Violence in france's past: An anthropological approach

Abstract

In France, the 1960s and 1970s were a major turning point in the field of the history of ordinary violence. Up to that period, researchers concentrated above all on studying collective forms of violence and popular protest, in continuation of the work done by Georges Lefebvre in particular. For the most part, the history of violence, and especially that of rural violence, was a history of crowds and protests (Corbin, 1991). From the 1960s on, a certain number of authors endeavoured to use the archives of the legal system with a view to analysing everyday crime and interpersonal forms of violence. © 2009 Springer-Verlag New York.