- 1 See G. Rudé, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730–1848(...)
1The recasting of deviance, criminal activity and anti-social behaviour as forms of dissidence and transgression has importantly influenced the way that we view human behaviour in both the recent and the not so recent past. Invariably attempts to understand the dynamics of people’s errant actions and to look beneath the record offered us by authorities has made us all acutely wary of how history has been loaded against the powerless and the victim. From the early work of Le Bon and George Rudé through to the restatement of their conclusions in England, the task of rendering articulate the protest and concerns of whole populations in pre-literate society has been a central activity for social historians.1 With this spirit in mind the subject of blasphemy has belatedly emerged from the shadows. As a form of protest it has been neglected in favour of more focussed and seemingly intelligible modes of behaviour yet also its status as a crime has been poorly understood in its historical context. Moreover any causal or reflective relationship with the emergence of modern legal and policing systems has similarly been ignored.
- 2 Those who have ventured in this direction include Richard Webster, A Brief History of Blasphemy: Li (...)
2Yet lately it has ignited as an area of analysis and has begun to concern cultural and legal theorists alike. The reasons for this are scarcely hard to find. The phenomenon of blasphemy presents a variety of cultural theories and theorists with, at first sight, an ideal seedbed for ideas and preoccupations. It is a crime, a deviant activity, an abstract or concrete expression of individuality and articulately demonstrates the transgressive effect of individual forms of expression. These yearnings for the individual to be heard also appear to provide evidence for the collision of older forms of control intermeshing the embryonic development of new ones. Moreover blasphemy also appears to resemble a species of behaviour where people express themselves outside both of these structures of control whether old or new. In doing so, they expose the raw and sometimes visceral nature of power relations related to gender, class, the colonial and the postcolonial. All of this is also far more in reach of the cultural theorist than many other forms of expressive subjective behaviour. Blasphemers, whether through court record, pamphlet, inflammatory newspaper or eventually through film and photograph leave their academic audience with readily available texts to be read with or against the grain. In its way this represents a golden opportunity for cultural theorists to work with a neglected and thoroughly fruitful topic. For those wishing to apply various species of linguistic, post colonial and cultural theoretical approaches a veritable heaven of transgressive episodes to be told and enriched by fertile texts awaits.2
3This article is an attempt to evaluate and draw comparisons (and differences) between how this cultural engagement with blasphemy has played itself out in the hands of British and French theorists. It assesses the cultural, legal and religious contexts that have produced both approaches and tries to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each to perhaps show how these may have at least a little to say to each other about their respective failings. Lastly the piece hopes to suggest what investigation in this area may eventually say to other, wider histories of deviance.
- 3 See G. D. Nokes, A History of the Crime of Blasphemy, London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1928 quoted in D. (...)
4The phenomenon of blasphemy in Britain evolved as a species of statute law that was envisaged as protecting the peace and stability of the realm. Blasphemers became dangerous individuals whose actions unravelled the population’s binds of loyalty to both church and crown. As the most famous legal pronouncement of the seventeenth century by Sir Matthew Hale put it ‘to say religion is a cheat, is to dissolve all those obligations whereby the civil societies are preserved.’ Thus any attempt to attack the church established by law was, by definition, an attack upon the security of the state.3 This would later be mollified and repacked by Hannah More into a much gentler nineteenth century homily in which blasphemers malevolently disturbed the peace and perpetrated evil by depriving the poor of the hope of salvation.
5Thus the historiography of blasphemy in Britain was from the outset shaped by the twin agendas of constructing a history of the growth of religious and other liberties and the history of those who were ideologically motivated to disturb the peace. In England blasphemy is located firmly within the contexts of the law and of species of social radicalism. It is a profoundly liberal historiography that looks for developments and advances in tolerance and charts these through an examination of episodes that contain motifs of fear, absurdity, injustice, and the occasional whiff of tyranny.
- 4 See T. J. Toohey, ‘Blasphemy in Nineteenth Century England: The Pooley Case and its Background’, Vi (...)
