J ean -M arie F ecteau . The Pauper’s Freedom

The Pauper’s Freedom: Crime and Poverty in Nineteenth-Century Quebec is a provocative and engaging examination of how Quebec dealt with crime and poverty in the nineteenth century. It is also Jean-Marie Fecteau’s final book. Fecteau (1949–2012) was the director of the Centre d’histoire des régulations sociales and an emeritus professor in the Department of History at Université du Québec à Montréal. He was a prolific researcher whose interests ranged from the law, state formation, military justice, and martial law to political history, with a particular focus on liberalism and liberal regulation. The French-language edition of The Pauper’s Freedom appeared in 2004, and this translation should prompt more Canadian and American social and criminal justice historians to read the work of this insightful scholar. The Pauper’s Freedom is accompanied by a foreword, written by Martin Petitclerc, a former graduate student and colleague of Fecteau. “The Freedom of Jean-Marie Fecteau” is a concise account of Fecteau’s intellectual trajectory, including an assessment of his contribution to various historiographical trends in Quebec. Influenced in the 1970s by French Marxists, notably Louis Althusser and Nicos Poulantzas, Fecteau focused more on shifting institutional forms of power rather than individuals’ resistance to state authority. In this regard, Fecteau eschewed a Thompsonian “bottom-up” approach to history in favor of a broader political view of how the leviathan regulated people’s lives. In the case of The Pauper’s Freedom, this tendency has resulted in a subtle interrogation of the role that liberal penality and regulation played in punishing criminals and distributing relief to paupers, but with scant primary evidence to support many of the book’s suppositions.

Criminal justice · Criminology · Economic Justice · Historiography · Liberalism · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Sociology · State (computer science) · Canadian Identity and History · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies