to modernity, where relationships were based on hiring and firing principles and were more utilitarian. Consequently, “these officials felt practically no obligation to the group of mercenaries whom they hired for specific duties” (166). These people were of no use. “These were not slaves they had bought, nor were they in-house trained men in the style of the timar holders. There was no long-term investment in these men; they were easily discarded and easily replaced.” Similar to soldiers of the regular army of the sultan, they had no place to go and were trained in military arts. It was not surprising that banditry was the most attractive option. Finally, there were marginal bandits, soldiers, and rebels who became part of the political struggle and then fell back into pure criminality having acquired experience from regular soldiers. There seem to be several cases when bandits were incorporated into the regular army just to be thrown back to their previous condition later. One case was the rebellion of Prince Beyazid in 1559. He was a person of noble blood, related to the ruling dynasty, and thus qualified to be sultan. Joining the prince was a viable option for many from the lower class. For many peasants, change did not imply a complete collapse of social order and creation of an absolutely different one. The peasant vision of revolution implied a rotation in which the old elite disappeared and lower-class people who followed the new leader could replace them. It was not surprising that “the prince was able to persuade many vagrants to bear arms and fight for him by promising them timar holdings when he became sultan. The promise never materialized because Beyazid was eliminated” (168). Bandits who had been soldiers lapsed into the old state but now did so with firearms and additional training and experience. Bandits as ex-soldiers were widespread in the sixteenth-century Ottoman state. “Armed gangs, often decommissioned from the state’s military campaigns, roved the countryside,” in most cases “engaging in pillage” (x). There was another pool of criminals: people plucked out of their traditional social niche who did not necessarily have military training. As in Europe, the transplanting of people, especially the young,

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was a salient phenomenon of early modern Ottoman history. Large numbers of people did not fit into the traditional structure. “Different as well as more disruptive of the rural equilibrium were regional movements of population, such as large-scale migration of young peasant men with no land, no job, and no resources” (147). These people tried to find a place in society, and banditry was one option. “These youths became the source of rural militias, official retinues, religious student organizations (suhtes) and regional bandit movements” (162). These antisocial groups came from different strata of society, unified by their inability to find a social niche. “All stemmed from the same great pool of unemployed, vagrant men who had abandoned their overcrowded ancestral land and taken up various occupations, all temporary in nature. One of these groups was the suhtes (religious students), displaced peasants who took the educational route and enrolled to acquire a religious (medrese) education” (156). The peasants followed tactics that could be easily found in many other societies, where education was a way to social mobility. One could say the same in regards to modern Western society. However, the state and economy could not absorb a large number of educated people. “Once these young men received their diplomas, they discovered that jobs were scarce in their new profession. They were therefore unable to enter the system of court employment, which by that time was already congested with the large number of judges” (157). Already plucked out of the social structure, it is not surprising that these students often resorted to banditry as alternative employment. “Early in the seventeenth century, religious students were engulfed in a wave of banditry” and “banditry and mercenary armies became common in the countryside and further rivalries and battles were ignited” (163). “These students railed together, pillaged peasant households, and looted officials’ holdings and merchants’ caravans” (157). These problems can be found in many societies throughout history. A good example could be events in Latin America where the university produced more graduates than society could absorb, and many disgruntled ex-students fell into revolutionary activities. Often, these were nothing more than crime in disguise, including drug trafficking and kidnapping. Ottoman society also had peasants who lapsed directly into banditry when they lost their land or became unemployed and misplaced.

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They regarded banditry not as a transition to anything else but as a lifelong occupation. There was little chance for these bandits to grow into large armies that could overthrow the ruling dynasty and create a new one. One reason for this was the consensus that the ruler of the Ottoman state had to belong to a certain royal lineage. The position could not be filled by just anyone, as was the case in China (where a dynasty could be founded by peasants). Ottoman bandits did not have grand social aspirations but regarded banditry as a permanent condition. “These bandits did not engage in rebellion per se, for they did not seek or find allies among the peasantry or elites interested in challenging the state” (157). As in modern times, banditry was often incorporated into the broader context of asocial movements. Bandits often joined with local separatists, where the elite defined the centralized state, and engaged in social protest in various forms, sometimes only loosely connected to their antistate position. Antisocial drives could be seen in various disturbances that created problems for the Ottoman state. This mixture of social forces concerned the Ottoman rule from the beginning of the sixteenth century when the state entered a period of steady expansion. Banditry was thus the product of a variety of processes, most notably problems with soldiers. The pattern and extent of banditry/semibanditry was similar to that in Western Europe; it was one of the most serious problems of the Ottoman state. In 1519, the Ottoman Empire had been shaken by the Seyh Celal rebellion, which included among its participants “rebels, bandits, and simple brigands” (156). Later in the sixteenth century, “a wave of unrest broke out in the Anatolia countryside, commanding the attention of the state and many local and foreign observers. Mounted bands of armed men attacked and plundered villages, defying central as well as local authorities. From western Anatolia to northern Anatolia to the southeast and down to northern Syria, armed bandits created havoc, challenging the state” (153). As a result, “the Anatolian countryside in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was awash with a wave of banditry and brigandage unleashed by the groups that constantly mixed and separated and reformulated their interests and occupations” (156). As time went on, the situation remained the same, with criminality incorporated into all sorts of asocial behavior. “From the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries, the Anatolian countryside

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experienced the depredation of these bandits, named celali, who, taking advantage of the state’s preoccupation with wars on two frontiers, attacked villages, small communities, and even large towns. Attacks on itinerant merchants expanded to constant raids on caravan routes, and city sieges intensified to include regular levies from urban populations” (153). As in Europe, bandits in the Ottoman Empire were not defenders of the weak and oppressed, and they preyed on the peasants in the same way as on the rich. Moreover, the peasants were much less able to defend their interests and suffered more than the well-armed and organized elite. “Peasants went to court often during the early seventeenth century to complain about the depredations of armed men” (146). Although the peasants suffered more than the elite, banditry was a problem for both groups, a threat to society as a whole. “Banditry was increasingly defined as a threat to the economic, social, and moral fabric of society.” Here, as in Europe, the polarity of society was often a conflict not between oppressed and elite but between order and disorder. The peasantry could be on the side of the elite in fighting against banditry. Foucault and others argue that the masses would rather be on the side of the banditry; they would join hands in fighting the repressive state; and they would be resolute enemies of any attempt at increasing the controls manifested by “hospitals” and “prisons.” But the peasantry actually asked for strong and repressive power. They preferred a cruel sultan who could bring order. In their minds, the definition of a bad ruler included the terms for weak and unjust, often synonymous in this context.

B IOASOCIAL P ROCESS : T HE P LAGUE Banditry and other crimes were not the only problems that faced Eurasian states. As in the previous centuries, France suffered from what could be called the bioasocial process, a combination of social decomposition or dysfunction and the biological process. Bubonic plague was a biological phenomenon, but its spread was facilitated by socially generated phenomena such as unsanitary conditions in the cities and the migration of displaced people. Plague continued to be the major malady of sixteenth-century France.63 Originating in certain limited areas, it was transmitted

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from one place to another by the throng of humanity. The uprooted and unspeakably dirty vagabonds were one of the groups that transmitted germs from one locality to the other, as some people suspected.64 Goldsmith stated that “hordes of beggars were immediately viewed as vehicles of spreading contagious disease, probably with good reason.”65 The populace had no idea why the plague emerged and proliferated66 but saw a direct relationship between the throng of unkempt and dirty people and the outbreak of epidemics. Some related plague to poor and marginal groups, whether vagabonds or not, and this observation had its rational basis. It was sometimes difficult to identify the source of plague, but at others the source was obvious. “Plague tended to break out in the poor quarters of towns.”67 Some members of the elite, especially the clergy, saw plague as divine punishment. Protestant moralizers pointed to sinful behavior, such as drunkenness, sexual promiscuity, or predilection to theft. There was no direct connection between sexuality and drunkenness and the plague, but their observations were not absolutely invalid. Those who lived in drunkenness and poverty paid much less attention to personal or public hygiene than did the rest of the population. They were often more asocial than the elite; and asocial, unsanitary conditions led to the proliferation of contagious disease, including plague. As in the previous centuries the plague was mostly a phenomenon of the cities, where it spread quickly and had the greatest implications for the population. It and other infectious diseases thrived in the unsanitary environment of French cities. Visitors to Paris noted the dirt and the stench.68 One could assume that the situation in the sixteenth century was worse than in the fifteenth. The rapid expansion of the capital had increased the biological-asocial refuse of human living—feces, urine, garbage, and so on. It was not surprising that contagious diseases increased. “In Paris the plague struck in almost every year of the sixteenth century”;69 and not surprisingly, “each time thousands of people were killed.”70 Some provincial cities did not fare much better. In Nîmes, for example, “vicious epidemics gripped the town no less than twenty times between 1501 and 1545. The plague then eased somewhat, striking only three times in the second half of the century.”71 Lyon experienced a “terrible epidemic” in 1564 and again in 1580, 1581, and 1585.72

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As in the previous centuries, the impact of plague was reinforced by famine and by the spread of other diseases.73 The toll was not as horrible as in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but the loss of life was considerable.74 And residents of big cities such as Paris lived “under the terrible risk of spreading diseases.”75 In their terror, they saw plague as “divine ire” which desocialized the people, actually anomized them.76 The social anomization and fear led to increased crime. The cities were depopulated because many residents tried to escape to the safer countryside. The poor, sick, and criminals stayed.77 Paris prohibited “all judicial officers and notables from leaving the city during the plague.” Yet it seems that this did not work, and the departure of officials created an additional opportunity for criminals. It might be added that disease also created problems for travelers, and some people avoided travel.78

A SOCIAL S EXUALITY

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D ISEASES

Sexuality was the other biological phenomenon deeply interwoven with society and its dysfunctions. As in the previous centuries, asocial sexuality spread, with promiscuous behavior and related violence. The impact was much greater, for it led to the spread of syphilis.

Asocial Sexuality The promiscuity of the previous century continued to be an integral part of the life in the sixteenth century, and prostitution continued to flourish, especially in the big cities.79 It was clear that the century shared the easy approach to sex and the ease with which men of high society approached women from the low classes, including prostitutes. This continued the “democratization” of a sex life. The court of Henry IV was known for loose sexual behavior, and the “grandes Courtisanes” and “damsels of the immoral life” entertained broad segments of the city’s population, including the elite.80 The sexual mores of the clergy also continued as in previous centuries. Priests engaged in sexual relationships with parishioners and had concubines.81 It seems that quite a few “young women were made pregnant” by the priests.82

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The masses also could satisfy their sexual appetites, especially if they were not too demanding. The state started to increase pressure on brothels and tried to eliminate them, but the policy was not consistent and both legal and illegal brothels continued to exist. The provinces may have been more relaxed than the capital, where the state had much more vigilant eyes. This apparently had been the case with the Romans, where there were “public brothels officially established by the town, or privately owned baths that had ‘beds everywhere, bathing facilities nowhere to be seen,’ where plump girls boldly frolicked; there were also ‘small private bordellos kept by madams,’ or finally, the girls who were in business for themselves.”83 Lack of sexual restraint went along with lack of restraint in speech84 and probably in manners as well. The sexually obsessed and carefree culture could be seen in the beginning of the spread of pornographic literature. Pornography could actually testify to increasing restrictedness in real sex life. Yet, in the context of sixteenth-century culture and other evidence, one could assume that the emerging, still quite limited circulation of pornographic works testified to real life. One piece conveyed a feeling of obsessed sexuality that apparently was shared by a sizeable part of the populace. “Let’s make love, my beloved, let’s make love right away since we are all born for this. And if you adore my cock, I love your pussy; and the world wouldn’t be worth a fuck without this. And if it were decent to screw postmortem I would say: Let’s screw so much that we die of it, and in the beyond we’ll fuck Adam and Eve, who found death so indecent.”85 Such views help explain why prostitution continued to flourish and was seen as “being important for sociability.”86 As in the previous century, prostitution was “a popular pastime.”87

T HE S PREAD

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S YPHILIS

Promiscuity had always paved the way for the spread of disease; in the sixteenth century it was syphilis.88 Emerging in the late fifteenth century, the disease spread in Europe in general and France in particular. It was described by the Italian Girolamo Fracasoro in his 1530 book, Syphilis sive Morbus Gallicus (Syphilis or the French Disease).89 In certain areas, syphilis reached epidemic proportions and evoked fear and revulsion in some cases stronger than for plague

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victims. In one Orléans charitable institution, people afflicted with syphilis were not accepted, whereas victims of plague were.90 When syphilitics were accepted, they were taken in small numbers after a detailed interview and received only a small portion of funds available.91 The disease was especially “rife among prostitutes and their patrons: it was a common cause of blindness in children. Women, hapless victims of male-dominated morality, were frequently denied the chance of early mercury treatment because of the stigma attached to the disease.”92 It was clear that prostitutes were among the groups hit hard by the disease, and it was not accidental that the sixteenth century saw a growing concern over the “the health problems posed by prostitution.”93 There was also the assumption that promiscuity was in general bad for the health and that fornication weakened the body and increased the chance of contracting diseases such as the plague.94 Authorities understood the danger of prostitution as a promoter of disease, but they were not always successful in reducing it. City authorities in Toulouse, for example, were aware of the connection between prostitution and syphilis, as well as the ineffectiveness of the cure, because they prohibited women from returning to the Chateau Vert if they had been afflicted with the disease. Nothing prevented them though from plying their trade illegally in the backstreets of the city, here prostitution continued unfettered despite the attempts of the city officials and the Watch to control it. When Thomas Platter visited the city in 1599 he remarked on its many houses of ill-fame, and his description would seem valid for the earlier part of the century as well.95

These houses of “ill-fame” continued to spread disease. Prostitutes and their customers were hit harder than other groups, but the spread of disease was broad. Popular belief saw the root of the problem in “errant venerians” who spread the disease by constant migration.96 In general, venereal and other contagious diseases were connected to marginal groups. The system of controlling marginals was not always efficient even if implemented. And, in certain communities, some of them could do whatever they wanted, even if they were afflicted with syphilis. The residents of Toulouse, for example, were apparently quite concerned with lepers, who were locked in

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“leper houses located in isolated corners of the city. Even with its decline a certainty, in 1539 the parlement declared that anyone who slanderously accused another party of leprosy would be fined.97 . . . Syphilitics, however, were free to do as they chose. One named Bordail was described by his neighbors as being a vagabond . . . with syphilis, who had left the area. Another named Alamandi was married and also suffered from the maladie de Naples and he too, had left the area, presumably with his wife. As we have seen with Cabriol, who went to La Grave to obtain some remedy, he did so entirely of his own volition.”98 The public saw soldiers also as one of the major culprits in spreading the disease. Soldiers were among the most promiscuous groups and frequent customers of prostitutes. “By 1519 the soldier had not only become identified through his defiantly anti-social costume but also by his titillating addiction to paid sex, gambling, and drink.”99 They were often both receivers and spreaders of syphilis among the prostitutes. This did not escape the attention of contemporary artists. “The exchange of deadly infection could be a mutual one is surely the meaning of the woodcut of 1524 by Graf in which two Landesknechts, their codpieces carefully emphasized by encircling short-sword hilts, stroll past a tree, in which squats Death with his hour glass, towards a knowingly smirking prostitute and her balefuleyed dog.”100 Travelers, especially those of dubious origin, were also seen as a source of the disease.101 It was clear that contemporaries saw marginals and soldiers as promiscuous and responsible for carrying venereal diseases. There was some truth in the assumption. But it was not just bohemian outcasts who engaged in promiscuous, casual sex. General promiscuity in France and elsewhere in Europe led to the proliferation of disease among all members of French society. “Syphilis did not discriminate; people from all walks of life and all classes were infected.”102 Francis I, for example, was afflicted by the disease and possibly died from it.103 It also spread in the provinces, as shown by the emergence of hospitals for the treatment of disease.104 The spread could be also seen in complaints of provincial hospitals and other charitable institutions. In Orléans, they had “neither the space nor funds to treat the multitude of poor syphilitic victims.”105 One could argue that the desire not to accept syphilitic patients was due to general revulsion, not lack of space. But if space and funds were even a part of the problem, this indicates that the influx

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of syphilitics was great. The numbers could well compete with the numbers affected by the plague, and it was not accidental that syphilis struck great fear in sixteenth-century minds.106

A SOCIAL S EXUALITY

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V IOLENCE

As in the previous century, asocial sexuality and prostitution were not separated from purely criminal behavior such as rape. The entire sexual culture was enmeshed in violence. Villages fought for girls.107 Often, “the young plebeians’ aggressive instincts shifted toward the rich men’s wives or daughters, particularly when Carnival permitted an outburst of sexual joy or madness, culminating in Mardi Gras.”108 At that time of excitement young men, especially of the lower classes, “planned to take a few liberties—fondling, pinching, and so forth—perh’ps even rape some women.”109 It was clear that for some lads rape might have been a spontaneous outgrowth of the carnivals and parties, or what contemporary Americans would call date rape. Women’s willingness for socialization or possible flirtation was commonly assumed to be an invitation for sex, especially if they had permitted kissing or fondling, and resistance was seen as a sort of erotic game. But most rapes were direct attacks by strangers and often had sadistic overtones. There were several types of such rapes. Some, likely the most common, were perpetuated by the same fellows as in previous centuries—soldiers, bandits, and so on. But a new type was apparently beginning to emerge—rape as social frustration and lack of sexual access due to low social position. This sort of rape, paradoxically, testified to the beginning of the stabilization of society, increasing the importance of law in social and sexual interactions. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, sexual access was often “democratized.” The young strong lad might have more access than the rich merchant. It was quite possible that a chap like Le Brun had intercourse with more women than some of the more prosperous members of the community. This was not just because he entertained himself with prostitutes but because sexual access to women was often nothing but by violence or threat of violence. In this situation, physical force and the ability to handle a weapon were the major ways to get women. Masculinity and sheer force also may have

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been attractive to the women. It was not just a biological gravitation to bigger muscles, broader shoulders, and youth—in the sociobiological context these are not the only factors that drive women to men. Gravitation to the younger and stronger had a pragmatic rationale. Not wealth but force could secure personal security and food. A woman might choose the strongest man, even if he raped her, as protector from future rapes. This sexual culture did not exclude the importance of men in high social positions. But their value as guarantors of security was in direct relation to their ability to exercise force. The concubine of the chief of a mercenary band, for instance, could feel safe not only because of the sword of the master but also because he commanded other armed men who would protect the woman of the chief. At the same time, the peculiar democratization of this bandit law-of-the-jungle environment provided a sort of “sexual mobility,” the chance for a person of humble origin to reach the top of the band or army hierarchy and have good access to what was seen as the ideal life: a lot of food, drink, and sex. These arrangements could work only in the chaos of the Hundred Years War. As society became more stable, sexual culture moved in a new direction with some segments of society becoming similar to modern societies. Youth and strength, although still valued, could not compete with status derived directly from wealth, especially for long-standing relationships such as marriage. A woman could belong to an older wealthy man rather than to a poor youngster, and it was not the sword but the law and the emerging machinery of the state that guarded her. The road to social and thus sexual mobility was closed to the young and the poor, creating a sense of injustice and stimulating aggressiveness toward women. One might add here that the predilection to sexual aggressiveness, although shared by all segments of society, was much stronger in the lower classes. All this created a culture that stimulated rape as social and sexual frustration. “Enlightened attitudes toward women came and went, but the lower classes maintained the medieval tradition of male chauvinism and brutality toward the second sex. There is some excuse for them; the urban world they lived in was a frustrating one. Many young women had married men twice their age, and were therefore off limits to the younger men.”110 The increasing pressure of the state and its drive for normalization of society prevented young low-class men from sexual access to

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beautiful women, especially of middle- and upper-class backgrounds. Government policy also meant that sexual access outside marriage was not as easy as before. Brothels, both legal and semilegal, continued to exist, but by the late sixteenth century the government was in the process of imposing more and more limitations on illicit sex. And this created a problem in satisfying the sex drive in general. Le Roy Ladurie stated that “one might raise the objection that the frustrated young men could always have satisfied their instincts, for lack of a better solution, in various houses of prostitution. However, these were a poor remedy at best.”111 And, in some cases, they were not available at all. In this situation, sexual and social frustration could lead to sexual starvation, which could be a problem for both women and men. Women, for example, could well suffer in harems where they might have sex only occasionally with their masters, who were “not always fiery young lovers.”112 But only men could respond violently to lack of a sexual outlet. All these often contradictory trends—the decrease in sexual outlets, the predilection to violence, and the general framework of asociality—led to the continuing prevalence of rape. Brutal gang rape was very common. In one recorded case, following the pattern known from previous centuries, rapists broke into the house of their victim, dragged her to an open field, beat her severely, and raped her. They told the terrified girl, “If anyone tells us that you complained about us, we will cut your throat.”113 The assumption that violence and rape was deeply engrained in the sexual culture could be seen in erotic and quasi-erotic paintings, sometimes with “motifs that creep toward the sadistic.”114 Charles Etienne’s De dissectione partium corporis humani (Paris, 1545) represents a woman in a “pose that shouts sexual availability, spread herself open in a way than no lover would bargain for.”115 This pose was not much about the woman’s readiness for intercourse but was a result of her belly opening up. “Despite being posed with inclined head and closed eyes, a passive posture of sleep that she shared with several other examples, this figure is the only one to participate actively in the demonstration in her own dissection.” One might suggest that this was just a cultural image of interwoven sex and sadistic murder, with nothing to do with real behavior. Yet the existence of such a person as Le Brun, who seems to have killed girls after intercourse, partly for sadistic enjoyment, indicated that these images related to real life.

C

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4 THE

F

CONCLUSION: RISE OF THE DESPOTIC GOVERNMENT

rom the end of the Middle Ages to the beginning of the modern era, one can see a great “revolution,” not only in Europe but also in other parts of Eurasia, as the Turkish example demonstrates. The revolution was not, or at least not only, a transition from one social, political, cultural, or ideological system to another but a push for the disintegration and anomization of society. The meaning of anomie is actually lost in this context. The word implies individual or group behavior and attitude in sharp contrast to the behavior and attitude of the majority. But in the late medieval/early modern era, those who would be regarded as anomic in the modern West were seen as mainstream, and vice versa. Anomization and the political configuration that results are not fully understood by most Western social scientists. Some, even among the most prominent, pointed to the melting down of society as an essential element of many revolutions, but their findings have often been ignored or marginalized. This was the case, for example, with Pitirim Sorokin, the seminal Russian-American sociologist at Harvard, who raised the issue in several works. One might expect Sorokin’s conclusions not to be accepted by political scientists on the Left, for they could not accept revolution as a push for anarchy. But conservative historians did not accept them either, though they saw anarchy as a significant part of some revolutions (e.g., Russian). Sorokin was quoted by neither the Left nor the Right. What was the reason for ignoring his explanatory model?

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Some might explain it in terms of Sorokin’s personal characteristics. He joined the Harvard faculty as a rising star and became, as he put it, a “member of the scholarly nobility.” (He made these remarks in a letter to N. A. Setnitskii, an extravagant Russian philosopher who lived in Harbin, in the northern Chinese region of Manchuria, and whose archives are now in Prague.) But he soon was in conflict with a number of sociologists, some in his own department, such as Talcott Parsons. But these issues cannot explain the limited circulation of his ideas on social meltdown as an essential element of revolution and harsh government as the only way to “normalize” society. The problem here is much deeper. The modern West has not experienced general meltdown of society and anomization of a considerable part of its members for a long time. Crime, like other asocial behavior, is an important part of modern life, but it has not reached such proportions as to question the existence of the democratic institution. The “sociability” of most Western citizens, that is, their adherence to the basic rules of societal interactions, is not seriously questioned. Even in major social conflicts, the vast majority do not loot or rape or challenge the basic rules of hygiene. Even those regarded as marginal or bohemian take showers and use toilets. Social meltdown has been limited in duration and related to emergency situations such as wars. Most Westerners are firmly placed in groups, and this societal existence is the other side of the individualism often seen as the essential trait of Western capitalistic democracies. Capitalism has shaped Western social thought, and the socium is seen as the place of interaction between groups and the state. These conditions prevent most social scientists from understanding the importance to average citizens of basic security and threats to it. Modern political scientists usually point to the state as the major threat to individual security. The entire system of modern Western democracies is designed to protect the individual from encroachment by the state. In premodern times the situation was altogether different. The major threat to the individual often came not from the state but from society, not from above but from below. The ability to see the importance of the asocial process has also been upset by the intellectual trend to minimize the role of asocial elements in general and crime in particular. At the turn of the twentieth century, most social scientists viewed criminals as comparatively minor segments of society. They were seen, especially in the case of Cesare Lombroso,

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not just as asocial groups but as a different species. In the 1930s, with the Depression and the increasing shift to the Left, criminals, still regarded as enemies of society, were also seen as victims of social injustice. In the postwar era this trend continued, with the French at the forefront. Criminals and asocial groups were transformed into a revolutionary force and equated with suppressed masses that fought for liberation. Finally, “criminal” ceased to be an objective category at all, in the context of postmodernism, which saw “reality” as constructed by ideological paradigms. That social reality could be seen differently depending on the positions of observers was hardly novel. What was new was that the values of the observers were directly related to the prevailing power in a particular society. Foucault propagated such a view with special vigor. Mainstream values were absolutely arbitrary, related to the power of the middle classes, and could be replaced by opposite values. The asocial or criminal would then be seen as mainstream. Foucault and similar philosophers remained popular in the United States when they started to fade in France. The assumption that an arbitrary ideology makes otherwise harmless and socially useful individuals anomic did not change much when conservative views intensified with the collapse of the USSR. Capitalist ideology, or “episteme,” was to blame for the repressiveness of capitalist society; Marxist ideology was to blame for the problems of socialist society. In each case the solution was to change the ideology and culture. The point of my work is to show that, with all the importance of ideology, its role is often overestimated in explaining processes in certain periods of history, specifically, periods of rapid disintegration of the social and political fabric, as in the transition from the feudal regime to the modern era. The eroding gemeinschaft culture was not immediately replaced by the gesellschaft arrangements of the capitalist West. The result in many cases was not only “revolutionary” change as usually understood but also the melting down of society and the emergence of a considerable segment as an aggregation of anomic personalities. This anomie was not the product of an ideological construct against people who could be integrated into society or create a stable society on their own. These asocial groups were not ideological abstractions but real problems that tore society apart. They were not marginal, in that they played an important role in shaping social conflicts and wars.

