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From Discipline to Punishment: The Trials of Sexual Deviance during the Plague of Marseille, 1720 - 1723
| This paper examines a shift in French responses to sexual deviance during the Great Plague of Marseille from 1720 to 1723. The late seventeenth century saw a vast increase in edicts involving the regulation of women’s sexuality in France. Following the law of February 23, 1688, “debauched” women were incarcerated in maisons de refuge. As hybrid institutions resembling a hospital, prison, and rehabilitation center, these maisons “reformed” “sexually deviant” women through a program that assumed that sexuality could be controlled through penitence, sobriety and isolation.
This reform system, however, was disrupted during the Great Plague of Marseille, the last plague to devastate France. New emergency laws in Marseille concerning sexuality trumped customary ones. All procedures involving sexual crimes – prostitution, fornication, pre-marital sex, adultery, rape – fell under the jurisdiction of commandants who imposed martial law on the plagued community. This paper analyzes trial dossiers from Marseillais archival records to demonstrate that sentences issued during the plague were characterized by unprecedented severity; sentences involving public whipping, banishment and capital punishment suggest that authorities steered away from the idea that the sexually deviant could be reformed. Interestingly, the draconian measures during plague introduced a heretofore nonexistent form of evenhanded justice: whereas pre-plague legislation focused on deviant women, plague procedures targeted men just as frequently and as severely as they did women. This “equity” can be attributed to the commandants’ and municipality’s assumptions about plague and the necessary requirements for the restoration of health and order. The plague destroyed communal fabric by disintegrating families; the fight against plague and its disorders then, involved the restoration of virtuous families founded on prescribed gender roles. In this context, man’s virility became just as dangerous and deviant as female sexuality; a man who engaged in sexual activities outside the family became just as reprehensible as a prostitute who contaminated the family with her moral and physical disorders. Interestingly, the authoritarian practices that emerged during the plague were sustained by a combination of French absolutist efforts at centralization and Marseillais classical republican traditions, two political traditions that are too often assumed to be antithetical.
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