violence

From 1562 to 1598, as the Wars of Religion deprived France of its reference points, strategies for mastering, disguising, and eliminating religious signs became necessary for survival. External markers of identity provide crucial insight into what civil wars do to a society.

“Excited delirium” is a diagnosis that was used to absolve police officers of responsibility for the deaths of Black and Brown men. For decades, it was legitimized by a network of forensic pathologists, law enforcement agencies, and private companies that sustained this pseudoscience.

The ritual massacre perpetrated by the Natchez against several hundred French settlers in Louisiana on 28 November 1729 was the starting point of a colonial violence against a tribe that lasted until its near disappearance.

Around 1900, when Paris had absorbed its outlying communes and the city’s lower depths were populated by a range of shady characters, police officers oscillated between repression and social chronicle. These bulwarks against crime were also painters of poverty, who did not shy away from poetry.

Jérémie Foa has written a history of the “other side” of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Nameless people, thrown into the Seine or buried in mass graves, succumbed to the blows of killers as well as to collective forgetting, which the historian seeks to remedy. This is an important book on mass violence.

Like machine guns, Kodak cameras make it possible to celebrate Western “modernity”. But to what extent do the photographs show European violence in Africa and Asia?

This collective book, which studies feminisms through the prism of intersectionality and gender, recalls the dynamism of struggles from the Revolution through to current debates, for instance around single-sex spaces and means of action.

Can we think of social transformation from the perspective of vulnerability? Yes, explains Marie Garrau, but for this we need to define the meaning of this notion differently, and to describe all the forms of inequality that weaken us and subject us to multiple forms of violence in our societies.

Every year in the United States around 650,000 people are released from prison, many of them destined to return. Bruce Western and his research team followed 122 released prisoners over a one-year period.

When groups defined as minorities take a political stand, those in a dominant position often see it as a threat. In a genealogy of power viewed through the prism of resistance, Elsa Dorlin analyses the political self-defence traditions these groups employ.

Paris, 1933. Oscar Dufrenne, a music hall mogul and notorious homosexual, was found murdered in his office. Even though a suspect was arrested, the investigation led nowhere. The case paints a portrait of interwar France in its desire to restore order, its political violence, and the slow evolution of social mores.

In his latest book, Carles Boix proposes to account for human history with a simple theoretical approach, where the interplay between warfare and production technologies determines the choice between production and violence. This, in turn, leads to different governance structures and inequality levels – and, eventually, to different performances in terms of innovation and growth.

“Parricide”, “tyrant”, “monster”: it would be an understatement to say that the last Julio-Claudian emperor is not highly regarded. Making use of some impressive documents, Donatien Grau analyses the image of the hated emperor from the first century AD to the present day. The story of Nero reads like a history of the West.

Does secularist rhetoric secretly lend itself to a discourse on social order and the exclusion of formerly colonized peoples? François Dubet argues that it is important to recognize French secularism’s rigid and conservative turn. But he also believes that we must qualify this claim if we are to find alternative secularities.

Laurent Gayer’s book, Karachi. Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City, tells the story of a city described seven decades ago as the “city of lights”, but now often portrayed as one of the world’s most chaotic and dangerous metropolises.

How can we produce a history of power and violence in the colonial context that is not confined to the discourse of the State, but takes full measure of the historicity of ethnographic and archival sources? Michel Naepels answers this question on the basis of extensive research in New Caledonia.

While women are first and foremost seen as victims of violence, C. Cardi and G. Pruvost show that they can also perpetrate it. Women’s violence tends to be sidelined, downplayed or made invisible, and is inextricably linked to their image, testifying to the sexual dimension of the notion of violence itself.

Past outbreaks of unrest in the French banlieues have confirmed that libraries were a favourite target during riots. Sociologists Denis Merklen and Numa Murard have investigated the conflicted relationship that some young people have with written culture. They are sharing their results with us in this article.

Is it possible to be at the same time a victim, a perpetrator, and a bystander of the Holocaust? What were the different attitudes of the Poles toward their Jewish neighbors before, during, and after the massive deportations of 1942? Relying on new sources, three recent books by American and Polish scholars throw new light on questions that are still hotly debated today.

By using statistics to study the attitudes of Jews in the face of persecution in the French town of Lens between 1940 and 1944, two historians offer a quantitative sociological analysis of the victims’ trajectories. This original approach paves the way for a social history of genocide.

Might manhunting—from helots to undocumented immigrants—be the paradigm of all power? This is the hypothesis that Grégoire Chamayou puts to the test in an ambitious and devastating essay that strides boldly across the centuries.

According to the historian Dan Edelstein, the violent phase of the Terror arose directly out of the French revolutionaries’ fascination with natural right theory. This new interpretation is unpersuasive to Annie Jourdan; in particular, she questions the relevance of analysing the French Revolution in Schmittian terms.

How can a republic be perpetuated and civic virtue maintained? The historian Dan Edelstein responds to the criticisms posed by Annie Jourdan in her account of his book, The Terror of Natural Right. In particular, he defends the thesis according to which natural right is two-sided, at once liberating and violent.