scholarly journals Le traitement de l’hermaphrodite dans la littérature juridique de l’Ancien Régime Droit, société et idéologie

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arnaud PATURET

Under the Ancien Régime in France, the individual was inserted into a legal system of binary classification shaped around masculinity and femininity already used in earlier periods. Roman jurists and after them the medieval canonists refuted the proven existence of both male and female sexes in one body and such an orientation continued in the West under the Ancien Régime. During these times, this physiological feature was assimilated to deviant and condemnable sexual behaviours. The study of several trials against hermaphrodites shows the social embarrassment caused by sexual ambivalent. This strange physiognomy was enough to suggest he was a criminal or a debauchee. Nowadays, French legal system is fortunately milder but remains organized around a unique and defined sex as stated in the birth certificate. Therefore it fails to recognize the concept of third gender. A mental revolution has to rise on this point.

1985 ◽  
Vol 78 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 149-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick J. Lambe

The case of Richard Simon and the suppression of his book, Histoire critique du Vieux Testament in 1678 stands at a point where the interests of both Church and State in maintaining control of the book trade intersected. As such, the case is of interest in two important areas: first, from the point of view of the social and political history of the ancien régime in France, this case exhibits the intense concern for maintenance or extension of the powers of jurisdiction of the authorities which is so characteristic of the reign of Louis XIV. In some instances this preoccupation with autorité and droit led to an unseemly public jockeying for power, and it is interesting to see how the book trade is seen as a vital element in this struggle.


Author(s):  
Nicholas Cronk

Voltaire worked hard throughout his life to establish and defend his status as an author within the social hierarchy of the ancien régime, with varying degrees of success, but with unflagging determination. ‘The courtier’ charts his time at the French court in 1725 and 1745–6, at the Prussian court of Frederick 1750–3, and his extensive correspondence with Catherine the Great. It describes Voltaire’s role as the Royal Historiographer in 1745 and some of his key works including the opera collaboration with Rameau, Le Temple de la gloire (1745), his historical masterpiece Siècle de Louis XIV (1751), and his world history, Essai sur les mœurs (1756).


Author(s):  
Ramón Maruri Villanueva

La fiesta en la España Moderna, con acusada preferencia la pública y barroca, tía venido siendo, desde 1980 fundamentalmente, un campo histohográfico bien frecuentado por los investigadores. Enmarcado en él, el presente trabajo se centra en cómo fue percibida por un conjunto de extranjeros que recorrieron la España del siglo XVIII. Sus percepciones, que hemos llamado mirada ajena, nos son conocidas a través de la denominada literatura de viajes y hablan de la fiesta pública y privada, profana y religiosa, civil y política. Dicha literatura, que no había sido utilizada con carácter sistemático en monografías sobre la fiesta, hemos considerado que podía iluminar tanto aspectos de ésta como de la mentalidad de quienes la recrearon en sus diarios y cartas: cuáles llamaron su atención; qué juicios les merecieron; en qué medida algunos de éstos sirvieron para construir, perpetuar o atemperar estereotipos; qué cambios pudieron producirse en los rituales festivos y de qué cambios en la realidad social podían dar cuenta; en qué se desviaba, o no, la percepción de los viajeros de la de españoles de la época o de la imagen recuperada por la investigación histórica contemporánea.Since about 1980 festivities in Spain of the Ancien Régime, with a marked preference for public and baroque festivities, have been a historiographic field frequently studied by researchers. Set in the frame of reference of this field, this work centers on how festivities were perceived by a group of foreigners who traveled around Spain in the eighteenth century. Their perceptions, which we call the foreign perspective, are known to us through what is called travel literature, and speak about various kinds of festivities: public and prívate, secular and religious, civilian and political. We believed that this literature, which had not been used systematically in studies of festivities, could shed light not only on facets of the festivities themselves but also on aspects of the mentality of those that described them in their diaries and letters: which festivities captured their attention; what judgments they made about them; to what extent these judgments served to construct, perpetúate or modérate stereotypes; what changos might have taken place in the festivo rituals and what changos in the social reality they could reveal; in what respects the perception of the travelers differed from that of Spaniards of the time or from the image recovered by contemporary historie research.


Author(s):  
Jacopo Martire

On the basis of the preceding argument, the author posits that the emergence of a new emergent virtual understanding of the individual, has brought us to the absolute limit of the normalizing complex. This vision of the subject as a virtual entity indicates a growing awareness of the presence of an existential uniqueness, or Otherness (born out of normalization’s inherent allusion to the Other as what lies beyond the norms), in everyone’s life that challenges the attempts at conceiving the social body in terms of normality. This has implications that are as yet undefined for our current legal system that has developed thus far in relation to the dynamics of normalization. Faced with the expansion of Otherness in our society, the author intimates that we may be forced to rethink the structure of our legal discourse, and imagine new foundations for the future of democracy and politics.


Author(s):  
Marc Ortolani

AbstractPoisoning at Nice under the Restoration, judicial investigations and toxicological experts' reports. – Poisoning may be a fairly well-known crime in legal history, but the judgements of the Senate in Nice (at the time of the Restoration in the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia) shed some new light on some of its issues. The court worked according to principles of organisation, a legal system and a procedure which had all been inherited from the Ancien Régime and re-established under the Restoration, and which allowed it to conduct core criminal investigations. These investigations aimed at finding out the intention of the criminal and the means used in committing the crime. They relied, in spite of the limitations of scientific knowledge, on toxicological expertise, which became an essential stage in prosecuting cases of poisoning.


