Violent Punishment: Civilising Violence
Until well into the nineteenth century the European patriarch had the duty of disciplining the family; this might involve physical punishment. In Victorian Britain, however, while schoolboys particularly could be severely chastised with canes and leather straps, wife beating was increasingly considered to be a working-class fault in need of correction.
Men from the middle and upperclasses rarely appeared on such charges, though these social groups seem to have included a number of very violent husbands and fathers.
In the same way that, particularly in Britain, the respectable classes generally considered that a beating was a reasonable way to correct and ‘civilise' schoolboys, they tolerated or simply closed their eyes to violent behaviour by the new, bureaucratic police bodies that emerged during the nineteenth century. As long as their focus remained on what a police official in France described as the ‘dangerous classes', the police were perceived to be disciplining the uncivilised. The Italian police and particularly the gendarmerie-style Carabinieri were deployed partly to persuade the peasants that they were now part of the newly united state; to enforce their position they employed brutality and violence, and even an unsuspecting British tourist who got in their way could find himself suffering the pain inflicted by a pollici (thumbscrew).[981] In late nineteenth-century Paris leaders of the police and their non-critical media advocates boasted that they were so well acquainted with criminals that, once a crime was committed, they could rapidly identify the offender from the modus operandi. Yet this did not prevent le rafle by which usual suspects were rounded up; nor did it prevent la cuisine de la surete or le passage au tabac as tough interrogations or beatings were popularly termed. In interwar Britain there were concerns that Hollywood films and stories of American crime might foster some sort of ‘third degree' among the ‘best police in the world', though it does not seem that British policemen needed too much encouragement to bully suspects or to get their retaliation in first.
Popular culture often made fun of police officers, and there were figures such as Mr Punch or the Lyons silk weaver Guignol who could raise laughs at puppet plays for beating up policemen - in Guignol's case the victim was a gendarme. The incidence of assaults on gendarmes in rural France appears to have declined over the nineteenth century, but across Europe violent assaults on policemen still occurred, notably during strikes or political demonstrations.[982] The police responded with violence of their own. A strike in a Durham colliery in 1891, during which fifty county police charged and batoned a crowd of miners with their wives and children prompted a parody of Tennyson's patriotic Charge of the Light Brigade:
Flash'd all their batons bare, Flash'd as they turned in air, Thumping at back-skulls there, Mauling away because Someone had blunder'd Pounding at ev'ry head, Quiet folks' blood was shed; Women and children Reeled from the blows that sped, Moaning and sunder'd Then they marched back again Gallant half hundred![983]
Criminal assaults by police could be investigated, and yet, while in Britain a violent policeman could be tried, found guilty, sentenced and as a consequence lose his job, in Germany at least he was quite likely to return to his old post after he had served his sentence. The Blutmai in Berlin in 1929 began with some assaults on traffic policemen by youths, and ended with thirty-three people killed and another 198 wounded after the police responded with ferocious violence.[984] The police of Weimar Berlin appear to have shared the thinking of many respectable householders across Europe that the ‘dangerous classes', a concept so easily extended to the bulk of the working class, had now morphed into communists. Problems arose when police violence was meted out to the respectable, but this was rare and, in England particularly, when any such complaints were made against the police, or about scandalous police behaviour in general, these were investigated by the authorities usually with more care than elsewhere.[985]
There was a fascination with criminal violence that continued in Europe across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
This went together with a possible decrease in such violence, and a belief among the educated and well- to-do that European society was increasingly shifting away from the idea of using violence to settle disputes. This developing view of interpersonal violence survived the ferocity of the two world wars and the bureaucratic and industrialised mass murder of the 1930s and 1940s. The Holocaust was seen to be exceptional. The sharp rise in the criminal statistics from the 1950s, which continued until the mid 1990s, together with a growing politicisation of these statistics prompted increasing nervousness. Non-violent property offences continued to dominate the number of crimes reported and brought before the courts but the cultural forms of news media, popular literature and films very rarely picked up on this. The supposed ‘conquest of violence' did not easily fit with the narrative chosen by sections of the media, or with political debate, though it did not prevent the steady and continuing abolition of violent punishments for offenders. Yet, at the same time, any rough behaviour employed by the state and its functionaries to repress or discourage aggressive behaviour by those perceived as ‘criminal' continued often to be excused or ignored.