This chapter maps out the scandals and high profile cases that have come to shape debates on MSV in each of the case countries. It also discusses the challenges associated with definitions and data collection.

This chapter focuses on the crucial importance of familial relationships within the ruling dynasties – both in terms of securing a successful transition from one generation of rulers to the next and with regard to the individual wellbeing of the royal heirs. Two key relationships are identified and explored through selected case studies: the relationship between the monarch and his or her successor (through the prism of the relationships between Queen Victoria, Emperor Wilhelm I and Emperor Franz Joseph and their oldest sons) and the relationship between the royal heir and his wife – through an analysis of the marriages of Prince Umberto of Savoy, Prince Wilhelm of Württemberg and Prince Friedrich August of Saxony.

A third scandal of 1845 was associated with the poor law, one of the most controversial aspects of the ‘Condition of England Question’. When appalling abuses in a workhouse in rural Hampshire led to a public enquiry, MPs and their constituents alike were riveted by reports in the national press. The poor law was administered from the metropolis through official correspondence that ran to tens of thousands of letters each year. Press reports and a later select committee of the House of Commons revealed that the boundaries between official (semi-public) and private letters were sometimes blurred at critical moments in the Andover story. As in the Mazzini debates in the Commons, however, such letters were often the most solid evidence available. Troubling parallels between all three scandals of 1845 that are under review in this part were used by the Revd Sydney Godolphin Osborne, the most lively contributor of letters to The Times on the subject of the Andover workhouse, thus twisting the tail of Sir James Graham, the beleaguered home secretary of the day.

The scandal associated with the opening of Giuseppe Mazzini’s private letters by the Post Office, on the orders of the government, fuelled a series of debates in the cockpit of the House of Commons. Those outside the House relied upon press reports on the debates for information, reports that included accounts of private letters and secret dispatches being brandished as evidence by both the home secretary, Sir James Graham, and his opponents. Two open letters to newspaper editors – Carlyle’s of June 1844 and Mazzini’s of February 1845 – were influential in their commentary upon the central themes of political honour and public morality. And Sir James Graham, leading statesman and devout evangelical, was humiliated when the ‘Grahamizing’ of letters became a craze, encouraged by Punch. But the general public remained on the outside, looking in upon the parliamentary hurly-burly.

Satire is often thought to differ in spirit or function from libel, defamation, gossip, and scandal. Many of the traditional ways scholars have defined satire – as a serious, high-minded mode focused on moral reform – enforce this distinction: the more frivolous and gossipy a satire is, the less it appears to be satire. This essay considers Lady Anne Hamilton’s satire, The Epics of the Ton; or, The Glories of the Great World (1807), a poem that challenges the traditional distinction between satire and gossip. Rare among satires in conceding its reliance on gossip, Hamilton’s poem surveys the sexual misdeeds of London’s fashionable classes, cloaking the identities of the targets. In presenting satire as a mode of printed gossip, Epics confounds the usual gender associations of satire. The poem contests the view, since John Dryden at least, of satire as a public, “manly” mode far removed from the furtive, gossipy genres associated with women, such as secret history and roman à clef. Hamilton uses the cloaked identities in her poem to replicate the play of gossip, where one scandalous tale ensnares many victims. By inviting identification of targets, Hamilton entraps readers into creating the gossip that is supposedly antithetical to satire.

Between the late 1960s and early 1980s, at least ten major and many smaller inquiries were held into neglectful, abusive and violent practices in a number of psychiatric and ‘mental handicap’ hospitals. Many of these institutions, or certain wards inside them, had become professionally isolated and severely under-resourced. Deeply ingrained cultures of harm and neglect had evolved over years, causing untold suffering to many of society’s most vulnerable people, including those with severe learning disabilities and older people. This chapter provides an overview of shifts in the understanding of institutional environments in the post-war period and the subsequent emphasis on moving care for acute conditions into the community, leaving long-stay wards more isolated than ever. It explores the social, cultural and political mechanisms that facilitated the exposure of harmful practices by the press and campaigners, compelling politicians to order inquiries. Finally, it examines how the inquiries helped to bring about change to the provision of long-term care in the 1970s and contribute to the widespread closure of the old Victorian asylums from the 1980s.

The Victorian period was the most formative era for professional nursing and for cultural concepts of the nurse. The most prominent representative figures of nursing from the period were the disreputable Sairey Gamp – the infamous character from Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewitt – and the very real and very proper Florence Nightingale. The Victorian cultural perception of nursing was more complex than these polar opposites might suggest, however. The influences that cumulatively fashioned the popular figure of the nurse were legion and contradictory, ranging from camp follower to proselytising nun to heroic martyr.

