The word “honor” (honos in Latin) referred originally to a Roman god of mili-tary courage. It would later describe the land grants awarded to victors in bat-tle. This material foundation supported, over time, the development of a moral concept of extreme complexity, if not to say ambiguity.
A rich body of literature defines honor as a guide to conscience, a code of conduct, and a measure of social status. Thanks to its plural meanings, honor has caused more deaths than the plague. It has sparked more controversy than divine grace, and more quarrels than money. In recent decades, however, we have spoken less and less of honor. Anyone using the term, eminent American soci-ologist Peter Berger (1970) goes so far as to say, reveals himself to be “hopelessly European,” irredeemably Old World.
The social sciences—whose explicit concern is human conduct and its mo-tivations!—have paid close attention to honor only in the last quarter century.
Before that, what little had been published on the subject was limited to literary histories of the concept and a few tendentious encyclopedia articles.
The reasons for this neglect—for this wariness?—can be found in prob-lems inherent to the analysis of honor. For it is simultaneously a sentiment and an objective social fact. On the one hand, honor is a moral condition that
* This is a translation of “La maladie de l’honneur,” which was first published in 1991 in the edited volume L’Honneur: Image de soi ou don de soi: un ideal équivoque.
corresponds to a person’s self-image. It can inspire the boldest of actions or the refusal to act in a shameful manner, whatever the material temptations might be. On the other hand, honor is a way of representing the moral value of others:
their virtue, their prestige, their status, and thus their right to precedence.
Honor motivates conduct, and it answers, in the depths of conscience, only to God. As such, it is purely individual; it depends on the individual’s will. Yet honor is also collective and can be attached to a social group: a family, line-age, homeland, or any other community a person might identify with. In the eighteenth century, Mad Jack Mytton jumped his horse off a cliff to defend the honor of the gentlemen of Shropshire. Miraculously, he survived.
Moreover, honor—or at any rate the conduct it prescribes—varies according to a person’s place in society. A man’s honor demands courage of him, which is not required of a woman, whereas sexual purity is or, at least until recent times, was. The elements of which honor is made vary according to social class: aris-tocratic honor, with its military origins, differs from bourgeois or working class honor, to say nothing of distinctions across social groups, trades, communities, or regions. The sense of honor in “the honorable society,” as the Sicilian Mafia likes to call itself, has little in common with the honor found among clergymen on the same island. Honor’s many possible meanings are rarely given objective appraisal, however. Honor resides in a person’s heart and is thus felt before it is thought of. Each person has but one notion of honor: their own. Anyone who understands honor otherwise must simply be without it!
The subjective aspects of honor must eventually come into contact with real-ity, for the personal sentiments manifest in our conduct will sooner or later be judged by others. When an individual has honorable aspirations, these will need to be acknowledged in the public domain: honor felt becomes honor proven, and so obtains due recognition by way of reputation, prestige, and “honors.” In short, honor is the sum total of an individual’s aspirations (and thus equal to his life, as is so often said). It is also the recognition given to him by others.
The process is reversed when an individual acknowledges shame. Honor’s re-jection—whether by way of denied precedence, rebuffed collaboration, slander, or other forms of negative prestige—is ultimately internalized by the individual, who is then forced to disavow his ambitions and admit his shame. As long as he can avoid doing so, however, there is still hope. For, much like the hero who has “lost everything but his honor,” he can recoup his losses if he musters the courage and tenacity needed to secure his claim. (Inevitably, this will engender jealousy and conflict).
The problem with this idealized framework, however, is that the recognition of honor within a given society is never consistent. The sovereign, the “source of honor,” and the vox populi do not always adopt the same criteria. To wit, the monarchy hardly shares the people’s political interests, nor does it give much consideration to a person’s reputation among his neighbors. Hence, it is pos-sible, as Montesquieu observed, to be loaded down with infamy and dignities at the same time.
Conflicts generated by honor are universal. during the Middle Ages, before disputes were subject to judicial review by the State, they were settled by a pseudo-juridical procedure guaranteed by divine authority. “Trial by combat”
resolved quarrels between powerful persons through a formal and ritualized contest before named witnesses—preferably the king or the royal authority. It was both a fight to the death and a trial by ordeal, for judgment was placed in the hands of God, who was trusted to decide for the just party by granting him victory over his opponent.
In one of the last such contests in France’s history, Jarnac battled La Chataîgneraire before Henry II in 1547. notwithstanding the somewhat un-conventional approach taken by the author of the infamous “coup,” God’s judg-ment appeared just and received the King’s assent. According to Shakespeare, however, Richard II was wrong to doubt Providence at the duel between norfolk and Hereford. This mistrust, we well know, would have tragic consequences.
during the Renaissance, the State reclaimed from divine authority the right to adjudicate matters of violence, though not under all circumstances. In Italy first of all, a parallel legal system devoted to “affairs of honor” began to take shape. This jurisprudence concerned a specific contest, the duel, which guar-anteed “satisfaction” to anyone who felt his honor had been wronged, whether he emerged victorious, wounded and therefore vanquished, or killed. Curiously, being defeated does not in itself entail dishonor. Only the man who refuses to risk his life to defend his honor can be dishonored. “Obtaining satisfaction,”
therefore, does not necessarily mean being right, but rather having the courage to fight. It is no longer an ordeal, but a test of courage. Both contestants obtain satisfaction when “first blood” is drawn, for, as Theophile Gautier reminds us,
“the laundry of honor is bleached only with blood.”