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It would also be wrong to see in these anomies just the lower classes fighting in an odd way against oppression, though this aspect should not be denied. Anomization was not directed against this or that group or order. Anomie in many cases was not a separate social category, for certain attributes of asocial groups (criminals) were shared by all groups of society. Violence and use of deadly weapons were central to social interaction, the “honorable” way to make a living or have sex for both vagabond and noble. The general anomization of society led to a situation in which not only did the lower classes accept the criminal models of the elite (banditry for making a living and rape for sexual access), but also the upper classes started to imitate the criminality of the lower classes. Nobles sometimes engaged in petty theft, an activity formerly seen as degrading. This similarity in behavior created a peculiar situation that would not be found in the future. In the modern West, with all the importance of the values of the middle class, there are great differences in the behavior of upper and lower classes and especially marginal groups. Such differences could hardly be recorded in the periods of societal breakdown. Nobles could understand the lower classes, and, if the situation required it, could easily socialize with them, as seen, for example, by the ease with which bands were formed from people of all walks of life. General meltdown was one of the essential aspects of fourteenthand fifteenth-century Europe and its exit from the gemeinschaft-oriented medieval society. It was an exit rather than a transition, for transition implies that a new social and political order replaced the old one. This distinction was an essential aspect of Sorokin’s views of revolution. We accept Sorokin’s general conceptual explanation of revolution but clarify the process of societal disintegration. For Sorokin, meltdown was essentially social (proliferation of various crimes). We assume that it was much deeper—not only social but also biosocial or purely biological when social conditions stimulated disease. Several of these processes were unleashed by the meltdown. Prostitution and promiscuity in general led to the spread of related crime and venereal diseases. Unsanitary conditions in the cities and migrations of displaced people spread the plague. The proliferation of asocial processes led, as Sorokin stated, to a violent backlash. From this perspective, the absolutist governments that started to emerge in fifteenth- through seventeenth-century Europe should be reevaluated in the context of the spread of the

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asocial process. These stresses on the ideological and discursive aspect of asociality and related problems of control reinforced on the theoretical level the general feeling shared by the vast majority of Westerners, especially Americans, who at least until September 11 had never questioned the basic security of the society. This “discursive” vision of reality and asociality prevented many Western scholars from assessing the importance general meltdown played in certain periods of history, early modern Europe in particular. This disregard obscured the roles played by totalitarian and semitotalitarian regimes such as Stalinist USSR and post-Mao China and by similar regimes (at least structurally) in early modern European states. The state often played a crucial role as the only anchor of order. The importance of order can be easily understood if we look at the situation in late medieval/early modern Europe, France in particular.

T HE R OLE

OF THE

D ESPOTIC G OVERNMENT

It seems clear that totalitarian and harsh authoritarian regimes past and present have no external legitimacy but are self-legitimized, so to speak. It has been assumed that there was little rationale for the existence of these regimes. For quite a few postmodernists, the problem with crime and the asocial process in general is mostly discursive, caused by an ideological paradigm or “discourse” that defined the nature of this or that group. Criminals were called “criminals” only because they were the victims of a certain type of “discourse,” the label the ruling elite imposed on the lower classes. This theory also explains the rise of the repressive and controlling aspects of the modern West. In Foucault’s view, the capitalist West was not a democracy but a great “circular prison.” He rightly saw the controlling aspect of the West from the beginning of the modern era, “the great confinement,” as the beginning of modernity. In his interpretation, the modern West was nothing but a combination of various prison-type institutions, from hospitals to factories. Those who opposed the Left, whose numbers increased on the collapse of the USSR, followed the same model in that they also visualized the repressiveness of political systems as a result ideology. The difference is that their arguments were directed against the Soviet regime rather than the Western capitalist democracies. They saw ideology as the reason for the rise of the totalitarian regime and assumed that

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replacing one ideological paradigm with the other would transform dictatorship into Western-type democracy. Other social scientists saw the roots of these regimes in the social and political interplay of life. They did not regard social reality as discursive, that is, the product of ideological interplay and subjective ideological definition, but considered society an objective reality that could be studied as such. Most of these reduced the rationale for the existence of these regimes to the benefit of the ruling elite as follows. First, absolute independence of rulers from their constituencies was needed to maintain the power and economic interests of the elite. Second, the absolute power of the ruler was essential for a strong military machine, and conquest was an action that benefited the elite. Third, as was the case with oriental despotism, absolute power benefited both the elite and the masses, for these regimes regarded maintaining the irrigation systems as a major responsibility. All these explanations for absolute power and its relationship to various segments of society were valid, but they were not the only ones. Even when this power was not needed for economic reasons, it was essential for protection—to protect not only the elite from social upheavals or the population from invasions but also the entire population from anarchy. Proliferation of crime, among the most serious manifestations, made personal security a crucial issue. This explains why the monarchy retained popularity for millennia, despite the fact that the populace suffered from an absolutist state. Absolute power, paradoxically enough, was often accepted by a great majority. And only when society felt it could police itself was the image recast. Absolute power started to be seen as onerous and the idea of social contracts emerged as a point of departure for modern revolutions (e.g., the French Revolution), which would replace legitimacy from above with a legitimacy from below. Yet before this, it was assumed that only a brutal despotic government could save society from itself, that is, from general disintegration with crime as one of its salient manifestations.

N ORMALIZATION AND THE T REND TO THE T OTALITARIAN M ODEL : PAST, P RESENT, AND F UTURE Repression cannot be explained by intellectual drives and the intention of the authorities to use torture, mutilation, and other forms of

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corporal punishment to reestablish through symbolic means a divine order which the criminal act represents. It was not so much symbolism, though this should not be discarded, but pragmatic interests that pushed the state to implement brutal punishment on a large scale. A variety of interests played a role in the formation of the strong state, such as the desire of the elite to reinforce its power and privilege and marshal resources for foreign adventures. But these could not explain the mass application of terror, which was in many ways a response to the disintegration of society. The inevitability of backlash was one of the central points of Sorokin’s model. His theory implied vacillation between meltdown and harsh backlash. This model could not be applied in all cases. In many cases, backlash has not happened or has failed to “normalize” society. Disintegration and asocial processes can last a long time. The conflict in Rwanda and the Congo began in 1994, and chaos and criminality together with pandemic diseases continue to the present. In other cases, the state has been able to avoid violent anarchy but has not been able to prevent asocial behavior from seriously deforming society. Russia under Putin, for example, is able to achieve measurable political stability but not to prevent corruption or stem diseases such as AIDS. One must resist the temptation to find the precise conditions for creating charismatic leaders. But they do have essential characteristics. The leader must be absolutely independent of society to be a dictator; for only a person with absolute power could implement harsh repressive machinery, and only this could normalize society at the very beginning if both the lower classes and elite were engaged in asocial behavior. In addition, the leader and the apparatus of the state, quite underdeveloped at the beginning of the stabilization process, must challenge social conflicts and foreign pressure. No questioning of the divine authority of the ruler must be present. The very human nature of the ruler must be excluded from his or her image. These leaders can emerge in various ways, for instance, from successful wars and other successes. They are most likely to be found in periods in which power emanates from above and rulers have a blood relationship to previous rulers. This was the case with all societies of Eurasia in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. At the same time, regardless of the source of origin, all of these rulers and regimes had some common characteristics. There was no visible

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notion of the people’s participation in government. The focus was not on an ideal populace composed of ideal citizens, but on ideal rulers and ideal elite. Two polar images emerged, especially after the Counter-Reformation. The average individual, the majority, was depicted as a cunning beast driven by passions and who could be restrained only by force. The other image was the stern, upright member of the elite, or the king. The image of the king became more complicated as the theory of the “two bodies of the king” emerged. In the human aspect, the king, like all humans, was subject to the vagaries of the flesh. In the second, spiritual and legal aspect, the king represented state and law in a sort of quasi-religion. The king as human would die; the king as embodiment of state and law could never die. In this capacity the king soared above everyone and had absolute power. The “divine” rights of the king were inseparable from his duties to protect subjects and maintain order. This drive for a strong absolutist state was in a way the other side of the meltdown of early modern society. The state steadily increased pressure over society during the process of “normalization.” Thomas Hobbes articulated this need to apply on a mass scale the sharp polarity between the divine absolute power and the rest of the society, nothing but an assortment of cunning beasts. His ideological framework represented the behavioral model for all rulers of Europe. They were all “Hobbesian” without knowing it.

T HE M AN

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P OWER

An essential aspect of Hobbes’s views was his discarding the major premises of Western liberalism, the idea, which would finally be entrenched during the late Enlightenment, that people’s natural sociability and truly understood self-interest would lead to a selfpoliced society. People’s sociability was based on reason, and personal interests truly understood would lead to voluntary self-restraint. Hobbes took the opposite view. He agreed that people were mostly concerned with selfish interests and followed the “law of Nature: The Right of Nature, which Writers commonly call Jus Naturale, is the Liberty each man hath, to use his own power, as he will himselfe, for the preservation of his own Nature; that is to say, of his own Life, and consequently, of doing any thing, which in his own judgment and Reason, he shall conceive to be the aptest means thereunto.”1

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But reason did not mean that a person would see his personal wellbeing as directly connected with that of the broad socium. Rather, a person would try to survive at the expense of others. Thus only the ferocious power of the state and the wide application of brutal punishment could preserve public order and prevent self-destructive fury. In Hobbes’s view, people “without a common Power to keep them all in awe” would inevitably lapse into the “condition which is called Warre; and such warre, as is of every man, against every man.”2 The state had absolute power over individuals to prevent self-destructive anarchy. But the state must do this for the high purpose of social stability and itself be bound by the power of law. If the state broke the law and acted in a truly arbitrary fashion, the affected individual could sue the state. “If a Subject have a controversie with his Sovereigne, of debt, or of the right of possession of lands or goods, or concerning any penalty, corporal, or pecuniary, grounded on a precedent Law; he hath the same Liberty to sue for his right, as if it were against a Subject; and before such Judges, as are appointed by the Sovereign.”3 Still the law provided only the most general framework for the state’s activities, and Hobbes clearly emphasized the power of the state rather than any limitations on this power. Application of terror on a broad basis was inseparable from the relationship between state and society. And it was Hobbes who, better than anyone else, represented the spirit of the age. “Hobbes recognized long ago that for effective domination, ‘the Passion to be reckoned upon, is Fear.’ For Hobbes, fear is what binds and ensures social order.”4

T HE H OBBESIAN S TATE

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R ISE

OF

T ERROR

The dramatic increase in repression accompanied the transformation of power and of the image of power. The king was seen as different from the rest of humanity.5 But not until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the French king represented as a demigod who could be compared with Oriental despots: In 1662, in his sermon on the duties of kings, Bossuet states that, “to establish this power (puissance) that represents His own, God places a mark of divinity on the forehead and face of sovereigns. . . . God has

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made in the Prince a mortal image of His immortal authority. You are gods, says David, you are all children of the Almighty. But, oh gods of flesh and blood, oh gods of earth and dust, you will die as men. It does not matter. You are gods even though you die, and your authority does not die. This spirit of royalty passes in its entirety to your successors and imprints everywhere the same fear, the same respect, and the same veneration. The man dies, it is true; but the king, we say, never dies; the image of God is immortal.”6

This image of the king as a divine person was inseparable from that of fear. In the personality of the king the god revealed itself mostly as terror. “The custom of seeing the king accompanied by guards, drums, officers, and all those things that bend the machine toward respect and terror, causes their face to imprint on their subjects respect and terror even when they appear by themselves, because one does not separate in thought their persons from the retinues with which they are seen.” Terror was not just an image. Terroristic violence was actively implemented to curb social discontent and crime. Historians differ as to when the repression intensified. Some see its beginnings in the high Middle Ages. According to R. I. Moore, “Europe experienced a fundamental and permanent transformation around 1100, away from the relative toleration extended to such deviants as Jews, heretics, lepers, and homosexuals toward outright persecution and severe punishment. Deviants were deliberately identified as social, racial, or religious enemies, as total pariahs and social contaminants who had to be purged.”7 This assumption could well be challenged. The state and society clearly often engaged in brutal persecution of those outside the social, political, or religious order. It was clear that Jews and Christians did not live in the mutually enriching “multicultural” environment where some historians on the Left would wish them to have lived. Jews experienced waves of pogroms that could be quite brutal, as in the time of the Crusades. But other cases of violence were just episodes in many centuries of living together. European rulers and their Christian subjects had no love for Jews but had no direct desire to exterminate them most of the time. The same could be said about heretics. In the Middle Ages, heresy, like most activities, was a communal undertaking. It was not only a different view by this or that individual but also was collective defiance of the church as an institution. Repression was brutal, as demonstrated by the extermination of the Albigensians. But these

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collective challenges of institutions were comparatively rare. And if the church was sure that an individual or group continued to pay the tithe and recognize the authority of the church, it usually did not bother investigating their beliefs. Still, the rigor of punishment increased during the high Middle Ages and even more by the beginning of the modern era. From the beginning of the modern era, we see a dramatic increase in the death sentence. Capital punishment was the lynch pin of the Ordinance of 1670, an important landmark in the development of the judicial machinery of the ancien régime.8 “According [to] the Criminal Ordinance of 1670, there could be no royal grace for those accused or convicted of dueling, premeditated murder (including accomplices), rescue of prisoners of justice, abduction with violence, or violence against magistrates and agents of justice during the exercise of their duties. Courts and chancelleries customarily assimilated rape, poisoning, arson, heresy, and treason to unpardonable crimes.”9 Other grave crimes included “crimes against nature.” The notion of “natural law” slowly infiltrated judicial thinking. Although all crimes implied violation of the divine order, “natural law” was the foundation of order as prescribed by nature. And this sort of crime was punished with exemplary rigor. These crimes included infanticide. “Through the ages Christian sentiment had exhibited abiding hostility toward the crime of infanticide. Within the Christianized Roman Empire, infanticide was made a capital offense already in 374 A.D.” Yet through most of the Middle Ages, the authorities were rather lenient toward it. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, French authorities, following ancient tradition that regarded the child as the property of the parents, could forgive the mother who killed her newborn.10 By the end of the fifteenth century, the authorities started to apply the death sentence with more rigor, and the records are full of stories of unfortunate women. “The little corpses are found in cisterns and wells, the mothers are discovered and burned; one has ‘une belle repentance’ before she dies, her charred body being laid in the street next to an infant carved from wood and a painting of the killing.”11 A mandatory death sentence for infanticide was promulgated by Henri II. “In February 1557 Henri II issued a decree on infanticide whose force was to last through the whole Ancien Régime: any infant death following a concealed pregnancy or clandestine childbirth, and with

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no formal baptism or burial, was presumed to be homicide and punishable by death.”12 The sentence was most likely not commuted. Although parents who killed their children were severely punished, even more so were children who killed their parents.13 The same was true with poisoning, especially if the victim was related to the murderer, for example, a husband poisoned by his wife.14 There were a variety of ways of dispatching a human being, of which decapitation seemed to be very popular: Death by the sword was the standard form of execution in early modern Europe. Medieval evidence suggests that it was employed to punish rapists, robbers, and occasionally those guilty of trespass. The early methods of administering this sentence varied. In one version the victim is made to kneel or lie with his neck resting on a wooden block. . . . As a rule, however, decapitation prescribed a kneeling victim and a single blow with a double-edged sword or an axe. The act is accompanied by an important post-mortal practice: the severed head is exhibited on the end of a pole or placed between the victim’s legs and interred with the trunk.15

By the end of the Middle Ages, decapitation, “which is quite venerable, is rarely inflicted among us except on noble persons,”16 and other forms of execution were employed for commoners. Hanging was one of the most popular all over Europe. “Hanging, a common penalty, was imposed on men found guilty of theft or treason.”17 The procedure goes back almost to the Dark Ages. “In the era of Charlemagne the oaks which had been utilized for this purpose made way for gallows properly constructed of clean, dry oak free of knots and bark. The earliest ropes were made from oak twigs carefully braided to the left.” Hanging was not only more painful than beheading but also was regarded as degrading. In Paris, for example, there was a traditional “coupling of the gibbet and the cesspool.”18 Simple execution was rather rare; it was usually accomplished by an array of frightful tortures.19 The state imported new ways of execution in the same way it would later import new industrial technologies. By 1534, France had introduced death on the wheel, a technique imported from Germany20 that continued to be popular in both countries until the eighteenth century. Breaking on the wheel was the most gruesome form of execution still in regular use in eighteenth century Wurttemberg. The executioner

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followed one of two procedures, as specified in the sentence of the court. If the offender was condemned to die on the wheel “from above” (von oben herab), the executioner fastened him to the ground face down and delivered fatal blows with a heavy spoked wagon wheel. If the sentence specified “from below” (von untern nach oben), the executioner fastened the offender to the wheel and smashed his limbs with a sturdy cudgel above and below.21

Another gruesome form of execution was live burial: Live burial was practiced in south German territories from the midthirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. While it was viewed primarily as a female punishment, it was originally not restricted to women. Rapists, sodomites, and men found guilty of bestiality were also buried alive, as were women convicted of murder, excluding infanticide. The executioner places the victim in an open pit strewn with thorn branches and nettles. Once the victim is in the pit, more thorns and nettles are added before the pit is closed with earth. Sometimes an oak pale is driven through the body, either while the victim lies in the pit or after the pit has been closed.22

The state was especially brutal with male social outcasts,23 but often neither sex nor social status protected against execution if the crime was seen as deserving capital punishment.24 From the sixteenth century or even earlier, the judicial machinery moved in the direction of making repression easier, removing obstacles to the terroristic machinery of the state. An important landmark was the “famous Edict of Villers-Cotterets. In its concern for eliminating delays in both civil and criminal procedure, the edict consecrated the inquisitorial character of the latter. The edict deprived the accused of any counsel and expected the defendant, in his bewildered condition, to come up immediately with any challenges against his judges or his accusers.”25 The seventeenth century followed suit with the Civil Ordinance of 1667 and the Criminal Ordinance of 1670. “It too built upon traditional principles, and it too aimed at speeding up the process. The code placed every possible weapon in the hands of the judge in his quest for the truth and left the accused more isolated and intimidated than ever. The intention of Titles XI:12 and XIV:1, requiring judges personally to interrogate suspects within twenty-four hours, was to get the case moving, not any concern for civil rights. As one may observe . . . , proceedings were secret, the

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accused was required under oath to testify against himself, and he was held incommunicado.”26 The most important move for speeding up the terroristic machinery of the state was the introduction of the principle of “arbitrary punishment.” Here the judicial practice of early modern France departed from the legal principles of the Middle Ages, which, paradoxically, might protect defendants more than would be the case in the future. During the classical Middle Ages, judges had employed the principles of Roman law, which provided some security against arbitrary punishment. But by the sixteenth century judges had great flexibility and, in some cases, practically unlimited power.27 The prévot, who since the reign of Francis I had dealt with criminals and vagabonds on the highways, had the power to apprehend, condemn, and execute criminals on the spot, usually by hanging on nearby trees, where the bodies remained until they decomposed.28 In some cases, an entire family was hanged. These “landmarks” were often mentioned by travelers in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Prévots in their disposal of the police-maréchaussée (rural police) had emerged in 1526 and expanded in 1668.29 Even when the state pardoned a culprit, it made actual release as hard as possible. The “letter of remission,” that is, the letter of royal pardon, had to be bought. “The cost of a letter of remission in the 1530s and 1540s was more than two months’ wages for an unskilled laborer, more than a month’s salary for a printer’s journeyman, and of a chamber maid’s dowry.”30 The king could provide the letter gratis or “at a reduced rate.” But the requirement of paying for the pardon undoubtedly created an additional problem in receiving it. There was continuous development of the apparatus for punishment, including the prestige of executioners. “From at least 1485 to the Revolution, kings granted considerable title, remuneration, and protection to the executioners of France.”31 The death sentence also increased widely. This repressiveness led to increasing state intrusiveness in all aspects of society. There was a “great rash of confinements around the middle of the seventeenth century, when, for example, within a few months during the year 1656 every hundredth inhabitant of Paris was arrested and put into institutions.”32 The state’s major claim to legitimacy stemmed from its role in maintaining order in the holistic sense. This notion was much broader than maintaining the power of the elite or defending society from foreign threat (remember that the state built its military

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machinery not only for imperial aggrandizement but also for protection from invasion). The state tremendously increased its power as protector of society from violence in general and violent crime in particular, and it did so by institutionalizing violence. This “normalization” of life provided a major source of state legitimacy and justified elevating the king to almost a living god. This all-embracing power buttressed by wide application of terror provided the state the attributes that made it structurally at least similar to totalitarian societies.

S OCIAL

AND

E CONOMIC R EGULATION

The state began broad regulation of the economy and society. It set food prices, especially during famine, and by the seventeenth century was restraining people’s movement both in and outside the country. It retained or reinvented medieval institutions that were supposed to have died out, such as the peasant commune, and began to promote slavery and new institutions where slave-inmates worked. The commune, rooted in prehistoric tradition, originally meant communal use of forest, meadows, and so on with no privately owned land. As capitalism developed and property rights and individual responsibilities were emphasized, this institution was in the process of natural extinction. It survived to the beginning of the twentieth century in Russia because of direct intervention by the monarchy. This was not only a manifestation of the Russian monarchy’s backwardness but also a sort of lingering “socialist” proclivity that would help Stalin’s “revolution from above,” which transformed peasants into virtual state serfs fixed to their collective farms. The French monarchy in the late seventeenth century, tainted by neither oriental tradition nor socialist ideology, followed the same path. Classic peasant communes were gone in France by the seventeenth century. But there was a similar arrangement called contrainte solidaire. “Contrainte solidaire meant that the community was collectively responsible for the obligations of the individual members, and individuals could be made responsible for the obligations of the entire community. In other words, individual liability and collective liability were merged.”33 This institution, valuable for feudal lords, apparently had been in decline until the seventeenth-century

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monarchy reinvented it. “By the seventeenth century, the seemingly outdated commune arrangement became valuable to royal authorities. In 1650, and again in 1666, the Parlement of Dijon agreed that the monarchy had the right to enforce contrainte solidaire when villages failed to pay royal taxes. Communities, formerly collectively responsible for seigneurial dues, were now held collectively responsible for royal taxes.” Moreover, to ensure the flow of taxes, the French crown engaged in practices to prevent “privatization” of communal property. “The importance of contrainte solidaire for the future became particularly clear in 1683 when as the part of a broader program designed to prevent communities from falling back into financial disorder, the monarchy began to prohibit villages from selling, leasing, or mortgaging their communal goods and property.” The state not only limited people’s freedom to use their property but also began to limit their personal freedom. There were attempts at fixing people in certain localities and turning them into slaves. Authorities applied the idea of “fixation” to marginal elements, vagabonds first of all, and avoided the previous strategy when the vagabonds were chased out of the particular city.34 This idea circulated by the end of the seventeenth century. The Company of the Holy Sacrament, like a modern think tank, had “begun to study the problem of disorder among paupers in 1631. The brothers attacked mendacity in the province, arguing that begging in Paris could never be controlled until the poor throughout the kingdom could be confined to their native regions.”35 The government was not able to fix all paupers to their localities, but it made their movement harder and harder. These principles were applied to practically any Frenchmen who ventured to move from his place of residence. Permission was required not only for foreign travel but also for travel from one part of the country to another. Workers in the crafts had to have documents that traced their work records. The government regulated trade by preventing certain goods, grain for example, from being taken out of the country. At the same time the government could purchase grain in case of famine, as with the great famine in the late seventeenth century.36 The state also engaged in social engineering. By the seventeenth century most French peasants were free, though living in appalling conditions.37 But there were strong movements across Europe in the opposite direction, notably the “second edition of serfdom” in

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Eastern Europe. In Russia, the position of serfs became hardly different from that of slaves. This development could be seen even in such countries as France, with the resurrection of virtual slavery under Foucault’s “great confinement.” The new slavery and drive to put marginals to work was related to the rise of “workhouses,” with the Hôpital général of Paris one of the “most polyvalent institutions of Old Regime Civilization.”38 Hospitals as institutions for the destitute and sick had developed along with leprosaria in the Middle Ages, for example, in Toulouse, since the eleventh century.39 The idea of institutions for marginals had apparently been in circulation for some time; Italy had one at the beginning of the fifteenth century.40 Repression, control, and work were not the only considerations of those who thought about places for those outside the social structure. It was assumed, at least at the beginning, that the institution would be a charitable effort for those who deserved government help. When “Louis XIII’s government attempted to distinguish deserving paupers from the notorious false beggars, [it] decreed in 1612 that all paupers who wanted to receive charity go to the asylums created for them.”41 The result was not a humanitarian institution but a Gulag-type establishment whose major role was to isolate and punish marginals and use them as cheap labor. The Hôpital général, which opened in 1656, was supposedly a humanitarian institution for the sick, but “these buildings were primarily places of confinement, not treatment, for the aged and feeble, the orphans, the insane, and the social deviants (vagrants, prostitutes, common criminals, and temporarily unemployed).”42 The hospital was a huge complex of buildings that “enclose[d] paupers on the Salpêtrière and the Bicêtre as well as the Hôtel-Dieu of Paris.”43 The arrangements were a culmination of the process started long before the seventeenth century. This desire to lock up and isolate people who fell out of societal niches, along with the trend to use the unemployed for public work against their will, went back at least to the fourteenth century, when Jean II Le Bon prohibited “vagrants from sheltering in hospitals” and required them to seek employment.44 As time progressed, marginals and criminals as cheap labor became more common. In Toulouse in the sixteenth century, “vagabonds and sturdy beggars were periodically rounded up to perform a small range of menial and sometimes unsavory tasks that probably no self-respecting artisan

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would do unless he had fallen on hard times, such as cleaning out a ditch, clearing away the rubble from a decaying wall, or unloading stones for one of the few new road projects of this period. ‘Lately’ after 1510, when the city took more responsibility for street cleaning, vagabonds were rounded up to man the wagons hired for this purpose and were supervised by the Judge de la Cour Pacque and his guards.”45 Women and men were used for hard work. The state, too, looked at marginals and criminals as an important source of slave labor. Criminals and vagabonds were sent to the galleys of the royal fleet, along with religious dissenters such as Protestants and sometimes entire ethnic groups.46 For example, “police regulations issued in 1666 made it clear that male Gypsies were to be arrested and, without legal process, sent in chains to the galleys.”47 Revolts among the starving masses also provided the opportunity to replenish the supply of convicts for the fleet. For example, at the beginning of the Sun King’s reign a disastrous harvest and heavy taxes led to numerous peasant riots, put down by troops who “left a trail of blood behind them.”48 A number of rebels were executed, while four hundred were sent “to the galleys for life.” The needs of the royal fleet even led to “liberalization,” replacing the death penalty with the galleys. According to a royal ordinance of December 4, 1684, military deserters were to be sent to the galleys for life, after cutting off their ears and noses and “branding each cheek with a fleur-de-lis.”49 Soon “a galley officer urged that noses no longer be cut off because ‘after a little work the difficulty of breathing notably diminished their strength, so that they have to be relieved.’” These people were also used for social engineering, including transportation to the colonies to populate the land. In France, sending people to the colonies began in 1719.50 The era was also marked by the transatlantic slave trade. Millions perished during the wars to capture them or during transportation. Although communication between the European states seems to have improved with the course of time, there was also a strong process to control the movement of individuals. The borders became more closed and a sort of passport or visa became increasingly required to enter or leave France. A sort of internal passport was required to move from one part of the country to another. Undesirable foreigners such as Gypsies were to be expelled from the country since the sixteenth century.51 At least since the fifteenth

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century, major epidemics led to restrictions on travel, and some cities closed their gates and placed sentinels to prevent dangerous strangers from entering.52 Measures for limiting the spreading of the plague at the beginning of the sixteenth century essentially meant isolating victims or contacts, when possible in their own homes. “With the development of specialized personnel, quarantine enforcement became more rigorous and some of the classic responses to the disease were initiated, such as marking the doors of infected households and, later, submitting lists of infected houses to the parliament at short intervals.” Those who violated the regulation were severely punished, as were those “who did not report suspicious death.”53 In some countries, those suspected of the plague were entombed in their houses in a sort of collective grave. Sometimes entire sections of cities were burned to prevent the spread. Authorities were sometimes irrational: in Lyon, a 1582 edict demanded expulsion from the city of all representatives of the medical profession.54 In Paris the prévot de santé, instituted in 1531 to supervise sanitary conditions, had power to transport those suspected of the plague to the HôtelDieu, often to certain death.55 Fear of pandemic also increased state interference in hotels, cabarets, and similar institutions. Those who used them had to present a certificate of being uninfected. Fear of the plague also increased restrictions on travelers from other countries. The first place to quarantine goods and merchants from abroad was Marseilles in 1526.56 A 1683 royal decree further increased control over entrance of goods at Toulon and Marseilles.57

T HE R EGULATION

OF

S EXUALITY

As Le Roy Ladurie implied, the beginning of the modern era led to the end of the sexual freedoms of the previous period: “The late sixteenth century the Reformation and Counter-Reformation threatened the very existence of prostitution. Brothels were often shut down.”58 The state started to regulate the most intimate aspect of the human life: “Early modern society somehow forced young people to repress or sublimate their sexual urges.”59 The reasons were manifold, but it was clear that authorities considered sexual impropriety in general was directly related to general disorder. The king regarded fighting this disorder as a major responsibily. And Parliament vowed to eradicate vices of all sorts.

