1. Objectifs

Intentions :
This chapter focuses on «the submission, recording, and archiving of documents, the literal archival remains, actualized litigants’ strategies and choices within developing litigation» (p. 12) with a special focus on family defamation cases.

2. Méthode

Échantillon/Matériau :
«This chapter is based on a subset of cases drawn from a larger project that sampled the Quebec judicial archives between 1840 and 1920 for cases relating to family matters. Overall, [the author’s] team identified, photographed, and compiled into a database some 1,836 civil and criminal cases from the judicial districts of Montreal, Quebec City, and Trois-Rivières, at both the Superior Court (civil matters) and the Court of Queen’s (King’s) Bench (criminal matters). Broadly speaking, the identified cases cover sexual infractions, intra-familial violence, matrimonial and parental difficulties, and conflicts concerning the patrimonial or moral status of the family. [The author’s] focus here will be on the last group: cases of family defamation, that is slander, insult, and libel […] in which the victim or the defamer was a member of the plaintiff’s family or in which the nature of the insult was family-related.» (p. 13)

Type de traitement des données :
Réflexion critique

3. Résumé

This chapter discusses extra-family and intra-family defamation. According to the author, «[t]he two groups of family defamation cases each involved threats to the honour of the family and its members, some originating from outside the family, others from inside. In some ways they reveal similar concerns at work, but in other ways they are strikingly different from one another. The extra-family defamation cases show clear urgency about repelling the threat to the family. Plaintiffs tended to resort relatively promptly to formal law, with the time between the incident and institution of proceedings being on average about half that of the intra-family cases.» (p. 23) In intra-family cases, «public vindication was again evidently a key goal […]. But public vindication had its limits—the desultory pursuit of many of these cases suggests that the point was less the outcome than the process, and public vindication seems often to have taken a back seat to private pressure within an ongoing relationship.» (p. 24)