Preliminary Programme

Tue 26 February
    14.15
    16.30

Wed 27 February
    8.30
    10.45
    14.15
    16.30

Thu 28 February
    8.30
    10.45
    14.15
    16.30

Fri 29 February
    8.30
    10.45
    14.15
    16.30

Sat 1 March
    8.30
    10.45
    14.15
    16.30

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Tuesday 26 February 2008 16.30
C-2 CRI03 Homicide on the Long Run: The Belgian Case
Cave C
Network: Criminal Justice Chair: Pete King
Organizer: Aude Musin Discussant: Pete King
Bernard Dauven, Xavier Rousseaux : Homicide on the long run : a regional case : Brabant (1350-2000)
Belgium data on homicide are interesting for two reasons. Firstly, the demographic and criminal statistics established in 1830 offers a relatively good quality. Secondly, the rich material produced in one of the most urbanized region of Europe since the 14th century, especially on recorded homicide (accounts of justice officers, pardon’s ... (Show more)
Belgium data on homicide are interesting for two reasons. Firstly, the demographic and criminal statistics established in 1830 offers a relatively good quality. Secondly, the rich material produced in one of the most urbanized region of Europe since the 14th century, especially on recorded homicide (accounts of justice officers, pardon’s letters) has been exploited in many crime studies, especially Manuel Eisner’s essays .
This contribution is the second of three devoted to Homicide on the long run.
Our purpose is to compare both sets of data on a regional basis, by comparing the ancient duchy of Brabant (1350-1650) with today provinces of Antwerp and Brabant (1830-2000) and revise some traditional explanation of homicide evolution on the long run, only based on local or national rates.

Partly due to this demographic density, the incredible state of the southern Low Countries’ documentation makes it possible to have a comprehensive and coherent vision of the public management of homicide from the end of the middle ages .
The study of the sources of practice will highlight a major trend going through the whole period: the decline of the homicide rate. But, on top of a regular trend, the study of these sources clearly indicates an irregular activity of the different officers, which needs to enlighten the role of these officers as actors of homicide repression and their role as mediators between the central power and the population. This shows, on the one hand, how recorded homicide rate varies according to the institution which is mainly in charge of it; and on the other hand how this quantitative difference and this responsibility taken by institutions which are more and more centralised has been accompanied by a change of position on homicide. This evolution is clearly illustrated in the evolutions related to the vocabulary of homicide, with the appearance of the murder in the 15th century and its growth throughout the period studied (the reversed trend as compared with the simple homicide), and to a lesser extent, with the emergence of the category ‘assassination’ in the 16th century. The aim of the paper will then be to demonstrate how the qualitative has a role to play on the quantitative. A lesser tolerance towards homicide defined as acts which are more and more serious must be pointed out, but, paradoxically, the simple homicide, by breaking away from murders and assassinations, follows a reverse evolution towards a definition which highlights the gravity of the act to a lesser degree, which is perfectly conveyed in the 16th and 17th centuries in the King’s letters of pardon which forgive the perpetrator of a homicide but which at the same time also participate in the criminalization of the homicide as such. The interest of the issue will lie in this paradoxical evolution focusing on forgiveness which is granted more and more often for an act which is more and more criminalized.

In the 19th c. national state, homicide has been clearly defined by Napoleonic Penal Code. Under Adolphe Quetelet impulse, a refined statistical apparatus has been established. The production on national judicial, criminal and medical statistics, discriminated by provinces and arrondissement allows us to compare the level of homicide for two major provinces Antwerp and Brabant . Unlike the Namur case examined by Aude Musin, these provinces became in the 19th-20th c., more urbanized.
In the paper, we will try to follow long-term continuing decline of homicide, the variability between rural and urban arrondissements, as well as the transformations in modus operandi and in legal qualifications. Opposite to the 14th-17th trend of criminalisation, we suspect for the 19th-20th a process of decriminalisation, due to the emergence of new forms of involuntary homicide as traffic accidents. (Show less)