2011 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 1-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Jones

ABSTRACTUnder the generic title, ‘French Crossings’, this Presidential Address explores the history of laughter in French society, and humour's potential for trangressing boundaries. It focuses on the irreverent and almost entirely unknown book of comic drawings entitledLivre de caricatures tant Bonnes que mauvaises(Book of Caricatures, both Good and Bad), that was composed between the 1740s and the mid-1770s by the luxury Parisian embroiderer and designer, Charles-Germain de Saint-Aubin, and his friends and family. The bawdy laughter that the book seems intended to provoke gave it its nickname of theLivre de culs(Book of Arses). Yet despite the scatological character of many of the drawings, the humour often conjoined lower body functions with rather cerebral and erudite wit. The laughter provoked unsparingly targeted and exposed to ridicule the social elite, cultural celebrities and political leaders of Ancien Régime France. This made it a dangerous object, which was kept strictly secret. Was this humour somehow pre- or proto-Revolutionary? In fact, the work is so embedded in the culture of the Ancien Régime that 1789 was one boundary that the work signally fails to cross.


Author(s):  
Jon Elster

This chapter compares the making of the American constitution in 1787 and the French constitution in 1791. It discusses aspects of the pre-constitutional systems that would prove relevant for the understanding of the constitution-making processes. It also attempts to practice the union of history and psychology, which are the two main pillars of the social sciences. The chapter focuses on the quest for causality and the quest for agency or methodological individualism. It covers the main features of the prodigiously complex social system of the French ancien régime. It also cites many contemporary texts that illuminate the perverse and sometimes pathological effects of the social system.


2004 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 292-297 ◽  
Author(s):  

AbstractIt is only recently that the study of Indian history since the Muslim conquest, especially the Mughal period (1526-1857), has seen a fundamental change. No longer is this period viewed in the static terms of 'oriental society,' the perennial 'village community' and the unchangeable rigidities of caste and community. Instead full attention is now given to the dynamics of Indian society. Dirk Kolff's work has significantly contributed to this change of perspective. Focussing attention on India's 'armed peasantry' in its various guises of both sedentary 'ryots' and itinerant warriors, Kolff brings out the flexibility and dynamics of the Mughal world that was known to its European contemporaries as the 'flourishing Indies.' Even though traces may still be found in modern India, the price of modernity has been the loss of the flexible dynamics of the ancien régime . Ce n'est que récemment que l'étude de l'histoire de l'Inde depuis la conquête musulmane et particulièrement durant la période de l'empire moghol (1526-1857) a été essentiellement transformée. Au lieu d'utiliser des expressions qui suggèrent des conditions inchangées comme la "société orientale", la sempiternelle "communauté de village," et l'immuable "système des castes", la recherche examine actuellement les aspects dynamiques de la société indienne. A ce changement M. Dirk Kolff a de manière incisive contribué. Focalisant son attention sur la "paysannerie armée", il met en évidence le dynamisme de l'Inde moghole que les contemporains occidentaux appelaient "les Indes florissantes". On en trouve encore des traces dans l'Inde moderne, mais le prix de la modernité a été la perte irréparable de la dynamique flexible de l' ancien régime .


2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (04) ◽  
pp. 607-613
Author(s):  
Étienne Anheim ◽  
Jean-Yves Grenier ◽  
Antoine Lilti

Social statuses existed before the social sciences. When scholars began to develop this concept in the nineteenth century, they were drawing on the juridical writings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and, more broadly, the vocabulary used by social groups to define themselves across time and space. From this moment forward, social statuses occupied a central position in the work of historians, sociologists, and anthropologists. These scholars were aiming to describe and explain the dynamics of human societies, but they also participated in framing the debates at the heart of the social sciences—as attested by the recurrent disputes between a Marxian notion of class and a Weberian conception of status groups, particularly among readers with tacit political motivations. Max Weber played a fundamental part in the success of the concept, taking the juridical aspect and the idea of society as a body, inherited from the ancien régime, and adding a specifically sociological content relating to the hierarchy of social prestige, which is neither directly inherited (as with castes) nor purely economic (as with classes). In truth, this definition was rarely applied stricto sensu by historians, sociologists, and anthropologists, but it did allow for the elaboration of a concept that could delimit groups of individuals sharing legal and symbolic characteristics within a given society, and that could incorporate the categories used by social actors themselves into historical analysis. Thus, during the 1960s, it was around the notion of status that interpretations of the ancien régime as a society of orders or a society of classes took shape, while anthropologists began to consider notions of emic and etic. From the 1980s, however, the concept of social status receded into the background as the idea of a global interpretation of society by the social sciences was called into question.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-229
Author(s):  
Alf Gerlach

In China, the one-child policy has cemented the imbalance between male and female newborns, the social and psychological consequences of which are difficult to assess. The targeted abortion of female foetuses goes back to traditions anchored in Confucian culture. This article examines the tensions in gender relations and in the inner representation of gender that are linked to the practice of gender-specific abortion. Using examples from psychoanalytic self-experience groups, the article shows how such conflicts can break out and be expressed in the individual psyche, but also between the group participants. With the help of the distinction between an ethnic and an idiosyncratic unconscious, an attempt is made to better understand the specific inner representation of gender in men and women in China. The author explores male reaction formations against women, male fear of castration, and of control by women through men's mothers, as well as a kind of ongoing unconscious "duel between the sexes" that involves gender discrimination that continues to this day.


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