1. Objectifs

Intentions :
«Wounded Feelings is a legal history of emotions in Quebec, a study of cases in which people sued others over their emotional injuries. [The author uses] the fluid idea of moral injury to explore the often uneasy interactions between emotional subjectivity and the rational world of the law.» (p. 7)

2. Méthode

Échantillon/Matériau :
L’auteur a consulté plusieurs Fonds et collections d’archives judiciaires variées, dont le Fonds Commission royale d’enquête sur l’administration des affaires de la cité de Montréal. Il a également mobilisé des archives législatives comme le Code civil du Bas-Canada, en plus d’étudier des rapports de cas isolés. Des journaux et des magazines tels que le Montreal Daily Star ou L’Étoile du nord de Joliette complètent également le corpus.

Type de traitement des données :
Réflexion critique
Analyse de contenu

3. Résumé

«The main chapters [of this book] are a series of studies of individual emotions as they were litigated in a variety of contexts. Together they comprise a social legal history of how feelings and sentiments were expressed, narrated, and legalized, shaped both by informal social codes and by the formal legal rules, practices, and institutions of the times.» (p. 9) «Chapter 3 looks at four cases that each reveal different ways in which families sought to protect their collective reputational capital and the feelings provoked by its perceived loss. This took various forms: attacks on individuals’ reputation through defamation of their relatives; defamation of the family collectively; insults to the memory of ancestors; and threats to the family’s boundaries from unwanted associations with outsiders […]. These cases, and the notion of family honour generally, also brought into relief the disjuncture between the liberal individualist framework of much of Quebec law and the relational and affective structure of the family.» (p. 25) «Love and affection gone wrong were [also] a fertile source of litigation, and chapter 5 focuses on four cases of perceived betrayal […]. Actions like [breach] of promise and alienation of affection, tested the limits of the principle in the civil law that any damage, whether physical, material, or moral, could be compensated.» (p. 26)