Interpersonal Violence up to the First World War

Let me start with the quantitative dimension. The reader is referred to my contribution to volume III for an extended discussion of the concept of homicide rates and the long-term decline of murder in Europe.

Southern Europe, in particular the Mediterranean fringe, certainly belonged to the outer zone. On two islands off the western coast of Greece the homicide rate stood at 12.4 in the first half of the nineteenth century. Within Italy the incidence of violence increased per region from north to south during all of the nineteenth century.

Estimates for the core countries of Europe, 1800-1914, fall within a range from about 1 to about 4. The continuation of the long-term trend of decline is visible mainly when we contrast this period, continent-wide, with the years 1920-70. For the rest, the national homicide rates in the inner zone in the long nineteenth century fluctuated without a clear or common pattern, except for a slight rise in several countries on the eve of the First World War. The collection of national statistics of crime, which per country started off at various points in time during the first half of the nineteenth century, actually means a disadvantage for the quantitative study of murder. These statistics are based on prosecution records and hence represent an undercount. In many countries it was not until the end of the nineteenth or even the beginning of the twentieth century that statistics of the causes of death - a source equally reliable as early modern body inspection reports - began to be collected. For the intervening period, available homicide rates are usually based on criminal statistics.

There are practically no data for the non-Western world to compare the pre-1914 European homicide rates with. The only reliable figures I have found so far are based on the governor's reports of the Mexican states of Hidalgo (1869-72), Oaxaca (ten years between 1869 and 1898) and Estado de Mexico (1877-9, 1889-93). Homicide rates in these three regions averaged 58.6, 27.6 and 30.2 annually.^[307] These figures suggest that late nineteenth-century Mexico had a rather high incidence of serious interpersonal violence, even when compared to the European outer zone.

Despite the relatively low homicide rates prevailing in the European core area, the qualitative dimension of interpersonal violence featured one notor­ious continuity with the early modern period: the formal duel. It was alive and well once more in the hundred years from the defeat of Napoleon until the First World War. This is true, moreover, for core-area countries such as France or Germany as well as representatives of the outer zone such as Italy or Russia. In England the duel flourished only in the first half of the nine­teenth century, while the Dutch continued a tradition of rejecting it. As in the early modern period, the duel rested on the principle that an affront to male honour required a challenge to a fight. Hence, the continued fashion for duelling in nineteenth-century Europe implied a temporary setback to two long-term historical developments: the pacification of the elites and the spiritualisation of honour (whereby male honour came to be based on inner virtue instead of physical bravado).

As before 1800, the formal duel was socially exclusive. Only members of an elite could challenge each other and you were morally obliged to accept the challenge only from your peer. For the first time, however, this elite included a substantial number of bourgeois men, such as politicians or university professors, next to nobles and military officers who were the traditional practitioners. As the century progressed, the elite ‘entitled to satisfaction' was gradually broadened to include journalists, for example. Another differ­ence with the preceding centuries is even more crucial. These latter-day duels involved decidedly less violence than their predecessors. If pistols were the weapons agreed upon, the adversaries often strove to miss each other or shoot at an opponent's feet.

Outside Europe the duel was practised primarily by men with European roots. It was frequent among the planter class in the southern United States in the antebellum period. The elites of several Latin-American countries, nota­bly Mexico and Argentina, took up duelling around 1870 in imitation of their European counterparts. Duels there were often related to political competi­tion and usually led to no more than minor injuries. This fashion lasted until about 1930.^[309] Finally, duelling was practised by men from the colonial elites in the age of imperialism. Dutchmen in Indonesia, for example, were decidedly more keen on it than their peers in the homeland.^[310] It appears that the colonial setting, which brought violence of all kinds with it, also made European men more eager to challenge each other to a duel.

Although a conspicuous feature, the formal duel everywhere and always represented just a small part of all interpersonal violence. Can we identify types and patterns within the majority of cases in nineteenth-century Europe? From the perspective of intercontinental comparison, perhaps the most important characteristic was a negative one. There were no slaves; every­body was free, except the serfs on the continent's Russian fringe until 1861. There were no racial minorities either; with few exceptions, everyone was white. No colonial elite faced a native majority; even if we accept the theory of internal colonialism, this concept implies two populations that are sepa­rated geographically.

