This careful and beautifully written study of crimes of violence in Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century focuses on the so-called crimes of passion that plagued the city's impoverished quarters. Many earlier studies have focused on the phenomenon of fin-de-siècle domestic violence and the vengeance of betrayed wives, husbands, and lovers, but in Gender and Justice Eliza Ferguson seeks to use Assizes trial documents to reconstruct the gender relations, sexuality, and material lives of the working-class people who were responsible for the vast majority of Parisian crimes of domestic violence. Her study reminds us that “domestic violence” as a separate category of offense did not exist in Europe and North America until the rise of political feminism in the 1970s. In France, men and women were prosecuted for first-degree (assassinat) and second-degree (meurtre) murder or for deadly assault where death was not the result.

The full-scale legal prosecution of such crimes produced a considerable array of evidence of interest to the historian: prosecutorial indictments, witness testimony, letters, material evidence, the testimony of victims and assailants, and the observations of the juge d'instruction, who interrogated all concerned. Ferguson examines 264 of these cases. They produced 200 male and 64 female defendants, and acquittal rates far higher (28 percent of men, 64 percent of women) than jury trials for nondomestic violent crimes, not to mention acquittal rates for property crimes in the single digits. Previous studies of crimes of passion have stressed that melodramatic treatments of domestic violence in the popular press and the theater, as well as medical discourses of mental illness, hypnotic states, and disordered emotions generated narratives that perpetrators then successfully deployed to gain exculpation or reduced sentences from juries familiar with the same scripts. Ferguson downplays these explanations in favor of close readings of the intimate lives of couples as observed by neighbors, kin, and public officials. She finds that community standards of retributive justice governed the vast majority of judgments made by those who knew the couple, and this had the effect of lessening the guilt or even exonerating the accused in the eyes of witnesses. It was not, she argues, an embrace of dramatic emotional narratives or deterministic theories of nonresponsibility that drove high rates of acquittal for domestic violence but codes of propriety embedded in the gendered “habitus” of working class culture.

As she examines these cases in detail, Ferguson fleshes out the intimate lives of the working poor of the capital, the gendered division of labor that structured their lives, their material domestic circumstances, and the networks of neighbors and kin for whom a couple's personal life was more or less an open book. Married or not, men and women were judged by their neighbors according to standards of masculine and feminine appearance and comportment that often trumped the legal grounds of prosecution by blaming victims or excusing perpetrators. A man who did not work, drank away his wife's salary, and beat her regularly could not count on the sympathy of witnesses if he did her harm. For her part, whether she worked or not, a woman was expected to have a meal ready for her husband, keep a good house, and present herself to the world in as respectable a manner as her resources allowed. If she failed in these things, and compounded her faults by taking a lover or drinking to excess, her husband's murderous vengeance was typically excused by neighbors, providing his own faults did not outweigh hers in the scale of gendered expectations.

Men were likely to be permitted more sexual freedom within the ménage, though they could not otherwise neglect their marital duties, and a complete lack of affection toward their partners was held against them. However, when she compiles the lists of responsibilities and rights in these often unstable relationships, Ferguson finds that women had to measure up to more and higher standards than men. She not only had to contribute to the family income but also to keep an orderly house, mind the children if there were any, remain sexually loyal and available to her partner, and not reproach her mate overmuch for the drinking, bouts of laziness, and occasional infidelities men were prone to. In short, women had greater opportunities for failure and for subsequent blame if they were victims of violence their neighbors regarded as deserved. On the other hand, despite lower expectations for them, gender deviance and acts of violence were committed far more often by men than women, which might explain the dependably generous assessments made of patricidal women whose neighbors had observed countless episodes of a man's drunken or bullying behavior.

But it was juries who acquitted these women, not witnesses. Ferguson duly acknowledges the cultural gulf that separated middle-class juries from the working-class cases they judged. They had their own class standards for propriety, but those did not include working wives, habitual violence, heavy drinking, or semipublic adulterous affairs (prosperity permitted greater opportunity for discretion). The rich documentary materials that permit Ferguson's reconstruction of the code of popular retributive justice do not exist for jury deliberations, so she is unable to explore the psychology of the middle-class jurists and jurors who sat in judgment of crimes of passion. Were the high acquittal rates juries granted a consequence of notions of retributive justice middle-class jurors shared with working-class people? Did they view the domestic violence of the poor as natural to people of their ilk and therefore not as blamable as similar behavior would be for more refined citizens? Or were they surprisingly capable of feeling sufficient empathy to bridge the sociocultural divide between themselves and the poor?