6The earliest attempts to write such histories display both the tendencies suggested above. They were products of a confessional state which never seemed likely to surrender and contained a series of milestone cases that provoked civil liberties commentaries around issues of justice and wider conceptions of societal benefit. The case against Thomas Aitkenhead in the 1690s, the only individual to have been executed for the crime in Britain, provoked outrage and vitriol from John Locke who wrote an influential commentary which set contexts in which the crime would be discussed. He described a miscarriage of justice in which the clergy had conspired to influence the penalty. This focussed the mind squarely upon the two issues for British historians; liberty of opinion and the just and fair operation of the law. In the nineteenth century the case against the deranged Cornish well sinker Thomas Pooley in 1857 provoked outraged comment in Mill’s On Liberty as an indictment of barbarous anti-modern remnants lurking within British culture and society.4 The famous Freethinker case against G. W. Foote in 1883 provoked petitions from the philosophical and artistic community. But more importantly still, the significant judgement in this case undid the link between religion and the law and substituted the notion of ‘decency’ and ‘manner’ as the test of offence and this was controversial. James Fitzjames Stephen ignored the apparent liberalisation of the law the decision represented to assert that this effectively preserved an anachronistic law that should have been abolished, thereby prolonging its life unnecessarily. Stephen’s criticism of a fellow serving judge was entirely without precedent and really focuses for us that the link between civil liberties issues and the codification of the law was indissoluble and that the offence always provoked judicial and reformist comment.
- 5 H. Bradlaugh-Bonner, Penalties Upon Opinion, London: Watts & Co., 1934; G. W. Foote, Heroes & Marty (...)
- 6 See Nokes, A History of the Crime of Blasphemy, London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1928.
7The long succession of cases which could be traced back to the law’s origin in heresy gave birth to a literature of outraged and barbed libertarianism which appeared in the Victorian period and carried on into the twentieth century. ‘Victims’ were described, punishments evaluated as unjust, and the legal anomalies or occasionally the advances quarried for their value in describing the march or slow disinterested amble of progress.5 There were however some slightly drier legal texts that are still capable of surprising the reader with their wit and sardonic humour. These expressed a mixture of curiosity and startled amusement at finding themselves investigating an area such legal minds believed had been long consigned to oblivion.6
- 7 A. Calder-Marshall, Lewd, Blasphemous and Obscene, London: Hutchinson, 1972.
8The start of modern meaningful research into this area in Britain was initiated by the work of Arthur Calder-Marshall whose work is sweetly evocative of the 1960s with its attendant atmosphere of permissiveness and libertarianism. His Lewd Blasphemous and Obscene was written in the wake of the Lady Chatterley and Oz trials and tried to demonstrate that liberty, free speech and artistic expression could triumph over Victorian prudish sensibilities and the needlessly restrictive cultural project of the ruling classes.7 As the title suggests the book rather carelessly wrapped obscenity and pornography up with blasphemy and emboldened its own free speech agenda. The focus became an assertion of how we all came to be less stuffy and offered a rumbustious high Tory tolerance that appeared capable of raucous victory.
- 8 N. Walter, Blasphemy in Britain: The Practice and Punishment of Blasphemy, and the Trial of ’Gay Ne (...)
9Ironically, given its modernist pedigree, this analysis produced an almost post-modern playfulness about those involved in blasphemy. Like the defendants in the Oz trial they could be naughty school boys confounding the establishment with their innocent cheek. Calder-Marshall could afford this progressive optimism because permissiveness and freedom of expression were set to carry the day in the early 1970s and appeared to be a social good, a truism and to be value free. If Calder-Marshall’s work was overshadowed by Oz and Lady Chatterley, Nicolas Walter’s work had its inspiration in the 1977 case against Denis Lemon and Gay News. After the trial and verdict Walter published two works under the auspices of the publishing wing of the National Secular Society (the Rationalist Press Association). These had the primary agenda of demonstrating that the law of blasphemous libel was alive and well and the optimism of Calder-Marshall had swiftly become anachronistic.8
- 9 G. Robertson, The Justice Game, London: Vintage, 1998.
