1This volume bears the title of a symposium which was held at the Maison Française d’Oxford in July 2003. It brought together historians, art historians and specialists of nineteenth-century French and English literature who confronted approaches and representations of social deviance in Britain and France from the 1830s to the turn of the century.

3The symposium had a broad vocation. It aimed neither at presenting deviant practices in great detail nor at offering over-specialised papers, but rather at providing general perspectives and overall problematics on various aspects of social deviance. Its goal was to enable specialists from different fields to discover other approaches of deviance and be able to discuss this issue regardless of their scientific backgrounds. As a result, the talks fostered fruitful, eclectic, interdisciplinary discussions on the topic of social deviance in nineteenth-century France and England. The papers tackled a great variety of facets of social deviance, including philosophical definitions of deviance, religious deviance, urban and rural deviance, pictorial representations of deviance, the criminal classes, deviance in novels or in subversive songs, female deviance, and finally deviance at the Fin-de-Siècle, all seen through historical, scientific and fictional perspectives.

4This publication, which derives from the symposium, is divided into six thematic sections associated with deviance and deviant behaviour. The first of these is entitled ‘Social Deviance and Religious Deviance.’ In the first paper, Mariana Saad explores an early nineteenth-century definition of deviance by the French social philosopher Charles Fourier who argued that society generated its own deviants. In the next paper, David Nash investigates the dynamics of different theoretical approaches to blasphemy, giving a particular focus to a comparative analysis between English and French traditions in this respect.

5The second section of this publication is entitled ‘Urban deviance and Rural Deviance.’ The first two papers tackle the problem of urban deviance. Max Duperray depicts nineteenth-century London as a locus for deviance associated with obscurity, disorientation, illegibility and the Gothic genre. He studies the figure of the flaneur, inspired from Baudelaire, as a character torn between alienation and contamination. Stéphane Michaud takes up the figure of the flaneur in London in his study of Flora Tristan’s sojourn in London described in her book Promenades dans Londres (1840) which analysed many aspects of English society and in particular social deviance. This study is all the more interesting as Flora Tristan saw herself as an outcast and a pariah. Christiana Payne, on the other hand, tackles the issue of rural deviance by analysing the representation in art, of smugglers, poachers and wreckers: three groups of people whose seemingly ’deviant’ activities in the countryside and on the coast, aroused conflicting opinions and reactions.

6The ‘Criminal Classes’ section of the publication deals with what would be considered the more ’traditional’ forms of deviant behaviour, i.e. criminality and illegality. In his paper, Philippe Chassaigne uses extensive archival analysis to assess the purpose and effect of legislative repressiveness on violent criminals during the later nineteenth century. He also explores the meaning and implication of the rhetoric surrounding the phrase ’dangerous classes’ for legislators and criminals alike. Dominique Kalifa stresses that the last third of the nineteenth century was a turning point in the representation of crime and delinquency in France. Indeed, the rapid growth of cultural industries, the development of a parliamentary democracy, and the rising passion for criminal enquiries influenced the staging, protagonists and political assessment of criminal and delinquency cases, thus giving rise to modern conceptions of insecurity.

7The next two papers relate to social deviance in England and France in the post 1830s period. In this section, entitled ‘Norms and Deviance’, Caroline Jackson-Houlston explores the existence of a ’submerged discourse’ in the structure and content of popular songs of song-and-supper clubs. She also examines the relationship between this seemingly subversive material and the respectable gender ideology said to exist in the Victorian period. Deviant behaviour in a literary context is further investigated by Nathalie Vanfasse who analyses the poetics of social deviance in Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens. Taking a closer look at the stylistic, semantic, syntactic and narrative components of the discourse on social deviance in this novel, she shows that Dickens simultaneously legitimised Victorian orthodoxy by condemning social deviance, deviated from this orthodoxy by producing ambivalence through normative polyphony, and sometimes subverted Victorian orthodoxy altogether.

8The penultimate section of the publication, ‘Female Deviance’ offers an interesting mix between literary and historical analyses of normed versus deviant behaviour. Elisabeth Jay’s paper looks at the portrayal of the housekeeper in Victorian fiction, and how this figure became the site for the expression of a series of class and gender anxieties, culminating in the representation of the domestic servant as a social threat. Anne-Marie Kilday then goes on to look at the subject of domestic violence in nineteenth-century Britain. She attempts to give a balanced gendered perspective of this subject matter, by looking particularly at the surprisingly brutal behaviour of violent women in the home. Finally, Alain Jumeau stresses the importance the Victorians placed on virginity and chastity and their perception of a woman’s loss of chastity as ‘the Tragedy of Tragedies’. His paper deals with this form of moral and sexual deviance in George Eliot’s early novels.

