Conclusion

This chapter has sought to place European developments within a global perspective. The present state of research on non-European regions means that any such comparison is tentative and provisional.

Many authors attribute the great decline in homicide rates, which was primarily a decline in male-on-male violence, to civilising processes. The average level of self-control of which people were capable, including control over aggressive impulses, increased. In turn, this was due to the monopolisa­tion of force within Europe's emerging states. In Elias's theory, moreover, changes in the (power) relationships between social groups are equally important. This explains how the social differentiation in male fighting impacted on rates of violence. Across Europe, the idea that duelling, a fair fight between equals, was befitting a gentleman came to be the norm during the seventeenth century. The elites refused to consider a knife fight a duel, ranking it along with common brawls as an unworthy pursuit for lower persons, and this attitude gradually trickled down. During the eighteenth century the elite duel, too, began to lose much of its value as a signifier of status and honour for upper-class men, particularly in north-western Europe.

Along with state formation, commercial expansion in the seventeenth cen­tury was an equally crucial factor. Thus, Holland and other provinces of the Dutch Republic were dominated by an urban patriciate with a largely civil and commercial outlook; its members constituted one of the few elite groups who condemned duelling from the outset.^[540] The total number of towns grew during the early modern period and most cities increased in size. Even the largest conglomerations - Paris, London and Amsterdam - developed sophisticated mechanisms of social control that had a pacifying effect.^[541] More importantly, commercial and bourgeois elites had a different concept of honour and largely eschewed the cult of violence associated with a landed aristocracy. In the course of the eighteenth century serious violence involving knives largely disappeared from cities like Amsterdam and London. Gentlemen no longer needed to carry swords in these cities. Thus commercial expansion and state formation mutually reinforced each other. The decline of Italy's great urban centres in this period may account for the higher homicide rates they experienced.

The pacification of the elites constituted a crucial intermediary between processes of state formation and commercial expansion, on the one hand, and the decrease of serious violence and aggressive impulses among broader sectors of the population, on the other. The upper layers of the working classes, for example, had no great stake in the state or in the economy, but they increasingly sought to ape the cultural model of a peaceful lifestyle provided by their superiors.

a stake in the state by financing it. In France, the court played a more significant role in the civilising process. Italy provides another point of contrast. The failings of the state there probably explain why Italian homi­cide rates did not go down until the end of the seventeenth century, and in the south even later. Not only was the monopolisation of force exercised by the territorial states of Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries relatively limited, but their rulers were largely unable to pacify local and regional aristocracies. The ancient leading families of former city-states ruled by Venice, for example, continued their feuds into the seventeenth century. In Bologna, the aristocracy did not accept papal rule and its law courts as legit­imate until the eighteenth century. Despite the adoption of elegant manners in other spheres of social life, the Italian elites retained their affection for the culture of vendetta. As long as this lasted, the population at large was devoid of a virtuous model to emulate.

Finally, the pacification of the elites was intimately related to the spiritua­lisation of honour. Honour is often categorised as a cultural capital, which in Bourdieu's theory is but one form of capital next to a person's economic or social assets. The transformation of the honour code meant that honour was still a valued commodity for elite men, but now it could be won not just by displaying martial prowess, but by commercial, intellectual, artistic or moral achievement. These were largely unattainable for lower-class men, who additionally lacked economic and social capital by definition. This explains why lower-class men continued to cherish traditional notions of honour, which obliged them to be violent when necessary.