Per una storia del «diritto di correzione»

Abstract

This text presents the project that led to the publication of the Dictionnaire du fouet et de la fessée. Corriger et punir (2022), dedicated to educational and punitive violence from antiquity to the present day, mainly in the European context. In ancient societies, the use of force in the domestic sphere and the punishment inflicted on women, children, servants, slaves, schoolchildren or animals were not considered reprehensible acts but a means of maintaining the proper order of society. The dictionary examines these coercive practices from specific objects (tools, notions, places, cultural productions, etc.) and shows how they were gradually regarded as violence and became the object of legal prohibitions. The “right of correction”, long upheld by the converging interests of political and religious authorities and family fathers, is now being called into question, with the state posing as protector of the weakest and bulwark of public order.