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The fear of prostitution and sexual irregularity was deeply connected with the fear of disease60 and was a major reason for the state to intrude, regulate, and control the most intimate aspect of human life. In Italy techniques to contain the peste had long been in operation. French towns were slower to take an aggressive stance against disease, and they may not have been as sophisticated and efficient as their Italian neighbors. But as the tempo of life quickened and city-living became more complex, urban governments were forced to extend their serviced into all aspects of public health. As in Italy, concern for public health widened to include a new awareness of the prostitute, and vagabond, sturdy beggar and poor person as possible carriers of the disease.61

In some cities all prostitutes were to be expelled;62 in others, only “illegal prostitutes” were targeted. (One could assume that “illegal” prostitutes were not registered with the authorities, did not ply their trade in municipal brothels, escaped medical supervision, and were seen as carriers of disease.) All over Europe, the state tried to decrease prostitution and minimize its harm, at least for some groups. When localities authorized brothels, they tried to choose locations as harmless for the city as possible, sometimes needing several sessions to find them.63 There were also attempts to restrict prostitutes’ movement within cities.64 The residents of the capital were of the greatest concern to the authorities, and Paris was to be cleansed of prostitutes and other marginal groups. Louis XIII undertook this task in earnest. A royal edict proclaimed that “vagabonds, even all apprentice barbers and tailors, and all others [without employment] and all debauched girls and women to find work within 24 hours, and if not, to leave this town and faubourgs of Paris, under summary penalty for men of being put on the chain and sent to the galleys, and for girls and women, of being whipped, shaved, and banished in perpetuity.”65 State pressure increased later when “a series of laws between 1684 and 1687 . . . attempted to eradicate the problem of prostitutes following the army. Intended apparently both to arrest the spread of syphilis among the troops and to make them more willing to risk death in battle by giving them less to live for, these laws stated that any prostitute found within two leagues of either Versailles or any military camp was to have her nose and ears split.”66

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An ordinance in 1684 attempted to control prostitution in Paris by providing that prostitutes be punished with imprisonment. It also distinguished between two categories of prostitutes: the incorrigibles who had venereal disease or were so hardened that they did not want to repented, and the women who repented. For the latter, the ordinance called for spiritual instruction and rehabilitation in the Salpêtrière. . . . Louis XIV directed La Reynie to draw up a list of all known women who sold their daughters into prostitution. La Reynie sent a list of thirty women to Louis, who then ordered them all arrested and confined.67

The lot of these women was, however, hardly different from that those sent to hard labor and prison. The concern could be seen by the fact that “illicit prostitution replaced witchcraft as the form of deviance most commonly prosecuted against women.”68 State involvement in private life extended to marriage. Consensual relationships and even those blessed by the church were not seen as valid unless they followed strict legal procedure and were authorized by the parents. In annulling marriages that did not meet these conditions the state challenged an essential aspect of Catholic doctrine: that marriage was a sacrament that must not be violated. The state could not only invalidate marriage vows made before a priest but also could execute the husband, and the parties to unauthorized marriages were “automatically disinherited.”69 This could be done even if the parents of the bride forgave the son-in-law and the couple had a child. The fact that a woman was legally married and the state had approved her union did not relieve her and her husband from state attempts to regulate their lives. The state was especially concerned with the women of the capital and entrusted the newly created police, led by La Reynie, with wide power to regulate family relationships. “Correspondence between Louis XIV and La Reynie revealed a special concern about developing a feminine police to control the disorderly conduct of women. Relying especially on the forty-eight police commissioners to keep careful watch on all unsavory people in their districts, the king and his Lieutenant-General of Police made the misconduct of women the responsibility of their husbands or fathers. In 1683, for example, the police began to issue reprimands to the husbands of women who entered Parisian churches immodestly dressed.”70

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In its drive to puritanize society and strengthen the role of the family, the state even restrained piety or, to be precise, pseudopiety. By the time of Louis XIV, the authorities “forbade their subjects to undertake unauthorized pilgrimages in order to prevent them from using this form of devotion as a pretext for escaping burdensome family obligations.”71 Restrictions of sexuality definitely had an effect on sexual mores. It has been suggested that the beginning of the spread of masturbation and homosexuality was the result not of sexual liberation but rather of the restrictive sexual culture and the absence of any other way of satisfying sexual urges.72

S PIRITUAL C ONTROL Ideological pressure and control over the internal world of individuals increased as the part of the general state drive for control. The Middle Ages, especially the earlier part, was a time of comparative leniency in religious matters. The church was mostly interested in collecting dues and preventing any direct display of heresy. It was not very concerned with the world of individuals, their morality or lack of it, dress code, or spiritual life. The situation changed during the early modern era and by the seventeenth century reached its zenith. Attendance at Catholic services became almost mandatory as a certificate of good behavior. One was expected to display piety and respect for the church and its doctrine. Foul language, especially if religious symbols were used, could lead to serious punishment, such as mutilation. People could be executed for sacrilege by the end of the ancien régime. According to the Declaration of 1666 even verbal blasphemy was to be punished “in the most severe way.”73 An edict of 1682 prescribed death for those who engaged in sorcery “accompanied by sacrilege.”74 Not only those guilty of violating the rules were punished, but also those who did not denounce them. “The stern laws of Louis XIV, inspired by his awareness of his obligations as Most Christian King, fined persons who overheard blasphemous remarks and failed to report them within twenty-four hours.”75 The state did not even leave a dead person alone if he or she committed suicide. “Self-destruction constituted a crime not only against God, who endowed humans with life and commanded them not to kill, but also against the ruler, the country, and the family, to whom

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‘every citizen is accountable for his days.’” Therefore the laws “ordered the police to investigate the death of individuals who did not die of natural causes, so as to identify and punish cases of suicide.” If it was found that a person took his life of his own will, a trial was staged, and “after posthumous trial and conviction, the corpses of suicides were dragged through the street face down on a hurdle, hung by the feet, and thrown in the refuse dump.” State intervention in intellectual life increased as well, as both state and church became more concerned with what people wrote and tried to disseminate. The process here was complicated and controversial. On one hand, the possibility for creative activities had increased dramatically; the blossoming of the Renaissance would not be possible otherwise. But tolerance was just one part of the story, and opposite trends could also be recorded. Censorship, in France in particular, increased as time progressed. It is often implied that rigid censorship kept medieval culture from flourishing. Censorship did not seem to be the major reason for the limited cultural output of the time; it lacked the cohesiveness to control cultural output. “In medieval France, the responsibility for censorship prior to work being placed in circulation was not clearly defined and was claimed both by the University, as custodian of theological orthodoxy, and by the Parlements, as custodians of the law.”76 “The importance of this censorship was increased immensely at the end of the Middle Ages by the invention of printing, which transformed the mode and speed of circulation of ideas, and by the Reformation, which generated new and dangerous ideas, and the development of the concept of legal property was a further argument for the creation of firm rules for approval and licensing.” Several pieces of legislation aimed at control over cultural output. “The first was the ordinance of Moulins of 1566, for which the Chancellor Michel de L’Hospital was largely responsible. This laid down that no person might print or cause to be printed any book or treatise without leave of the king and letter of privilege sealed with the great seal, and the printer was ordered to insert in the book or treatise his name and town, along with the text of the privilege.” Control increased as “the Code Michaud of 1629 laid down the procedure to be followed: two copies of the manuscript text were to be presented to the Chancellor, who would nominate a censor to examine the work; the censor would examine the work; the censor was to write his attestation.”

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The increase in the repressive and regulatory role of the state embraced all aspects of societal life. “The period from the latter half of the seventeenth to the nineteenth” was marked by “the perfecting of disciplinary techniques in military, medical, and educational institutions and manufacturing concern.”77 Although each of these actions can be found in Western democracies, the combination of phenomena created a picture of a society strikingly similar to the modern totalitarian state, as Sorokin regarded seventeenth-century France. But totalitarian states, such as the USSR, China, and Cambodia, are usually associated with mass terror and lack of individual security for life, dignity, property, and “basic human rights.” In European society, French society in particular, one can see a different process. As time progressed, society in general became more and more secure.

T HE B ENEFITS

OF

R EPRESSION

As noted in the preceding text, modern scientists are reluctant to see the rise of the strong repressive state, especially with totalitarian features, as caused by the general disintegration of the society. Rather, it was brought about by the state’s desire to maintain the power of the elite and engage in imperial aggrandizement. Certain discursive practices—ideological constructions—either put the helpless populace into the “great confinement” of modern Western capitalism, as Foucault insisted, or destined them to the gulag of the Communist societies, according to the conservatives. It was logical to assume that there was no relationship between brutal and controlling practices and increasing general security. There are clear differences in approaching violence. A number of Western intellectuals, mostly on the Left, would condone and even glamorize violence from below—the violence of the masses that use it to be freed from the oppressive state. Few works justify state violence against the people, and the idea that state violence could bring positive results not only to the elite but also to society in general is even less popular. Scholarly treatises and popular fiction are full of heroic rebels and criminals as rebels. Images of heroic police or judges are rare. And it would be hard to find a modern Western work with a heroic executioner or jailer.

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Improvement in security was seen as caused by the internal evolution of society, not related to the repressive and controlling aspects of the state. Elias suggested that internal evolution of the value system brought the changes. It is true that changed values and internal evolution were clearly important. In general, normalization of the society, increasing marginalization of asocial processes, and true stability would be impossible without internalization by the majority of basic norms of societal interactions. But this would happen only later, and at the beginning of the normalization process only the repressive and controlling power of the state kept society together. Even the self-policing civil society when it emerged was extremely fragile and needed the power of the state as a prop. The dramatic increase in repression was not due just to the king’s desire to maintain the rule of the elite or marshal forces for imperial aggrandizement. The king was concerned with basic security for all and wanted each of his subjects to “eat his bread and live on his possessions tranquilly, without being harassed, beaten, pillaged, tormented, or molested.”78 And in the drive to protect security, both personal and property, the king was concerned with all segments of the population, including peasants. It was suggested that “beginning in the Middle Ages, the kings of France had attempted to consolidate their political authority by protecting peasant property rights.”79 In this drive to protect life and property, the law, which had acquired a quasi-religious quality, provided justification for the dramatic increase in the power of the absolutist state. But the sacredness of the law also implied that the state was bound by the law. “Absolutism did not equal arbitrary rule because both natural and fundamental laws were always and everywhere held to bind the ruler’s actions. At this point, one might be tempted to argue that ‘absolutists’ and ‘constitutionalists’ were not really so different after all.”80 The balance between the king’s freedom to exercise power and the restraints posed by the law changed over time. “If we are going to consider ancien régime absolutism, however, it is imperative to keep in mind that the notion of puissance absolute as a description applied to their own government by contemporaries still changed in the course of time. While the characteristic emphasis on monarchical self-limitation remained constant through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the balance between the scope of the monarch’s rule by will on one hand and the binding quality of

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natural and fundamental law shifts over time.”81 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with all due reference to self-restraint, the stress was on the absolute power of the state and its freedom to do whatever it saw necessary to maintain order. Later, the balance shifted toward more restraint on the power of the state. It was implied that adherence to the strictures of the law required the state to curb its own abuses and those of its agents such as the army and the bureaucratic apparatus. The process of curbing army abuses could be seen from the seventeenth century. “Mercenaries had lived off the land since the 1560s, but beginning in the seventeenth century, the crown took measures to isolate soldiers from the civilian population. The regiments were supervised by the intendants, and the military commanders were made to answer personally for abuses committed by their troops.”82 Transfer of power over troops to civilian authorities was apparently crucial in making the soldiers’ presence less harmful to the civilian population. The intendants used their power in several ways in order to reduce this harm. First, the life of the troops among the civilian population was strictly regimented. “Soldiers were directed to inform civilian authorities of their movements, follow prescribed routes, and maintain discipline in transit, all in accordance with the intendant’s orders. The intendants received additional powers of supervision over activities that affected the military, such as furnishing of horses and supplies by inhabitants, the provisioning of barracks, the lodging of the troops, and the raising of village militia.”83 Second, civilian authorities took over criminal cases when soldiers were accused of impinging on life, honor, or property. The intendants “were authorized to bring suits against the delinquent soldiers and to see that the courts followed through, even if that required going to the highest level of jurisdiction.” The intendants were also to protect civilians against unintentional property damage. “The king authorized the intendant to verify that civilian proprietors near military encampments were reimbursed for property damage caused by the troop movements.” The intendant, as supreme embodiment of the state in the province, also protected people from arbitrary tax collectors, corrupt judges, and other misdeeds of the bureaucratic machinery.84 The increasing regulation and changes in the apparatus of the state did not immediately change the life of the French. Still, as time progressed, there were results. Personal security, broadly defined,

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slowly increased. And “although by twentieth-century standards we might think that the law and order were insufficiently established, by the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century standards they were respected to a remarkable extent through the French kingdom.” Security started to improve in some of the major cities, notably, Paris, where La Reynie “moved energetically to establish order.”85 With several hundred men at his disposal, regular police and auxiliary forces, “he cleared out many cours des miracles, personally directing a police bombardment of their wall.” There was also increasing security in provincial cities. Even skeptical historians such as Andrew Lossky acknowledge that “forces of order maintained by most towns did, however, provide a modicum of protection from the bands of highwaymen roving beyond the city gates that were closed every night.”86 Banditry declined markedly by the end of the eighteenth century. Some regions continued to be pestered by bandits, but for most of France armed banditry was no longer a pressing problem. This was testified to not only by the amount of trade but also by the existence of a rudimentary mail service,87 public transportation of a sort, and, above all, recreational travel. Such had been recorded long before, but people usually traveled for pragmatic reasons that justified the lack of comfort and security: trade, study, religious pilgrimage, or medical treatment.88 In the eighteenth century travel became safe enough for people of means to do so just for sightseeing. The fact that women without male companions started to engage in travel and tourism also testified that banditry was limited in most of the country. There was a decline in violent crime in general, and violence in solving problems became increasingly unfashionable, especially when Louis XIV increased the drive to eliminate dueling.89 There was also a substantial decline in sexual violence. It was true that prostitution had spread.90 Lecherous behavior was common, and France provided for world literature the classical professional libertine, the Marquis de Sade. In a way, sexual promiscuity and eroticism became a sort of French trademark. Nevertheless, there was a successful trend to limit the negative implications of promiscuity. Some more notorious forms of sexual violence, though not completely absent, were considerably marginalized, for example, the gang rapes so popular in earlier centuries. Dexterity, social prestige, and verbal persuasion replaced direct violence as a means to sexual conquest: one

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could see a clear transition in the libertines’ behavior, from rape to seduction. At the same time, seduction could be punished, even if the seducer was of the same high social position as the girl. This provided women and their families, who often suffered as a result of men’s lecherous behavior, additional protection. It would be wrong to assume that only men from the low classes were restrained and the upper classes could do as they pleased. Even the king was restrained, if not in his sexual appetites, then at least in his matrimonial plans, and his family was protected from the sexual whims of its august head. Louis XIV was infatuated with Madame de Montespan, but it was years before the “Parlament of Paris at least legally separated the Montespans.”91 The king could now enjoy the presence of his mistress with less inhibition, and he was clearly deeply in love with her, evidenced by the eight children he sired with her. But he could not legally marry her. Fear of punishment and legal hurdles were not the only reason for change in behavior. There was a slow internalization of the maxims of civilized behavior, as the term is usually understood. The virtuous and polished knight of the Middle Ages who valued the spiritual ties with his lady was mostly the reverse of reality.92 Only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did it become slowly integrated into real life, especially with regard to sexual mores. “Manners came to be taken more seriously and a stronger belief in the necessity of selfcontrol emerged.”93 General refinement, especially for the elite, was emphasized by Baldassare Castiglione’s popular book The Courtier.94 People tried to hide sexual indulgences not only because of fear of the law but also because of fear of public opinion.95 The importance of the family also increased, and pornographic pictures loaded with political content started to emerge not to only arouse viewers, but also to condemn the objects of the displays as immoral.96 Concubinage declined in the sixteenth century and practically disappeared in the seventeenth.97 Sexual probity and attachment to family values became essential even for the king, and the lecherous behavior of Louis XV contributed mightily to discrediting royalty as an institution. “As he himself explained in 1769, the year before his daughter Louise joined the Carmelite convent at SaintDenis in hopes of expating her father’s sins, ‘At my coronation I acquired the gift of being able to be the instrument of the grace of God for curing of scrofula, but for this I must be in a state of grace myself, and it has been some time since this has happened.’”98 It was

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expected that the queen, too, would live according to sexual probity. The culture of restrained etiquette moved from the court to the wider society.99 It would thus be oversimplistic to assume that state intervention in sexual and family life and the increased power of the husband and father over the rest of the family was simply a clear manifestation of patriarchy. The whole family benefited because power increased the responsibility of the heads of both family and state. Concern for children was manifested in increasing state support for institutions that cared for children. In 1670, the state created Enfants Trouvés à Paris for abandoned children.100 This broadening of personal security benefited the entire society, including the lower classes. Increasing respect for property meant that the scanty possessions of the poor became safer. That which could be called medical-social security increased by actions such as improving the supply of drinking water and trying to remove cemeteries from the center of the cities.101 Increased control over daily activities, including hygiene and the movement of people, played an important role in decreasing pandemic diseases. The plague continued to pester France until the beginning of the eighteenth century, but, “although there was an outbreak of plague at Marseilles in 1720, the disease had virtually disappeared from France in Louis XIV’s reign, as it had previously from England and Low Countries. Although the proportion of death due to plague occasionally reached twenty-five to fifty percent in the early seventeenth century, this probably added only an extra five to eight percent to the number which would have occurred anyway. Overall, in comparison to its depredations in earlier centuries, the effect of plague on the France of Louis XIV was minimal.”102 One could claim that the decline of the epidemic had nothing to do with government policy or even changes in behavior but followed the biological cycle of the plague. This explanation is usually proposed by scientists who in a quasi-Darwinian fashion regard process in human society as similar to that in the animal kingdom. This explanation has some merit, but it cannot provide a comprehensive explanation of the decline of the plague. Social process played an important role, and the restrictive and repressive actions of government were important in the decline of the spread of diseases. One of the most important aspects of biomedical security was regulation of defecation and urination. The state could not regulate

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these activities per se, but it could control where they took place. In the Middle Ages, they took place everywhere. “For centuries, in Paris as elsewhere, it had been the practice simply to throw all waste and rubbish into the streets, or into the Seine.”103 There were attempts to create a rudimentary system for waste disposal between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. “The chateaux of Coucy, Chauvigny, Marcoussis, and Pierrefonds had latrines connected to drains or towers used as lavatories. In Paris in the eleventh century cesspits were installed outside dwellings.”104 But human waste and garbage collection were major problems, and the Black Death pushed the French authorities to take a closer look. “As early as 1374, a royal ordinance had declared that all owners of buildings in the city of Paris and its faubourgs should have ‘sufficient latrines and privies in their houses.’”105 The first ordinance had little effect, and “this order was repeated several times over the course of the centuries that followed. A 1538 Parlement decision announced that ‘those who may have excused themselves from having cesspools dug for their houses’ would be punished ‘exemplarily.’”106 The number of people who did not install toilets in their houses declined markedly, for “the set of general regulations for the cleaning of the city of Paris, dating from 1663, devotes one article to denouncing the absence of privies in certain houses.” By the eighteenth century the problem of houses without toilets seems to have ceased to exist; at least it was not in the public records.107 Although the majority of the Frenchmen, including Parisians, relied on public toilets, some started to have private chamber pots. The emergence of these facilities implied that the idea of restraint in basic bodily functions was slowly being internalized by society. Privacy and restraint in elimination of body waste was espoused originally only by the elite, and only a very few people had a private chamber pot. One of the first chamber pots was provided for persons of royal blood. “In 1387, Queen Isabeau of Bavaria purchased a chamber pot virtually identical to those used by our grandparents. Her paymaster gave 32 sous minted in Paris for ‘a double case of cuir-bouili for disposing and transporting the Queen’s urine, stamped and emblazoned with the Queen’s coat of arms, and with a key for locking it up.’”108 As time proceeded, the number of people who had a chamber pot increased. The introduction of public toilets was part of creating a better sanitary environment, including regular garbage collection, street

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cleaning, and relocation of facilities that could be dangerous for health, such as slaughterhouses.109 It also led to more restriction on behavior that could spread disease and general discomfort.110 The authorities also worked hard to decrease fires. A law of 1667 prohibited keeping pigeons in the cities because the London fire convinced the authorities that pigeons could spread flame. The general betterment of the life of the French, involving both security and living conditions, was especially clear in the capital, where streets brimmed with life and whose appearance inspired the awe of travelers.111 The initiative came from above. In ways that would later be recorded in the annals of the totalitarian state, repression and control went along with beautification and amelioration of life. As would be with Stalinist Moscow, Paris occupied a special place. Parisians were to be watched, controlled, and punished, but live in a much better environment than other residents of the realm. Louis XIV did his best to make Paris the showcase of the country, much as Soviet leaders strove to make Moscow an “exemplary city” of the achievements of the regime. At the beginning of the seventeenth century Paris was still a dirty city with unpaved streets and was a dangerous place at night.112 The king decided to change it radically: “Beginning in 1662, a coherent plan of urban renewal and administration gradually took shape that lifted Paris out of its medieval past and into early modernity. The initiatives came not from the city government, but from the Crown.” At least a decrease in crime, especially violent crime, in the city was a major priority. In 1667 Louis XIV introduced the lieutenant-general of police to engage in an energetic anticrime drive. He focused especially on eradicating crime from sections of the city that were virtually run by the underworld. The eradication of outlaws was the new police’s important goal, but it was not the only one, and, with the blessing of the king, they engaged in general amelioration of living conditions: A “‘mud and lantern tax’ was applied to property owners to finance street cleaning and the placement of over 5,000 candle-lit lanterns that provided Paris with Europe’s first system of public street illumination.” Radical improvements in transportation helped Parisians without a horse to move around the city. In 1662 “appeared the ‘carrosse à cinq sous’ (five-penny coach)—the first omnibus, which continued in service until the end of the century. By 1700, it is estimated that

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there were about 20,000 coaches in Paris,”113 one of the first examples of public transportation. There were numerous regulations to improve general sanitary conditions, for example, “regulations controlling building height to admit more natural light into the streets (a maximum height of 15.6 meters was ordained for facades up to cornice level).” This policy of mixed control, punishment, and inducement went along with major state investments in the beautification of the city. The state invested in Paris resources sucked from the provinces as would be done in Soviet and, to some degree, postSoviet Russia. “In 1662, Louis XIV began an annual subsidy for new street pavement and road repairs. In 1666 and 1667, a council was convened to survey and make recommendations,” and results could be seen soon after: “Beginning in 1669, streets were widened and straightened, quais along the Seine (a major commercial artery) were enlarged or newly built, and the water-supply system was improved, with many new public fountains appearing from 1671 on.” There was also extensive building activity. “Improving living and housing conditions for Parisians by the seventeenth century, and above all during the eighteenth century in the newly developed neighborhoods to the west, were one of the factors behind this growth. It is true that in terms of material comfort, the small advances achieved in terms of heating, lighting, and hygiene beginning in 1750 seem slender indeed, if we compare them with the progress brought about by the industrial revolution a century later.”114 Still, progress was evident compared to life centuries before. All this improvement would have been impossible without the increasing sense of security. As time progressed, sanitation, comfort, and general aesthetics replaced security in architectural arrangements. The gloomy towers of the mansions of the grand seigneurs even in the cities were replaced by baroque facades with elaborate decoration. Mansions might still have impressive collections of weapons but as decorations rather than tools of survival. And major fights were hardly likely in rooms full of expensive and fragile pieces of art.115 This transformation of weapons into symbols in the palaces of the elite paralleled the transformation of personal weapons. The sword continued to be attached to the belt but not so much for fighting as to underscore the bearer’s noble origin. All this definitely improved the life of Parisians, both elite and masses. The development of civil society with its stress on selfrestraint and basic norms of social interaction slowly changed the

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state intrusions in the life of marginal people. The goal of the state became not only to isolate, repress, and use them as cheap labor but also to provide comfort and a security net. Discharged soldiers, especially if wounded, sick, or aged, had little place to go. Some could find refuge in convents, but most had no choice but to become criminals. The authorities slowly came to the decision that the state’s role was not repression but creation of a safety net for ex-soldiers with an honorable discharge. “Homes for them were proposed and sometimes founded beginning with the reign of Henry IV (1589–1610), but without real success.” The Sun King decided to tackle the problem in earnest and chose Paris for a new institution to provide a refuge for old and disabled soldiers. “In 1670, two years after the end of Louis XIV’s first foreign war—the war of Devolution (1667–68)—the King resolved to create an institution on a new scale that would flourish and act as an inducement to potential recruits.”116 And the grand Hôtel des Invalides was created. The entire construction and community was designed like a medieval cloister, which was often self-sufficient. “The Hôtel was intended to house a self-sufficient community of several thousand, and included living quarters, refrectories, a vegetable garden, brewery, cemetery and other features. . . . The Hôtel des Invalides received veterans and disabled soldiers who lived a semi-monastic life, doing handicrafts (including knitting and manuscript illumination).” State repressiveness increased protection of property, and contractual obligations under vigilant eyes made economic activity safer. Society became more “moral.” We must not forget that “in the new capitalist society morality rested on less on conviction or on a sense of social responsibility and more on the market, which attached cost to violations,”117 that is, punishment. But the basic norms of social interaction became more internalized and provided lubrication for the economic rise of the West. Economic regulation benefited economic security for a considerable part of the French population. “In the old regime it was widely believed that the king had a duty to safeguard the existence and therefore the sustenance of his subjects.”118 The king followed these popular expectations and pursued the policy of regulating the price of the major commodity—grain.119 Government price control and, in some cases, free distribution of bread considerably reduced starvation.120 “Hunger existed in early modern France, but the chances

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of dying from starvation decreased as the years passed, partially as a result of increased governmental intervention in the economy.”121 City dwellers benefited most from the government intervention in the economy. “One of the attractions of towns was that even poor inhabitants were less likely to starve than were their brethren outside the walls.” Paris was undoubtedly the authorities’ major concern, but smaller cities also benefited. “Even Lyons, a town with poor sources of food supplies, appears to have gotten through the crisis of 1709 with at least some food available for nearly everyone. The situation undoubtedly was better for most town dwellers during the eighteenth century.” This basic availability of food for most of the French population led to a steady population increase by the eighteenth century, which was not halted even by the catastrophic loss of life during the several major famines.122 It was clear that the strong state and increasing rigidity of society in general provided the security that was essential aspect of the economic growth. The authoritarian streak in the early modern state had other positive implications for economic development. The Hobbesian state as maintainer of order and war lord (not only expanding but also protecting the realm) provided the opportunity for expanding serfdom and slavery in various forms, from workhouses to black slaves taken from Africa. Slavery, child of the Hobbesian state, was seen not only in absolutist monarchies but also in republics like Holland. It was profitable not only because the trade in slaves was profitable but also because it was an efficient way to generate national wealth, even in the second half of the nineteenth century in advanced America. Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman in their classic work, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, “proved that slavery was a sound business proposition.”123 These statements about “positive” implications of the slavery and semislavery of many toilers in early modern Europe could be made only ironically, for they implied misery and death for millions of people. One could add that slavery did not contribute economically to the places from which the slaves were taken but was a serious economic blow for the continent of Africa. Thus the absolutist state had what seemed to be two separate trends. On one hand, it seemed to repress individuals and callously waste huge numbers of lives. On the other hand, it provided more individual security and in various ways promoted, at least in the long run, the well-being of the majority.