10Arguably the essence of the tradition was restored in the more recent work of Geoffrey Robertson the defence lawyer in the Gay News case. His tour-de-force memoir of his most famous and influential cases portrays a righteously indignant lawyer whose preoccupation with ‘underdogs’ and the needless fuss caused by the sensitivities of the British establishment meant some of the light heartedness that had infused Calder-Marshall’s approach returned. Robertson’s coverage of the Gay News case looked for overall progress in the cause of human rights. Inevitably an almost Victorian ‘establishment’ was invoked and Robertson’s numerous brushes with this leaves him with a jaundiced view. He concluded once more with a clearly modernist wish for the enduring and constant possibility of both fairness and surprise in the operation of the law. For Robertson the possibility of acquittals represented a fundamentally important check upon society and government’s wish that the law be there solely to do its bidding.9
11The Salman Rushdie case was the cause and occasion for a brief examination of blasphemy in the light of the concerns around tolerance and free speech that it raised. Richard Webster’s A Brief History of Blasphemy was really concerned with the issues inherent in the free speech/tolerance agendas and arguably took the logic of these to their ultimate conclusion. Arguing that liberalism had been a construct of the West ill-suited to the needs and wishes of multicultural Britain. Webster saw the contemporary issue of blasphemy through a deeply anti-orientalist prism.10
12My own work has been, not surprisingly, unable to escape from this tradition and has similarly scarcely been able to elude the importance of the historical context that has influenced work on blasphemy in Britain. However it has had to do so without the optimism of the previous approaches and focuses upon incidents, both historical and contemporary, which have not supported a view of unfettered and continuous progress.11 Faced with debates around legal integration with European Law and a renewed historiographical attitude to issues such as the role of religion in nationalism and secularisation the prognosis by the end of the 1990s looked bleak. It was possible to entertain concerns about how the retreat into the personal and the replacement of religious belief with religious feelings might convince liberal tolerance it was merely one view amongst many.
13What might be considered a series of drawbacks inherent in the approaches outlined above have led to significantly different treatments of British blasphemy. A preoccupation with wider society, with the role of police and courts has arguably not allowed blasphemy to become a part of cultural history. The historiography in Britain could be accused of being a history of offence, detection and punishment with precious little attempt to discover the mechanisms, genres and cultural norms or errancy of behaviour which gave birth to a ‘culture of blasphemy’. It is with these criticisms in mind that writers such as David Lawton and Joss Lutz Marsh have approached the subject. They have offered more theoretical readings of many of the cases covered by others and show (to varying degrees) the influence of post-structural, postmodern and post colonial theory. Nonetheless despite the criticisms their work illuminates it is also possible to see their approach as selective and liable to produce episodes in a history of transgressive culture rather than a history of the way that we have constructed understood and implemented a culture’s conception of blasphemy. It is perhaps possible to argue that this is indeed the point, the two projects outlined here were, and are, by no means exclusive to each other and their divergent destinations means that paths will cross, albeit fleetingly. Whose is the most impressive destination, however, remains a question to be tackled at greater length elsewhere.
14When we look at how phenomena such as blasphemy have been studied and conceived of in France the whole area of deviance, policing, confinement and transgression is quite clearly dominated by Michel Foucault. As we are aware Foucault mistrusted the notion of progress—denying the positivism that underlies versions of both bourgeois liberalism and Marxism. He was a refusenik of the enlightenment who did not believe the modern world has given us essentially more humane ways of playing out our relationships. Similarly he was preoccupied with how power is constructed as a philosophical and an historical phenomena and this appears as a clear cue to others that it should be studied in all possible circumstances. Our notion of progress, tolerance and enlightenment becomes in this vision the continual institutionalisation of forms of violence in systems of rules, one species of domination invariably replaced by another. The ‘birth of the clinic’ and the ‘birth of the prison’ showed that rationalism could objectify people and become thereby tyrannical. Power was the inevitable result of the creation of knowledge perpetuating the cycle of imprisonment.
15Using some of these Foucauldian ideas can shed light upon where some species of analysis might begin with the subject of blasphemy. Supposedly liberal and tolerant society has been neither especially liberal nor tolerant to blasphemers. Modern nineteenth and twentieth century societies did not suddenly cease to condemn or act against the blasphemer. Faced by the persistence of surveillance and control some in the nineteenth century adopted the language of anachronism to ask whether the triumph of rational modernisation was ever actually likely to occur! Blasphemers do however look attractive to Foucauldians who would want to explore how mankind can rescue itself from rationalist tyranny. They seem to embody resistance and appear to be trailblazers of ‘subjugated knowledge’.
16The period in which Foucault saw the invention of ‘surveillance’ occurring is in England contemporary with the conception of blasphemy linked to the maintenance of social peace as outlined in the Hale judgement. Similarly Foucault’s concern about the ‘objectification’ of the patient has analogies in the treatment of blasphemers. Just as medical discourse was the tool to separate patient from illness so legal discourse could be seen as a mechanism for separating the blasphemer from the particular conditions of their crime. This has served to create the possibility of a history of blasphemy that focuses upon the state of blasphemers as individuals expressing their subjectivity. It sees the act as one of self-expression and encourages scholars to look at the phenomenon as a further place where cultural power relationships are formed and transacted. This would be valuable in drawing our attention away from seeing the law as a neutral mechanism to make us concentrate more upon blasphemers and the cultures that produce them.
