Shame by Peter N. Stearns

Author:Peter N. Stearns
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2017-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 5. The frequency of the word shame in British English, 1800s–2000, according to Google Books Ngram Viewer.

As in the United States, spurred by new ideas and the revolutionary climate, France moved fairly quickly against shaming punishments. The pillory was abolished in 1789 and replaced by a milder, less physically painful exposure for offenders called “exposition,” and then this was abolished in turn after another revolution, in 1832. British discussion was strongly influenced by the same kind of turn toward individualism that had occurred in the American colonies, which could lead both to a desire to protect miscreants from “barbarous” treatment and to a concern about the fickleness of crowd reactions.76 The United Kingdom limited use of the pillory to perjury and subornation, in 1816, and then banned it in outright 1837 (two years before the U.S. Congress did the same). Reformers argued against the unfairness of exposure to the crowd, while also noting unpredictability: sometimes, given mob passions, a man might be intended for disgrace only for the event to “[turn] out [as] a sort of triumph.” No less a figure than Edmund Burke spoke against the pillory in the late eighteenth century, mainly because it could incite public violence against an exposed miscreant well out of proportion to even particularly repulsive offenses, such as sodomy. Opponents did point to the importance of tradition and the probability that public exposure—even in front of a fickle mob—would still be a deterrent to others. A few added that certain crimes were so “shocking to human nature” that they deserved the uncertainties attached to public shaming. But ultimately reform won out.77

British movement against milder public shaming, through use of the stocks, was a bit slower than in the more reform-minded United States. Reformist zeal converged more tentatively on alternatives such as penitentiaries, and of course the availability of convict transport to places like Australia may also have complicated more systematic change. Use of stocks declined but persisted into the later nineteenth century. In 1860 one John Gambles was publicly exposed in Pudsey, for the crime of gambling on the Sabbath—though the experience was now so rare that the passing crowd was more bemused than shaming. The last known case occurred in 1865, for drunkenness. British analysis has interestingly added to the standard explanations for the decline of public shaming, in citing a special concern for making city centers places of refinement rather than coarse justice, at a time when urban leaders were eager to polish local reputations.78

The duel survived in many European countries far longer than was true even in the U.S. South. Debates over the duel, and its senselessness, paralleled those in the United States, but impacts might be considerably delayed. And shame played a great role. French duelists, defying laws that banned the practice, thus noted that a loss of honor, through failing to take up a challenge, was “a kind of civil death.” Prussia, with its large quotas of military officers and civil servants, fed by dueling societies in the universities, yielded very slowly.

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