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As time progressed, there was an increase in safety in the more holistic sense, not only from crime but also from behavior that could cause disease and discomfort. This is what Elias called the “civilizational process.” In his view, this process was intrinsic and developed slowly as society evolved in the course of time. “The leading element in that transformation is a change in the balance between externally imposed constraints on the individual’s impulses and constraints that spring from a constant and rigorous self-control.”124 Freud also visualized increasing restrictiveness of human behavior as an essential aspect of the internal civilizational process. Similar views could be seen in Tocqueville.125 Our point is different. Self-restraint, actually self-policing, of civil society was not the leading force in this civilizational process. It was the state that enforced holistic order with brutality and vigor. Security was bought with the price of an increasingly repressive and controlling state, yet it was clear that for the majority the alternative would have been not modern democracy but criminalized chaos. The expansion of the security net was a slow process in which the state played a crucial role; only later did the civic society, the selfpolicing body of citizens, eventually take the lead. Slowly the notion of restraint was internalized, usually by the rulers, the first to internalize and understand the importance of following their own law, but also increasingly by groups of average people.126 At that point criminalized violence and disregard for hygiene were rejected not because of fear of repression but because of internal restraint. Certain rules of societal behavior were acknowledged even during extreme violence. It was assumed, for example, that even in violent social conflict, the parties should avoid wholesale looting and rape. Criminal activity became more and more set apart from social conflict. The birth of modern political behavior also coincided with changes in attitudes toward the monarchy and its despotic power. As self-restraint developed and expanded, absolutist power became useless and finally onerous. One might say, as Foucault and others rightly admitted, that the modern West reduced the controlling power of the state and dissolved it into the civic society only to make it more efficient, for the problem of security has never disappeared from society. Thus the despotic brutality of the early modern kings, the absolute power that enabled them to engage in social engineering

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and foreign conquests, was the price society paid for expanded security. Security was important in itself, but it was also an essential prerequisite for economic expansion. The “spirit of capitalism” could flourish only in the predictability of a legalistic culture that in itself was tied to security.127 All these aspects of early modern European states, with France as one example, help show the reasons for the rise of some types of totalitarian societies and despotic regimes in the past.128 One of the essential aspects of these societies was to lay the foundations for basic security. The former USSR could serve here as an example.

S TALINIST USSR

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The assumption that Stalinist USSR was in some way related to security could be seen as preposterous. Some “revisionist” Russian historians in the United States saw the life of Soviet citizens under Stalin as joyful and secure. They usually discarded the totalitarian and terroristic nature of the regime and took Soviet propaganda at its face value. They emphasized the interaction between the state and society in which differences between modern capitalistic democracies and totalitarian regimes were downplayed.129 These intellectuals declined in the post–cold war intellectual climate with the collapse of the USSR and the push to the Right. Popular historians of a different type took postmodernist assumptions about ideology and discourse as a guide in explaining Stalinist USSR. They combined the importance of ideology with the old doctrine that explains the Soviet regime in the context of the totalitarian model. In the view of these historians, Stalin’s USSR was a brutal, repressive society driven either by utopian dreams or by a utopian drive for global predominance. In the pursuit of this goal, the regime instilled in the society the grip of fear. These historians rightly pointed to the waves of terror and famine that washed away millions of lives and wrecked the lives of countless millions of survivors of the camps and exile. In their view the Stalinist regime had not brought about security or stability but, on the contrary, was the cause of great instability. Yet, taking all the horrors into account (and these horrors were a good match for those of early modern Europe), one could state that the very repressive nature of the regime laid the foundation for basic security in the future.

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The Stalinist regime, like the early modern European monarchies, emerged from a turbulent era. Most important here was the Revolution and Civil War, which led to mass proliferation of crime, disease, and similar events. The 1920s were also a period of persistent instability as well as the spread of corruption and general immorality among the elite, who often behaved as “practically autonomous satraps.”130 Stalin’s own actions, the so-called Revolution from Above, generated famine and social dislocation. It is clear that many actions of the Stalinist regime destabilized society and led to unimaginable suffering for millions of people. Still, one could argue paradoxically that Stalin’s policy laid the foundation for the future stability and security of society. Stalin’s wrath and the waves of terror based on the well-oiled machinery of the repression had eliminated or sent to the camps not only the political and social enemies of the regime, real or imaginary, but also common criminals.131 It is true that violent crime never disappeared in Stalinist USSR. But the most serious forms, especially banditry, including that enmeshed in quasi-political and nationalistic protest, were marginalized drastically by the end of Stalin’s rule, and by the last decade of the Soviet regime most citizenry traveled all over the country without much fear of banditry or other violent crime. From this perspective, the situation was pretty much the same as in the West. The controlling and repressive nature of the regime reinforced not only political conformity but also the holistic sense of order. Citizens were compelled to follow not only the political dicta of the leaders but also the basic rules of social interaction. They were taught through repression to respect the basic elements of “bourgeois” law—to respect the property of other citizens and that of the state. “At the largely ‘criminal’ Polyansky camp near Krasnoyarsk26, home of one of the Soviet Union’s nuclear reactors, S. P. Kuchin has identified one prisoner with a six-year sentence for stealing a single rubber boot in a bazaar, another with ten years for stealing ten loaves of bread, and another, a truck driver raising two children alone, with seven years for stealing three bottles of wine he was delivering.”132 These could definitely be seen as extremely brutal punishments by contemporary standards, yet they would hardly have surprised the authorities in early modern Europe when even harsher punishments were meted out against those who touched the property of citizens or even more so the property of the king or church.

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The dramatic increase in repression in the late 1930s also coincided with an increasing drive for conservative and civilized practices. Marriage once again became not only a formality but also a quasi-religious ritual with the exchange of rings and full responsibilities of the father for upbringing and financial support of the children. There was increasing emphasis on kulturnost, or civilized behavior.133 From this perspective, Stalin was similar to the French kings; there was emphasis on neatness of dress, hygiene, and avoidance of foul language. In relation to what could be called social and medical hygiene, the state started to eradicate prostitution and restrain the most outrageously promiscuous behavior, especially if it spread serious venereal diseases. According to Soviet law, those infected with such diseases were required to identify their partners and so on until the root of the disease was found. An infected person who would not provide this information was liable and punished. All these drives to “normalize” society were strikingly similar to what could be seen in the time of Foucault’s “great confinement.” And like the French king, Stalin enjoyed awe and support. He enjoyed this support not because he was seen as a democratic leader, as some historians of the Left contend, but because he was a charismatic leader—the symbol of the might and stability of the country. It was not accidental that he was often compared with the sun, like Louis XIV and other despotic leaders of the past.134 This capacity of the mighty warlord and keeper of order was quite important for maintaining Stalin’s power in the same way as for the French king and the native Russian rulers with whom Stalin was anxious to compare himself.135 Stalin employed this power not only to make it absolutely unchallenged, wasting millions of lives of imaginary and real enemies, but also for social engineering, to enrich and modernize the Soviet state. French monarchs launched “the great confinement” and placed thousands of their subjects in workhouses. They and other European rulers populated the colonies with exiles and transported millions of slaves from Africa. Europeans wasted millions of lives and made the lives of other millions miserable, not because of the abstract “spirit of capitalism” or the even more abstract “episteme” of capitalistic discourse (though the role of ideology should not be discarded) but because slave and semislave labor was quite profitable. This sort of labor was efficient, and the European states made a great leap in economic progress. This progress transformed Western Europe, a small

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part of Eurasia, into an economic and, therefore, military and geopolitical global center by the nineteenth century. Stalin took a similar road, following the pattern of not only early modern Europe but, even more so, Oriental despotism. Millions were transformed into slaves to toil in all branches of the Soviet economy. “There were plenty of them—millions, as the figures for the camps of Kolyma and Vorkuta make clear—but there were also, we now know, camps in central Moscow, where prisoners built apartment blocks or designed airplanes; camps in Krasnoyarsk where prisoners ran nuclear power plants; collective farm camps in southern Uzbekistan. The Gulag photo albums in the Russian state archive are full of the pictures of prisoners with their camels. From Aktybinsk to Yakutsk, there was not a single major population center that did not have its own local camp or camps.”136 Anne Applebaum stated that there was no economic rationale in the arrangements. Gulag inmates were not efficient producers and died and suffered en masse to satisfy the artificial ideological paradigms of the regime. This assumption could hardly hold water. True, gulag slaves were not exemplary workers, and one could also question whether Soviet workers, subject to rigid discipline and severe punishment for the slightest infraction, were enthusiastic and saw increasing output as their life goal.137 Yet the same could be said of the slaves in the New World plantations and workhouses, as well as those legally free workers who toiled, often in abysmal conditions, for twelve to fourteen hours a day. All this went on not because of the capitalist “episteme” or because the new emerging “discourse” commanded authorities and elite to put these people in various types of “grand confinement,” but because this exploitation was profitable. The same could be said about Stalin’s social and economic arrangements. In the Soviet regime before World War II, repression was extremely brutal, and it can be claimed that political and social repression was as important as repression against common criminals. The emphasis changed in the postwar era, especially after Stalin’s death. The regime continued to harass political dissidents until the very beginning of Gorbachev’s reform. Their cases got a great deal of publicity in the West, mostly due to the cold war, and created the impression that persecution was a central preoccupation of the regime. This was not the case; most late Soviet repressive machinery was dedicated to fighting crime and maintaining a modicum of the

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stability achieved after long years of “normalization” through repression. The repression and residual fear it instilled in the citizenry was not so much a liability of Soviet society but, paradoxically, its great legacy. The anarchy and criminalization that followed the regime collapse made many Russians nostalgic about a regime that maintained a modicum of order. One might say that Putin’s popularity is in many ways due to the fact that he appeals to the legacy of the Soviet state.

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The importance of the repressive and controlling policies of the state for maintaining order and ensuring basic stability was not understood until recently by most social scientists and intellectuals in general. Those on the Left continued to lambast the “hegemonic discourse” that prevented the people of Western societies from enjoying harmonious and spontaneous relations. Western societies were seen as totalitarian and the residents as cowed into submission and uniformity for the pleasure of the elite. The elite through discourse “creates a space in which inmates, through the strategies of carceral dispositifs and through actual practices, discipline themselves. . . . The passage to the society of control does not in any way mean the end of discipline. In fact, the immanent exercise of discipline—that is, the self-disciplining of subjects, the incessant whispering of disciplinary logic within subjectivities themselves—is extended even more generally in the society of control.”138 Criminals and other asocial groups were victims of this “hegemonic discourse.”139 The notion of objective reality continues to be discarded.140 Revolutionary ideology is seen as the important prerequisite for the avant-garde—the revolutionary leaders—in changing society.141 There was even less understanding of the role of repression in fifteenth- through seventeenth-century Europe. Brutality and drive for control was seen as exclusively the result of ideological trends and shifts in discourse. Empire building was often interpreted not so much as real politics but as the conversational play of the ideological paradigms.142 Even scientists who tried to look beyond the discursive model usually marginalized the role of the state as a force of order essential for the existence of society. There was more attention to the strong state as needed for foreign conquest.

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Conservative social scientists actually followed their Leftist counterparts in stressing ideology and discourse to explain historical events. Emboldened by the collapse of the Communist regime and the cold war, one of the longest wars in human history, they came to a conclusion about the “end of history.”143 This theory was elaborated by Francis Fukuyama. In his vision of political reality, the rise of Communist regimes was related to erroneous ideologies that cost millions of lives,144 and the Western democracies were to dominate the globe. Fukuyama was apparently not alone, and quite a few scholars considered that Western capitalist democracy, a “government by the people and for the people,” had proved its viability and should be spread globally. It was assumed that the same principle should govern international relationships. Like the internal life of Western states, relations among all states should be based on the “rule of law,” and everything should be done in the context of legalistic discourse, with the United Nations as the embodiment of the global community. This order should be maintained through “softAmerican hegemony,” as Zbigniew Brzezinski asserted. Some observers, comparing the United States with the Roman Empire, maintained that stopping imperial expansion would be detrimental to the American future. It was asserted that the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire started when Rome ended its expansion.145 There was a troubling spot. There were signs that the global community was not to be as orderly as planned and that there was a serious push for anarchical process. This was the case with postcolonial Africa, which seemed to be constantly in genocidal wars, famines, diseases, and banditry, and it was acknowledged that there were no institutions, for example, UN peacekeepers, that could solve the problem.146 There was also the continuous threat of the uncontrolled chaotic process in post-Soviet Russia. “Chaos theory” had been popular for some time to explain a variety of events in history.147 Still, all these problems were manageable, at least from the American point of view. Many Russians before the collapse of the USSR shared the majority Western view of the state as the major source of insecurity and took the comparative stability and security of Soviet society for granted. Gorbachev’s reform and the proliferation of crime led to a reevaluation of the Soviet experience or at least of the use of harsh measures to stop crime. The case of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the seminal Russian writer and political activist, could be instructive.

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Solzhenitsyn had lambasted the Soviet regime for its cruelty and liberal use of the death sentence. But watching the spread of crime in Russia, he came to the conclusion that the death sentence could the only way to solve the problems.148 These ideas of Russian intellectuals were also ignored as having no valid relationship to Western realities. The fact that most of those who proposed strong authority and wide imposition of brutal punishment to control the asocial process had belonged to Nationalist and Communist parties (“red-to-brown”) provided additional ammunition for those who discarded these views. The Chinese experience, where the authorities emphasized brutal punishment and harsh rule as the only alternative to chaos, was usually also short shifted, and observers of the Chinese response to public executions seemed genuinely perplexed that “popular will has been expressed in the reverse fashion, and has led to demands for harsher, not lighter, forms of penalty.”149 September 11 changed the picture completely.150 It was not only a signal that the peaceful “end of history” was wishful thinking, but it also had much broader implications. The events and sense of a persistent terrorist threat challenged the very nature of people’s security. It was not the first time that the nation has had a sense of insecurity. It is true that the phenomenon on crime in various degrees is taken into account by the majority and, to various degrees, influences their behavior.151 It was also not the first time that the country had experienced the fear of internal threat. There was the threat of the Japanese “fifth column” in World War II and the “red” scare after the Bolshevik Revolution and during the first years of the cold war. But these fears had a certain abstract character. It was fear of taking the country by external force, not so much fear for individuals and daily activities. There were fears that Communist agents could sell military secrets to the enemy and help it to take over the country. But there was no fear that the Communist threat would lead to danger for individual citizens, and the threat of Communist infiltration did not change the lifestyle. The situation is altogether different in the present. “Osama bin Ladin had already made women in New York and Washington rethink wearing high heels and skirts to the office, in case they have to clamber through wreckage. Now anthrax terrorism is forcing us to wear rubber gloves and surgical masks if we want to open our mail.” And there was a real fear of the catastrophic type of epidemic that “would create chaos.”152

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The terrorists were not common criminals (with no principles) but people inspired by ideas. But structurally, the implications of the terrorist attack were similar to those of the rapid spread of crime. This new threat implied that there were no “safe” or “unsafe” neighborhoods or “safe” or “unsafe” times to be outside. Other types of security usually taken for granted, for example, travel, started to be questioned. There were even questions about basic biosocial security. Contracting a deadly disease became not also a consequence of certain types of behavior or poor health but also could happen to an absolutely healthy person anywhere. This erosion of security, which most of American society took for granted, did not make society dysfunctional, at least not so far. And life still flows as before. But the unmistakable anxiety and change in attitude resemble that at the beginning of the modern era in Europe and in other parts of the world more recently. In all these cases there was fear for basic personal security. The attack led to trends that contrast sharply with the paradigms of both liberals and conservatives. The Left suffered the most visible setback. For almost two generations postmodernists regarded criminals and terrorists as just victims of “hegemonic discourse,” but after September 11 they emerged in the public eye as evil for the society in general.153 Here the masses and the elite were united like peasants and merchants terrified by bandits, who needed royal power for order and implicitly gave it license to engage in the most drastic measures. The broad desire to maintain basic security was one reason early modern kings acquired dictatorial power they could use for other projects, including foreign adventures. The same could be for the U.S. government, which uses September 11 not only to increase control over the life of the citizens but also to engage in foreign-policy actions previously seen as characteristic of totalitarian regimes. The major thrust of criticism of the Left was that they justified the socialist state, which brutally discarded the will of the people and created a leviathan. The totalitarian state stifled freedom, enslaved the citizens, engaged in unbridled repression, and was the source of the insecurity. This state was the product of the ideology the elite imposed on the helpless masses, and the disappearance of the totalitarian colossus should, according to this interpretation, lead to fundamental changes in foreign policy and the role of states in internal development.154 This vision provided the explanatory model for the totalitarian state’s foreign policy. The goal of this

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policy was to enslave the globe. Totalitarian practices and drive for imperial aggrandizement were deeply connected with disregard for the rule of law. All these accusations were thrown at the USSR. Not only the totalitarian state but also the state in general, even in its Western liberal interpretation, would wither away almost as described in Lenin’s celebrated The State and Revolution. In this work, written just before the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin proclaimed that the state, the weapon of suppression of the masses by the elite, would wither away because the majority of the people would not need the powerful machine of repression to control the minority—the vanquished excapitalists and ex-landlords. In the same way it was assumed that globalization, the trend toward global government, would reduce the importance of the state.155 After September 11, the situation changed here in the most drastic fashion. International law was openly null and void, and the relativistic disregard for the objectivity of the law and a Nietzschean streak incorporated into Western intellectual life by the postmodernistic Left received new meaning and life in the Rightist reading. Bill Keller made this clear enough in his article on George Bush: “In the world, America rampant—unfettered by international law, unflinching when challenged, unmatchable in its might, more interested in being respected than in being loved.”156 This pronouncement could well be made by Louis XIV and other French kings, who placed on gun barrels the Latin inscription, “The last arguments of the king.” It could also be placed on the pages of Volkischer Beobachter, the official Nazi vehicle. These sorts of ideas were undoubtedly entertained by Stalin, yet as a good student of Machiavelli and Orwell he never would have made the statement publicly. Keller assumed that the United States should exercise imperial power to stop uncontrolled global anarchy, which constituted the major danger for the country. Keller was certainly not alone in this justification of the American empire. John Lewis Gaddis, prominent historian at Yale University, stated that the terrorists underestimated the resolve of the Americans, who would impose global predominance as the only way to save themselves and the global community from terroristic chaos. There is actually no alternative, and “what’s emerging is the prospect, once again, of ‘something worse’ than an American-dominated world—perhaps something much worse.”157

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Both authors, while discussing the immensity of the American imperial presence, are still ambivalent in regard to the form of the domination. Robert Kagan removed the fig leaves, evoking both totalitarianism and the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century prototypes. Kagan appealed to Hobbes. The author of Leviathan was not just the intellectual forefather of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century; he also was a spokesman for the political and social arrangements of power in early modern Europe. The arrangement was simple enough—total control and brutishness in imposing this control as the only way to “normalize” society in order to prevent its sliding into chaos. Kagan, in his influential article, “Power and Weakness,” stated that while European powers maintained the illusion of the rule of law as the guiding force of foreign policy, the United States understood that reality was the “anarchical Hobbesian world.”158 Realityminded Americans should forsake international law and implicitly the will of the majority and impose domination all over the globe. And because most of the globe would resist, the only way to provide leadership should be the Hobbesian—harsh, and if need be, brutal— way to impose American predominance. Only this global U.S. domination could save the globe from criminalized anarchy. The implication is that the “Hobbesian world” requires a “Hobbesian state,” a global empire not restrained by law or even the will of the majority. Kagan was reluctant to follow directly the geopolitical paradigms of people like Carl Schmidt. One of the founders of modern geopolitics and a major ideological architect of the Third Reich, Schmidt was more consistent. He understood that the “Hobbesian” state in foreign policy, the state whose foreign policy is based on sheer force, should be totalitarian in domestic policy as well. Kagan, still reluctant to be completely “Hobbesian,” saw the American state as preserving government of, by, and for Americans. But trends indicate that the global empire leads to “Hobbesianization” of the internal life of the country as well. It would be preposterous to see the United States as in the process of transforming into a totalitarian state. But present trends lead unmistakably not to expanding “government by the people,” the liberal capitalistic democracy, but in the opposite direction. In the wake of September 11, a military tribunal was established that actually nullified most constitutional guarantees not just to foreigners but to American citizens. There was also a dramatic increase in

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surveillance, which continues to expand.159 This dramatic increase in state power was duly compared with the practice of totalitarian regimes, especially Soviet, which led to ironic comments in the Russian press, where the United States was seen as following the Soviet footsteps.160 The tribunal and general trend to stronger control also reminded observers of early modern institutions such as the “Star Chamber.”161 Some observers stated that this aggressive foreign policy, which discarded the very notion of international law and, implicitly, democratic principles in general, would be rejected by Americans. They would simply need to see the ugly implications of “Darwinian political philosophy” to reject an affront to the sacred principles of the Founding Fathers.162 Surprisingly, at least from the point of view of some liberals, the public did not protest but readily accepted this trend toward the “Big Brother” society. William Safire, one of the leading columnists of the New York Times, wrote with a mixture of surprise and anger that “polls show terrorized Americans willing to subvert our Constitution and hold Soviet-style secret military trials. No presumption of innocence; no independent juries; no right to choice of counsel; no appeal to civilian judges for aliens suspected of being in touch with terrorists.”163 Public willingness to accept the dramatic increase in the state power was noted even by the local press: “Terrorism encourages anxiety and uncertainty. In times of war, the public is much more likely to give up a variety of personal freedoms in exchange for security.”164 The American public would apparently not even mind public executions of the terrorists, as with Timothy McVeigh.165 “Quiet Americans” would be no different from the people of early modern Europe, who watched executions of dangerous criminals both with the feeling that justice was done and with sadistic curiosity.166 This sense of the importance of basic security is something new for the contemporary American; it would hardly be a revelation for residents of early modern Europe or for a large part of the world, past and present. The majority of the American public appreciated the control and toughness of the state in the same way as these people, who saw not only the negative but also the positive implications of the expanding apparatus of the state that guaranteed them higher security.167

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T HE B RAVE N EW W ORLD : A G LANCE AT THE P OSSIBLE F UTURE The present conditions and the new threshold of the historical process tempt historians to look to the future. The present trend in American society may well continue. The reason would most likely stem from increasing global instability, qualitatively different from that during the cold war, when it hardly influenced the life of the average citizens. The war with Iraq might be just the beginning of the attempt to impose at least regional prominence: control over the strategically important and resource-rich Middle East and possibly the Eurasian heartland. In this case, “the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom could well mark the beginning of Operation Eternal War.”168 The attempt at global predominance may well not be successful, and there is no reason to believe the American empire would be different from the previous one.169 The possibility of a grand debacle is not excluded even by those who glorify Bush’s imperial design in the most exalting way. Bill Keller ended his article on a sobering note: “If he [Bush] fails, my guess is that it will be a failure not of caution but of overreaching, which means it will be failure on a grand scale.”170 And one could assume this scenario is slowly in the making. The war led to a “breakdown in the system of collective security that was fashioned in the waning days of World War II.”171 It went against international law and increased alienation between the United States and Europe. In fact, European U.S. allies could be transformed into major enemies172 regardless of recent improvement in the United States’ relationship with France and Germany. The possible proliferation of nuclear weapons would create additional problems. This in itself would accelerate the process started long ago, when the spread of knowledge and technology through globalization made it easy for even third-world countries to produce weapons of mass destruction.173 It would lead to deep resentment, reinforce the desperation of poverty, increase terrorism and anarchical behavior, and lead the world, as one observer stated, to “another Hundred Years’ War.”174 One should not equate it with the Hundred Years War that afflicted France with bands of predatory mercenaries. But there are structural similarities between terrorists and late medieval/ early modern criminals in Europe, and terrorism can create major

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problems for the United States and lead to structurally similar outcomes. On one hand, the United States seems to be extremely powerful. On the other hand, the same United States can be extremely vulnerable. One attack with nuclear or biological weapons would wreck the stock market. Nuclear war, even in other countries, could trigger major economic breakdown. Moreover, breakdown of international law could have implications for investment from abroad and aggravate the economic situation considerably.175 All this would lead to mass state intervention in the economic fabric of society, which would acquire more and more of the characteristics of the totalitarian state. It would be ahistorical to assume a complete duplication. Both the societal and global context will be different, and, above all, history has never duplicated itself word for word, at least in the long run. And the phraseology will be different. In Orwellian fashion, tightening the state control might be called defense of freedom, or similar labels might be invented to make the actions “politically correct,” whatever the notion will mean. Still, with all the specificity and idiosyncratic features unique to a certain era and culture, these political and economic innovations could be familiar both to Eurasian rulers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and to totalitarian rulers of the last century. No one can predict the exact configuration of events, but there are indications that a trend toward an increasing role of the state as guarantor of the order and stability is in the air. Characterizing the chaos and looting in various parts of Iraq, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times remarked, “It would be idiotic to even ask Iraqis here how they felt about politics. They are in a pre-political, primordial state of nature. For the moment, Saddam has been replaced by Hobbes, not Bush.”176 Friedman was certainly not alone in recent evocations of Hobbes while describing the situation in Iraq and the global problems stemming from instability in general. Still all the pundits who invoke Hobbes are certainly aware, without maybe fully conceptualizing it, that Hobbes was important in Western thought not just as a thinker who introduced the idea of “natural” man as a predatory beast very different from the image of the self-controlled virtuous citizen so dear in American political culture since the Enlightenment. He was well-known for another reason—it was he who introduced the idea of Leviathan, the all-embracing and controlling state that could be the operational model for understanding

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both European states in the seventeenth century (when Hobbes actually lived and worked) and modern totalitarian states. And evocation of him here is indicative of the possible trend. The increasing instability could also lead to increasing repression, including institutionalizing torture for obtaining crucial information to track terrorists and prevent future attacks.177 Torture to obtain information would surprise neither Stalin or other totalitarian rulers of the twentieth century, nor French kings of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries. It is hardly imaginable how Jeffersonian liberties could survive in such circumstances, especially if there are moods on Capitol Hill, at least among some Republicans, “to sacrifice civil liberties in the name of fighting terrorism.”178 Not only political or social life but also the economy could be subjected to state intervention as a result of crises, which in the long run could produce results hardly anticipated by those who set the ideas in motion. Massive state intervention in the economy and the social-economic fabric of society could well break the global economy into the fragmented enclaves and reverse the pattern of globalization.179 If this were happen, it might be seen as a good prank of the Zeitgeist. The beginning of the century and millennium was seen by the famous Fukuyama in statements about the “end of history,” the global triumph of liberal capitalism. And it was thought that the United States must provide the alternative to defunct totalitarian regimes with Leviathan-type Hobbesian governments. The trick of the Zeitgeist could be that the United States will provide the new Hobbesian state. And if this happened, there is no doubt that future historians will evoke Tocqueville, the Frenchman; Alexander Herzen, the Russian; and Foucault, the other Frenchman, all of whom dubbed the United States a society that had nothing to do with individual liberties. For Foucault, the United States, the embodiment of capitalism, was nothing but a “circular prison.” History has been always intimately connected with the present, and there is no reason to believe this will change in the near future. Thus the coming instability and possible anarchy not only will provide Americans and possibly Europeans with an understanding of what was experienced in the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries, but also provide insight as to why a strong government with characteristics like a totalitarian regime was so popular and why the monarchy was not challenged. It would be understood that the “great confinement,” the watchful eyes of the state, could not be reduced

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to “episteme” or “hegemonic discourse” or even the desire to marshal resources for imperial aggrandizement but involved the fear of anarchy in all its forms and modifications. This appreciation of the strong state in early modern Europe also provides a new view on some of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, such as Stalin’s USSR. The vindication of these regimes would come not from the fact that they spurred economic development in an idiosyncratic way or that they expanded the empire. The historical legitimacy of these regimes was in what was thought to be their condemnation—the ability to place themselves above society and save it from itself. These vindications explain why those who preserve this legacy of obedience and discipline in the West or East (China) prosper, and those who squander this heritage decline like post-Soviet Russia.