- 12 Michel Foucault, ‘Truth and Power’ in Colin Gordon (ed.) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and O (...)
17However there remain problems with an acceptance of a Foucauldian interpretation of blasphemy. Despite Foucault’s claims to the contrary there is an implicit denial of the importance of individual human agency to affect the course of history—something which certainly clashes with British historiography.12 We might also comment how Foucault’s chronology of ‘epistemes’ fits uneasily with the history of blasphemy in Britain. The concepts of blasphemy, libertineage and immorality do not abruptly cease with the onset of Foucault’s supposed age of confinement and the arrival of policing and otherwise coercive institutions. An even nominally confessional state, such as Britain, never properly surrenders ‘pastorship’ or ‘surveillance’ and the triumph of rationalist forms of tyranny does not happen in the way predicted. Almost all blasphemers ultimately would be happier in a rationalist prison than a pre-rationalist community of belief.
18Consideration of the punishment regimes constructed for blasphemers produces some further complications. Central to Foucault’s notion of surveillance was an assertion that punishments were finely calculated to prevent recidivism and that this was explicitly how the fine balance of power and its exercise was regulated and controlled. This really does not fit with punishments for blasphemy dispensed in the modern era. Nineteenth century commentators in English and Scottish cases frequently asserted that the offence was an anachronism, that punishments seemed arbitrary, capricious and quite beyond the severity of offence. There appeared a vast unbridgeable difference between the guilt of defendants and conceptions of how they should be punished.
19Lastly we might consider how Foucault’s confidence in the human ‘will to power’ and the quest to achieve subjective liberation has been significantly misplaced. In its way such analyses fall into a trap Foucault identified with post enlightenment modernism. The presumption that individuals will choose freedom and liberation is a simultaneously utopian and rash assumption. Even a Foucauldian history of blasphemy would probably find itself writing about the outraged who discover their subjectivity by abdicating power to give it back to pre-rationalist institutions. These are overwhelmingly institutions whose mission, in Foucauldian terms, is to limit and constrain. It is also not always true to say that any modern institution’s stewardship of knowledge has been central to their own preservation and perpetuation. Versions of public and professional opinion have regularly been prepared to use prison, the courts and informal action, to defend pre-rational belief systems.
- 13 Alain Cabantous, Blasphemy: Impious Speech in the West from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Centu (...)
20The most recent attempt to produce an analysis of blasphemy using French evidence and French perspectives has been the work of Alain Cabantous.13 His work is right to suggest that historians of mentality have surprisingly neglected blasphemy. Working from research about the merchant marine he sees it as a lapse of discipline which authority sought to wipe out, inferring from this that blasphemy is endemic in this society and in these circumstances. The influence of Foucault is clearly evident in the attempts made here to make the history of blasphemy a history of subjective expression. For Cabantous the phenomenon emerges as a customary invocation that allowed people to play with power in their own minds becoming ‘a veritable exercise of freedom, the expression of a spirited human thought that seeks not so much to harm one’s neighbour but, rather, addresses itself to God alone.’ (Cabantous 5–6). Identifying the various discourses that have clustered around blasphemy is also a vehicle for describing the definition of the offence altering substantially from a misty medieval past:
Blasphemy eludes the historian with its shifting definitions and approaches, with the multifarious perceptions imposed on it by political, legal, and, of course, religious thinking. An evolving object of inquiry, beset by distortions and modulations, it has never failed to generate commentary and investigation, at least up to the end of the nineteenth century. Pride of place has been reserved to theologians and clerical moralists among the many who have gone looking for it and sought a definition so manifold. This is due to the fundamental nature of what they term blasphemy, namely, human beings’ wilful breaking away and falling out in the expression of their relationship to the divine. (Cabantous 9).
21From here it becomes possible for Cabantous to suggest that blasphemy was an accusation about the sin of ‘otherness’ once more conjuring pictures of authority stamping out those expressing their subjectivity. (Cabantous 16). There is also a foucauldian geography and archaeology of knowledge in Cabantous’ search for spaces and places where blasphemy happens. Likewise there is a sliding scale of language about the utterance: ‘speech’, ‘verbal exchange’, ‘invective’—all, it is suggested, mean a varying range and importance obvious to the audiences for these. (Cabantous 102; 109). The text’s use of heresy cases in which the accused is compelled to read out a written statement of confession demonstrates species of control and regulation. The authorities involved in these appear to be more interested in asserting orthodoxy rather than punishing the errant. Only belatedly do we get a mention of blasphemy as the product of intellectual and scholarly activity noting that blasphemy could occasionally become outright atheism in clandestine circles discussing such views. (Cabantous 23–24).
