On the Threshold: Youth As Arbiters of Urban Space in Early Modern France (Section III AUTHORITY IN VILLAGE AND URBAN Life) (Essay‪)‬

In early May 1700, Jean Villat, a mason in Dijon, France, brought defamation and abuse charges against seventeen-year-old Denis Degissey, son of a deceased tiler, for having publicly declared in a tavern that he had sex with Villat's daughter, Louise, more than one hundred times. In the evening, after his boasting at the bar had ended, Degissey walked to the Villat residence and called the girl "a whore" in the street. When Louise Villat's mother ran out to the street, "having wanted to defend the honor of her daughter," Denis Degissey proceeded to swear at her. After running the drunken youth away from their home, Jean Villat returned to his house, slept on the matter, and upon awakening went to the city court to file a complaint. Dijon's court officers took the matter seriously; twenty witnesses were called to testify, eleven of them aged between twelve and twenty-five years old. The judge found the boy guilty of "atrocious and aggravated injuries to the honor and reputation of Louise Villat." The court then forced the young man--and his mother--to stand on a platform before the town hall, "in the presence of Jean Villat and his wife, and four of their friends and family members," to declare "that they hold Louise Villat for a fine, honorable girl ... and that they ask to be pardoned for having injured and offended the family." Degissey and his mother were fined, including court fees, a hefty fifty livres. (1) This prototypical defamation proceeding illustrates well the interplay between articulations of honor and urban spaces among early modern European youth. Degissey's comments warranted a severe penalty for two reasons. On the one hand, they were proclaimed on the street. Neighbors and passersby could easily hear the coarse and provocative words. On the other hand, the seventeen-year-old challenged the sexual honor of an unmarried young woman, and thus her parents, at the threshold of their own domicile. While routine boasting and even insults at the pub might have been anticipated, replicating those words in another spatial context sparked the court proceedings. (2)