C ONCLUSION Many aspects of the historical process cannot be explained by social conflicts, conflicts between state and society, influence of ideological paradigms, and so forth. Asocial phenomena have played a major role in in many important events. These forces do not act to destroy one order and affirm another but rather confront order. Authorities are then faced with restoring order as their most important task. When society was not able to engage in self-policing, the absolute power of the state took over, that is, if a charismatic leader emerged. This violent backlash to meltdown can be seen as an essential aspect of most premodern and non-Western revolutions that were marked by societal breakdown and restoration of order by a strong power. Persistent application of violence and control on a large scale created states with characteristics similar to totalitarian regimes. The fear of disorder can be found in any society that experiences crises. It becomes especially serious when the entire paradigmatic matrix of the society is in the process of transformation, for example, from the gemeinschaft society of the Middle Ages to the gesellschaft of modernity. In fourteenth- through sixteenth-century Europe, the disintegration of the feudal order led to revolution as general disintegration, which led to asocial process on a grand scale. Although society experienced disintegration, the state was in the process of consolidating its power, and in the process of “normalization” of

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society it acquired some characteristics of totalitarian societies. The rise of absolutist states in early modern Europe was not only the product of the social conflicts or the military adventures but also was due to the fact that only the strong state could establish basic order. And this role of the state was not marginal but was extremely important. Fear of meltdown could also shed light on the rise of totalitarian regimes in the modern era. The role of despotic governments was not understood by most Western scientists, particularly of the Anglo-American tradition, because of the historical context in which these scientists work, especially in the United States. Since the beginning of its history, Americans have enjoyed a strong self-policing society. It is true that crime has been a serious problem and some sections of big American cities are very dangerous, especially at night. Americans also shared with the rest of the globe the problems caused by contagious and sometimes pandemic, diseases, such as AIDS and syphilis. But most Americans, especially the middle class, do not regard the danger of asocial or marginal behavior as of paramount concern in their lives, at least compared with economic problems, social and racial conflicts, and major wars. It is assumed that if one does not live in a “bad neighborhood” and does not engage in drug use or sexual promiscuity, for example, then one does not have to be very concerned with personal safety. These conditions of the modern West led to the marginalization of crime and other forms of asocial behavior. They are studied extensively but are rarely if ever seen as forces equal to social conflict, war, or ideological trends. The rise of the strong despotic regime and its repressive machinery was rarely attributed to the paramount goal to establish order. Although social conditions are the major reason why there is so little understanding of the role of the asocial process in making history, there have been other reasons as well, rooted in the strong intellectual trend of the post–World War II West, a trend related to but independent of social realities. The foundation was laid by French postmodernism in its Leftist interpretations, with Foucault as one of the chief representatives. In this view, social reality does not exist as an independent category but is nothing but “discourse,” a cultural linguistic construction. It was created implicitly by the ruling elite to subjugate and manipulate society and transform heroic fighters for liberation into outcasts and enemies of the population. This intellectual trend obscured the role and danger of the asocial

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process and the role of the repressive and controlling state in curbing it. And it was not accidental that the proponents of this view attacked the “circular prison” of the modern West, which unjustifiably controls citizens’ behavior. The conservative intellectuals who began to dominate the intellectual milieu after the collapse of the USSR have also lost understanding of the importance of the controlling and repressive role of the totalitarian regimes in the culture of the USSR and China. Although sharply at odds with their Leftist counterparts, they nevertheless share the assumption that it was the “wrong” ideology that was responsible for the rise of the brutal regime. They failed or did not want to understand for reasons of ideological partisanship that, without a self-policing civil society the cohesiveness of all these societies can be maintained only by strict and repressive machinery that was in many ways similar to the Hobbesian states of the European monarchy. Although most Western scholars, especially Anglo-Americans, cannot understand why a brutal controlling system was needed to maintain basic social obligations, there were problems even for non-Western scholars who understood the danger of social meltdown and the importance of a strong, and if needed, brutal, regime to maintain societal normality. This was the case with Russian intellectuals. Some of them, such as Sorokin, Iurii Got’e, and others, experienced the Russian revolutions and civil war that revealed the horrors of anarchy. They also understood that the Bolshevik repression was essential for normalization of Russian society. But this normalization, especially under Stalin, cost the country countless millions of innocent victims. They and their dear ones suffered from the terror, and they were unable and unwilling to accept the brutality of the state as the pathway to the end of the anarchy. There were other problems for Soviet intellectuals in the last decades of the Soviet regime. They already enjoyed a comparatively stable society with a tolerable level of asocial behavior. From this perspective, they were similar to Western intellectuals. In addition the collective memory of Russian intellectuals has been dominated by the memory of state atrocities, and they instinctively see the state not as a protector but as a predator from which they were utterly alienated.

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With the collapse of the USSR, and with the rising crime and asocial behavior of all sorts that followed, some of these intellectuals began to appreciate the control aspect of the Soviet state. But their ideas have had little impact on social science, Western thought in particular; they were in sharp contrast with the intellectual mainstream in the West. These ideas were elaborated in Russian by Russians who were marginalized politically, intellectually, and linguistically, and, furthermore, were primarily rabid Communists, Nationalists, or unsavory (from most of the Westerners’ point of view) hybrids of both. This provided additional reason to marginalize their views as those of reactionary pranksters who were utterly lost in “the end of history,” unable to accept their political and intellectual defeat. September 11 led to a sharp change in the political climate. It was the first time in American history that a large segment of the population experienced fear for personal safety. The basic safety of travel, food, and water supply was questioned. The problem with safety was felt not only by people who lived in “bad neighborhoods” or in a way different from the majority but also by mainstream middle-class Americans. It is true that one should not overestimate the sense of insecurity, and the life of the majority of Americans has remained the same. The terrorists, the major threat, are also qualitatively different from criminals: criminals are asocial; terrorists are people who sacrifice their lives for a cause. Still, the effect on society is similar to the effect of criminal bands and disease-ridden people in early modern Europe. There was a general sense of insecurity, a feeling that no one could be safe regardless of lifestyle. This new feeling led to a shift in the intellectual climate. Postmodernism in its Leftist reading suffered first. Criminals and terrorists ceased to be a product of “hegemonic discourse,” a danger only for the elite, and became seen as a serious problem for the entire society. The fact that postmodernism emerged in France provided an additional reason for criticism, and France almost became part of the “axis of evil.” Traditional conservative neoliberalism also suffered a blow. Its preaching of unobtrusive government and respect for the rights and civil liberties of individuals does not match the increasingly controlling and repressive policies of the government. Both the traditional Left and traditional conservatives were out of tune with reality in another important area as well. They both assumed that people cherished liberty more than anything else and

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lived according to the dictum, “give me liberty or give me death.” They assumed that people would sacrifice their liberties only under pressure of a despotic state and would look for any opportunity to be free again. Many American intellectuals were surprised that most American people were less upset by the dramatic increase in FBI and other state power than by a sense of insecurity (personal and economic), and they willingly accepted limitations on civil liberties in exchange for security. In this way, they are quite similar to the people of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, who often gladly accepted brutal state power as the price for security. And similar to these Europeans, the American public in general is ready to provide the executive with great power for imperial aggrandizement if this American empire somehow relates to security, personal or economic. It is hard to make predictions about the future. But if the present trend continues, one might expect another prank of the Zeitgeist. The United States, the major destroyer of the totalitarian “evil empire,” could create a society with elements and policies that the leaders of those “evil empires” could recognize as their own. And here they would not be unique. One could hardly be unique. Not many people in the early days of Marxism believed that the great leap to the kingdom of freedom would resurrect a system that Hobbes, a seemingly outdated political thinker of the seventeenth century, would accept as his own.

NOTES C HAPTER 1 1. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1965), 20. 2. On the introduction of the term revolution in intellectual history, see Ilan Rachum, “Revolution”: The Entrance of a New World into Western Political Discourse (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1999). 3. This assumption was shared even by those who argued that “there is no agreed definition of revolution”; see Mattei Dogan and John Higley, “Elites, Crises, and Regimes in Comparative Analysis,” in Elites, Crises, and the Origins of Regimes, eds. Mattei Dogan and John Higley (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 9. They stated that revolutions “constituted political crises of the highest order,” leading to a situation where “political power is up for grabs.” It was implied here that the new order, although resting on the foundation of the old political and social system, would nevertheless be different. 4. Arendt, On Revolution, 112; Fred Halliday, Revolution and World Politics: The Rise and Fall of the Sixth Great Power (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1999); Charles Tilly, “History and Sociological Imagining,” Tocqueville Review 15 (1994): 65. Tilly, though skeptical about patterns of revolution development, still believes one can see some general features. For him, revolution consisted of rapid and visible depreciation of state power, divisions in control over the major means of coercion, formation of antiregime coalitions, and other political shifts that neither guaranteed revolution nor constituted parts of the definition. Political scientists even tried to deuniversalize the Marxist theory of revolution that provided, at least in general outline, a universal pattern for revolutionary upheavals, claiming that “Marx did not try to create a general theory of the revolution relevant to all kinds of societies at all times.” See Theda Skocpol, Social

186

NOTES

5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

Revolutions in the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 121. Skocpol, Social Revolutions, 105. Quoted in ibid. Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1978). Quoted in Skocpol, Social Revolutions, 133. This was the case with political scientist Samuel Huntington. In his view, a revolution was a rapid, fundamental, violent change in the dominant values and myths of a society in its political institutions, social structure, leadership, government policies, and activities. The collapse of the old order led to the rise of a new one. A “complete revolution” implied “the creation and institutionalization of new political order into which an explosion of popular participation in national affairs is channeled.” Quoted in Skocpol, Social Revolutions, 129, 133. Jack A. Goldstone, “The Soviet Union: Revolution and Transformation,” in Elites, Crises, and the Origins of Regimes, eds. Dogan and Higley, 99. Skocpol, Social Revolutions, 279. Karl Griewank, “Emergence of the Concept of Revolution,” in Revolutions in Modern European History, ed. Heinz Lubasz (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 55. Ibid. Ibid., 57. Arendt, On Revolution, 13. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 36. William Sewell, “Ideologies and Social Revolutions: Reflections on the French Case,” Journal of Modern History 57 (March, 1985): 57–85, quoted in Skocpol, Social Revolutions, 192. David Bayley, Patterns of Policing: A Comparative International Analysis (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1985), 132. Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (1893; repr., New York: Free Press, 1984). Pitirim A. Sorokin, The Sociology of Revolution (1925; repr., New York: Howard Fertig, 1967). Ibid., 3. Sorokin’s analysis isolated three major types of culture. See Joseph B. Ford, Michel P. Richard, and Palmer C. Talbutt, eds., Sorokin and Civilization: A Centennial Assessment (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1996), 6. Sorokin, Sociology of Revolution, 3.

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25. Ibid., 12. 26. Jack Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 27. Sorokin, Sociology of Revolution, 12. 28. Pitirim Sorokin, Man and Society in Calamity: The Effect of War, Revolution, Famine, Pestilence upon Human Mind, Behavior, Social Organization, and Cultural Life (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1963). 29. Skocpol, Social Revolutions, 125. 30. Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (New York: Scribner, 1974). 31. Roger Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language, and Practice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 19. See also Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 32. Sorokin, Man and Society in Calamity, 124.

C HAPTER 2 1. David Bayley, Patterns of Policing: A Comparative International Analysis (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1985), 34. 2. Pitirim A. Sorokin, Man and Society in Calamity: The Effect of War, Revolution, Famine, Pestilence upon Human Mind, Behavior, Social Organization, and Cultural Life (1942; repr., New York: E. P. Dutton, 1963), 131. This was the first and last attempt to ration sex and provide it along with other commodities. However, something similar introduced much later by some Bolshevik groups included rationing women. 3. Bayley, Patterns of Policing, 35. 4. Ibid., 3. 5. Ibid., 28. 6. Ibid., 80. 7. James Shapiro, “Who Is Buried in Virgil’s Tomb?” New York Times Book Review, March 21, 1999, 11. 8. Bayley, Patterns of Policing, 32. 9. A recent example would be the collapse of the Taliban in Afghanistan, which led to violent crime (Peter Baker, “Disorder Replaces Taliban in Southern No Man’s Land,” Washington Post Online, December 11, 2001). A similar process can be seen in revolutions in premodern and non-Western societies, where collapse of strong state power led to proliferation of violent crime.

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10. George Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 63. For many premodern people, especially nomads, the job of bandits (raids in search of booty) became so inseparable from their identity that their self-definition would be freebooter; see George Vernadsky, Mongoly i Rus’ (Tver: Lean/Agraf, 1997), trans. as The Mongols and Russia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953), 298. Their often sedentary adversaries called them “simply ‘enemies’ or ‘robbers.’” Andrew Robert Burn, Persia and the Greeks: The Defense of the West, c. 546–478 B.C. (London: Edward Arnold, 1970), 73. The fact that the bandits’ job entailed murder and rape did not bother these people, because deep restraint was exercised when dealing with those to whom they were connected by blood ties or friendship. Outside the circle, anything was permitted (Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms, 262). “For most of humanity, the tribe is the unit within which killing is considered murder, and outside of which killing may be a proof of manhood and bravery, a pleasure and a duty,” Erich Goode, Deviant Behavior (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1990), 215. The culture (it still survives in some places) saw nothing wrong in killing enemies or mere strangers for fun, as a form of entertainment. Maureen Dowd, “Go Fly a Kite, Taliban,” New York Times on the Web, November 14, 2001. 11. This practice can be found in modern Africa, for example Congo, which is seemingly endlessly embroiled in ethnic strife and the most macabre atrocities (“U.N. Probes Cannibalism Report in Congo,” New York Times, January 8, 2003). In the city of Drodro, 966 people were killed in early April 2003. Hamadoun Toure, spokesman for the United Nations force in Congo, commented: “Nearly 1,000 dead—I cannot remember a time when so many were killed in such a short space of time” (“U.N. Investigates Alleged Civilian Massacre in Congo,” New York Times, April 7, 2003). Remarkable also was the nature of those who committed the murders: women and children participated in “the bloody dawn raid.” 12. Jean Delumeau and Yves Lequin, Les malheurs des temps: histoire des fléaux et des calamités en France (Paris: Larousse, 1987), 27; Norbert Elias, The History of Manners: The Civilizing Process (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 192. 13. Delumeau and Lequin, Les malheurs des temps, 39. 14. Ibid., 45. 15. Ibid., 68. On the invasion of barbarians, see also Fernand Braudel, The Identity of France, 2 vols. (New York: HarperCollins, 1986–90), 2: 119. 16. Claude Gauvard, “De grace especial”: crime, état et société en France à la fin du Moyen Age (Paris: Sorbonne, 1991), 262–63. Until the

NOTES

17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

189

nineteenth century, the fight against piracy was an essential aspect of colonial power in the non-European world. Hugh Kennedy, “Rivals to the Freedom of the Seas,” Times Literary Supplement, September 4, 1998, 25. Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms, 332. Emphasis on loyalty to the ruler was found all over Eurasia, especially in societies with warrior elites. Personal loyalty to the ruler as a cardinal virtue was emphasized in the Mongol empire and most nomadic societies. Savitskii even assumed that the tradition of killing a ruler’s wives and children and burying them together stems from emphasis on absolute devotion to the leader. Petr Nikolaevich Savitskii, Kontinent Evraziia (Moscow: Agraf, 1997), 345. Elias, History of Manners, 195. Ibid., 193. Samuel Clark, State and Status: The Rise of the State and Aristocratic Power in Western Europe (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995), 338. Sorokin, Man and Society, 108. It was not surprising that preparation for war and full immersion in the culture of violence was an essential part of elite life. Direct force to receive wealth and ensure the flow of goods to the tribute collector was not only an attribute of medieval Europe or premodern societies but also can be seen in post-Soviet Russia, which has socioeconomic conditions strikingly similar to European feudalism. Iuliia Latynina, “Nepravitelstvennyi Zakhvat,” Novaia Gazeta, March 26, 2001. Victor Davis Hanson, The Wars of the Ancient Greeks (London: Cassell, 2001), 67. Herodotus, The Histories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 62. Elias, History of Manners, 195. Clark, State and Status, 158. Elias, History of Manners, 194. Ibid., 195. This was also the case with the Mongols; see Vernadsky, Mongols and Russia, 110. Jorge Arditi, A Genealogy of Manners: Transformations of Social Relations in France and England from the Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 62. Esther Cohen, “Violence Control in Late Medieval France,” Legal History Review 51 (1983): 120. Harold G. Marcus, A History of Ethiopia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 14.

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33. For a general description of anarchy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, see Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (New York: Ballantine, 1979). 34. Dean Keith Simonton, “Do Sorokin’s Data Support His Theory: A Study of Generational Fluctuations in Philosophical Beliefs,” in Sorokin and Civilization: A Centennial Assessment, eds. Joseph B. Ford, Michel P. Richard, and Palmer C. Talbutt (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1996), 197. 35. Pitirim A. Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics, 4 vols. (New York: Bedminster, 1962), 2: 49. 36. A similar process could be seen elsewhere. Soviet Russia in the late 1920s experienced peasant migration to the cities, which eroded the traditional safety net and system of control. Vadim Volkov, “The Concept of ‘Kul’turnost,’” in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (London: Routledge 1999), 215. 37. Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action: A Study in Social Theory with Special Reference to a Group of Recent European Writers (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1949), 346. 38. Ibid., 367. 39. Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics, 3: 177. 40. William Buxton, “Snakes and Ladders: Parsons and Sorokin at Harvard,” in Sorokin and Civilization: A Centennial Assessment, eds. Ford, Richard, and Talbutt, 33. 41. Parsons, The Structure of Social Action, 375. 42. Ibid., 372. 43. Pitirim A. Sorokin, Society, Culture, and Personality: Their Structure and Dynamics: A System of General Sociology (New York: Cooper Square, 1969), 92.

C HAPTER 3 1. Some historians argue that population growth and extension of land under cultivation indicated stability; see Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “Motionless History,” Social Science History 1, no. 2 (1977); Jean Delumeau and Yves Lequin, Les malheurs des temps: histoire des fléaux et des calamités en France (Paris: Larousse, 1987), 116, 150, 158. But Jacques Chiffoleau, Les justices du pape: délinquance et criminalité dans la région d’Avignon au quatorzième siècle (Paris: Sorbonne, 1984), 158, writes about “the demographic, economic, social crisis” in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. See also Barbara Beckerman Davis, “Reconstructing the Poor in Early Sixteenth Century Toulouse,” French History 7, no. 3 (1993): 277.

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2. R. J. Knecht, Renaissance Warrior and Patron: The Reign of Francis I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 356. On the decline of laborers’ wages, see also Robin W. Winks, Crane Brinton, John B. Christopher, and Robert Wolff, A History of Civilization: Prehistory to the Present (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1996), 233. 3. Bronislaw Geremek, The Margins of Society in Late Medieval Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 242–43. 4. Norbert Elias, The History of Manners, The Civilizing Process, vol. 1 (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 195. 5. Claude Gauvard, “De grace especial”: crime, état et société en France à la fin du Moyen Age (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1991), 935; Nicole Gonthier, La châtiment du crime au Moyen Age XIIe–XVIe (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 1998), 205. 6. Claude Gauvard, “Fear of Crime in Late Medieval France,” in Medieval Crime and Social Control, eds. Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 1. See also Gauvard, “De grace especial,” 162, 220. 7. Delumeau and Lequin, Les malheurs, 195. 8. Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace, eds., Introduction to Medieval Crime and Social Control, xi. On the war and crime see also Gauvard, “De grace especial” 550. 9. Karen Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucrats: The Ottoman Route to State Centralization (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 9. 10. Bloodshed was easy in Europe at the time. See Robert Muchembled, “Anthropologie de la violence dans la France moderne (XVe–XVIIIe siècle),” Revue de Synthèse 1 (January–March 1987): 37. 11. George Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 81. 12. Xuezhi Guo, The Ideal Chinese Political Leader: A Historical and Cultural Prospective (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002), 134. 13. At the beginning of the modern era there was a strong streak of anomization in the fabric of French society. Asocial drives endangered society’s very existence. “Durkheim had clearly shown empirically that beyond a certain point the extension of anomie is dangerous to physical life itself.” Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action: A Study in Social Theory with Special Reference to a Group of Recent European Writers (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1949), 392. 14. Elias, The History of Manners, xvi, 15. 15. John Bellamy, Crime and Public Order in England in the Later Middle Ages (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 66. 16. Cohen, “Violence Control in Late Medieval France,” 121. 17. Ibid.,” 120.

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18. The situation is similar in parts of the contemporary world that have experienced the collapse of authority and culture. 19. Gauvard, “De grace especial,” 533; Monique Bourin and Bernard Chevalier, “Le comportement criminel dans les pays de la loire moyenne, d’après les lettres de remission (vers 1380–vers 1450),” Annales de Bretagne et des Pays de l’Ouest 88 (1981): 254. 20. Gauvard, “De grace especial,” 1. 21. Simon Pepper, “Up Close and Personal,” Times Literary Supplement, October 26, 2001, 36. 22. Bellamy, Crime and Public Order, 25. 23. Ibid., 66, 68. 24. Cohen, “Violence Control,” 118. 25. Gauvard, “De grace especial,” 166 (on homicide, see also p. 529); Chiffoleau, Les justices du pape, 162. 26. Chiffoleau, Les justices du pape, 156; Nicole Gonthier, “Délinquantes ou victimes: les femmes dans la société lyonnaise,” Revue Historique 271 (1984): 30–31. 27. Chiffoleau, Les justices du pape, 152; Nicole Gonthier, Délinquance, justice et société dans le lyonnais médiéval: de la fin du XIIIe siècle au début du XVIe siècle (Paris: Editions Arguments, 1993), 324. 28. Stanley I. Greenspan and Serena Wieder with Robin Simons, The Child with Special Needs (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1998), 29. 29. Cohen, “Violence Control,” 119. 30. Chiffoleau, Les justices du pape, 147. 31. Gonthier, Délinquance, 72. 32. Bellamy, Crime and Public Order, 10. 33. Ibid., 1. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 3. 36. Ibid., 6. 37. Ibid., 5. 38. Ibid., 12. 39. Walter B. Miller, “Lower Class Culture as a Generating Milieu of Gang Delinquency,” in Social Deviance, ed. Erich Goode (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1996), 105. 40. Ibid., 106. 41. See, for example, Zavtra, February 19, 2002. 42. Gauvard, “De grace especial,” 268. 43. Ibid., 270–71. 44. Gonthier, Délinquance, 171. 45. Samuel Clark, State and Status: The Rise of the State and Aristocratic Power in Western Europe (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995), 342. 46. Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms, 201–2.

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47. According to some historians, the banditry could not have spread without the help of the nobility. Barkey (Bandits and Bureaucrats, 5) notes: “Fernand Braudel writes, ‘Behind banditry, that terrestrial piracy, appeared the continual aid of lords,’ an indication that the nobility was attempting to disrupt state-making through such innovative means.” 48. Jean Gallet, “En Bretagne, seigneurie et pouvoir militaire du XVIe au XVIIIe siecle,” Revue Historique des Armées 1 (1985): 8. 49. Gauvard, “De grace especial,” 534. 50. Knecht, Renaissance Warrior and Patron, 359. 51. Ibid., 42. 52. S. H. Cuttler, The Law of Treason and Treason Trials in Later Medieval France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 33. 53. Gauvard, “De grace especial,” 538. 54. Ibid., 554. 55. Ibid., 201. 56. Fernand Braudel, The Identity of France, 2 vols. (New York: HarperCollins, 1986–1990), 2: 160. 57. Gauvard, “De grace especial,” 197. 58. Geremek, The Margins of Society, 130. 59. Ibid., 246. 60. Chiffoleau, Les justices du pape, 124. 61. Maurice Berthe, Famines et épidémies dans les campagnes navarraises à la fin du Moyen Age (Paris: S.F.I.E.D, 1984), 1: 260, 263. 62. Geremek, The Margins of Society, 127. 63. Yves Berce, History of Peasant Revolts: The Social Origins of Rebellion in Early Modern France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 283. 64. Braudel, The Identity of France, vol. 2, p. 100. 65. Jeffrey Richards, Sex, Dissidence and Damnation: Minority Groups in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 1991), 17. 66. Berce, History of Peasant Revolts, 100. 67. Gauvard, “De grace especial,” 253–54. 68. Cuttler, The Law of Treason, 147; Gallet, “En Bretagne,” 5–6. 69. Bellamy, Crime and Public Order, 42. 70. Ibid., 49. 71. Ibid., 46. 72. Ibid., 6, 48. 73. Cuttler, The Law of Treason, 163. 74. Berce, History of Peasant Revolts, 100, 282. 75. François Neveux, “Les marginaux et le clergé dans la ville et le diocèse de Bayeux aux XIVe et XVe siècles,” Cahier des Annales de Normandie 13 (1981): 35–36.

194 76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88.

89.

90.

91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

NOTES Braudel, The Identity of France, 2: 161. Ibid., 160. Bellamy, Crime and Public Order, 10. G. W. Coopland, “Crime and Punishment in Paris,” in Medieval and Middle Eastern Studies in Honor of Aziz Suryal Atiya, ed. Sami A. Hanna (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1972), 83. Gonthier, Délinquance, 170. Coopland, “Crime and Punishment in Paris,” 82. Elias, The History of Manners, 1: 63. Gonthier, Délinquances, 178. Geremek, The Margins of Society, 246. Elias, The History of Manners, 1: 63–64. Ibid., 177. Encyclopedia Britannica Online, “Agincourt, Battle of.” Personal gain side by side with high moral standards was in no way limited to the West. In Imperial China an essential characteristic of a Mandarin bureaucrat was not just knowledge but high moral caliber. Still, what today’s West would regard as corruption was seen as essential for a Mandarin bureaucrat to supplement his salary. Paul C. Hickey, “Fee-Taking, Salary Reform, and the Structure of State Power in Late Qing China, 1909–1911,” Modern China 17, no. 3 (1991). The same connection can be found in post-Soviet Russia, which some scholars assert has traits of feudalism. Boris Berezovskii, for example, received wealth from direct connections with Yeltsin. In some cases he behaved exactly as a feudal baron; he did not formally control the enterprise but worked through his management, who were like vassals from whom he collected a form of tribute. Robert Cottrell, “Mr. Bigsky: Review of Paul Klebnikov,” Godfather of the Kremlin: Boris Berezovsky and the Looting of Russia (New York: Harcourt, 2000) and Chrystia Freeland, Sale of the Century: Russia’s Wild Ride from Communism to Capitalism (New York: Crown, 2000),” New York Review of Books, October 19, 2000. The tradition of giving females to rulers for sex goes back to Herodotus, The Histories (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 310. Bellamy, Crime and Public Order, 8. Ibid., 23. Post-Soviet Russia law-enforcement agencies collected tribute (Novaia Gazete, July 5, 2001). Ibid., 193. Encyclopedia Britannica Online, “Cloak and Sword Drama.”

