Vol-violence

The renunciation of violence by prévôtal magistrates, and the unabating, increasingly profitable activity of Périgourdin thieves, are both consistent with what is now received doctrine on ancien régime criminality, vol-violence – ‘theft-violence’. In the course of the eighteenth century, in other words, the theft of property replaced physical violence as the most common form of criminal activity. This ‘Authorised Version’ of ancien régime criminal behaviour, arising out of the urgent need to impose some kind of pattern on the confusing mass of incident which makes up the judicial archives, had the attraction of alliterative simplicity, and the advantage of adaptability both to Annaliste and to Marxist historiography. Violence could optimistically be labelled the characteristic form of criminal activity under an aristocratic, ‘feudal’ society, while theft became the characteristic crime of bourgeois capitalist society. The criminological pattern could be made to fit the general pattern of eighteenth-century social and economic development.

The vol-violence theory was built upon statistics culled from the systematic study of court records, a rich and rewarding source for social historians, but one fraught with limitations. If in the twentieth century cases in which prosecutions are initiated constitute only a fraction of the crimes which are actually committed, it is hardly necessary to stress that this distortion is an obvious problem for the period of the ancien régime, when the natural difficulties of communication were accentuated by community spirit and intimidation, and when police patrols made appearances in most parishes at long intervals.