The History of an Urban Fear: Attacks by Piqueurs on Women in Restoration France
In 1819 “prickers” of women appeared as a new category of deviants. Within five months, some 400 people – mostly young women – complained of having been pricked by unknown people, with needles or other tools, in public spaces in Paris. From November 1819, authorities, newspapers and cartoons began to publicize this event. Soon, it triggered off an acute collective fear, which swiftly spread around provincial cities where such acts were observed. Rumors mingled with established facts and tended to make a political issue of these gestures. Thus, at the crossroads of the history of sexual perversions, rumors and political fancies, a new and disconcerting field of research emerges, blurring boundaries between fiction and statement, miscellaneous and political manœuvre, jokes and perverse drive.
This paper provides a historical anthropology of this short-lived urban fear, quickly erased by the traumatic assassination of the Duke of Berry, which took place only a few weeks later, on 13th February 1820. This fear reveals the vulnerability of the female body in an urban public space under reconstruction. It is expressed through forms of “moral panic” and also through rumors attributing a unique, clearly identifiable causality – a police or political conspiracy – to a probably much more complex phenomenon. In this respect, the “prickers case” discloses the intense politicization of gestures committed in public, at a time of great conflictuality.
Keywords
- historical anthropology
- Restoration
- France
- urban fear
- rumor
- sexual perversion