NOTES

195

96. Geremek, The Margins of Society, 147, 150, 154. Students were not the only literate ones who could easily be criminals; among them could be poets such as Villon (128). 97. This would not be at odds with post-Soviet Russia, where under Yeltsin bandits became absolutely legitimate and were regarded as the “new violent entrepreneurs.” Georgi Derluguian, The Invisible First: Russia’s Criminal Predators against Markets and Themselves, Program on New Approaches to Russian Security, Police Memo Series 77 (October 1999), 48. 98. Geremek, The Margins of Society, 157. 99. Chiffoleau, Les justices du pape, 124. 100. Ibid., 120, 140–41; Neveux, “Les marginaux,” 24. 101. Neveux, “Les marginaux,” 27–29; for highway robberies see Gonthier, Délinquance, 164. 102. Neveux, “Les marginaux,” 27. 103. Chiffoleau, Les justices du pape, 154. 104. Bellamy, Crime and Public Order, 47. 105. Similarly, in the wake of the destruction of the USSR, criminals looked for a powerful sponsor or sponsored various businesses themselves. See Vladimir Shlapentokh, “Early Feudalism: The Best Parallel for Contemporary Russia,” Europe-Asia Studies 48 (May 1996): 393–413. 106. Victor Davis Hanson, The Wars of the Ancient Greeks (London: Cassell, 2001), 64. 107. Encyclopedia Britannica Online, “Anabasis.” 108. Braudel, The Identity of France, 2: 162. 109. Machiavelli, The Prince (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 43. 110. Geremek, The Margins of Society, 127. 111. Braudel, The Identity of France, 2: 162. 112. Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucrats, 5. 113. Ibid., 176. 114. Bellamy, Crime and Public Order, 6. 115. Robert Jütte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 188. 116. Bellamy, Crime and Public Order, 42. 117. Geremek, The Margins of Society, 126. 118. Encyclopedia Britannica Online, “Louis X,” http://search.eb.com/ article-9049063. 119. John Casparis, “The Swiss Mercenary System: Labour Emigration from the Semiperiphery,” Review 4 (Spring 1982): 623. 120. Ibid., 624. 121. Ibid., 593.

196

NOTES

122. Ibid., 623; see also Benoit Garnot, Crime et justice aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Imago, 2000), 79. 123. “Who Are the ‘Mercenaries’?” Time, December 22, 1961. 124. The war in Iraq is a good example. In southern Iraq, soon after the invasion, villagers started to “complain of roving bands of armed men who steal tractors, hijack trucks, loot factories, and terrorize local residents with near-impunity”; see Keith B. Richburg, “Bandits Hindering British Peacekeeping Progress,” Washington Post, March 28, 2003, and “Iraqis Loot Basra as British Take Control,” New York Times, April 7, 2003. The situation is common in modern Africa; see, for example, “Gangs Loot Central African Rep. Capital,” New York Times, March 18, 2003. 125. Casparis, “The Swiss Mercenary System,” 623. 126. Jean Boca, La justice criminelle de l’échevinage d’Abbeville au moyenâge, 1184–1516 (Lille: L. Danel, 1930), 60; Chiffoleau, Les justices du pape, 167. 127. Chiffoleau, Les justices du pape, 141; on banditry see p. 117. 128. Neveux, “Les margineux,” 34–35. 129. Gauvard, “De grace especial,” 212. 130. It was employed, for example, by peasants during Jacquerie to torture captured nobles. For example, one “knight was tied to a spit and roasted before the eyes of his wife and children, who were then offered the flesh to eat.” Stuart Flexner and Doris Flexner, The Pessimist’s Guide to History (New York: Quill, 2000), 49. 131. Coopland, “Crime and Punishment,” 73. 132. Geremek, The Margins of Society, 115. 133. Coopland, “Crime and Punishment,” 73. 134. Ibid., 73–74. 135. Pierre Van der Vorst, A l’enseigne de la braconne: le parfait petit braconnier, braconnages, braques, braconneux et braconniers, hier et aujourd’hui (Bruxelles: Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1982), 229. 136. Berce, History of Peasant Revolts, 100. 137. Geremek, The Margins of Society, 126. 138. Chiffoleau, Les justices du pape, 158. 139. Geremek, The Margins of Society, 205. 140. Neveux, “Les marginaux,” 35. 141. Benoit Garnot, “La perception des délinquants en France du XIVe au XIXe siecle,” Revue Historique 296, no. 2 (1996): 362. 142. Bellamy, Crime and Public Order, 76. 143. Gauvard, “De grace especial,” 499. 144. Ibid., 487.

NOTES

197

145. Marylee Reynolds, From Gangs to Gangsters: How American Sociology Organized Crime, 1918–1994 (Guilderland, NY: Harrow and Heston, 1995), 53. 146. Geremek, The Margins of Society, 126; Reynolds, From Gangs to Gangsters, 53. 147. Berce, History of Peasant Revolts, 282. 148. Ibid., 283. 149. Encyclopedia Brittanica Online, “Jacquerie.” 150. Pitirim Sorokin, The Sociology of Revolution (1925; repr. New York: H. Fertig 1967), 158. 151. Chiffoleau, Les justices du pape, 118. 152. Geremek, The Margins of Society, 126, 197. 153. Ibid., 265; on Jewish pogroms, see also Richards, Sex, Dissidance, and Damnation, 103. 154. Berthe, Famines, 266. 155. Flexner and Flexner, The Pessimist’s Guide, 481. 156. Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms, 153. 157. Jütte, Poverty and Deviance, 149, 151. The correlation between subsistence crisis and crime was not always evident; a rise in prices sometimes corresponded with a decline in crime. 158. Ibid., 190. 159. This universal connection between uprooted people and crime can be seen among refugees. See, for example, Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 29. 160. Bellamy, Crime and Public Order, 30. 161. Ibid., 14. 162. Coopland, “Crime and Punishment in Paris,” 79. 163. Bernard Schnapper, “La repression du vagabondage et sa signification historique du XIVe au XVIIIe siècle,” Revue Historique de Droit Français et Etranger 63 (1985): 145; François Martineau, Fripons, gueux et loubards: une histoire de la délinquance en France de 1750 à nos jours (Paris: J. C. Lattes, 1986), 42; André Abbiateci, Crimes et criminalité en France sous l’Ancien Régime, 17e–18e siècles (Paris: A. Colin, 1971). 164. David Mayall, “Egyptians and Vagabonds: Representations of the Gypsy in Early Modern Official and Rogue Literature,” Immigrants and Minorities 16 (1997): 59–60. 165. Barbara Beckerman Davis, “Poverty and Poor Relief in SixteenthCentury Toulouse,” Historical Reflections 17 (1991): 277; on the spread of migration see also Chiffoleau, Les justices du pape, 159. 166. Geremek, The Margins of Society, 29. 167. Ibid., 38. 168. Cohen, “Violence Control,” 120.

198

NOTES

169. Jütte, Poverty and Deviance, 165. 170. Casparis, “The Swiss Mercenary System,” 623. On migration in the late Middle Ages/early modern era, see Gauvard “De grace especial,” 543; Schnapper, “La repression,” 147. 171. Angus Fraser, The Gypsies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 95. 172. Geremek, The Margins of Society, 205. 173. Bellamy, Crime and Public Order, 6. This information about England could be applied to France. 174. Ibid., 75. 175. Jütte, Poverty and Deviance, 181–82. 176. Ibid., 180. 177. Geremek, The Margins of Society, 8. 178. Ibid., 6. 179. Ibid., 7. 180. Mary Elizabeth Perry, “Popular History of the Reign,” in The Reign of Louis XIV, eds. Andrew Lossky and Paul Sonnino (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1991), 47. 181. Geremek, The Margins of Society, 97. 182. Chiffoleau, Les justices du pape, 165. 183. Geremek, The Margins of Society, 97. 184. Ibid., 99. 185. Chiffoleau, Les justices du pape, 165. 186. Coopland, “Crime and Punishment in Paris,” 77. 187. Geremek, The Margins of Society, 130. 188. Ibid., 167. 189. Ibid., 193–94. 190. Ibid., 35, 39. 191. Ibid., 40. 192. Ibid., 131. 193. Coopland, “Crime and Punishment in Paris,” 72. 194. Garnot, Crime et justice, 84–85. 195. Geremek, The Margins of Society, 131. 196. Parisian thieves could be compared to prerevolutionary Russian peasants. Most were not proprietors of commune land but received allotments according to a “moral economy,” depending on the number of sons, roughly correlated to the size family the peasant needed to feed. 197. Coopland, “Crime and Punishment in Paris,” 69. 198. Geremek, The Margins of Society, 86. 199. Coopland, “Crime and Punishment in Paris,” 73. 200. Geremek, The Margins of Society, 107. 201. Ibid., 108. 202. Ibid.

NOTES 203. 204. 205. 206. 207. 208. 209. 210.

199

Ibid., 129. Chiffoleau, Les justices du pape, 123. Ibid., 170. Ibid., 169. Gonthier, Délinquance, 26–27. Elias, The History of Manners, 198. Geremek, The Margins of Society, 131. Gonthier, La châtiment du crime, 178.

C HAPTER 4 1. Herodotus, The Histories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 61. 2. Robin W. Winks, Crane Brinton, John B. Christopher, and Robert Wolff, A History of Civilization: Prehistory to the Present (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1996), 233. 3. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “Motionless History,” Social Science History 1, no. 2 (1977): 116–17. 4. Ibid., 123. 5. Fernand Braudel, The Identity of France, 2 vols. (New York: HarperCollins, 1986–90), 2: 238. 6. Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action: A Study in Social Theory with Special Reference to a Group of Recent European Writers (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1949), 111. 7. Samuel K. Cohn Jr., introduction to The Black Death and the Transformation of the West by David Herlihy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 5. The similarities between AIDS and the plague have been highlighted by noting that AIDS is the only epidemic to destroy as many people as the Black Death, approximately forty million. “AIDS Set to Surpass the Black Death as Worst Pandemic,” New York Times on the Web, January 25, 2002. 8. The relationship between globalization and spread of pandemic disease can be seen in post-Soviet Russia. The spread of venereal disease, AIDS included, was due to Russia’s openness to the outside world. “Russia Is Experiencing the Downside of Globalization and Putting Much of the Rest of the World at Risk,” Boston Globe, February 10, 2002. 9. Braudel, The Identity of France, 2: 420. 10. Yves Renouar, “The Black Death as a Major Event in World History,” in The Black Death: A Turning Point in History? ed. William M. Bowsky (Huntington, NY: Krieger, 1978), 27.

200

NOTES

11. Giovanni Boccaccio, “Plague in Florence: A Literary Description,” in Bowsky, The Black Death, 8. 12. Ibid., 11. 13. Agnolo di Tura del Grasso, “The Plague in Siena: An Italian Chronicle,” in Bowsky, The Black Death, 14. 14. The ancient residents of Kiev were fond of hot baths, which fascinated observers. The tradition continued in late medieval and early modern Russia, though the streets of major Russian cities were as dirty as those in Europe. 15. Norbert Elias, The History of Manners, The Civilizing Process, vol. 1 (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 65. 16. Ibid., 69. 17. Jean-Noël Biraben, Les hommes et la peste en France et dans les pays européens et méditerranéens, 2 vols. (Paris: Mouton, 1975–76), 1: 147. 18. Jean Delumeau and Yves Lequin, Les malheurs des temps: histoire des fléaux et des calamités en France (Paris: Larousse, 1987), 199. 19. Biraben, Les hommes et la peste, 1: 139. 20. David Mayall, “Egyptians and Vagabonds: Representations of the Gypsy in Early Modern Official and Rogue Literature,” Immigrants and Minorities 16 (1997): 61. 21. Braudel, The Identity of France, 2: 157. 22. Biraben, Les hommes et la peste, 1: 23. 23. Stuart Flexner and Doris Flexner, The Pessimist’s Guide to History (New York: Quill, 2000), 61. 24. Biraben, Les hommes et la peste, 1: 23. 25. Flexner and Flexner, The Pessimist’s Guide, 10–11. 26. Ibid., 11. 27. Ibid., 28–29. 28. Ibid., 23. 29. Ibid., 30. 30. Elisabeth Carpentier, “The Plague as a Recurrent Phenomenon,” in Bowsky, The Black Death, 35. 31. Robert H. Pollitzer, Plague (Geneva: World Health Organization, 1954), 12. On the plague during the reign of Justinian see also Biraben, Les hommes et la peste, 1: 25. 32. Flexner and Flexner, The Pessimist’s Guide, 37. 33. Ibid., 35. 34. Carpentier, “The Plague as a Recurrent Phenomenon,” 35. 35. Biraben, Les hommes et la peste, 1: 25, On the spread of bubonic plague in history, see also Ruth Oratz, “The Plague: Changing Notions of Contagion: London 1665–Marseille 1720,” Synthesis 2 (1977): 5. 36. Pollitzer, Plague, 11.

NOTES

201

37. Carpentier, “The Plague as a Recurrent Phenomenon,” 36. Recent research shows that what was called the Justinian plague (541–767 CE) affected all of Europe. Daniel Del Castillo, “A Long-Ignored Plague Gets Its Due,” Chronicle of Higher Education, February 15, 2002. 38. Le Roy Ladurie, “Motionless History,” 124. 39. William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, NY: Anchor/ Doubleday, 1976), 151. 40. Flexner and Flexner, The Pessimist’s Guide, 47. 41. Philip Ziegler, The Black Death (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 15. 42. Renouar, “The Black Death,” 25; see also Biraben, Les hommes et la peste, 1: 49. 43. Linda Altman, Plague and Pestilence: A History of Infectious Disease (Springfield, NJ: Enslow, 1998), 19. 44. Monique Lucenet, Les grandes pestes en France (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1985), 21; Flexner and Flexner, The Pessimist’s Guide, 48. 45. Lucenet, Les grandes pestes, 16; Flexner and Flexner, The Pessimist’s Guide, 47 46. Neithard Bulst, “La lutte contre la peste noire en France (1348–debut XVIe siècle),” Bulletin d’Information de la Société de Démographie Historique (1983): 34. 47. George Vernadsky, A History of Russia, vol. 3, The Mongols and Russia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953), 213; see also 211. 48. John B. Henneman Jr., “France: A Fiscal and Constitutional Crisis,” in Bowsky, The Black Death, 87. 49. Renouar, “The Black Death,” 33. 50. Pierre Chaunu, La mort à Paris: XVIe, XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Fayard, 1978), 184. 51. Maurice Berthe, Famines et épidémies dans les campagnes navarraises à la fin du Moyen Age, 2 vols. (Paris: S.F.I.E.D, 1984), 2: 315. 52. Delumeau and Lequin, Les malheurs, 141. 53. Ibid., 198. 54. Carpentier, “The Plague as a Recurrent Phenomenon,” 37. 55. Ziegler, The Black Death, 64; on the French perception, see Claude Gauvard, “De grace especial”: crime, état et société en France à la fin du Moyen Age (Paris: Sorbonne, 1991), 217. 56. Claude Gauvard, “Fear of Crime in Late Medieval France,” in Medieval Crime and Social Control, eds. Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 1. 57. Flexner and Flexner, The Pessimist’s Guide, 47.

202

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58. Carpentier, “The Plague as a Recurrent Phenomenon,” 37; Flexner and Flexner, The Pessimist’s Guide, 47. 59. Ziegler, The Black Death, 227. 60. Flexner and Flexner, The Pessimist’s Guide, 48. 61. Herlihy, The Black Death, 19. 62. Ibid., 31. 63. Flexner and Flexner, The Pessimist’s Guide, 47. 64. Altman, Plague and Pestilence, 201. 65. Flexner and Flexner, The Pessimist’s Guide, 48. 66. “The Kosciuszko Chair of Polish Studies,” Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia, Bulletin 1 (Fall 2001): 40. Other nature events could lead to devastation, for example, locusts, which since ancient times were a danger to crops, dooming many people to starvation. An 1875 swarm in the United States was recorded as “1,800 miles long and 110 miles wide, equaling the combined area of Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont.” Carol Kaesuk Yoon, “Looking Back at the Days of the Locust,” New York Times on the Web, April 23, 2002. 67. The ratio of deaths in battle and disease and starvation can be seen in the Congo, where it could compare to France during the Hundred Years War. Only a small proportion died because of the violence. The great majority were victims of starvation and disease. Barbara Crossette, “War Adds 1.7 Million Deaths in Eastern Congo, Study Finds,” New York Times, June 9, 2000. 68. Henneman, “France,” 86. 69. Delumeau and Lequin, Les malheurs, 198–99. 70. Renouar, “The Black Death,” 27. 71. Ziegler, The Black Death, 64. 72. Braudel, The Identity of France, 2: 157. On mortality during the Black Death in France see also Delumeau and Lequin, Les malheurs, 188–89. 73. Lucenet, Les grandes pestes, 92. 74. Flexner and Flexner, The Pessimist’s Guide, 48. 75. Bronislaw Geremek, The Margins of Society in Late Medieval Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 31. Pandemic diseases can affect economic performance even in modern times. The spread of AIDS and other infectious diseases in the former USSR and Africa is a good example. A CIA prediction for 2015 stated, “AIDS and such associated diseases as TB will have a destructive impact on families and society. In some African countries, average life-spans will be reduced by as much as 30 to 40 years, generating more than 40 million orphans and contributing to poverty, crime, and instability. AIDS, other diseases, and health problems will hurt prospects for

NOTES

76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

94. 95. 96.

97.

98.

203

transition to democratic regimes as they undermine civil society, hamper the evolution of sound political and economic institutions, and intensify the struggle for power and resources.” Global Trends 2015: A Dialogue about the Future with Nongovernment Experts, Publication of the National Intelligence Council, 2000, 24 (Internet version). Regarding the devastating implications of AIDS for the former USSR, see also Abigail Zuger, “Infectious Diseases Rising Again in Russia,” New York Times on the Web, December 5, 2000. Anthony Sutcliffe, Paris: An Architectural History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 3. Chaunu, La mort à Paris, 184–85. D. Bourrouilh and B. Chéronnet, “A propos de la peste en Béarn (1368–1652),” Revue de Pau et du Béarn 15 (1988): 45. Delumeau and Lequin, Les malheurs, 10. Carol L. Loat, “Gender and Work in Sixteenth-Century Paris,” PhD diss., University of Colorado, 1993, 2. Le Roy Ladurie, “Motionless History,” 124. Ibid., 127. Gauvard, “Fear of Crime,” 21. Herlihy, The Black Death, 64 Gauvard, “Fear of Crime,” 21. Berthe, Famines et épidémies, 324, 353. Delumeau and Lequin, Les malheurs, 199. Boccaccio, “Plague in Florence,” 10. Pavel A. Florensky, Sobranie Sochenenii, 4 vols. (Paris: YMCA, 1985). Renouar, “The Black Death,” 30. Herlihy, The Black Death, 65. Flexner and Flexner, The Pessimist’s Guide, 48. Leah Otis, “Nisi in Postribulo: Prostitution in Langedoc from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century,” PhD diss., Columbia University, 1980, 100. S. H. Cuttler, The Law of Treason and Treason Trials in Later Medieval France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 154. See, for example, the wife of Edward II, “Edward II,” Encyclopedia Britannica Online. Claude Fouret, “Douai et le XVIe siècle: une sociabilité de l’agression,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 34 (January–March 1987): 18. J. L. Flandrin, “Repression and Change in the Sexual Life of Young People in Medieval and Early Modern Times,” in Family and Sexuality in French History, eds. Robert Wheaton and Tamara Haraven (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1980), 32. Joan Brace, “From Chattel to Person: Martinique, 1635,” Plantation Society 1 (April 1983): 65.

204

NOTES

99. Elias, The History of Manners, 177. 100. Erich Goode, “Pornography,” in Social Deviance, ed. Erich Goode (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1996), 263. 101. Richard Lewinsohn, A History of Sexual Customs (New York: Bell, 1958), 6–7. 102. Most people had little shame performing urination and defecation, so they did not hesitate to engage in sex in the presence of a stranger, behavior seen as truly uncivilized by Herodotus (Histories, 89). 103. Herodotus, Histories, 88. 104. Otis, “Nisi in postribulo,” 21. 105. Soviet society with its marginal role of money was structurally similar to feudal Europe. The sexual culture had features of Carolingian France. Sex life was quite promiscuous in the late years of Brezhnev’s regime, but there were few prostitutes. Most women who engaged in promiscuous sex (bliadstvo) did so for reasons such as enjoyment of sex, boredom, or social protest. A popular Soviet joke/proverb makes the difference clear: “Prostitution is a profession, bliadstvo is a call.” On sexuality in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, see Dmitry Shlapentokh, “Making Love in Yeltsin’s Russia: A Case of ‘DeMedicalization’ and ‘De-Normalization,’” Crime, Law, and Social Changes 39 (2003): 117–62. 106. Lewinsohn, A History of Sexual Customs, 143. 107. This practice can be seen among primates. Presumably it would ensure natural selection. 108. The notion of sex in which all males had sexual access to all females as a more advanced form of sexual organization has been questioned by some scholars. Friedrich Engels, for example, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, in the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan (London: Lewis and Wishart, 1943) suggested that promiscuity was the most ancient form of sexual relationship. 109. Jacques Rossiaud, “Prostitution, jeunesse et société dans les villes du sud-est au XVe siècle,” Annales 31, no. 2 (1976): 289–325. 110. There were indications that prostitutes could be seen in French cities in the sixteenth century. See François Martineau, Fripons, gueux et loubards: une histoire de la délinquance en France de 1750 à nos jours (Paris: J. C. Lattes, 1986), 100. 111. The UN troops in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in 1991 were comparatively well disciplined. Yet their presence led to a dramatic increase in prostitution. In 1991 there were six thousand prostitutes in the city; in 1992 there were twenty thousand. A. Betts Fetherston, “Voices from War Zones: Implications for Training,” in A Future for Peacekeeping? ed. Edward Moxon-Browne (New York: Macmillan, 1998), 167.

NOTES

205

112. Jeffrey Richards, Sex, Dissidence, and Damnation: Minority Groups in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 1991), 116. 113. Barbara Beckerman Davis, “Poverty and Poor Relief in SixteenthCentury Toulouse,” Historical Reflections 17 (1991): 277. 114. Richards, Sex, Dissidence, and Damnation, 117. 115. Geremek, The Margins of Society, 215. 116. Ibid., 216; Richards, Sex, Dissidence, and Damnation, 117. 117. Jacques Rossiaud, “La prostitution dans les villes françaises du XVe siècle,” Communications 35 (1982): 290–91. 118. Geremek, The Margins of Society, 226. 119. Ibid., 231 120. Jacques Rossiaud, “Prostitution, Youth, and Society in the Towns of Southeastern France in the Fifteenth Century,” in Deviants and the Abandoned in French Society: Selections from the Annales: Economies, Societies, Civilisations IV, eds. Robert Forster and Orest A. Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 3–4. 121. Otis, “Nisi in postribule,” 69. 122. Richards, Sex, Dissidence, and Damnation, 116. 123. Ibid.; Rossiaud, “La prostitution,” 292. 124. Fouret, “Douai,” 18. 125. Rossiaud, “La prostitution,” 5. 126. These authorities were not unique in their desire to make money on prostitutes: see “Nevada Considers Taxing Its Prostitutes,” New York Times, February 26, 2003. 127. Richards, Sex, Dissidence, and Damnation, 124. 128. Flandrin, “Repression and Change,” 31. 129. Ibid., 127. 130. Ibid., 125. 131. One might add that drugs such as hashish had been known since the Middle Ages. Delumeau and Lequin, Les malheurs, 142. 132. Gauvard, “De grace especial,” 575; On the spread of concubinage, see also Nicole Gonthier, Délinquance, justice et société dans le lyonnais médiéval: de la fin du XIIIe siècle au début du XVIe siècle (Paris: Editions Arguments, 1993), 163. 133. Richards, Sex, Dissidence, and Damnation, 118. 134. Gonthier, Délinquance, 164; On concubinage among clerics, see also Jacques Chiffoleau, Les justices du pape: délinquance et criminalité dans la région d’Avignon au quatorzième siècle (Paris: Sorbonne, 1984), 176. 135. David Potter, “‘Rigueur de Justice: Crime, Murder and the Law in Picardy, Fifteenth to Sixteenth Centuries,” French History 11, no. 3 (1997): 270. 136. Nicole Gonthier, La châtiment du crime au Moyen Age: XIIe–XVIe siècles (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 1998), 182.

206

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137. Gauvard, “De grace especial,” 816. 138. Gauvard, “Fear of Crime,” 1. 139. Ernle Bradford, The Battle for the West: Thermopylae (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980), 76. 140. Ibid., 64. 141. Simon Pepper, “Up Close and Personal,” Times Literary Supplement, October 26, 2001, 36. 142. Robert Muchembled, La violence au village: sociabilité et comportements populaires en Artois du XIe au XVIIe siècle (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1984), 322. 143. Goode, “Rape,” 294. 144. Cuttler, The Law of Treason, 147. 145. Elias, The History of Manners, 118. 146. Ibid., 144. 147. Madeleine Lazard, Pierre de Bourdeille, Seigneur de Brantome (Paris: Fayard, 1995), 220. 148. Antony Beevor, “They Raped Every German Female from Eight to 80,” Guardian, May 1, 2002. 149. Clifford Coonan, “Interview—Book on Red Army Rapes in Berlin Angers Russians,” Reuters, June 4, 2002. 150. Omer Bartov, “The Last Battle,” Times Literary Supplement, June 14, 2002. 151. Beevor, “They Raped Every German Female.” 152. Marc Lacey, “War Is Still a Way of Life for Congo,” New York Times, November 21, 2002. In Chechnya, soldiers mortally wounded fifteen-year-old Aminat. A relative saw “half-dressed” Russian officers “lying on top of Aminat. She was covered in blood from the bullet wounds. Another soldier shouted, ‘Hurry up, Kolya, while she’s still warm!’” Krystyna Kurcxab-Redlich, “Torture and Rape Stalk the Streets of Chechnya,” Observer, October 27, 2002. 153. Flexner and Flexner, The Pessimist’s Guide, 49. 154. Many rapists assumed that violence was essential to sexual gratification. These views were common in military culture, especially if moral restraint and fear of punishment were removed. This was, for example, the case with the Soviet soldiers who engaged in rape sprees after the invasion of Germany. For most, rape was a way of satisfying sexual desire and humiliating and punishing the defeated enemy. Quite a few were convinced that the women enjoyed the rape and could receive sexual gratification that way. One soldier recalled his sexual exploits: “They all lifted their skirts for us and lay on the bed.” Fetherston, “Voices from Warzones,” 165. 155. Rossiaud “La prostitution,” 75. 156. Ibid., 293.

NOTES 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167. 168. 169.

170. 171. 172. 173. 174. 175.

176.

177. 178. 179. 180.

181. 182.

183.

