Cultural blindness and ambiguity: Reading (for) and writing about rape

Abstract

In the long nineteenth century, crime reports in popular, sensationalistic broadsheets called canards sanglants contributed to making the crime of rape visible to a broader audience in France. The general public learned about heinous crimes, as vendors in public streets and squares shouted out and sang the papers' titles and complaintes. Moreover, during the first third of the century, not only did statistical accounts of increasing crime make rape more noticeable, but the visual spectacles of the criminal were replaced by crime reports in the press, such as the Gazette des Tribunaux. After examining why rape sold papers, and explaining my larger corpus of 115 canards sanglants, this essay investigates the murky way in which seven particular crimes of alleged murder were represented in the canards sanglants - two in 1827, the others in 1843, 1852, 1879, 1887 and 1889. These seven crimes share several common features. Ambiguity is manifest in each case, as the crime report declares that only a murder transpired; however, linguistic similarities and parallels with the physical evidence at the crime scenes mirrored the crime of rape. My methodology looks at code words and blind spots that cause the erasure of sexual violence, illuminating what was previously unseen. Bensmaïa's figurative use of scotoma, as well as the term's etymology, paradoxically highlight the gaps, shadows or blind spots when legislating, examining or reporting cases of rape or attentat à la pudeur. Both canards sanglants and the legal and medical institutions focused more on brutal acts of sexual violence that occurred to child victims under 13 years of age, rather than to adults. Medical and legal discourses contained significant omissions and blind spots regarding the rape or sodomy of adults.1 Although rape gained greater visibility in the nineteenth century, seven verdicts provide examples of how signs of sexual violence occasionally remained invisible to journalists, judges and forensic doctors.