Crime and the Press

Le présent article se propose d’analyser la circulation de la formule « crime passionnel » dans la presse française contemporaine. L’étude se développe à partir d’un corpus d’articles journalistiques, parus entre février 2017 et mars 2018, dans lesquels nous avons observé que la formule « crime passionnel » est prioritairement mobilisée pour désigner le meurtre ou l’assassinat d’une femme par son conjoint. Une analyse plus approfondie a montré comment la formule participe d’un processus d’évaporation de la haine des hommes contre les femmes, en inscrivant leurs gestes meurtriers dans l’imaginaire de l’amour passionnel. La circulation de la formule « crime passionnel » dans la presse est renforcée par d’autres éléments récurrents dans les récits journalistiques : le recours à des expressions similaires renvoyant à la fatalité du meurtre, l’emploi de chiffres, les discours rapportés des coupables. Notre étude vise alors à comprendre quel ordre du monde et des relations sociales la formule « crime passionnel » cristallise et continue de faire exister.

Abstract
This paper aims at analysing the circulation of the formula “crime of passion” in the contemporary French press. This study is based on a corpus of newspapers articles published between February 2017 and March 2018. We observed that the formula “crime of passion” is mostly used to designate the murder of a woman by her partner. An in-depth analysis showed that the formula contributes to minimize the men’s hate against women and recall the collective image of the passionate love. The circulation of the formula “crime of passion” in the press is accentuated by other recurrent elements as the use of similar expressions referring to the fatality of the murder, the reporting of numbers and statistics, the reported speech of the murders. This study aims at understanding how the formula “crime of passion” maintain and preserve the existing societal order.

In late nineteenth-century Italy, the court, and especially the court of assizes, became a new and important public space: the law began permitting an audience in order to help control the judiciary power. This article shows that the court audience, hitherto placed at the margins of both historical narratives and historiographical analysis, played a key role in emotional interactions in the modern courtroom. Drawing primarily on court reports published in newspapers, this article offers a systematic and detailed analysis of the way in which the court audience’s emotional expectations, dispositions, experiences, and practices were described and critically evaluated by the press, by the judicial and political authorities, and by legal and social scholars. Furthermore, it highlights the gender and class dynamics at play in the portrayal and perception of the audience at court hearings. Finally, it analyzes the complex relationship between the court audience itself and consumers of court news. This article demonstrates that research on law and emotions should focus not only on the primary actors in the courtroom, that is the judge, defendant, plaintiff, and witnesses, but also on those at the margins: the audience in the courtroom as well as the virtual audience of consumers of court news. In doing so, it shows that the emotional interaction in the courtroom was a two-way process: those on trial performed for their audience, but the audience’s reactions also shaped the way in which future trials played out.