207

Ibid., 77. Ibid., 293. Gonthier, Délinquance, 313. Michael Ross, “It’s Time for Me to Die,” Whole Earth 98 (1999): 3. Goode, “Rape,” 285. Rossiaud, “La prostitution,” 294. Ibid., 297–98. Ibid., 293. Flandrin, “Repression and Change,” 31. Encyclopedia Britannica, “Saturn.” Rossiaud, “La prostitution,” 75–76. Ibid., 7. Diana Scully and Joseph Marolla, “Riding the Bull at Gilley’s: Convicted Rapists Describe the Rewards of Rape,” in Goode, Social Deviance, 298. Richards, Sex, Dissidence, and Damnation, 39. Ibid., 16; on the spread of group rape, see also Gonthier, Délinquance, 139. Rossiaud, “Prostitution,” 6. Richards, Sex, Dissidence, and Damnation, 39. Chiffoleau, Les justices du pape, 123. Etienne van der Walle, “Motivations and Technology in the Decline of French Fertility,” in Family and Sexuality in French History, eds. Robert Wheaton and Tamara K. Haraven (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), 147. Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), 85. David Rock, Argentina, 1516–1987: From Spanish Colonization to Alfonsín (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 18. Le Roy Ladurie, “Motionless History,” 124. Flexner and Flexner, The Pessimist’s Guide, 59. Robert Benoit, “La syphilis à la fin du XVIe siècle, d’après les cours du professeur Jean Riolan, de la Faculté de Médecine de Paris,” Histoire des sciences médicales 32, no. 1 (1998): 40. Flexner and Flexner, The Pessimist’s Guide, 59. Laura Guidi, “Prostitute e carcerate a napoli: alcune indagini tra fine 800 e inizió 900,” Memoria: Rivista di Storia delle Donne 4 (1982); Giovanna Fiume, “Le patenti di infamia: morale sessuale e igiene sociale nella sicilia dell’ottocento,” Memoria: Revista di Storia delle Donne 17 (1986). J. R. Hale, “The Soldiers in Germanic Graphic Art,” in Art and History: Images and Their Meaning, eds. Robert I. Rotberg and

NOTES

208

184. 185.

186.

187.

Theodore K. Rabb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 103. Flexner and Flexner, The Pessimist’s Guide, 59. Claude Quetel, “Syphilis et politiques de santé a l’époque moderne,” Histoire, Economie et Société 3, no. 4 (1984): 543–44; on the spread of syphilis see also Benoit, “La syphilis,” 39. Howard M. Smith, “The Introduction of Venereal Disease into Tahiti: A Re-Examination,” Journal of Pacific History 10, no. 1 (1975): 39; on the beginning of the spread of syphilis, see also Delumeau and Lequin, Les malheurs, 240. Flexner and Flexner, The Pessimist’s Guide, 59.

C HAPTER 5 1. Lynn Martin, “Jesuit Encounters with Rural France in the Sixteenth Century,” Australian Journal of French Studies 18, no. 3 (1981): 207; see also Jacques Lorgnier and Renée Martinage, “L’activité judiciaire de la Maréchaussée de Flandres (1679–1790),” Revue du Nord 61, no. 242 (1979): 593. 2. Yves Berce, History of Peasant Revolts: The Social Origins of Rebellion in Early Modern France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 99. 3. Robert Muchembled, “Anthropologie de la violence dans la France moderne (XVe–XVIIIe siècle),” Revue de Synthèse 1 (January–March 1987): 31–55; James B. Collins, “State Building in Early Modern Europe,” Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (1997): 624. 4. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Royal French State, 1460–1610 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 153. 5. Robert Muchembled, La violence au village: sociabilitié et comportements populaires en Artois du XIe au XVIIe siècle (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1984). 6. Robert Muchembled, L’invention de l’homme moderne: sensibilités, moeurs et comportements collectifs sous l’ancien régime (Paris: Fayard, 1988), 16. 7. Barbara Beckerman Davis, “Poverty and Poor Relief in SeventeenthCentury Toulouse,” Historical Reflections 17 (1991): 270. Benoit Garnot, Crime et justice aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Imago, 2000), 78. 8. Claude Fouret, “Douai et le XVIe siècle: une sociabilité de l’agression,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 34 (January–March 1987): 11.

NOTES

209

9. Arlette Jouanna, “Les gentilshommes français et leur rôle politique dans la seconde moitié du XVIe siècle et au début du XVIIe,” Pensiero Poltico 10, no. 1 (1977): 35. 10. Fouret, “Douai,” 13; Benoit Garnot, “La perception des délinquants en France du XIVe au XIXe siècle,” Revue Historique 296, no. 2 (1996): 350–51. 11. David Potter, “‘Rigueur de Justice’: Crime, Murder and the Law in Picardy, Fifteenth to Sixteenth Centuries,” French History 11, no. 3 (1997): 288. 12. Fouret, “Douai,” 16. 13. Jaime Contreras, “Espagne et France au temps d’Henri IV: inquisiteurs, morisques et brigands,” Revue de Pau et du Béarn 17 (1990): 36. 14. Fouret, “Douai,” 9. 15. Ibid., 9–10, 30. 16. Potter, “Rigueur de justice,” 277; Fouret, “Douai,” 7–9, 27; Bernard Schnapper, “La justice criminelle rendue par le Parlement de Paris sous le regne de François I,” Revue historique de droit français et étranger 52, no. 2 (1974): 255, 271. 17. J. J. Woltjer, “Violence during the Wars of Religion in France and the Netherlands: A Comparison,” Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis 76, no. 1 (1996): 29. 18. Ibid., 31. 19. Encyclopedia Britannica Online, “Noblesse de robe.” 20. Bronislaw Geremek, The Margins of Society in Late Medieval Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 127. 21. Jean Delumeau and Yves Lequin, Les malheurs des temps: histoire des fléaux et des calamités en France (Paris: Larousse, 1987), 195. 22. Roger Chartier, Figures de la gueuserie (Montalba, Paris: Bibliothèque Bleue, 1982), 92. 23. Fernand Braudel, The Identity of France, 2 vols. (New York: HarperCollins, 1986–90), 2: 387. 24. Contreras, “Espagne et France,” 37. 25. Ibid., 34, 36–38. 26. Potter, “Rigueur de justice,” 301. 27. Ibid., 300. 28. Encyclopedia Britannica Online, “Callot, Jacques,” http://search.eb .com/eb/article-9018716. 29. Jean Gallet, “En Bretagne, seigneurie et pouvoir militaire du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle,” Revue historique des armées 1 (1985): 9. 30. Delumeau and Lequin, Les malheurs, 258. 31. James B. Wood, The King’s Army: Warfare, Soldiers, and Society during the Wars of Religion in France, 1562–1576 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 227 (on troop criminal activity

210

32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47.

48.

49. 50. 51.

NOTES see p. 228); Jean-Pierre Babelon, Paris au XVIe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1986), 183. R. J. Knecht, Renaissance Warrior and Patron: The Reign of Francis I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 359. Hilton L. Root, Peasants and King in Burgundy: Agrarian Foundation of French Absolutism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 210. Potter, “Rigueur de justice,” 290, 295. Berce, History, 10. Wood, The King’s Army, 44. Raymond A. Mentzer Jr., “Organizational Endeavour and Charitable Impulse in Sixteenth-Century France: The Care of Protestant Nîmes,” French History 5, no. 1 (1991): 15. Dominique Dinet, “De l’épée à la croix: les soldats passés à l’ombre des cloîtres (fin XVIe–fin XVIIIe siècle),” Histoire, économie et societé 9, no. 2 (1990): 172–73. Robert Jütte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 187. Mentzer, “Organizational Endeavour,” 14. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Pantheon, 1966), 47. Knecht, Renaissance Warrior and Patron, 6, 359. Ibid., 357. Laure Chantrel, “Les notions de richesse et de travail dans la penice économique française de la seconde moitié du XVIe et au début du XVIIe siècle,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 25, no. 1 (1995): 133. R. J. Knecht, French Renaissance Monarchy: Francis I and Henry II (London: Longman, 1996), 6. Ibid., 156. Kristin Elizabeth Gaper, “‘Comme leur propre enfant’: Adoption of Children and Domestic Boundaries in Sixteenth and SeventeenthCentury Paris,” PhD diss., Princeton University, 1992, 150. Hilary Meg Ballon, “Architecture and Urbanism in Henri IV’s Paris: The Place Royale, Place Dauphine, and Hospital St. Louis,” PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1985, 192–93. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 47. Babelon, Paris, 184. Fouret, “Douai,” 10; on the economic situation, see also Leslie Henry Goldsmith, “Poor Relief and Reform in Sixteenth-Century Orleans,” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1980; Schnapper “La justice criminelle,” 21.

NOTES

211

52. Alexander Cowan, Urban Europe, 1500–1700 (London: Arnold, 1998), 152. 53. Mentzer, “Organizational Endeavour,” 15. 54. Goldsmith, “Poor Relief,” 184. 55. Cowan, Urban Europe, 172. 56. Quoted in Matthew Koch, “Poor Relief in Montauban, 1548 to 1629,” in vol. 23 of Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History: Selections of the Annual Meeting, ed. Barry Rothaus (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 1996), 73. 57. Goldsmith, “Poor Relief,” 183. 58. Cowan, Urban Europe, 176. 59. Karen Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucrats: The Ottoman Route to State Centralization (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), x. 60. Ibid., 168. 61. On the role of slavery, including slaves as soldiers, see, e.g., Richard Hellie, Slavery in Russia, 1450–1725 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 62. Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucrats, 176. The following quotations from this source are cited by page number in text. 63. Fouret, “Douai,” 11; on the spread of plague in sixteenth-century France, see also Annette Finley-Croswhite, Henry IV and the Towns: The Pursuit of Legitimacy in French Urban Society, 1589–1610 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 164. 64. Koch, “Poor Relief in Montauban,” 73; Cowan, Urban Europe, 159. 65. Goldsmith, “Poor Relief,” 35, 235. 66. Muchembled, L’invention de l’homme moderne, 49. 67. Cowan, Urban Europe, 189. 68. Babelon, Paris, 286. 69. Kristin Gager, “‘Comme leur propre enfant’: Adoption of Children and Domestic Boundaries in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Paris,” PhD diss., Princeton University, 1992, p. 156; Pierre Chaunu, La mort à Paris: XVIe, XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Fayard, 1978), 184. 70. Ballon, “Architecture,” 188. 71. Mentzer, “Organizational Endeavour,” 4. 72. Olivier Zeller, “L’espace et la famille à Lyon aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles,” Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 30 (October–December 1983): 588–89. 73. Delumeau and Lequin, Les malheurs, 260. 74. Ibid., 274. 75. Babelon, Paris, 172. 76. Pierre Grégoire, “Les enjeux du souvenir collectif: événement et representations historiques en Provence, XVII–XXe siècle,” Historical Papers (1987): 70.

212

NOTES

77. Ballon, “Architecture,” 191. 78. Justin Stagl, “The Methodising of Travel in the 16th Century,” History and Anthropology 4 (1990): 317. 79. Muchembled, L’invention de l’homme moderne, 61, 76, 79; Muchembled, La violence, 324. 80. See Alain Couprie, “‘Courtisanisme’ et christianisme au XVIIe siècle,” Dix-septième Siècle 33, no. 4 (1981): 372; Madeleine Lazard, Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantome (Paris: Fayard, 1995), 223; François Martineau, Fripons, gueux et loubards: une histoire de la délinquance en France de 1750 à nos jours (Paris: J. C. Lattes, 1986), 101. 81. James R. Farr, Authority and Sexuality in Early Modern Burgundy (1550–1730) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 65. 82. Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), 86. 83. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Carnival in Romans (New York: George Braziller, 1979), 224. 84. Muchembled, L’invention de l’homme moderne, 66. 85. Bette Talvacchia, Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 199. 86. Fouret, “Douai,” 17. 87. Barbara Beckerman Davis, “Reconstructing the Poor in Early Sixteenth Century Toulouse,” French History 7, no. 3 (1993): 281. 88. Delumeau and Lequin, Les malheurs, 9; Joan Sherwood, “Treating Syphilis: The Wetnurse as Technology in an Eighteenth-Century Parisian Hospital,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 50, no. 3 (1995): 315. 89. Encyclopedia Britannica Online, “Medicine, History of,” http:// search.eb.com/eb/article-911031. 90. Goldsmith, “Poor Relief,” 92. 91. Ibid., 142, 145. 92. Encyclopedia Britannica Online, “Europe, History of,” http:// search.eb.com/eb/article-9106072. 93. Leah Otis, “Nisi in Postribulo: Prostitution in Langedoc from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century,” PhD diss., Columbia University, 1980, 95. The direct connection can be seen in post-Soviet Russia. In social arrangements the Soviet regime in many ways resembled premodern society. A comparison between the Soviet regime and oriental despotism was made by Karl Wittfogel, Die Orientalische Despotie: eine vergleichende Untersuchung totaler Macht (Koln, Berlin: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1962). Although for some observers post-Soviet society is close to that of the Middle Ages, the early modern era is the best analogy. Prostitution exploded, with at

NOTES

94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99.

100. 101. 102. 103.

104. 105. 106.

107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113.

114. 115.

213

least one hundred thousand prostitutes in Moscow alone in 2002, up to 35 percent infected with HIV. Boston Globe, February 10, 2002. Biraben, Les hommes at la peste en France et dans les pays européens et mediterranéens (Paris: Mouton, 1975–76), 2: 38. Davis, “Poverty and Poor Relief,” 208–9. Claude Quetel, “Syphilis et politiques de santé a l’époque moderne,” Histoire, Economie et Société 3, no. 4 (1984): 45. Davis, “Poverty and Poor Relief,” 208. Ibid., 551. J. R. Hale, “The Soldiers in Germanic Graphic Art,” in Art and History: Images and Their Meaning, eds. Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 105. Ibid., 103. Norbert Elias, The History of Manners, The Civilizing Process, vol. 1 (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 72. Stuart Flexner and Doris Flexner, The Pessimist’s Guide to History (New York: Quill, 2000), 59. Encyclopedia Britannica Online, “Francis I,” http://search.eb.com/ eb/article-9035120. On other possible other causes of Francis’s death, see Knecht, Renaissance Warrior and Patron, 545. Davis, “Poverty and Poor Relief,” 278–79; Babelon, Paris, 173–74. Goldsmith, “Poor Relief,” 146. Quetel, “Syphilis,” 544. One might add that infectious disease had been connected in people’s minds with spiritual pollution and therefore with heresy. See Denis Crouzet, Les guerriers de Dieu: la violence au temps des troubles de religion vers 1525–vers 1610, 2 vols. (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1990), 1: 257. Potter, “Rigueur de justice,” 292. Le Roy Ladurie, Carnival in Romans, 224. Ibid., 224. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 177. J. L. Flandrin, “Repression and Change in the Sexual Life of Young People in Medieval and Early Modern Times,” in Family and Sexuality in French History, eds. Robert Wheaton and Tamara K. Hareven (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), 45; see also Fouret, “Douai,” 12. Talvacchia, Taking Positions, 187. Ibid., 175.

NOTES

214

C HAPTER 6 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 71. Ibid., 72. Ibid., 121. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 323. Michael D. Slaven, “Scapegoating, Sexuality, and Theories of the Body during the Parisian Fronds: A Reassessment of the Mazarinades,” PhD diss., West Virginia University, 1993, 30. Louis Marin, Portrait of the King, trans. Martha Houle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 14. Karl Wegert, Popular Culture, Crime, and Social Control in 18thCentury Württemberg (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1994), 10. Pierre Deyon, Le temps des prisons: essai sur l’histoire de la délinquance et les origines du système pénitentiare (Villeneuve d’Ascq, France: Université de Lille III, 1975), 20. Richard Andrews, Of Law, Magistracy, and Crime in Old Regime Paris, 1735–1789, vol. 1, The System of Criminal Justice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 395. Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), 85. Ibid., 86. Ibid. See also D. Ulrich, “Le statut des municipes d’après les données africaines,” Revue historique de droit français et étranger 50 (1972): 402. Gérard Aubry, La jurisprudence criminelle du Châtelet de Paris sous le règne de Louis XVI (Paris: Librairie Générale de Droit et de Jurisprudence, 1971), 54. Ibid., 52. Wegert, Popular Culture, 102. Ibid., 384. Ibid., 99. Louis Chevalier, Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses à Paris pendant la première moitié du XIXe siècle (Paris: Plon, 1958), 212. The state at the same time tried to minimize private violence and was engaged in the continuous disarmament of the population. Andrews, System of Criminal Justice, 40. Robert Anchel, Crimes et châtiments au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Librairie Académique Perrin, 1933), 183. Wegert, Popular Culture, 105. Ibid., 108.

NOTES

215

23. François Martineau, Fripons, gueux et loubards: une histoire de la délinquance en France de 1750 à nos jours (Paris: J. C. Lattes, 1986), 242. 24. James R. Farr, Authority and Sexuality in Early Modern Burgundy (1550–1730) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 128. 25. Duane Anderson, “The Legal History of the Reign,” in The Reign of Louis XIV: Essays in Celebration of Andrew Lossky, ed. Paul Sonnino (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1991), 75–76. 26. Ibid., 82. 27. D. Ulrich, “La repression en Bourgogne au XVIIIe siècle,” Revue historique de droit français et étranger 50 (1972): 401–2. 28. Claude C. Strugill, L’organisation et l’administration de la maréchaussée et de la justice prévotale dans la France des Bourbons: 1720–1730 (Paris: Service Historique de l’Armée de Terre, 1981), 6. 29. Pascal Brouillet, “L’organisation de la maréchaussée dans la géneralité de Paris à la fin de l’Ancien Régime,” Revue historique des armées 4 (1998): 10. 30. Davis, Fiction in the Archives, 10. 31. Ibid., 389. 32. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 243. 33. Hilton L. Root, Peasants and King in Burgundy: Agrarian Foundations of French Absolutism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 41. 34. Barbara Beckerman Davis, “Poverty and Poor Relief in SixteenthCentury Toulouse,” Historical Reflections 17 (1991): 101. 35. Mary Elizabeth Perry, “Popular History of the Reign,” in The Reign of Louis XIV: Essays in Celebration of Andrew Lossky, ed. Paul Sonnino (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1991), 48. 36. France was definitely not the first to be actively involved in economic life. The despots of Egypt and China engaged in wide management of economic activities. Pitirim A. Sorokin, Man and Society in Calamity: The Effect of War, Revolution, Famine, Pestilence upon Human Mind, Behavior, Social Organization, and Cultural Life (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1963), 129. 37. This harshness could be testified to by catastrophic famines such as that of 1693–94, which killed a tenth of the population and could be compared to any famine in totalitarian societies. Audrey Dorothea DeVore, “Under Pressure: The Ministers of the State of Louis XIV, 1688 to 1700,” PhD diss., University of Southern California, 1979, 7. 38. Andrews, System of Social Justice, 343–44. 39. Davis, “Poverty and Poor Relief,” 89. 40. Ibid, 88. 41. Perry, “Popular History of the Reign,” 48.

216

NOTES

42. Martin S. Staum, Cabanis: Enlightenment and Medical Philosophy in the French Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 110. See also Martineau, Fripons, gueux et loubards, 101. 43. Perry, “Popular History of the Reign,” 49. 44. Davis, “Poverty and Poor Relief,” 212. 45. Ibid., 215. 46. Philadelphe Maurice Alhoy, Les bagnes: histoire, types, moeurs, mystères (Paris: Havard, 1845), 9. 47. Angus Fraser, The Gypsies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 145. 48. Root, Peasants and King, 22. 49. André Zysberg, “Les galériens de Louis XIV,” Histoire 98 (March 1987): 32; Perry, “Popular History of the Reign,” 53. 50. Bernard Durand, “Remarques sur la récidive en Roussillon au XVIIIe siecle,” Revue historique de droit français et étranger 63, no. 1 (1995): 51. 51. Fraser, The Gypsies, 96. 52. Davis, “Poverty and Poor Relief,” 101. 53. Ibid., 204. 54. Monique Lucenet, Les grandes pestes en France (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1985), 159–60. 55. Ibid., 156. 56. Ibid., 164, 170. 57. Daniel Panzac, “Crime ou délit? La législation sanitaire en Provence au XVIIIe siècle,” Revue historique 275, no. 1 (1986): 41. 58. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Carnival in Romans (New York: George Braziller, 1979), 224. 59. William Roosen, “Demographic History of the Reign,” in The Reign of Louis XIV: Essays in Celebration of Andrew Lossky, ed. Paul Sonnino (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1991), 14. 60. Slaven, “Scapegoating, Sexuality, and Theories of the Body.” The drive against prostitutes intensified in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but some French city legislation for their expulsion could be traced to the thirteenth century. Davis, “Poverty and Poor Relief,” 209. 61. Davis, “Poverty and Poor Relief,” 188. 62. Ibid., 211. 63. Ibid., 59. 64. Ibid., 210. 65. Perry, “Popular History of the Reign,” 48. 66. Colin Jones, “Prostitution and the Ruling Class in EighteenthCentury Montpellier,” History Workshop Journal 6 (1978): 8; see also Perry, “Popular History of the Reign,” 53. 67. Perry, “Popular History of the Reign,” 51. 68. Ibid., 53.

NOTES

217

69. Jean-Louis Flandrin, Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 132. 70. Perry, “Popular History of the Reign,” 51. 71. Jeffrey W. Merrick, The Desacralization of the French Monarchy in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 45. 72. Roosen, “Demographic History of the Reign,” 15. 73. Deyon, Le temps des prisons, 22; see also Anchel, Crimes et châtiments, 5. 74. Aubry, La jurisprudence criminelle, 53. 75. Merrick, The Desacralization, 40. 76. Robert Shackleton, “Censure and Censorship: Impediments to Free Publication in the Age of Enlightenment,” Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin 6 (1973): 27. 77. Roger Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language, and Practices, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 63. 78. Andrews, System of Social Justice, 593. See also Andrew Lossky, “The Absolutism of Louis XIV: Reality or Myth?” Canadian Journal of History 19, no. 1 (1984): 2. 79. Root, Peasants and King, 8. 80. Adrianna E. Bakos, Images of Kingship in Early Modern France: Louis XI in Political Thought, 1560–1789 (London: Routledge, 1997), 94. 81. Ibid. 82. Root, Peasants and King, 176. 83. Ibid. 84. Arlette Lebigre, “Les préfets du roi contre les régions,” Histoire 46 (1982): 15. 85. Perry, “Popular History of the Reign,” 51. 86. Andrew Lossky, Louis XIV and the French Monarchy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 33. 87. “Even though the first regular postal service in France dated from the reign of Louis XI (1461–1483), the post developed very slowly as a public service under the ancien régime.” Susan Dimlich Bachrach, “The Feminization of the French Postal Service, 1750–1914,” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1981, 13. One could assume that the postal service started to resemble the modern system only in the eighteenth century. 88. Irma Staza Majer, “The Notion of Singularity: The Travel Journals of Michel de Montaigne and Jean de Léry,” PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1982, 54. 89. Clark, State and Status, 168–69, 342. 90. Prostitution actually increased in some French cities by the end of the seventeenth century. Jones, “Prostitution and the Ruling Class,” 7.

218

NOTES

91. Robert Berger, A Royal Passion: Louis XIV as Patron of Architecture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 85. 92. Clark, State and Status, 337. 93. Ibid., 343. The importance of self-control could be seen in increased concern with masturbation and “excessive sexuality.” Philippe Lejeune, “Le ‘dangereux supplement’: lecture d’un aveu de Rousseau,” Annales 29, no. 4 (1974): 1015. 94. Berger, A Royal Passion, 4–5. 95. Nancy Nichols Barker, Brother to the Sun King: Philippe, Duke of Orléans (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 58–59. 96. Slaven, “Scapegoating,” 84. 97. Flandrin, Families in Former Times, 182. 98. Merrick, The Desacralization, 20. 99. Mary Rosalie Fisher, “Models for Manners: Etiquette Books and Etiquette in Nineteenth-Century France,” PhD diss., New York University, 1992, 18, 50. 100. Calixte Hudemann-Simon, L’état et les pauvres: l’assistance et la lutte contre la mendicité dans les quatre départements rhénans, 1794–1814 (Sigmaringen, Germany: Jan Thorbecke, 1997), 161. 101. Annik Pardailhé-Galabrun, The Birth of Intimacy: Privacy and Domestic Life in Early Modern Paris (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 353. 102. Roosen, “Demographic History of the Reign,” 23. 103. Jean-Pierre Goubert, The Conquest of Water: The Advent of Health in the Industrial Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 91. 104. Ibid. 105. Pardailhé-Galabrun, The Birth of Intimacy, 141. 106. Ibid. 107. On toilets, see also Pierre-Denis Boudriot, “Essai sur l’ordure en milieu urbain à l’époque préindustrielle: boues, immondices et gadoue à Paris au XVIIIe siècle,” Histoire, économie et société 5, no. 4 (1986): 520. 108. Goubert, The Conquest of Water, 92. 109. Davis, “Poverty and Poor Relief,” 206; Reynauld Abad, “Les tuéries àParis sous l’ancien régime ou pourquoi la capitale n’a pas été dotée d’abattoirs aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles,” Histoire, économie et société 17, no. 4 (1998): 666. 110. On the drive for more hygienic behavior, see Annick Le Guerer and Georges Vigarello, “La propriété au temps de Louis XIV,” Histoire 78 (1978): 1985. 111. Annik Pardailhé-Galabrun, La naissance de l’intime: 3000 foyers parisiens XVIIe–XVIII siécles (Paris: Presses Universitairess de France, 1988), 1.

NOTES 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123.

124. 125. 126.

127.

128.

129.

130.

219

Berger, A Royal Passion, 73–74. Ibid., 73. Pardailhé-Galabrun, La naissance de l’intime, 215. Françoise Bayard, “Manière d’habiter des financiers de la premier moitié du XVIIe siècle,” XVIIe siècle 41, no. 1 (1989): 60. Berger, A Royal Passion, 9. Richard Grassby, The Idea of Capitalism before the Industrial Revolution (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 50. Steven L. Kaplan, Bread, Politics and the Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV, 2 vols. (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1976), 1: 5. Ibid., 1: 14. Davis, “Poverty and Poor Relief,” 101. Roosen, “Demographic History of the Reign,” 22. On population increase, see, for example, Root, Peasants and King, 177. Edward N. Luttwak, “Why Dutchmen Grew Taller,” Times Literary Supplement, May 25, 2001; Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974). Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff, 139. Fisher, “Models for Manners,” 28–29, 33. One might add that the idea that rulers should be self-restrained and control their emotions was known to ancient rulers. See, for example, Norman Hammond, “The Road That Has No Ending,” Times Literary Supplement, June 30, 2000, 5; Louis Auchincloss, False Dawn: Women in the Age of Sun King (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1984), 21. Stability also benefited criminals: “stationary” bandits had a “vested interest in providing public services, defending the residents of the territory against roving bandits, for example, or building roads.” Mancur Olson, “Why China Did Better,” Times Literary Supplement, November 23, 2001, 26. The strong despotic government as the only way to maintain order was apparently axiomatic for oriental rulers. See Irene Eber, ed., Confucianism: The Dynamics of Tradition (New York: Macmillan, 1986), 33. E. A. Rees, “Stalinism: The Primacy of Politics,” in Politics, Society, and Stalinism in the USSR, ed. John Channon (New York: Macmillan, 1998), 36. J. Arch Getty, “Pragmatists and Puritans: The Rise and Fall of the Party Control Commission,” Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies 1208 (1997): 3; Stephen White, “Stalinism and the Graphic Arts,” in Politics, Society, and Stalinism in the USSR, ed. John Channon (New York: Macmillan, 1998), 125.

