Violence is so much in the news today that we may find it hard to
believe that it is less prevalent than it was in the past. But this
is exactly what the distinguished historian Robert Muchembled
argues in this major new work on the history of violence. He shows
that brutality and homicide have been in decline since the
thirteenth century. The thesis of a 'civilizing process', of a
gradual taming, even sublimation, of violence, seems, therefore, to
be well-founded.
How are we to explain this decline in public displays of
aggression? What mechanisms have modernizing societies employed to
repress and control violence? The increasingly strict social
control of unmarried, male adolescents, together with the coercive
education imposed on this age group, are central to Muchembled's
explanation. Masculine violence gradually disappeared from public
space, to become concentrated in the home. Meanwhile, a vast
popular literature, precursor of the modern mass media, came to
play a cathartic role: the duels of The Three Musketeers and the
amazing exploits of Fantomas, as described in the new crime
literature invented in the nineteenth century, now helped to purge
the violent impulses.
And yet we seem, in the first few years of the twenty-first
century, to be witnessing a resurgence of violence, especially
among the youths of the inner cities. How should we understand this
resurgence in relation to the long history of violence in the
West?
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