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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 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.
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