Condemned by philosophers yet favored by aristocrats and the military, the duel endured into the twentieth century despite being outlawed by an indig-nant Church and State. Its social logic appealed to the deepest urges of human
conduct, which neither prison nor excommunication could deter. Consider the following case: at the turn of the century, the Minister for War demoted an officer for taking to court a man who had caused him offence rather than chal-lenging the latter to a duel. In short, the officer was demoted for not breaking the law. As far as the minister was concerned, his officer’s respect for civil law was proof that the sentiment of honor had been violated.
This unofficial jurisprudence contains the very principles of honor, which can be briefly summarized as follows:
1. The essence of honor is intention. If you cheat at cards, for instance; if you commit an act of betrayal; if you refuse to take up the gauntlet thrown down before you, then you are completely dishonored, which conventionally amounts to moral death. “My life belongs to my king, my soul to God, but my honor is mine alone,” says Brantôme. The opening challenge in Richard II takes up the same terms: “A traitor to my God, my king, and me!” Words alone cannot answer such an accusation: it demands action. Honor resides in the physical body, is symbolized by blood, and one therefore has no choice but to fight.
2. You do not, however, have to take on all comers. You can always deny a challenge if you do not recognize the challenger as being of equal honor to you, whether on social or moral grounds. You would humiliate yourself, moreover, by agreeing to take on an unworthy opponent. If you are sure of your honor, you can allow yourself to refuse such a challenge and, in so do-ing, dishonor the challenger.
3. When your honor is offended, the formal response is not the direct challenge but the “mentis” (you lie): “In calling me a coward, a cheat, a cuckold, or”—as was the case for Jarnac—“incestuous, you lie.” Yet lying is not dishonorable in and of itself. Adults do not owe children the truth, nor do superiors their subordinates. The mentis therefore implies inferiority and, at the same time, a weakness of will akin to a betrayal. However, the mentis—and this is its practical role—also ensures that the offended party rather than the offend-ing party has the choice of weapons. Thanks to this rule, Jarnac managed to pull off his unusual stroke, sliding beneath his opponent’s shield and slicing the jugular with a dagger.
While the ruling class had a monopoly on “affairs of honor,” this does not mean that the rest of society was without a sense of honor. nowadays, popular ways
of “settling scores” may not be codified in law, but we find the same underly-ing principles at work in agonistic situations. In “street corner society,” as in a Spanish honor play, the offended party tries not to show it, until one day he takes his revenge and restores his honor to its state of grace. In the Mafia, vengeance is a pseudo-moral duty, and “silence” (omertá), the refusal to reveal in-sider dealings, is a defining quality of masculinity. Various conceptions of honor can be found among truck drivers, attorneys, and even bankers, whose honor is staked less on power and revenge than on scrupulousness. Each professional community recognizes its rule and draws a distinction between duties owed to other members and those that govern conduct toward outsiders. In the earlier example, the Minister for War adopted criteria of honor that were consistent with his role as head of the armed forces; the Attorney General, however, would hardly have agreed with this interpretation.
It will come as no surprise that honor is bound up in the reality of power, whether it be political, military, or economic power. “Without money, honor is nothing but a malady,” says Racine. These three dimensions of power are, in fact, interrelated.
Among the principles that govern political life, Montesquieu distinguished two: monarchy, which is governed by honor; and the republic, which is governed by virtue. Voltaire misunderstood Montesquieu’s proposal, failing to separate the operative principle of a given political system from the moral evaluation of the conduct of persons within that system. It is true that royalty is the source of honor according to ancient historical tradition, but honor endures in a republic, just as virtu—by which Montesquieu meant “civic virtue”— can be found in a monarchy. I would rather treat both terms as “honor” and distinguish “honor = precedence” from “honor = virtue,” which corresponds respectively to the social and the ethical aspects of honor. This distinction follows from the fact that, while the king or the president of the republic is indeed the wellspring of honor (he is the one who confers “honors”), a second source exists in the form of popular approval—public acknowledgment of honorable qualities. The possibil-ity of conflict between these two criteria, precedence and virtue, is a leitmotif that stretches from El Cid to the present day, and this despite all the historical transformations in the meaning of honor that unfold from one era to the next.
Without doubt, the most spectacular of these upheavals was England’s Puritan Revolution.
When Cromwell spoke of an opposition between “men of honor” and
“men of conscience,” he considered the former in the same way Montesquieu
did—which is to say, “honor = precedence”—and he most certainly did not count himself among them. Partisans on either side of this civil war were identi-fied by the length of their hair, a fact that is not without symbolic significance:
the “Roundheads,” men of conscience, had short hair; the supporters of the king, the “Cavaliers,” had long hair.
