Truth is Bad and There Should Be Less of It: A Continuing Series

First installment here.

From Charles Walton's Policing Public Opinion in the French Revolution: The Culture of Calumny and the Problem of Free Speech:

[François] Dareau understood the risks to individual honor in the courtroom, which is why he downplayed the importance of discovering the truth of alleged calumnies in his treatise on injurious speech. "In addition to the fact that the effort to prove the truth of the claims asserted through calumny leads to more injures being aired . . . if truth can serve as an excuse, it will open the way everyday new injures to be made, which it is always prudent to avoid." Dareau encouraged magistrates to focus on, first, determining the fact of the statement (was it made and was it made by the defendant?) and, second, the relative status of the parties involved. Social hierarchy, not truth, was the animating principle of Old Regime jurisprudence on injurious speech.

He continues:

Dareau and [Daniel] Jousse said that in cases involving close-knit power relationships, the dependent party had fewer or no rights. Thus, a bailiff could not seek redress for the verbal offenses made by a judge, a son by his father, a wife by her husband, or a domestic or artisan by his or her master. "Otherwise," Dareau explained, "it would not be possible to teach anyone a lesson."

I'm not sure this principle should cover all "close-knit power relationships," but, to someone who considers semi-ritualized abuse to be an important pedagogical tool, the basic idea sounds right.

If you're curious about the rest of Walton's book, this is one of its Big Ideas:

. . . historian François Furet saw in de Staël's observations a source of the Revolution's radicalization. Better known for attributing the Terror to Enlightenment egalitarianism, he briefly speculated in his essay "The Terror" that the legacy of Old Regime privilege may have also contributed to the Revolution's tragic course. "Aristocratic society, composed of castes created by the monarchy and fiercely jealous of their privileges, left the embers of its violence to the Revolution, which fanned them into conflagration."

The chapters ahead explore this conflagration. They show how the transition from aristocratic privilege to civil inequality unleashed the systemic violence of the Old Regime. The problem, I argue, was not the principle of civic equality; rather, it was the abruptness of the transition. The sudden democratization of honor unleashed a sudden democratization of vengeance.