The Trough of Violence in Europe

For European violence, the five decades from the 1920s to the 1960s constitute a unity because overall homicide rates declined from the nineteenth-century level, reaching their lowest point towards the end of this period.

As we advance through the period 1920-70, non-European homicide rates are increasingly available. We know them for the ‘Western Offshoots’ since the beginning of the twentieth century; they are similar to European rates in Canada and Australia but much higher in the United States.

Turning to qualitative aspects of European violence, we must once more begin with a negative characteristic. Homicide rates declined further because fewer fights ended lethally. The relative peacefulness of working-class males, in particular the renunciation of settling conflicts with knives, intensified and became geographically more widespread. This development was due in part to conscious campaigns to change the behaviour of the rough sections of the working classes, through housing projects for example. In the 1950s and 1960s knives more often were the weapon of choice for men who killed their female partners than for those attacking other men. This coincided with the culmination of a centuries-long trend by which murders in intimate relationships accounted for an ever larger proportion of total homicide. By the mid twentieth century they made up between a third and nearly half in several European countries. With the fascination for crime passionnel gone, moreover, murders of intimates or rivals in love received equal public condemnation as other types of homicide. Murder had become a marginal phenomenon.

The marginalisation of murder was symbolised most tellingly in the rise of and subsequent fascination with serial killers.

The second marginal phenomenon, which inculcated both fascination and fear, was the underworld, as it came to be called. The underworld appeared in Europe's largest cities around 1900, with a concentration of prostitution, gambling and the homes of habitual criminals in a few neighbourhoods. It became firmly established during the interwar period in cities such as London, Berlin and Marseilles, although these did not match the reputation of Chicago. Indeed, in Europe after particularly notorious incidents, the media and the public alarmingly spoke of an American situation. This happened in Berlin in 1928, when a participant in a massive fight between two rival gangs had died and a host of club members escorted the victim to his funeral in cars. The media concluded that the underworld was motorised, which enabled them to perform quick raids into wealthy neighbourhoods.

As I have posited earlier, the hippie movement of the second half of the 1960s was the cultural corollary to the trough in violence. Its encompassing youth culture was at home in Europe no less than in the United States. Whereas young men for ages had been the main perpetrators of physical violence, hippies, male and female, renounced it and proclaimed love. Although like-minded youth groups preceded them, these had consisted overwhelmingly of young men and women with a middle-class background. The hippie movement was the first to attract a significant part of working­class youths. As it turned out, this ideal of peacefulness was short-lived, but we must turn to the pre-1970 non-Western world first. While some hippies proclaimed a cultural revolution, non-violent of course, this term soon became associated with a wave of massive violence in China. This semantic switch symbolises the diverging experiences of the West and the rest.

Unfortunately, the semantic switch is also a symbol for the state of research (in languages accessible to this author). Qualitative evidence for violence in the non-Western world, 1920-70, abounds, but it refers over­whelmingly to instances of mass violence or to colonial repression. Thus, one study with violence as first word in the title, covering European colonies world-wide during the interwar period, deals in fact with the policing of labour unrest. The author argues that economic interests rather than political concerns determined when and where police forces were called upon.^[325] One exception, in which the focus is on interpersonal violence, concerns the African cases in which Indigenous beliefs played a facilitating role. Especially notorious were the medicine murders in Lesotho, tried between 1895 and 1969, whose perpetrators believed that their victims' organs gave them extra strength.

Martin Wiener's study of murder in various British colonies, extending to 1935, focuses on the legal treatment ofWesterners who had killed non-whites. In British Honduras, now Belize, the colonial elite mingled with immigrants from the southern United States. One of them, an Alabama-born lumber mill owner, searched the home of his black employee for stolen goods in 1934, finding none but yet shooting the tenant to death. The owner claimed that his gun fired accidentally but several black witnesses testified that he had threatened the victim. This resulted in a life sentence, of which the con­demned eventually served two and a half years.^[326] For Argentina, finally, a process of refinement has been observed which involved the retreat of the rough gaucho as a cultural hero. The ‘new guard' of tango lyric writers, active in the 1920s and 1930s, wrote about independent women and romantic men, whereas the ‘old guard', active 1880-1920, had glorified honorific men who subjugated women and often were skilled knife fighters.^[327]