Book. It is a fascinating journey through history, a methodical exploration of the intricacies of the law, a deep reflection on the notion of testimony and a powerful analysis of what incest represents. Saying, hearing and judging incest from the Middle Ages to the present day It is a collective work that, like a puzzle, allows us to understand, chapter after chapter, why this crime digs a hole “Abyss in the psyche of the child victim”in the words of sociologist Irène Théry. Whether they are historians, sociologists, anthropologists, psychoanalysts or magistrates, the authors, as the historian Caroline Callard points out, manage to make incest a “ something that can be said and thought”.
Coordinated by two historians (Anne-Emmanuelle Demartini and Julie Doyon) and an anthropologist (Léonore Le Caisne), this book explores the many facets of a crime that, according to a 2020 Ipsos survey, affects one in ten French people (the 80% of the victims are women.
There is not one, but incest, the researchers immediately warn: the term designates both a rule – the civil code establishes that one cannot marry one’s father, mother, brother, sister, uncle, aunt or nephews. – such as transgression: the penal code provides penalties for sexual abuse of a minor, whether or not committed within the same family.
One of the great merits of this collective work is to reinscribe incest at the center of the long history of social representations. In the deeply religious world of the 18th centurymy century, theincestmeaning “impure” or “impure” in Latin, was not considered a sexual assault imposed on a child by a family member, but rather a sin of vice and lust. Furthermore, at that time we did not distinguish the criminal from his prey: in the Middle Ages, as under the Ancien Regime, this “crime without sexual violence” AND “without victims”underlines Julie Doyon, hugged the adult and the child “ in the same fault and the same guilt.”.
Psychic reordering
The view of incest has changed profoundly over the centuries, as surprisingly shown by an article by sociologist Sabine Chalvon-Demersay dedicated to the television adaptation of the swashbuckling novel. The Hunchback When the play premiered in 1857, as during its adaptations in 1912, 1925, 1934, 1944, 1959, 1967 and even 1997, the marriage of the knight and Aurore, the young woman he had taken in as a child, seemed like a happy ending. . In 2003, however, it raised deep concern: after long debates, the scriptwriters had the knight marry not Aurore, but her mother. The sociologist sees in this rewriting the sign of “change in moral sensibilities” about incest.
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