Prosecuting Child Sexual Assault in Nineteenth-Century French Algeria

In 1856, the Constantine assize court tried Auguste Payan, a twenty-six-year-old watchmaker, for the indecent assault of an eleven-year-old girl in which she contracted a venereal disease.According to the president of the court, the evidence that Payan had sexual contact with the girl was clear, but an absence of proof of physical violence led to acquittal.In the mid-nineteenth century, French law criminalized all sexual activities with children under eleven, but cases involving the sexual abuse of children aged eleven and older did not qualify as crimes unless there was proof of physical violence.The court president suggested that not only the limitations of French penal law but also the behavior of the child influenced the judicial verdict.He claimed that if the girl had not actively provoked Payan, she was at the least a willing participant and not a victim.Furthermore, the court president criticized the child's "deplorable precocity" and accused her of "scandalizing the public by her effrontery." 1 Assessments of a child's innocence and behavior similarly influenced other trials that involved child sexual assault in French Algerian courts.Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the French state prosecuted sexual crimes against children in French Algeria's assize courts presided over by professional judges.During the French conquest of Algeria, which began with the invasion of Ottoman Algiers in 1830, colonial officials established a plural legal system that incorporated French, Islamic, Berber customary, and Mosaic law. 2 After annexing Algeria, the French state later established assize courts in 1854 to deal with the most serious criminal offenses in each arrondissement of Algeria.While trials by jury for serious offenses had been established in metropolitan France since the Revolution, they were not introduced in Algerian assize courts until 1870. 3 Most sexual crime cases tried in the French Algerian assize courts involved child victims.Building on Judith Surkis and Sarah Ghabrial's work, this essay examines the interplay of gender, sexuality, and colonial legal order in