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