The evolution of nursing practice from menial to professional work was widely examined and debated in the media and through fictional representations of nurses. As these treatments reveal, there was marked cultural ambiguity about the entrance of refined women into nursing, which, even in its most professional form, entailed a level of intimacy with both male and female bodies and bodily fluids that was disturbing to Victorian sensibilities. What emerges in both the media and fiction is a curious and very Victorian fixation on sexuality that was explicitly or implicitly directed at the women who practised nursing.

Chapter 2 introduces a two-stage theory of institutional continuity and reform, laying out how societal preferences over the distribution of protection and repression shape politicians’ decisions between the status quo of authoritarian coercion and reform to promote democratic coercion. Far from constituting a failure of democratic processes, politicians’ decisions to either maintain the status quo of authoritarian coercion or undertake police reform both result from ordinary democratic politics. I argue that, even under the constraints posed by the structural power of police, shifts in the convergence of societal preferences over policing and security and a robust political opposition can serve as key drivers of reform by raising the costs to the incumbent of not reforming the police. The theory yields two key predictions. When societal preferences over policing and security are fragmented, politicians have incentives to pursue accommodation with the police, wherein they grant police greater autonomy in exchange for cooperation in the selective distribution of coercion. This favors the persistence of institutional weakness and authoritarian patterns of coercion. On the other hand, incumbents are likely to pursue democratic police reform when societal preferences converge and when they face an electoral threat from a robust political opposition.

Because the cases of Buenos Aires Province and Colombia eventually resulted in ambitious structural police reforms, Chapter 7 presents a detailed sequential analysis of the events that brought about reform in each instance, leveraging changes over time in societal preferences and the strength of the political opposition. The sequential analyses presented in this chapter elucidate the factors that shape politicians’ incentives when choosing between continuity and reform, demonstrating how those incentives changed in response to short-term shifts in societal preferences and political competition. The accounts of Buenos Aires Province and Colombia complement one another well, demonstrating that neither of these conditions is sufficient to bring about reform on its own. In each case, we observe an explicit decision by the executive to maintain the status quo when faced with the convergence of societal preferences (Buenos Aires Province) or a robust political opposition (Colombia) on its own. After both conditions were present, however, the two executives chose to enact comprehensive structural reforms just months after opting for the status quo. By analyzing politicians’ choices before and after the joint occurrence of these conditions, we obtain a greater understanding of the mechanisms underlying institutional persistence and change among police forces.

Chapter 5 studies one particularly famous and controversial rewriting of a fait divers in Libération in 1985: “Sublime, forcément sublime Christine V.” Here Duras rewrites a very famous, ongoing true crime case, transforming the suspect, Christine Villemin, into a prototypical Durassian heroine who kills her own son in revolt against a brutal, patriarchal order. Because of the way that Duras accuses (and absolves) the woman in public before her trial, and, significantly, because the media was saturated with images of the author during this time, the article caused a major scandal, and Duras became a sort of sensational fait divers in her own right.

The essay explores the ways in which Edith Wharton’s early work, written as facts were emerging about corrupt insurance industry practices, inspired questions that Wharton would raise throughout her oeuvre about the monetization of life and death, the evaluation of pain and suffering, and the larger consequences of a managed and insured society. By the early twentieth century, insurance was a central institution in the organization and management of modern life, although it is rarely recognized as a cultural force or context in Wharton’s work. This essay corrects this neglect by asking how an early twentieth-century insurance scandal inspired Wharton’s exploration of a growing wound culture intent on regulating and managing pain and suffering, life and death, and by examining Wharton’s representations of a managerial society rather than the society of manners for which she is still best known.

The concept of the “sacred palace” provides us with a key to understanding how Carolingian kings and emperors understood their roles in relation to religion and to the church, for they did not consider church and state to be fundamentally separate or mutually antagonistic domains. Furthermore, without understanding royal religious authority, we cannot properly interpret the role of public and royal penance during the reign of emperor Louis, Charlemagne’s son and successor. In this exploration of the wider context of the ruler’s religious authority, the interdependence of the ecclesia and the body politic in the ninth century is discussed. The French translation of this text was published as “Sacrum palatium et ecclesia. L’autorité religieuse royale sous les Carolingiens (790-840)” in Annales HSS, 58.6 (2003): 1243–69. It has not been updated to the present state of scholarship, but some suggestions for further reading have been added.