Documents found
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3201.More information
AbstractAlthough formally considered a crime, the duel became increasingly common in Latin America through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially among the political class, the very people charged with writing, interpreting, and enforcing the laws. The contradiction was not lost on contemporaries, who saw the impunity of duelling as a serious problem and debated how best to overcome the gulf between law and practice. This article looks at the arguments for and against the criminalisation of the duel, and shows how the debate raised far more fundamental questions about the role of law in a modernising society.
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3205.More information
AbstractThe pre-eminent figure in mid-Victorian psychological medicine, Dr. John Conolly had his reputation damaged in the 1850s by scandals linking him to cases of wrongful confinement, including one that figures in Charles Reade's novel, Hard Cash. This essay looks at two major works Conolly published during the scandals and argues that they are responses to the charges against him. Both works focus on representations of insanity in art, rather than actual patients. “The Physiognomy of Insanity” (1858-59) is a series of essays on photographic portraits of asylum patients, and his essays prove to be more fictional than factual. A Study of Hamlet (1863) looks at the ambiguity of madness in Shakespeare's portrayal of Hamlet, but it explains how Conolly understood the relationship between fact and fiction in cases of insanity. In both works, Conolly defends himself as an aesthete and defines his diagnostic method as a deliberate and necessary form of impressionism.
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3206.More information
This essay investigates an important stock scene of female peril and suffering from Victorian melodrama that I am calling the penitent woman tableau. I argue that this highly iconographic staged moment, where a sexually fallen daughter, fiancée, or wife sinks to her knees in remorse at the sight of the father, lover, or husband she has betrayed, derives its emotional energy and cultural force less from its representation of feminine terror and more from its equivocal portrayal of masculine authority. The penitent woman tableau spotlights a tense moment where violence against a woman could occur but doesn't; it is a performance of masculine power where the man's physical force is implicitly available but never literalized. Both visual artists and writers of the Victorian period were drawn to this scene, which I believe fascinated audiences because it spotlights the difficulty of representing masculine mastery in a society increasingly skeptical of physical force as a desirable means of domestic discipline. By examining the penitent woman tableau across several Victorian media and literary genres, including painting, poetry by Alfred Tennyson, and fiction by Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Joseph Conrad, I not only attempt to enrich our understanding of the unstable nature of masculine authority within the middle-class mid-Victorian family but also to illuminate the ways in which melodramatic conventions were crucial to the exploration of this urgent social question. Melodrama, often thought of as both feminine and conservative, offers a surprisingly complex depiction of masculinity within the penitent woman tableau.
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3207.More information
This paper is an attempt at the refutation of certain fallacies, which have gained a wide currency in legal and criminological thinking. These fallacies are the following. First, the mistaken interpretation of universal statements such as « Any person condemns murder » as the expression of a cross-cultural consensus about the blameworthiness of a certain type of behaviour ; such statements, it is argued, are mere tautologies reflecting the cogency of our linguistic customs. Second, the erroneous belief that criminology can dogmatically account for the sum of the facts which appertain to its field of study, by means of a single, all-encompassing explanation ; arguments are given fo show that the fate of criminological studies is fragmentation. Third, it is argued that the criminal justice system should be conceived as an apparatus for social provocation rather than as institutionalized social reaction. Fourth, it is pointed out that we must draw an unambiguous distinction between the legal notion of a sentence and the intuitive notion of punishment ; stressing this difference leads the author to compare briefly the main tenets of what he respectively calls dogmatic and sceptical criminology. Finally, the necessity to recognize as separate issues the justification and the allocation of criminal sanctions is proven and it is shown how the penal fascination with capital punishment is responsible for blurring the distinction between these issues.
Keywords: Système de justice criminelle, sanction criminelle, pensée légale, pensée criminologique, peine capitale, Criminal justice system, criminal sanction, legal thinking, criminological thinking, capital punishment, Sistema de justicia criminal, sanción criminal, pensamiento legal, pensamiento criminológico, pena capital
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3208.More information
Keywords: Mouvement étudiant, sexisme, censure, Révolution tranquille, université
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3209.More information
AbstractThis article presents the different responses France has taken in face of various abuses committed by members of certain cultic groups sectarian groups. Following a historical and a descriptive methodology, the evolution of the French approach is presented and discussed with a view of analysing which French laws have been used by magistrates against cultic groups as well as which laws are likely to be used with an aim of showing how French law can and is used. Finally, the modulations of France's response to cultic abuse are presented and discussed.
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3210.More information
During the summer of 1847 the impact of famine, disease, and social upheaval in Ireland was felt in port cities across the North Atlantic World. As an important hub of commerce and migration, Montreal was deeply affected by these events. The arrival of thousands of Irish migrants, many of whom had contracted typhus during their journey, touched off a contentious debate in the city. An engaged and alarmed public threw their support behind a proposal put forward by representatives of the municipal government that called for the construction of an elaborate quarantine facility just down the St. Lawrence River from the city. This facility, which migrants would be confined at until their healthy status was confirmed beyond reasonable doubt, promised to return order not only to Montreal, but to the entire migration process. The body appointed by the colonial administration, however, rejected the proposal, and tabled a far more modest plan that would continue to house migrants in sheds located just a stone's throw away from the city's western suburbs. The highly charged debate that ensued furnishes us with an opportunity to examine how the city's political elite and the broader public were thinking through questions about migration, public health, and the contours of liberal governance. The objective of this article is to consider the role that moments of crisis such as this played in shaping the city's political culture, and to place the events of 1847 in the context of the larger struggle between local and metropolitan authority occurring during this period.