Once Belgium was acknowledged internationally (1839), the concerns of the young State’s governments quickly passed from outwards to inwards, with the increase in popular upheavals and the emergence of social conflicts of a new generation in the background. The 1840s therefore represented a critical period as regards the legitimization process ...
(Show more)Once Belgium was acknowledged internationally (1839), the concerns of the young State’s governments quickly passed from outwards to inwards, with the increase in popular upheavals and the emergence of social conflicts of a new generation in the background. The 1840s therefore represented a critical period as regards the legitimization process of the State. Thanks to an “efficient” control and repression system, disorder was avoided whilst, in a background of economic crisis, revolutions burst out across the old continent. Yet, this critical moment in the history of the inward legitimization of the State must not make us forget the highly time-consuming undertaking aimed at imposing the new regime and its way of working to the country as a whole, including rural parts. Indeed, as regards the way of living and the forms taken by social regulation in particular, the ways of the “Ancien Régime” still prevailed for a long time in the Belgian countryside of the 19th century. In this context, the judges, and more globally, judicial actions played the role of a privileged interface between the people and central administration, which also proved to be a conflictive interface through which the State tried to legitimize itself and to impose its regulation modes, but also to share the middle-class and liberal values on which its creation was based.
We learn through the archives of the prosecution offices that notably except the crisis periods where certain fringes of the population were suddenly under the spotlights of the repression, the customary population dealing with the administration system and penal justice was composed of rural people, essentially day workers, many of which due to their taking part in brawls and other street violence, which could result in human death. The more we progress in the century, the more this type of violence played an increasing role in the matters dealt with by the courts. In this respect, it is interesting to note that in Belgium, as everywhere in North Europe at the time, while extreme violence represented by homicide rather tended to decrease, the “Assaults” category was rather on the increase.
What does the increase in ordinary violence mean? A surge in daily violence, an increasing intolerance of society towards certain ways of social interaction or the use of penal justice as a way to rule the country?
The matter will be addressed based on published statistics and archives of the prosecution offices, particularly heeding the parties on the field (local police, plaintiffs, prosecutors, ...).
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