After the fall of the Commonwealth and the restoration of the monarchy, long hair came back into fashion and with it, the monarchist understanding of honor. Sexual honor replaced religious scruples and financial probity. The theat-ers opened their doors yet again and for the ensuing decade put on comedies that almost exclusively dealt with marital deception, such as The golden horn, A horn for cuckolds, and The country wife, in which the play’s hero, Mr. Horner, seduces his many conquests by spreading rumors that he is impotent and thus the model chaperone.
Honor is granted according to criteria that depend on a given community’s identity as well as their particular view on the world. The approval or misgivings conjured by a person’s conduct in everyday life are seed for all those notions of honor that, eventually, will be articulated by moralists and lawmakers and incorporated into social mores. Since the Renaissance, such debates portray a struggle within society between characters or classes seeking to enforce criteria that suit their own actions and interests: Church versus aristocracy, military versus merchants, city dwellers versus peasants, and so on. Bourgeois revolu-tions always swapped out a military idea of honor for an economic one: you no longer won it “spear in hand,” like a conquistador, but “checkbook in pocket,”
like a Quaker.
Power is still power, whether it comes in military, legal, political, or financial form, or even, hitched to class culture and ancestral prestige, in the form of sym-bolic capital. But different forms of power are often interchangeable. daughters from nouveau riche households marry into the aristocracy, bearing generous dowries destined to refurbish noble domains. Honor does not confer rights of precedence only through ceremonial rituals, but also on occasions where ac-knowledgment is given in hard currency. Honor is not just the Roman god of martial valor, but the land given as compensation to his devotees. The conquista-dors set sail in search of glory, endlessly comparing themselves to Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great, yet they were also searching for gold.
Honor is always influenced by wealth and property, despite all caveats ap-plied by churchmen. Indulging the high and mighty recognizes their symbolic
capital, yet practically speaking it would be ill advised not to do so, for power knows how to quash dissent. Material advantage, moreover, underlines inequal-ity: hospitality, charity, and generosity are, as expressions of magnanimity, hon-orific. nevertheless, the person who is honored will pay for the privilege if he fails to reciprocate. In Canada’s northwest, First nations people took this prin-ciple to extremes during potlatch ceremonies, where largesse and the brazen de-struction of property were carried out with the express intention of humiliating guests who could not rise to the challenge of one-upmanship.
Yet humiliating others is not always the purpose of material gain. Honor based on power is the backbone of clientelism: he who acknowledges his own inferiority and attaches himself to a powerful patron also shares in the latter’s glory. While his enjoyment of the protection and rewards such a relation affords does at first place him in a position of inferiority to his patron, it simultaneously confirms his superiority over his equals. Lackeys are known for their arrogance the world over, and it is obviously advantageous to have friends in high places. As the Spanish proverb goes, “without a godfather, you can’t get baptized.” It would be wrong to assume, however, that only a hierarchical society affords such advantages: the Melanesian “big man” takes care of his clients as well as the cacique did in nine-teenth century Spain, and he is just as much a bully to those who have no patron.
In the European tradition, honor is hereditary, but it is not inherited in the same way in all times and places. Honor inherited from the father is not the same as that received from the mother. This distinction is most pronounced in Southern Europe. In Sicily, for instance, you receive social prestige from your father in the form of the family “name,” whereas your mother transmits “blood”: in other words, the purity of untainted descent. Masculine honor is affirmative: it de-mands that a man assert himself and claim the precedence owed him as a result of either hereditary rank or his own exploits. Feminine honor, meanwhile, is passive: it calls not for particular exploits but rather for a woman to protect her reputation from any and all ignominy lest her children, male and female alike, inherit it. The sentiment of modesty or shame (vergogne, vergüenza) guaran-tees a woman’s honor, whereas it does nothing for masculine honor. Andalusian women routinely say that men have no shame. In this sense, honor = precedence is masculine and honor = virtue is feminine. Hence, in keeping with this moral division of labor that maps onto a physiological and economic division of labor, men are responsible for protecting the “blood” of the family and are therefore given authority over their women.
This brings us to an explanation of what might otherwise strike the cultural outsider as passing strange: namely, that the gravest offence to a man’s honor refers not to his own conduct but that of his mother, sister, or daughter, whose blood he is meant to share, or to his wife, whose loose conduct could make a cuckold of him. The domestic drama reaches a climax when the wife plays her final trump card and, turning to her husband, says: “I’ll have you wearing the horns.”
Hence, the greatest threat to a man’s honor comes from his womenfolk, and the shortcomings of a woman’s honor come from her menfolk. Women are indeed the ones who demand vengeance when the “family name” is slighted, much as they are the ones who, in the name of female solidarity, protect a fallen kinswoman by covering up her indiscretions.
The ultimate offence to honor consists of calling a man a “son of a whore,”
which means accusing him of being born a bastard, and thus of an immodest
which means accusing him of being born a bastard, and thus of an immodest