220

NOTES

131. Geoffrey A. Hosking, “Cards on the Table, Comrades,” Times Literary Supplement, January 28, 2000, 3. The machinery and personnel of repression were trained long before the Great Purges during the Civil War. Executions became enterprises that not only terrified but also entertained the public. Even children enjoyed them. Izvestiia, February 8, 2001. 132. Anne Applebaum, “Inside the Gulag,” New York Review of Books, June 15, 2000, 35. 133. Vadim Volkov, “The Concept of Kul’turnost’: Notes on the Stalinist Civilizing Process,” in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (London: Routledge, 1999), 218, 223. 134. White, “Stalinism and the Graphic Arts,” 121. Awe was felt even by liberal intellectuals. They were hardly so naïve as to believe Stalin was elected in the usual way, and they were aware of the span of the terror. Yet they were in awe of Stalin. Valentin Lyubarsky, “Soviet Civilization,” Times Literary Supplement, September 7, 2001, 17. 135. On nationalism in Stalin’s Russia and his desire to identify with ancient rulers, see David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 136. Applebaum, “Inside the Gulag,” 33. 137. “General Alexander Lebed’s father, a factory worker, was twice ten minutes late to work in 1937, for which he received a five-year camp sentence.” Ibid., 35. 138. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 330. 139. Foucault and the postmodernists who saw in “discourse” both enslavement and liberation continued to be popular. Hardt and Negri saw even building empires in the Foucaultian way. “Imperial command is exercised no longer through the disciplinary modalities of the modern state, but rather through the modalities of biopolitical control. These modalities have as their basis and their object a productive multitude that cannot be regimented and normalized, but must nonetheless be governed, even in its autonomy” (Empire, 344). 140. One recent episode might demonstrate the persistence of postmodernist paradigms in their Leftist reading. A 2002 study suggested that blacks are more predisposed to certain diseases than whites. This discovery of biologists has been perceived as having racist implications and protested. “The American Sociological Association, for instance, said in a recent statement that ‘race is a sociological construct,’ and warned of the ‘danger of contributing to the popular conception of race as biological.’” Nicholas Wade, “Gene Study Identifies 5 Main Human Populations,” New York Times, December 20, 2002.

NOTES

221

141. Michael Walzer, “Intellectuals, Social Classes, and Revolution,” in Democracy, Revolution, and History, ed. Theda Skocpol (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 136–37. 142. See, for example, Hardt and Negri, Empire. 143. Tony Judt, “Why the Cold War Worked,” New York Review of Books, October 9, 1997. 144. In this theory, the cold war was not a geopolitical conflict but rooted in ideological differences between the USSR and the West. These views were elaborated in the Black Book of Communism. For discussion, see, for example, Henri Astier, “Worse than Hitler?” Times Literary Supplement, September 1, 2000; Anne Applebaum, “A History of Horrors,” New York Review of Books, October 18, 2000; Martin Malia, “The Lesser Evil?” Times Literary Supplement, March 27, 1998; Gabriel Schoenfeld, “Room at the Top,” Wall Street Journal, April 15, 1998; Arkedii Vaisberg, “Professora sorbonny v poiskakh novogo ‘svetlogo budushchego,’” Obshchaia Gazeta 8, no. 4 (1998). Postmodernist intellectuals on the Left were also trashed; see, for example, John Hargreaves, “Michel Foucault and His Defenders,” Times Literary Supplement, January 25, 2002, 17; James Drake, “The Naming Disease,” Times Literary Supplement, September 4, 1998. On conservative views of Russian history and the Left, see, for example, Richard Pipes, “Did the Peasants Really Make Russia?” Times Literary Supplement, August 24, 2001. These ideologists lambasted the “ideological frenzy” to create harmonious societies that cost countless millions and strike a “triumphalist note” seeing their ideological rival vanquished by the collapse of the USSR. Joseph Joffe, “The Worst of Times,” New York Times Book Review, December 21, 1999, 22. 145. Lynne Brindley, “American Influence in the Post-War World,” Times Literary Supplement, August 31, 2001, 15. 146. Robert D. Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post-Cold War (New York: Random House, 2000). See also Chester A. Crocker and Fen Osler Hampson with Pamela All, eds., Managing Global Chaos: Sources of and Responses to International Conflict (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace, 1996). On peacekeeping, see Clement E. Adibe, “Learning from Failure in Somalia,” in A Future for Peacekeeping? ed. Edward Moxon-Browne (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998), 144. 147. “How Great Are the Risks for Socioeconomic Collapse in Russia? An Inventory of Russian Problem Areas,” Swedish Defense Research Institute (May 1, 2000). On “chaos theory,” see Jack Martin Balcer, The Persian Conquest of the Greeks, 545–450 B.C. (Konstanz, Germany: Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 1995), 220.

222

NOTES

148. “Russia’s Solzhenitsyn Wants Death Penalty Restored,” Reuters (April 29, 2001). 149. Michael Dutton and Lee Tianfu, “Missing a Target? Policing Strategies in the Period of Economic Reform,” Crime and Delinquency 39, no. 3 (July 1993): 317. 150. Some people downplayed the importance of the events of September 11. See, for example, Patrick E. Tyler, “The World Cries Uncle,” New York Times Book Review, September 22, 2002, 22. 151. On rather grave pictures of the crime problem in contemporary society, see Robert Reiner, “Prisoners in the Cage,” Times Literary Supplement, January 25, 2002. 152. Maureen Dowd, “Plague on the Potomac,” New York Times on the Web, October 17, 2001; “Laws for an Epidemic,” editorial, Washington Post, December 3, 2001. 153. Postmodernists regarded activities of criminal, terrorist, and asocial groups as a way of combating “hegemonic discourse.” Because postmodernism was born in France, the attack against crime as “alternative discourse” acquired a French reading, reinforced by the fact that France was the strongest opponent of the Iraq war. The French reciprocated, and their anti-American feelings spread in Europe. Henri Astier, “La maladie française,” Times Literary Supplement, January 10, 2003. 154. Ideologies and discourse continue to be popular explanations of the events. The attacks were often reduced to the influence of Islamic fundamentalists. The economic problems of this or that country were also explained by the variety of ideologies. Liah Greenfeld, The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 155. On the vision of the role of the state at that time, see, for example, Martin van Creveld, The Rise and Decline of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 156. Bill Keller, “Reagan’s Son,” New York Times, January 26, 2003. 157. John Lewis Gaddis, “Setting Right a Dangerous World,” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 11, 2002, B10. 158. Robert Kagan, “Power and Weakness,” Policy Review (June–July 2002). 159. William Safire, “Seizing Dictatorial Power,” New York Times, November 15, 2001; Safire, “Kangaroo Courts,” New York Times on the Web, November 26, 2001; Safire, “Military Tribunal Modified,” New York Times on the Web, March 21, 2001; Safire, “The Great and Unwatched,” New York Times on the Web, February 18, 2002; Elizabeth Bumiller and Katharine Q. Seelye, “Bush Defends Wartime Call for Tribunal,” New York Times on the Web, December 5, 2001); Mike Allen, “Bush Defends Order for Wartime Tribunals,”

NOTES

160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167.

168. 169. 170. 171. 172. 173. 174. 175.

223

Washington Post Online, November 20, 2001; Katharine Seelye, “Public Defender Denied for Suspected American Taliban,” New York Times on the Web, June 26, 2002; John Markhoff-Schwartz, “Bush Administration to Propose System for Monitoring Internet,” New York Times, December 20, 2002; Dan Eggen, “FBI Seeks Data on Foreign Students,” Washington Post, December 25, 2002. Politika, October 25, 2001; Izvestiia, February 4, 2003. Safire, “Seizing Dictatorial Power.” Bob Herbert, “Bait and Switch,” New York Times, January 30, 2003. William Safire, “Voices of Negativism,” New York Times, December 6, 2001. Diane Squire, “Information Policy, Citizen Privacy, and ‘National Insecurity,’” IU Home Pages, February 28, 2003. Izvestiia, April 14, 2001. Kai T. Erikson, “The Functions of Social Deviance,” in Social Deviance, ed. Erich Goode (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1996), 136. Recognition of the importance of a strong state as guarantor of security changed the approach to modern authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. Some observers stated that China’s economic success was due to its ability to preserve social and political stability by keeping the controlling power of the party government. The USSR, which did not preserve a strong state, collapsed and Russia was relegated to a third world country. Christopher Marsh, “Talking Behind Their Back: Chinese Thoughts on Their Coming Collapse,” National Interest, October 23, 2003. Maureen Dowd, “Dances with Wolfewitz,” New York Times, April 9, 2003. Michael Ignatieff, “Barbarians at the Gate?” New York Review of Books, February 28, 2002. Keller, “Reagan’s Son.” “The Worst-Case Scenario Arrives,” New York Times, March 6, 2003. “U.S.-Europe Iraq Dispute a Strategy Shift,” New York Times, March 6, 2003. R. Scott Appleby, “The Next Christendom,” New York Times Book Review, May 12, 2002. Elaine Sciolino, “European Union in the New Warning on Bush GoIt-Alone War,” New York Times, March 12, 2003. Paul Krugman, “Things to Come,” New York Times, March 18, 2003. The economic problems could be aggravated by the spread of contagious disease. Thomas Crampton, “Asia Faces Increasing Isolation Because of Deadly Disease,” New York Times, April 9, 2003.

224

NOTES

176. Thomas L. Friedman, “Hold Your Applause,” New York Times, April 9, 2003. 177. Barry Gewen, “Thinking the Unthinkable,” New York Times Book Review, September 15, 2002, 12. 178. Eric Lichtblau, “Republicans Want Terror Law Made Permanent,” New York Times, April 9, 2003. 179. On the possible reverse of globalization, see Harold James, The End of Globalization: Lessons from the Great Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

INDEX

absolute power, 12, 14, 15, 17, 22, 136, 137–38, 139, 156, 165, 180 absolutism and the law, 155–56 absolutist state. See repressive state Africa, 78, 79, 80, 81, 164, 168, 171, 171 AIDS, 73, 75, 137, 181 anomie assumptions of, 17 characteristics of, 20, 25, 29, 45, 54, 89, 114 class structure and, 29, 50, 64, 134 defined as, 7, 31, 131 displacement and, 108 marginalization of, 7 significance of, 133 violence and, 36 anomization absolutist governments and, 134–35 biological consequences, 20 capitalism and, 132–33 class structure and, 134 ideology and, 133 increase of, 20, 21–22, 36, 37, 109, 124 injustice and, 19 as mainstream, 131 mercenaries and, 21 societal breakdown and, 19–20, 132, 134

views of, 17–19, 131–32 arbitrary punishment, 144 Arendt, Hannah, 2, 5–6 army mercenaries and, 37, 44–45, 56–58 and nobles, 44 Augustus Caesar, 23, 24 Badefol, Seguin de, 47 Baker, Keith, 12 banditry beggars and, 114–15 clergy and, 112 decline in, 107, 157 disease and, 77 famine and, 82 incentives for, 39–40 increase for, 36, 122 mercenaries and, 61, 112–13, 113–14 nobles and, 42, 44, 110–11, 112, 134 peasant uprisings and, 63 politics of, 45–46 soldiers and, 112, 113–14, 118 students and, 53–54 vagabonds and, 115 Bayley, David, 7 beggars, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69–70, 114–15, 116, 123, 147 Bellamy, John Williams, 40 Belleville, Jeanne de, 47 bin Ladin, Osama, 172

226

INDEX

Black Death biological aspects of, 75 death rates for, 82–83, 83–84, 106 depopulation from, 84–85 famine and, 82, 83–84 globalization and, 75–76, 122 handling of corpses, 84 increase of crime during, 85–86 lawful authority and, 85 other diseases and, 82 pan-European range of, 80–81 psychological effects of, 83–84 routes of, 81–82 sanitation and, 76, 160 similarities to AIDS, 75 symptoms of, 83 Braudel, Fernand, 73, 75 bribery, 51–52 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 171 Bubonic plague. See Black Death; plagues burglary, 53, 63, 70, 71, 103 Bush, George W., 177 Callot, Jacques, 112 Cambodia, 154 capitalism anomization and, 132–33 cohesiveness of, 7, 8 development of, 30, 31, 33, 179 extinction of, 145 ideology of, 56, 154, 166, 168, 179 state expansion and, 4 trade and, 73, 74 capital punishment, 141, 142–44, 144 Carpentier, Elisabeth, 80 castes, 49, 50, 58, 107 Castiglione, Baldassare, 158 censorship, 153 Chandos, John, 56

Charles VII, 106 children, concern for, 159 China, 11, 13, 36–37, 135, 154, 182 Christians, 6, 63, 66, 140 Church discipline, 152–53 cities crime and, 116–17 economic regulation of, 164 prostitution in, 93 spread of plague, 123–24 See also Paris clergy banditry and, 112 criminality of, 54–55 decline in violent crime, 107 democratization of sexuality, 95, 124 moralizing of, 123 Clinton, William Jefferson, 10 Cohen, Esther, 38 Collins, James, 108 communes, 15, 64, 145 concubinage, 57, 72, 95, 99, 129, 158 Congo, 59, 137 contrainte solidaire, 145–46 corporal punishment, 136–37 Courtier, The (Castiglione), 158 courts, 23, 71, 141, 156 crime acceptance of, 21, 34, 69 decrease in, 107, 157–58 defined as, 19 increase of, 21, 29, 30, 63, 65, 95, 119, 134, 137 intolerance toward, 34 nobles and, 43–44, 107 normalcy of, 32–33 opportunities for, 69, 116 pandemic diseases and, 85–86, 107–8 prosecution of, 33–34

INDEX social controls and, 15, 29, 30, 117, 165 social divisions and, 32, 49 spacial divisions of, 32–33 urbanization and, 116 white-collar, 42 Cuttler, S. H., 46 Dark Ages, violence during, 24–25 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 116 debauchery, 88–89 decapitation, 142 defecation/urination regulation, 159–60 De Revolutionibus orbium coelestium (Copernicus), 5 despotic regimes. See absolute power; repressive state; State diseases. See Black Death; pandemic diseases drug trafficking, 42 drunkenness, 52, 53, 57, 123 dueling, 37, 141, 157 Durkheim, Emile, 7, 31, 32 economic regulations, 163–64 Edward II (England), 48 Edward III (England), 52–53 Elias, Norbert, 49, 73, 107, 110, 165 elites. See nobles Engerman, Stanley L., 164 Etienne, Charles, 130 executioners, 144 Falstaff, John, 56 family, importance of, 158 famine bandits and, 82 Black Death and, 82, 83–84 mercenaries and, 82 spread of disease and, 77, 124 fixation, 146 Florensky, Paul, 88

227

Fogel, Robert William, 164 Foucault, Michel, 34, 73, 135, 168, 179, 181–82 Fouret, Claude, 109 Fracasoro, Girolamo, 125 France, liberalism of, 183 Freud, Sigmund, 165 Friedman, Thomas, 178 Fukuyama, Francis, 171, 179 Gaddis, John Lewis, 174 gemeinschaft society customs of, 7, 8, 20, 26, 68, 98, 119 erosion of, 30, 133, 134, 180–81 military and, 26, 44, 56 patriarchy and, 86 urban influence on, 68 gesellschaft society, 7, 8, 133, 180 globalization, 79, 80, 174, 177, 179 Goldsmith, Leslie, 116–17, 123 Gonthier, Nicole, 49 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 169, 171 Got’e, Iurii, 182 Greece, 23, 30, 64, 80, 97, 105, 106 Gurr, Ted Robert, 3 gypsies, 67, 148–49 Henri II (France), 141 Henry IV (England), 116, 163 Herzen, Alexander, 179 highway robbery, 42, 47–48, 49, 57, 58, 72 Hobbes, Thomas, 138–39, 178–79 Leviathan, 175 Hobbesian state, 138, 139, 164, 175, 179, 182 homicide, 36, 38, 52, 109, 142 hunger, 14, 163–64 See also famine Hussein, Saddam, 178

228

INDEX

hygiene bathing and, 77 eating utensils and, 77 improvements in, 162 laws to enforce, 74 rules of, 73, 132, 159 venereal disease and, 105 infanticide, 103–4, 141–42 Jean II (France), 48 Jews, 63, 66, 110, 140 Johnson, Chalmers, 3 Kagan, Robert, 175 Keller, Bill, 174, 177 kings corruption and, 52–53 divinity of, 139–40 legitimization of, 12 pardons and, 144 protection of subjects, 155, 156 knights emergence of, 25–26 hunting and, 28–29 solidarity among, 26 violence and, 26–27, 27–28, 29 Knowles, Robert, 56 laws absolutism and, 155–56 Black Death and, 85 bureaucracy and, 51 hygiene and, 74 impartiality of, 33–34 men/women recognition, 52 sexuality and, 149–52 as societal controls, 73–74 legitimization of rulers, 12–14 Lenin, Vladimir, 3, 174 LeRoy Ladurie, Emmanuel, 75, 80, 85, 105, 130, 149 Leviathan (Hobbes), 175 looting, 132

Lossky, Andrew, 157 Louis XIII (France), 150 Louis XIV (France), 151, 152, 157, 159, 161, 162, 168, 174 Louis XV (France), 158 Man and Society in Calamity (Sorokin), 8–9 Marx, Karl, 21, 73 McVeigh, Timothy, 176 mercenaries anomization and, 21 as army, 37, 56–58 banditry and, 112–13, 113–14 brutality of, 59–60 cost of, 56 decrease in violence, 156 discipline of, 60–61 famine and, 82 gemeinschaft culture and, 56 habits of, 57 highway robbery and, 57 incentives for, 39–40, 57–58, 58–59 increase in, 58 nobles and, 58 organization of, 61–63 origins of, 55–56 popularity of, 58 prostitution and, 93 sense of displacement and, 108–9 syphilis and, 105 threats to public, 57 weapons availability, 38 middle class, 12–13 conflicts and, 29 crime and, 42, 43, 101 democratic tradition of, 14 economic weakness of, 12–13, 14 legalistic culture of, 14, 110 power of, 133

INDEX values of, 32, 134, 181, 183 migration increase of violence, 35, 119–20 spread of disease, 122, 134, 159 Moore, R. I., 140 murder, 20, 24, 28, 29, 30, 33, 46, 47, 53, 54, 59, 60, 63, 108, 114, 115, 130, 142 prosecution for, 40, 143 New York Times, 176, 178 Nixon, Richard, 10 nobles army and, 44 banditry and, 42, 44, 45–46, 110–11, 112, 134 as bureaucrats, 51 corruption and, 51–52 highway robbery and, 47–48 and mercenary armies, 44–45 order and, 10–11 petty theft and, 50, 134 political banditry and, 45–46, 46 private wars and, 46 rape and, 134 restraint of, 107–8, 158 sense of displacement and, 108–9 social norms of, 49–50 toughness of, 43 victims and, 49 violent crime and, 43–44, 107 women and banditry, 47 Operation Iraqi Freedom, 177 order, restoration of, 10–12 oriental despotism, 22 Ottoman Empire increase of violence, 121–22 migration and, 119–20 peasants and, 120–21 spread of banditry, 117–19 students and, 120

229

pandemic diseases biological aspects of, 75 crime and, 107–8 decline of, 159 discarding possessions and, 76 famine and, 77 globalization and, 75–76 handling of corpses and, 76, 77 sanitation and, 75–76, 134 sexual promiscuity and, 104, 125, 127 spread of, 73, 74–75, 75–76, 181 pardons, 144 Paris anonymity of, 69 beggars and, 69–70 crime in, 68, 70, 116, 161, 162 depopulation from Black Death, 84–85 economic crisis of, 69 mobility for criminals, 72 pickpockets and, 71–72 as place of refuge, 69 prostitution and, 93 regulation of, 161 security improvements, 157 spatial and social division of, 70–71 as student center, 53 thieves and guilds, 69, 70 transportation improvements, 161–62 Parsons, Talcott, 31, 132 peasants banditry and, 63, 117, 120–21 uprisings of, 11, 13, 59, 63, 100, 117 petty theft, 45, 49, 50, 65, 66, 69, 72, 94, 134 pickpocketing, 71–72 Pipes, Richard, 10

230

INDEX

plagues in Athens, 77–78 Biblical accounts of, 77 decline of, 159 effects in Constantinople, 79–80 as punishment, 123 in Rome, 78–79 spread of, 80, 122–24 throughout Roman Empire, 79 policing cohesiveness of, 68 controlling, 11, 22, 34, 107, 157, 159, 161 created, 23–24, 151 growth of, 107, 156 presence, 95, 151, 154 regulations of, 148, 153 rural, 144 weaknesses of, 22 women and, 96, 151 See also self-policing pornography, 90–91, 158 power and bureaucracy, 51–52 premeditated murder, 141 property crimes, 40 prostitution, 42 attitudes toward, 89–90 clergy and, 95 concubines and, 95 economics of, 91, 94 importing of, 94 increase of, 124 mercenaries and, 93 nobility and, 94 in Paris, 93 pornography and, 90–91 regulation of, 94, 125, 149–51 social stability and, 95 societal breakdown and, 86 societal need for, 91–92 syphilis and, 105, 126–27, 134 vagabonds and, 92–93 violence and, 95–96, 134

public attitude toward crime, 21, 34, 69 public order, disturbance of, 115 Putin, Vladimir, 137, 170 rape cultural roots of, 96–97, 132 decrease in, 157–58 economic status and, 101, 128, 129–30 group assaults, 100–101, 102, 130 indicator of virility, 97–98 lack of restraint and, 98–99 military culture and, 99–100 motivation for, 101 nobles and, 98, 134 property crimes and, 103 punishment and, 100 victims of, 97 victims’ responses, 102–3 violence of, 98, 128 repression, increase of, 139, 140–41, 155 repressive state absolutism and, 155–56 corporal punishment and, 136–37 ideologies and, 135–36 ideologies of, 154, 170–71, 181–84 increase of security, 164–66 leaders and, 137–38 legitimacy of, 144–45, 179–80 normalization and, 137, 138, 155, 180–81 personal security and, 156–57 property protection and, 163 repression and, 139, 140–41 role of, 1–2, 9 slave trade and, 164 success of, 164 support for, 17–18 See also State

INDEX revolutions collapse of order, 8 cyclical model of, 4–6 defined as, 2–4, 4–5, 6 medieval vision of, 5–6 restore basic order, 1, 9–10, 11–12 Rock, David, 105 Roman Republic, 22–24 Rome, 5, 22, 23, 24, 54, 64–65, 78, 79, 84, 171 rulers absolute power of, 14–16 characteristics of, 137–38 legitimacy of, 12–14 Russia anarchy and, 18 bribery and, 51–52 communes, 145 criminal elite and, 43 post-Soviet, 137, 171 Romanov dynasty and, 10 Rwanda, 137 sacrilege, 152–53 Sade, Marquis de, 96–97 Safire, William, 176 sanitation defecation/urination regulation and, 159–60 and handling of corpses, 77 improvements in, 162 lack of, 74 regulation of, 160–61 spread of diseases and, 76, 122, 134 urbanization and, 74 Schmidt, Carl, 175 security, increase of, 156–57, 159, 162, 164–66 self-policing, 15, 16, 136, 138, 155, 165, 180, 181, 182 See also policing

231

September 11, 2002, 135, 172–74, 175, 183 sexual acts, 95–96, 97 See also rape sexuality attitudes toward, 89, 158–59 democratization of, 124, 128–29 lack of restraint, 98–99 laws on, 149–52 multiple partners and, 99 speech and, 124 spiritual changes and, 88–89 See also prostitution Simmel, George, 25, 36 Skocpol, Theda, 2–3 slave labor, 148, 168 slavery, 14, 65, 90, 91, 92, 99, 102, 118, 119, 145, 146, 147, 164, 168, 169, 173 slave trade, 80, 148, 164 social control changes in, 3, 35, 65, 99, 133, 136, 137, 181 courts and, 23, 71, 141, 156 crime and, 15, 29, 30, 117, 165 early modern state and, 74 social disintegration capitalism and, 30–31 despotic state and, 16, 154 disease and, 77 factors leading to, 9 increase of crime and, 23, 29, 36, 73, 91, 92, 95, 111, 117 longevity of, 137 normalization and, 180–81 patriarchy and, 86–87 sense of displacement and, 64, 108 as transitional state, 19, 21, 133, 134, 136 urbanization and, 30–32, 68 social engineering, 146–47

232

INDEX

social norms, 20, 31, 33, 49, 54, 155, 162, 163 Sociology of Revolution, The (Sorokin), 8–9 soldiers banditry and, 112, 113–14, 118 decrease in violence, 156 honorable discharge of, 163 military organization of, 118, 119 sense of displacement and, 108–9 syphilis and, 127 See also mercenaries Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 171–72 Sorokin, Pitirim, 2, 15, 16, 18, 21, 31, 33, 131–32, 137, 154, 182 Man and Society in Calamity, 8–9 Sociology of Revolution, The, 8–9 State brothel regulations, 125 censorship and, 153 defecation/urination regulation and, 159–60 economic regulations and, 163–64 fixation regulations, 146 food regulations and, 145–46, 163–64 increased power of, 107, 154 ineffectiveness of, 112 institution regulations and, 147–48 legitimacy of, 144–45 sexuality regulation, 149–52 slave labor and, 148 social engineering and, 146–47, 148 spiritual regulation and, 152–53 travel restrictions and, 148–49 violence of, 154

State and Revolution, The (Lenin), 174 Stenitskii, N. A., 132 students, 53–54, 120 syphilis spread of, 86, 104, 105–6, 108, 125–27, 181 treatment of, 127–28 terrorism, 176, 177–78 See also September 11, 2002 terrorists, 173, 176, 183 thievery Paris and, 69, 70 rates of, 38 students and, 54 See also pickpocketing Time on the Cross (Fogel and Engerman), 164 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 165, 179 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 7, 30 totalitarian regimes. See repressive state trade, 73, 74 travel, 74–75, 148–49 Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, The (Lenin), 3 United States civil liberties and, 179 global predominance and, 177 governing elite and, 10 imperialism of, 171 instability of, 177–79, 179–80 need for security, 173–74, 183, 184 as repressive state, 174–76, 181 torture and, 179 toughness of, 42–43 urbanization crime and, 116 sanitation and, 74, 122, 134 social disintegration and, 30–32

INDEX urination/defecation regulation, 159–60 USSR, 154 as repressive state, 176, 182–83 security of, 171–72 Stalin regime and, 135, 166–70 vagabonds banditry and, 115 emergence of, 64–65 in France, 66–68 increase of, 65 and mercenaries, 67–68 migration of, 65 and prostitution, 92–93 rise of, 66–67 slave labor and, 148 social engineering and, 148 susceptible to disease, 77 Villandrando, Rodrique de, 47 violence culture of, 27 declining, 156 economic divisions and, 109 increase of, 36, 40, 108, 121–22 institutionalization of, 28 legitimization of, 37 plunder and, 109–10

233

proliferation of, 40–41 protection from, 15 religious factions and, 108 sense of displacement and, 108–9 by State, 154 unmotivated, 39 urban/rural, 115–16 weapons accessibility and, 109 weapons availability, 117–18 See also crime Volkischer Beobachter, 174 war, democratization of, 37 War of the Roses, 49 weapons availability of, 37–38, 38 of mass destruction, 177, 178 white-collar crime, 42 women criminal behavior of, 39 interest in sexuality, 87–88, 128 lack of male guardianship, 86–87 legal existence of, 52 nobles and banditry, 47 rape victims, 97 starvation and, 87