The Alien and the Soldier

Aliens and migrants were commonly feared, perhaps in a few instances with some justification. Irish migrants into British cities during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were uniformly perceived as violent.

In English literature the most celebrated nineteenth-century Jewish crim­inal is Charles Dickens's Fagin, not a murderer but a fence who trained boys to steal for him. Across Europe there were popular assumptions that crim­inals started with small offences, often as children, and progressed to becom­ing murderous burglars. The two ends of this spectrum were portrayed, along with Fagin, in Dickens's Oliver Twist; Jack Dawkins, ‘the Artful Dodger', was at the youthful end and Bill Sikes was the fully developed adult criminal. Male members of this ‘criminal class' were considered to use violence to settle disputes among themselves and to abuse female partners and children.

Another group often stigmatised as dangerous to the public were soldiers. War was considered to have a brutalising effect on the men that fought it. The brigand bands that affected eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe were commonly seen to have deserters or former soldiers present in their ranks; similarly the brigands in southern Italy immediately after unification had a backbone of men from the old, beaten Bourbon army. Several English high­waymen enjoyed adopting military trappings; they rode to commit their crimes armed with sword and pistols and delighted in military rank, notably ‘captain'. Some brigands liked to pose as heroic Robin Hoods, though there was little romantic about either their threats or the occasions on which they opened fire; the poor rarely if ever profited from highwaymen robbing the rich. Yet a highwayman brought to the gallows in Britain, or broken on the wheel in France or elsewhere, might make a good, courageous death in the eyes of the crowd that assembled to witness his end - the kind of death associated with a good and courageous soldier. One of the first attempts to explore the impact of a military campaign on violence committed by young men was undertaken in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War by Wilhelm Starke, a senior figure in the Prussian Ministry of Justice.

Unlike other European powers, the British had an army composed of volunteers until the introduction of conscription in 1916, and though before the end of the Victorian period old soldiers were increasingly regarded sympathetically - not surprisingly given the common move of British veter­ans from the barracks to the workhouse - those still serving were often feared as ‘criminal types' and drunkards. In the British Army the punishment of flogging continued until 1881; its replacement, Field Punishment Number 1, known as ‘crucifixion' by soldiers, could be ferocious and was known occa­sionally to result in death. A press campaign towards the end of the First World War led to its abolition. The Royal Navy, however, remained a law unto itself and flogging continued to be listed as a punishment in King's Regulations up until the beginning of the Second World War; as a deterrent all ships carried a cat, with which the punishment was administered. As had been noted by Starke for France and Germany at the end of the Franco- Prussian War, there was a slight increase in assaults in Britain at the end of both world wars. At least some of this can be put down to violence meted out by returning soldiers on wives and girlfriends who had been or were said to have been unfaithful during the war. In a number of such incidents juries were inclined to give a wronged soldier the benefit of the doubt when charged with assaulting an unfaithful wife, and magistrates and judges were similarly inclined to pass a very lenient sentence.^[979] Such incidents do not appear to have been confined to Britain. At the same time, communities were inclined to exact popular justice without recourse to any formal court on women guilty of what was euphemistically termed la collaboration horizontale. Usually such women were dragged from their homes, sometimes had their clothes torn away, had their heads shaved in front of jeering crowds and were then paraded before their communities. Some such assaults took place before the war's end, but most commonly they became a part of the celebration of liberation.^[980] In many respects they need to be considered as another and an especially violent and degrading manifestation of the traditional practice of charivari.