Conclusion

The greatest difficulty for advocates of the civilising thesis occurs when there is an upswing in violence, because this requires a new process of regression or ‘de-civilisation’.

This chapter has argued differently. It has shown that violence was subject to significant chronological and regional variation in the early modern period. This was rooted in feelings and beliefs that were shaped by the social and political environment. The evidence suggests that interpersonal violence increased significantly across much of Europe from the mid sixteenth century onwards and only fell again in the second half of the seventeenth century. Renaissance civility did not canalise and control violence. Rules of etiquette and protocol were complicated from the fifteenth century as the social elite expanded and became more diverse: boundaries were tested and transgressed in the constant battle to assert and win status. This was compounded by the emphasis on heroic autonomy. When threatened with the law in a Parisian street in 1622, Henri de Saveuse simply unsheathed, saying ‘that he cared not for justice and, showing his sword, said that this was justice’.^[985] It was the experience ‘of unbridled chaos, of a myriad of competing claims battling each other to extinction, [which] made thoughtful men realise that these reckless assertions of private will were the surest route to disaster'.^[986] The freer codes of conduct that resulted emphasised civil living together, in contrast to ceremonial relations with their relentless attention to the opaque signs of honour.

The limits to the new social decorum were also fixed according to class. In the rural world the routine murder of servants, tenants and vassals by their masters continues to stand out in the judicial records of France, Italy and Germany in the seventeenth century. This was compounded by the cheap­ness of lives of the poor: compensating for the life of a French peasant was valued at less than 200 livres (£14) in the 1780s. By the eighteenth century it had become widely accepted that force had to be exerted within reasonable limits and that doing so was a sign of social superiority. Nevertheless, in polite society the use of corporal punishment against the lower orders went largely unquestioned until the very end of the eighteenth century: ‘If any boy or girl, under fourteen years of age, shall be found begging out of the parish where they dwell,' wrote John Locke in a plan to revise the poor law, ‘they shall be sent to the next working school, there to be soundly whipped and kept at work till evening.' Slaves represented an altogether different category; they were disqualified from civil society. The Jamaican plantation owner Thomas Thistlewood (1721-86) was a self-made gentleman who combined an Enlightenment belief in progress and modernity with the pursuit of his interests through the use of private and public violence. He was a brutal and sadistic master who controlled his slaves through the use of extreme violence and arbitrary and cruel tyranny.^[989] Yet Thistlewood was a civilised man of letters who knew his Montesquieu, Voltaire and Locke and who kept up with the latest in polite fashion through subscriptions to the Tatler and Spectator. Thistlewood's diary lays bare civilisation's heart of darkness.