Aude Musin : Homicide on the Long Run : a Regional Case (Namur, 1360-1860)
Linked to the “civilizing process” theory (Norbert Elias), the decline of lethal violence in Western World from the Middle Ages to the 1950s has had the attention of scholars in the past few years, especially since the appearance of Ted Gurr’s study (Historical Trends in violent Crime : a critical ... (Show more)
Linked to the “civilizing process” theory (Norbert Elias), the decline of lethal violence in Western World from the Middle Ages to the 1950s has had the attention of scholars in the past few years, especially since the appearance of Ted Gurr’s study (Historical Trends in violent Crime : a critical Review of the Evidence in Crime and Justice, 1981) and Manuel Eisner’s article (Modernization, Self-control and lethal Violence…, 2001). This last essay and other ones use figures issuing from various studies to estimate homicide rates in Belgium before the nineteenth century. We would begin briefly by proving that most of these figures, from the pre-statistics period, are problematic for the Belgian case, largely because they don’t take all the useful sources about homicide into account. As a second point, we would develop a case study of Namur, a city of middle importance in the Low Countries, from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, basing our study on all the conserved sources on homicides known by urban Justice, the “Haute Cour” (High Court) of Namur. This case study and other ones in the session “Homicide on the Long Run : the Belgian Case” should produce reliable datas for “pre-statistics” Belgium, useful for judging long term trends. Moreover, we would place lethal violence in the larger context of violence in general : if homicide rates decline, other forms (non-lethal violence, sexual abuses, verbal abuses,…) do not necessarily follow the same trend. This study case inevitably gives rise to a few methodological remarks : homicide is gradually criminalized by the central government during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Before that, some homicides are lawful, authorized (feuds or self-defence). This authorized violence is problematic for many scholars and forms part of the methodological debate about relevant homicide rates for the Middle Ages (Crime, Histoire et Sociétés, 2001 and 2002). For the “Ancien Régime” our contribution would consider homicide “management” by local Justice, while Bernard Dauven and Xavier Rousseaux’s would focus on the regional and “central” level. As a third point, with all the methodological cautions, we would extend our research to the statistics period (since the 1830s for Belgium) by using judicial statistics to seek further evolution. (Show less)

Frédéric Vesentini : Homicide on the Long Run : the Belgian Case (1830-1990)
This paper is the third and last in a series of three (Musin / Dauven-Rousseaux) that have sought to describe the evolution of homicides committed in « Belgian space » from the 14th century to the present. Our first point will involve evaluating changes in sources that occurred at the ... (Show more)
This paper is the third and last in a series of three (Musin / Dauven-Rousseaux) that have sought to describe the evolution of homicides committed in « Belgian space » from the 14th century to the present. Our first point will involve evaluating changes in sources that occurred at the beginning of the 19th century and, above all, measuring the impact of those changes on our counting the number of homicides. At the dawn of State statistics, Belgium was a pioneer in the production of administrative statistics, under the influence of personalities like Quetelet or Ducpétiaux. Those official statistics, continuously produced since 1830, will be our principal source in this research. Once the ways of constructing the data base have been established, the rest of the text will be dedicated to exploring four critical elements in the comprehension of homicides committed in Belgian society.

The first questions the continuity and rupture between mid 19th century society and the Ancien Régime. Taking sources into consideration, can homicide be used as a vantage point in asking that question in terms of the evolution and continuity of ongoing processes, at a period when new political structures were being set up ? The second element seeks to explore and detail the stability in 19th century rates, in going beyond the rate for 100,000 inhabitants and in trying to detect mutations in a changing, industrializing society, where new actors and new social relationships appear and remain. Thus particular attention will be paid to the geography of homicides as well as to the evolution of relationships between victims and criminals. A third element is devoted to the first half of the 20th century and, particularly, the country’s two wartime occupations. Once again we shall look beyond the strict estimation of homicide figures by taking advantage of these occupation situations to study the evolution of violent behaviour and its wartime management, as well as for considering such crises to be « social stress », with everything that that can reveal about the state of a society. Finally, the last element considered involves the evolution of homicides during the second half of the 20th century in taking a direct look at the perceptible rise that took place during the 1960’s and 1980’s. After having evaluated the demographic impact, various hypotheses will open the debate on a question crisscrossing the four subjects : as to how the civilisation process has unfolded in Belgian space ? With its wars and a rise in homicide rates, does the 20th century represent an element of rupture in relation to this evolution ? (Show less)



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