What follows is a brutal assault in a dense forest and a shocking act of corruption. When Corvière seeks justice, she discovers the investigation has been mysteriously rigged. But she refuses to accept defeat. She launches a decade-long legal battle that takes her to the high courts of Rouen. Her quest for justice will shake the very foundations of the French legal system.
It is a pattern we know all too predatory behavior by men of elite classes whose victims are women of a lower status, whose bodies they believe they can appropriate. Many women in Corvière’s place would have given up. But she did not.
~ ~ ~
Jennifer Thibodeaux has taken on a rather obscure French court case for the subject matter of her book "J'Accuse". The case is documented in the registers of Rouen's high court (Échiquier de Normandie) and the Cathedral Chapter's pardon records. And here we have the re-telling of the judicial conflict between servant girl Jeanne Corvière and Exupère (or Souplis) Le Mire, and one Thibodeaux herself admits was too important to be housed away in academic libraries.
Historical Background
Thibodeaux begins with the period in which "J'Accuse is set, known as The Hundred Years War (1337 - 1453), where England sought sovereignty over France, and the French monarchy was all but impotent. The book also aligns with the final years of Joan of Arc from the siege of Orleans, her capture, trial and execution.
She then talks about the socio economic background of the area and era, particularly as it relates to female servants. In medieval French society was divided into a rigid three tiered social and political hierarchy. Servants were included in the Third Estate along with labourers, artisans, merchants and farmers. The First Estate being the Church (the moral compass of society), and the Second being the Nobility (who undertook roles in government, military and judiciary).
Jeanne Corvière was a servant girl, who nearing the end of her current domestic tenure, went to the local hiring fair to secure employment. These hiring fairs served as open-air marketplaces where day laborers, farmhands, and domestic servants gathered to offer their services to prospective employers. Service contracts were typically struck for a fixed term and the agreement formalised (written, verbal or token).
Thibodeaux follows on with a discussion on the suspicious nature of society towards servants, the domestic and sexual violence particularly against females who were often considired "fair game" at the hands of master or others.
The reader is introduced the the medieval French judiciary system, both canon and secular, and alerts the reader to the how both the law and the legal system are closely associated with gender, chastity and control - blame and shame, with insinuation being the best line of defence. The system itself openly provided avenues for corruption, intimidation, mishandling and chicanery - all of which Thibodeaux explores in depth for this is the backbone of the narrative.
The Case & Outcome
In Normandy, 1429, servant girl named Jeanne Corvière attended a hiring fair. Exupère Le Mire, a sergeant of the law, tricked her to going with him by claiming his wife needed help giving birth. Instead, he dragged her into a dense forest, viciously assaulted/raped her, leaving her severely injured. She survived the brutal attack and rather than staying silent, she sought justice for herself, launching into a decade-long legal fight in the high courts of Rouen. This Thibodeaux expounds upon in great detail for Corvière's battle culminates in her public declaration at the procession which formed part of the Privilige of Saint Romain.
The medieval Privilege of Saint Romain was an ancient custom that allowed the clergy of Rouen to release a chosen prisoner and erase their crimes. In 1431, Le Mire's name was entered into the register of the Privilège de Saint-Romain. However, this particular case would publicly expose the manipulation and corruption of this process, as Thibodeaux shows how through her public outcry, Corvière dared to challenge the power of the clergy in Rouen.
Corvière's case would continue on for some after this, when she took her claims to the King's Court, who ruled in her favour and she was duly compensated. But more lawsuits followed, as Le Mire's supporters used all avenues of law to thwart her claims. In the end, she received minimal award by way of compensation but all had been made public in Rouen, the testimonies survived in nineteenth-century transcriptions such as Amable Floquet's Histoire du privilège de Saint-Romain. Corvière then fades from the pages.
Thibodeaux's work provides the reader with a powerful account of how sexual violence was prosecuted in fifteenth-century Normandy, of the intersection and interference of local patronage, and the medieval French royal and ecclesiastical pardon systems during the Hundred Years' War.
A scholarly work that adopts a slightly fictional approach for the consumption of the general public. But make not mistake, this is no work of fiction!
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