As a positive characteristic, the great majority of fights among European men took place within a working-class setting, whether urban or rural. This sealed a development which had already begun before 1800 with the social differentiation of male fighting. For the inner zone alone, the disappearance of the knife constituted another new development. Knife fighting had been extremely common in early modern Europe. In England, as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century, lower-class men most often fought with their fists only. The formality of such fights increased as well. The opponents shook hands before they started off and the spectators formed a ring. Often there was talk of seconds and distinct rounds. The duel - as it may well be called - ended when one combatant gave up or was unable to continue. The participants in such fights appear to have shared a growing conviction that it was un-English to use anything other than your bare hands.

should not turn too dangerous, refraining from handling knives in particular. Spatial segregation enhanced the social exclusiveness of fighting. Whereas in the early eighteenth century respectable men had often been obliged to defend themselves, after 1800 they were less likely to meet their social inferiors. Physical confrontations were confined even more strictly to work­ing-class neighbourhoods and rural villages.

Remarkably, gun violence in the inner zone also remained limited. Several countries witnessed a gap of three to four decades between the widespread availability of handguns and the introduction of legislation restricting own­ership of them. That was the case in England, which introduced prohibitive legislation in 1920. Mauser and the Belgian firm of Browning increased their production for the German market from the mid 1890s, while the number of ads for handguns increased likewise. By 1911 the national government was concerned enough to ask the country's states to report incidents and announce their opinion about regulation, but the war interrupted the legis­lative process. Regulation had to wait until 1928. Significantly, the incidents reported in 1911 consisted mostly of accidents, when adolescents had taken a gun with them to school to impress their fellows, for example.^[311] A direct link between the modest increase in homicide rates in several countries on the eve of the First World War and the availability of handguns has not been demonstrated so far. It is quite possible that firearms were too expensive for the majority of working-class men who did most of the fighting.

Within Europe's outer zone, whatever the availability of guns, the knife continued to be a popular weapon in male-on-male confrontations in most places throughout the nineteenth century. Popular duels, akin to those of the early modern period, have been studied in depth for several places from the Mediterranean to Finland. All these places had high homicide rates; in Finland a neat correlation existed between a province's homicide rate and the prevalence of knife fighting. Thus, it is highly likely that the entire level of murder throughout the outer zone owed much to the continuation of the use of knives as weapons there. Conversely, the lower level of murder in the inner zone owed much to the renunciation of knives. Men fought with their fists only, which was rarely lethal. When an incident amounted to murder, this was often done with any kind of instrument at hand. Homicide ceased to be a day-to-day event. Consequently, the image of murder came to be

Homicide in a Global Perspective dominated by a few remarkable types. One of these consisted of the exploits of serial killers, which I will discuss later. Another was the crime passionnel.

There is no official definition for the crime passionnel; a murder or attack falls into this category by virtue of its designation as such by contemporaries. This happened most often in France; hence the French name. The act always had to do with love, often extramarital. Murders or attacks were labelled as passionate in particular when the target was either a lover who had broken off the affair or a rival in love. The label referred not to the intense mutual affection that had once prevailed but to the moment of blind rage in which the perpetrator supposedly had acted. Juries (and the public they repre­sented), psychiatrists and criminologists were the parties that helped shape the crime passionnel. The first and third parties had a sympathetic under­standing for the offenders in question, considering the risk of repeat, moreover, negligible. The second group, increasingly called upon as forensic experts as the century progressed, pleaded temporary insanity. As a consequence passionate killers got off with relatively light sentences. In the public imagination crime passionnel was a typically female crime, but in fact from three-fourths to four-fifths of the perpetrators were men. This still means an over-representation of women when compared to overall violent crime. It was only women, moreover, who used the method of throwing vitriol (sulphuric acid) at former lovers and often at their new sweethearts when caught with them. This custom was largely restricted to France, but crime passionnel overall had a truly international dimension. This is exempli­fied by the case of Maria Tarnovskaia, a Russian noblewoman who had a series of affairs with men from Kiev to Venice between 1903 and 1910. She got each of them so jealous that all but the last one killed their rivals.^[312] The age of crime passionnel began in the 1870s, when all three parties that produced the label were in place. It ended around 1930, when popular and scientific sympathies waned.