9The publication is concluded with a section appropriately entitled ‘Deviance at the Fin de Siècle.’ Firstly, Marie-Christine Leps uses the Dreyfus affair to present an analytical model which could be transferred to different disciplinary enquiries. In particular her work focuses on the play of power and resistance, the calculation of normal and deviant and the determination of identity and subjectivity, and how these themes became distorted over time. Nigel Messenger’s detailed analysis of Gissing’s Nether World provides an insight into the creative dynamic behind this novel and how it related to the writer’s own experiences of ‘deviancy’, as well as his perceptions of ‘acceptable’ versus ‘deviant’ behaviour. Finally, Andrea Goulet investigates four texts that revolve around the central conceit of the ‘optogram’ (the photograph of a retinal image in a cadaver’s eye). By looking at specific discourses—biological vulnerability, psychic pathology and social-geographical deviance—her paper encourages the re-reading of the theme of the retinal membrane as a symbol for the anxiety-provoking porosity of national and civic boundaries in an age of colonial exchange. What, then, are the major conclusions and common threads which emerge from these interdisciplinary debates?

101 It first appears that deviancy and deviant behaviour were very much a preoccupation with writers, moralists, legislators and social commentators alike in Victorian England and in France during the same period. This fixation was a reflection of the social, economic and political climate of each country, as well as an over-arching desire to establish and maintain control over the general populace.

112 The second observation which results from these papers is that in spite of English and French attempts to come to terms once and for all with social deviance, the phenomenon proved difficult to control. Thus differences in the definition of deviant behaviour were multifarious and often unique to given situations or based purely on personal opinion. What some individuals considered deviant, others did not. Circumstances were crucial in determining the boundaries between normal and deviant behaviour, and regularly these boundaries were blurred, unclear and being constantly redrawn, making it hard to determine where the limits of acceptability ceased, and the boundaries of deviancy began.

123 The papers reveal that there was an evident class dynamic to the perpetration of deviant behaviour in France and England in the nineteenth century. Deviant behaviour was considered the role of the lower social orders and the right to control this behaviour, to manipulate it, or curb it completely, was the role of the respectable class. However, these accepted/established patterns were becoming rather unreliable, as the French and the English alike became increasingly aware of the disturbing possibility of social deviance originating from within the supposedly ‘respectable’ upper classes.

134 Another conclusion emerging from these papers is that perceptions of gendered ideologies were extremely important to considerations of deviant behaviour. Traditional ideas associating women with ideologies of femininity and domesticity abounded, but it is clear from the evidence provided here, that female transgressors were a constant cause for concern, especially when women stepped outside the boundaries of what was considered appropriate behaviour for a member of the so-called fairer sex. Men were expected to be deviant, they were almost encouraged to be so, as a promotion of the strength of their manhood. Women, on the other hand, could not behave in an unacceptable, unfeminine manner, it was simply not to be tolerated. This gendered double standard appears to have existed on both sides of the Channel during the nineteenth century.

14This publication prolongs and questions some of Michel Foucault’s assumptions in Surveiller et Punir, and although, at times, doubts can be cast over the accuracy of some of his analyses, his ideas prove nonetheless a very stimulating and rewarding starting point and reference.

15Finally, throughout the various sections, it becomes clear that many nineteenth-century analyses of social deviance paved the way for modern definitions and perceptions of this phenomenon, which gives this originally historically-oriented project very contemporary undertones.

16In France, just as in England, deviancy and deviant behaviour thus provide us with information that is rarely dull, invariably interesting, and which helps us understand much about the nature, attitudes and functions of these societies and the people who managed them. As for the so-called ’deviants’ themselves, their persona and their actions tell us much about the nature of French and English societies in terms of their political, cultural, social and economic boundaries, and they provide a completely different perspective to that offered by the legal, moral and religious authorities of the time. These facts account for the fascination the topic of social deviance in England and in France c. 1830–1900 still holds for scholars and the general public today.

17The editors of these proceedings wish to thank all the participants whose competence and enthusiasm made the symposium so rewarding. They also wish to express their gratitude to the Maison Française d’Oxford and Oxford Brookes University for their support in organising this event, and the Maison Française and the Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens for the present publication.