- 14 See Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, London: Chatto and Windus, 1975.
- 15 Compare the accounts in Cabantous 28 and Lawton 202.
22The war against blasphemers looks in these terms as an almost foucauldian project undertaken by the Catholic church whilst Cabantous describes this as ‘acculturating the Christian populations of Western Europe.’ (Cabantous 28). Combating blasphemy was part of the Catholic Church’s desire to Christianize and looks somewhat analogous to the analysis of witchcraft that was offered by Margaret Murray in the 1930s. This portrayed witchcraft as a benign fertility cult which was wiped out systematically by the authoritarian power of the church. Although such a view was subsequently discredited, some elements of its assumptions are evident here.14 Both this view and Cabantous’ analysis of blasphemy in attributing harmlessness to those involved in both activities robs them of their agency and arguably their ideological motivations. This can amount to a type of condescension—blasphemers were ultimately harmless victims—it was merely self-constituted forms of authority that wished to persecute them. Again the choice of material to discuss influences this view and the choice of the mentally unstable Susannah Fowles as indicative of English blasphemy cases leads Cabantous into a victimological model which had also informed Lawton’s analysis of the case.15
- 16 Cabantous 100. See also Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre (London: Allen Lane, 1984) 79–104.
23Nonetheless Cabantous’ analysis identifies a significant history of lower class profanity and cultures in which the use of blasphemous language was common currency. He notes that soldiers who took pride in being blasphemous associated such actions with bravery and once more portrays these people as a part of the wider history of transgression. (Cabantous 86). Blasphemy here is made to seem as a way of working with and understanding religious dogma for the unlettered. (Cabantous 182). The difference we might note is that in England such soldiers if they had behaved in this manner during the English revolution would have perhaps been seen as potential antinomians. Such individuals are strangely de-politicised by Cabantous instead suggesting soldiers, mariners, libertines and gamblers constituted the mass of ‘blasphemous social types.’ (Cabantous 91). This alludes to another characteristic which has clustered around French analysis of transgressive episodes. Anthropological insights have sometimes blended with functionalist sociology which here equates blasphemy with rites of passage amongst high spirited youths recalling the transgressively murderous actions of printer apprentices against their employers’ cats made famous by Robert Darnton.16 Cabantous goes further along this road in seeing blasphemy as part of the ritual of aggression and as central to histories of gesture in which the use of blasphemous profanities could be understood in the context of social arguments. The suggestion that this is a central part of masculinity again has a functionalist tone that offers an explanation for local and civic jurisdictions seeking to stamp it out. (Cabantous 192).
24In contrast to this endemic picture of widespread, almost customary, practice Cabantous himself notes how English blasphemy is episodic and the acts of authority reactive in the extreme. But a crucial difference becomes apparent in his suggestion that Blackstone drew an especially important distinction between swearing profane oaths and actively denying the existence of God, a distinction manifestly much less clear cut in Europe. Perhaps this offers to open a window on a cultural history with which English history needs to reacquaint itself. Whilst a history of English cursing may, one day, be written it will have problems analysing blasphemy with this agenda. (Cabantous 57).
25In providing an analysis of blasphemy’s later nineteenth century history Cabantous suggests that the French Revolution gave the issue ‘a wide semantic latitude’ and that it was retained because the sacred and the religious were ‘guarantors of social and civic cohesion.’ (Cabantous 163). However the mystery is that the analysis here is strangely silent about the effect of the Revolution and the work of the philosophes who provided ideological justifications for transcending the authority of the church and the state. These were precisely the lines of argument that informed the British tradition of Paine, Carlyle, Bradlaugh and Foote in their quest to replace Christian error with philosophical rationalist truth. Invariably during the course of this they blasphemed and the cases against them became a part of the liberal and libertarian tradition with which we started this enquiry.
26In seeking to draw conclusions for wider histories of deviance from both the British and French perspectives there are some penetrating questions to ask. Can the French approach of foregrounding power, expression and subjectivity be legitimately criticised for not offering sufficient consideration of ideology? Does emphasis on the subjectivity of individuals rob them of ideological purpose? Similarly does the English tradition worry too obviously about outrage and the supposed impacts upon society itself? Is this part of a wider national and even historiographical concern about social structures and institutions that has conveniently forgotten the self and the issue of self-expression? This would be a somewhat ironic conclusion for a society which has used free speech and free expression as signifiers of national identity and touchstones of a civilised society.
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