When examining interpersonal violence world-wide up to 1914 from a qualitative perspective, we can begin by turning Europe's negative char­acteristic around. Racial tensions, colonial dominance, ethnic conflict or, until its abolition, slavery - one or more of these factors - deeply affected the pattern of homicide and assault. Even China had to accept the introduc­tion of extraterritorial zones in its port cities, where Europeans acted as masters. Studies that directly address interpersonal violence in the non-

Western world up to 1914, however, mostly cover limited regions within countries and sometimes for brief periods. Consequently, it is difficult to deduce larger patterns, valid for broader world regions, from these studies. We know little about the class character of homicide and assault, for exam­ple, although one study maintains that all violence - thus not just interperso­nal - in Brazil throughout the nineteenth century and beyond served to maintain elite dominance.^[313] This raises the question of the distinction between interpersonal and other types of violence, also in colonial settings. French ruthlessness in Algeria in the 1830s and 1840s, for example, has been amply described; among other actions, natives hiding in caves were smoked to death.^{[314] [315]} There is nothing wrong with calling this murder, but it was also part of establishing colonial rule and as such probably belongs to another section of this volume.

Let me briefly touch on two world regions, independent Latin America and colonial India and Indonesia. A study of several local courts in Bahia, 1780-1840, bridges the gap between the colonial period and Brazilian inde­pendence. These courts dealt mainly with cases of violence. No fewer than two-thirds of all accused murderers were free men of colour, whereas whites accounted for a mere 6 per cent; the others were slaves. Race mattered indeed! Honour played a role in nearly all cases and some involved group murder out of revenge.11 In the backlands of Fortaleza, in the subsequent four decades, traditional male honour equally played a role in violence, whether it concerned conflicts over access to land or with rivals in love. Whereas rich men derived a large part of their honour from status and wealth, poor sertanejos could maintain a reputation with physical strength only. Alternatively, men channelled their energies into poetic contests.^{[316] [317]} Murders were frequent around this time even among the con­victs on the island of Fernando de Noronha, 350 km off the Brazilian coast. 1³ Frontier areas of Latin America witnessed both interpersonal and collective violence. One study narrates the hostilities between the Mexican presidio of Janos and a nearby Chiricahua community, which started well before 1800 and continued after an international border officially separated them. Mutual violence effectively ended with Geronimo's final surrender to the United States in 1886.^[318] Banditry, finally, was rampant in many rural parts of Latin America in the post-independence period.

Interpersonal violence in a colonial setting has been studied for British India in particular. Here, too, the racial difference deeply affected relations between colonisers and colonised. British people of all social classes routinely called Indians blacks or niggers. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, numerous incidents were reported of Europeans who had shot natives and claimed in court that, while hunting, they had accidentally mistaken them for monkeys, birds or buffalos. Courts usually credited such claims with an acquittal. A considerable part of coloniser-on-native violence took place within the context of labour relations, such as on Assam's tea plantations. Employers and managers treated Indian labourers as if they were slaves, disciplinarily beating them with some­times lethal result. In such cases, too, the killers got off lightly in court, which was the reverse of when a native had attacked a European.1^[319] Whereas Elisabeth Kolsky suggests that racist violence and judicial condonement of it in India were as high in 1914 as they had been in 1800, Martin Wiener sees a change of attitude beginning at the turn of the twentieth century.^[320]

Male honour loomed large in assault and murder not only in Latin America but also in many colonial societies. To whites in British India, honour mattered more than to their countrymen in the metropolis, and it was equally important for natives. The penal code that the English intro­duced in India was modelled after their own, except for acknowledging a large spectrum of insulting words and gestures as signs of provocation that reduced a charge from murder to culpable homicide.^{[321] [322]} This legal situa­tion also benefited Indians who had killed fellow natives. Traditional honour was likewise important for many native men on the islands of Dutch Indonesia. The colonial government often leaned on violent entrepreneurs for support, but such tough men also turned against Europeans with robbery raids or setting sugar cane fields on fire.1⁸ Compared to repression and anti­colonial resistance, native-on-native violence gets less attention in the histor­ical literature. In cases of inter se killing among Australian Aboriginals, the culprit usually enjoyed mercy, escaping capital punisment, for reasons of ‘tribal custom’.^[323]