Droit et Cultures (Jun 2009)
Les interdits hors la loi : la répression institutionnelle et médicale de la sexualité (1850-1930)
Abstract
Apart from sexuality with a procreative aim, sexual behaviour as such was considered, by physicians, as pathological and, by the moralists, as crimes against morality. Although masturbation and homosexuality were not regarded as a criminal offence or even as a crime by the French criminal code, however they were considered as the object of a moral interdiction and, particularly between 1850 and 1930, repressed by all society actors (clerks, members of a league, monks, police officers, judges, teachers, parents) and by the medical profession (the first of which psychiatrists). This repressive phenomenon concerned all the Western countries, including the United States, to various degrees (the German criminal code, for example, was much more repressive than the French one on this topic). Many psychiatrists turned into auxiliaries of justice by supporting judicial action against homosexuals and masturbators. Western psychiatry of this period of time is characterised as far as sexuality is concerned as “a psychiatry of error” which will turn into “a psychiatry of horror” by developing a monstrous arsenal both technological (corsets, nightshirts and cages of retention..) and therapeutic (infibulation, cauterisation, circumcision without anesthesia, castration..). Our contemporary societies still carry the marks of this dark periodduring which medicine and justice acted together for medicalizing and punishing sexual behaviours deviating from the standard.
