Vol. 1 No. 10 (December, 1991) pp. 132-133
CRIME AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE UNDER THE THIRD REPUBLIC: THE SHAME OF
MARIANNE by Benjamin F. Martin. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press. 317 pp. Cloth $39.95.
Reviewed by Donald W. Jackson, Texas Christian University
Benjamin Martin gives as his purpose the analysis of the French
criminal justice system -- from the perpetration of crimes,
through police investigation, through procedural formali- ties
and trial -- to conclude only with the eventual punishment of
those found guilty. His is certainly an ambitious undertak- ing.
Indeed, his principal boundaries are temporal, those of the
French Third Republic, from 1871 to 1914. As it turns out, the
book is fairly short on analysis, but replete with a sometimes
aimless narrative of what must be, as least to many readers,
criminal justice trivia. For the avocational aficionado of crime
and criminal justice lore, there are no doubt a variety of
interesting nuggets. A serious scholar also occasionally might
find interesting bits and pieces, but the book hardly deserves a
consecutive front to back reading. Picking out the good bits is a
better option. For one thing, the book sometimes lurches
surprisingly from one topic to another. Let me illustrate.
The beginning is fairly auspicious. Martin begins with a
description of the most common crimes during the Third Republic.
Four crimes, grand larceny, girl molestation, unpremeditated
murder and premeditated murder accounted for more than 57 percent
of reported felonies. What "astonishes" Martin is the
prevalence of girl molestations, which turn out (not so
surprisingly) to be crimes committed by males -- and by males of
all age cohorts -- from under sixteen to over sixty. Fair enough!
At that point I thought the book would explore the causes and
nature of that phenomenon, and I was indeed interested in
learning more. Alas, very little more was forthcoming. Despite
the fact that Martin finds that in France "every young girl
was at risk of sexual molestation from males of all categories
and descriptions," (p. 37) he concludes that the high
incidence of sexual molestation of young girls was probably not
peculiar to France during this period. He proposes that sexual
repression may have contributed to the molestation of young girls
during the last several decades of the 19th century, but he also
suggests that such crimes may be of "immense"
proportions still today (he cites the appeal of Nabokov's LOLITA
as a clue). If so, sexual repression seems an unlikely
contemporary cause. But the reader will learn no more from this
book, for the next chapter turns to the police. Martin begins
with an interesting narrative of the origins of the French
police. His account, both of the employment and the exploitation
of criminals and informants by the French police, is particularly
informative, but after about fifteen pages of such narrative he
switches to successive biographical sketches of the various
directors of the Srete. Ten pages later we encounter a narrative
of the careers of several notorious criminals, followed only a
few pages later by a description of a typical day of a director
of the Srete, followed by a descrip- tion of the techniques for
policing Parisian prostitutes. By the time the reader completes
the two chapters on the police, puzzle- ment, just short of
confusion seems the most likely outcome, for there is no
continuous theme.
Page 133 follows:
The chapters on criminal procedure (thirty-one pages), the courts
(thirty-three pages), the magistrature (forty-two pages,
including ten pages of tables on the structure of promotions
within the system), and the bar (twenty pages) conclude Martin's
institutional survey. And after that the subject of punishment is
dispatched in only thirteen pages. There is much of interest
here, but each subject skims the surface. There simply is not
enough substance here for the serious scholar.
Coming at last to the conclusion, I was eagerly awaiting the
author's analysis -- hopeful to the end that we would learn
something more about the high incidence of sexual molestation
during the Third Republic. Instead we very nearly get a brief
obloquy (in seven pages) on the injustices of the French system
during the Third Republic. To top that off, the author adds an
afterword of forty pages or so that describes a particular band
of anarchists and gangsters, the Bande Bonnet of the "Belle
Epoque." The afterword is interesting, but, in contrast, the
Dreyfus affair receives only a few pages.
The final puzzle: What is "The Shame of Marianne" in
the subtitle of the book? You won't find out from the book
itself. For those readers who, like myself, know something more
about criminal justice than French civilization, it seems that
Marianne is the female figure with peaked cap who long has
symbolized France. So in Martin's view the shame of Marianne is
the shame of France for the injustices of its Third Republic.
Copyright 1991