Violated Bodies and the Search for Meaning

But are all unhappy cases of mutilation or decapitation alike? In Gemenos and Rocquevaire in 1795, for example, victims had their eyes, ears, noses and throats cut out. In March 1793 in La Rochelle, conversely, both the heads and genitals of refractory priests were set atop pikes (as well as forks, sabres and batons) in a triumphant parade, their corpses dragged along closely behind.^[614] Nor were the shootings of Gabriel and Gonzague Latreille in 1830 and the attack on the gendarmes to force them to release their prisoners the final act of violence that morning.

On the other hand, even as there is something cross-cultural about the public display of beheadings, meaning inevitably alters with context, as Regina Janes has noted: ‘While severed heads always speak, they say different things in different cultures.'^[616] Hence Claudy Valin, in seeking to understand the decapitations of the La Rochelle massacre in 1793, points away from the influence of the guillotine's introduction. Instead, he cites a deposition of 1791 from the nearby town of Dompierre-sur-Mer that made reference to the earlier bouts of violence in Paris as a model - saying, of the local constitu­tional priest, that one had to ‘cut his head off and put it at the end of a baton like one had done in Paris'.^[617]

Even so, explanations of decapitation in terms of political symbolism do not necessarily conflict with other possibilities.

Everyone wants to participate; everyone strikes a blow and, in order to do this, pushes as near as he can to the victim... His permitted murder stands for all the murders people have to deny themselves for fear of the penalties for their perpetration... No-one has been appointed executioner; the com­munity as a whole does the killing.^[618]

Although the murders at Villeseque occurred in November, there may also have been a symbolic identification of the lifeless nobles with the carnival dummy dispatched on Ash Wednesday to represent the climax and the end of ‘the world turned upside down': the enactment of symbolic popular justice was common in carnival celebrations in the Midi.^[619] However, in this region the carnival dummy was normally burnt on Ash Wednesday, sometimes after being ‘hanged' or ‘shot' first.^[620] Alternatively, just as Corbin stressed the parallels between the way the nobleman was burnt at Hautefaye and the roasting of pigs in its region,^[621] so the regular butchering of sheep and goats in Villeseque may have rendered the severing of the nobles' heads less shocking to those involved.

To be sure, change could and did occur. Comparing the Hautefaye murder to those of the September Massacres, Corbin has argued for the clear handprint of ‘modernity': the perpetrators of violence in 1870 displayed certain ‘humanitarian sentiments' by refusing to ‘indulge in the “ceremonious mutilations”' of the earlier case. Yet it is also easy to exaggerate this. Even when assessing the killings of September 1792, to confront their violence head-on is not to cede to naivety over either contemporary sources or posterior accounts.

But that revolutionary and subsequent accounts centred on the sexual and feminine dimensions of de Lamballe's vulnerability prompts questions about the reverse: male violence. Thirty-four men from Villeseque stood trial; in Hautefaye, twenty-one men were accused. The gendered assumptions of judicial authorities aside, which inevitably fed into these legal outcomes, what might this say about violence and masculinity? Working within the tradition of the Annales school, the analyses of Nicole and Yves Castan of violence in eighteenth-century Languedoc illuminated the mentalite of this rural world, one in part characterised by a highly developed male sensitivity to perceived insults, to ‘l'honneur viril' and by a ready escalation of physical resolution to such menaces to manliness. In Nicole Castan's words, ‘in a society based on esteem and dignity, the desire to protect physical and moral respectability mattered above everything'.^[623]

Still, although much violence in nineteenth-century France can be traced to such intersections of honour and masculinity, which were accentuated in rural areas, demographic trends of especially young men cannot alone explain everything.^[624] Few of Moneys’s murderers, for example, were men between the ages of 18 and 30 - due in part to conscription, in part to work, since the murder occurred at a fairground in the middle of the day.^[625] Subsistence riots often present another exception as a domain traditionally dominated by women. Olwen Hufton’s reading of the ‘bread riot [as a] maternal terrain’ has been extended by David Garrioch to argue for the gendered particularity of the October Days.^[626] Female violence too could therefore be revolutionary: as Garrioch has reminded, we must detach ourselves from a common ‘condescending dichotomy’ between a putatively ‘traditional’, localised collective action that is female and its ‘modern’ and national ‘male’ counterpart.^[627]