Monsters in the Village? Incest in Nineteenth Century France (Winner OF THE 2008 GRADUATE STUDENT Competition) (Report‪)‬

Introduction Lost deep in the consciousness of mankind, incest continues to suggest hotror. Beyond just the crime, the taboo has created the monster. (1) But in France, since the end of the nineteenth century, the social imaginary of incest is undoubtedly telated to poverty and the rural world. Creating a mental map of this crime, French society had relegated incest to peasants and distant villages. A picture of these criminals can also be painted: drunkards, savages and idlers. They represent the worse of humanity: the "hot monster" led to the path of crime by his passionate and vivid nature. (2) In less than one hundred years, this monster's face had been shaped. We can understand this construction given the importance of the family as the society's mainstay. In the patriarchal structure of the family, the father guaranteed the good order in his home. But the growing publicity of incest cases in the late nineteenth century revealed the existence of the crime and the criminal father's image to the entire society. Introducing horror and immorality into their homes, incestuous fathers became pariahs and were seen to endanger the moral society of the nineteenth century.