Daddy Dearest: Fathers, Gender, and Infanticide

At around seven in the evening on 1 September 1743 in the French Indian colony of Pondichéry, Santouche heard screaming at the house of his neighbors, Françisca and Fernandes, and rushed over to see what was wrong. He found Françisca distraught over the death of her newborn, Antoine, who had apparently been injured during the couple’s domestic quarrel. Santouche immediately retrieved several French colonial officials to launch an inquest. From the initial testimony, the officials learned that Fernandes, Antoine’s father, had struck the infant during a confrontation with Françisca, resulting in a fatal injury.^[1]

We know that Antoine’s death had not been quick. His mother’s testimony recorded that he died two hours after the altercation.^[2] According to the autopsy report, Antoine, who had been only fifteen to eighteen days old, had such severe damage to his skull that the surgeon-major who examined the body was uncertain if Antoine had been stuck with a blunt instrument – a pestle, he had posited – or some other object.^[3] Though Fernandes was arrested and admitted to the grievous harm of the child, in the end Fernandes was “absolved” of the crime and received no punishment. Why? As the trial documents and investigations suggest, in the early modern world, gender offered avenues for fathers like Fernandes to navigate accusations of infanticide, which were not extended to women.

While cases of infanticide were not uncommon in the early modern European world, women were far more likely to be accused of the crime than men. The archetypical perpetrator of infanticide was a single woman with no known or officially recognized sexual partner, who had borne the child out of wedlock. She would have smothered, poisoned, or left her child to die from exposure – indirect methods of killing that required some measure of forethought and planning.^[4] Given their typically marginal place in society, such women were usually believed to have resorted to infanticide out of desperation, either to prevent further disgrace or to hide illicit and immoral activities.

Fernandes was not the typical suspect for infanticide, but the case bore certain similarities to the narrative sketched above. Fernandes, who claimed to be originally from Goa, was not legally married to Françisca. Both stated they were “not married” (non-marié), even though Françisca was adamant that she was Fernandes’ “wife” (femme). Their “more than one year” relationship and cohabitation had resulted in a child, and they had remained linked since. While unmarried cohabitation was not unusual in the early modern period, it would have been significant to the investigators. In their eyes, unwed mothers and, perhaps, fathers had motive to remove evidence of sexual relations outside marriage, whether to avoid social censure or the financial burden of childcare.

Initial witness statements collected from Santouche and Conery, both neighbors of the family, and Françisca, Antoine’s mother, all reported the same general series of events: Fernandes had returned home and went into a rage over the fact that Françisca had “forgotten to cook some rice” for him.^[5] In response and in his anger, Fernandes began to beat Françisca with his fists. The first two blows hit her on the shoulder. The third blow struck Antoine on the top of his head. These testimonies were not damningly accusatory, but it is implied that Fernandes may have intentionally struck the child to further punish Françisca for her failure to cook dinner. The informal circumstances of the couple may have suggested an even darker motive to the investigators: perhaps the altercation presented Fernandes with an opportunity to extricate himself from unwanted family obligations and return to Goa unencumbered by an illegitimate child.

Of course, there are at least two sides to any story, and Fernandes offered a wholly different perspective during his interrogation. He claimed that Antoine had been ill, and that Fernandes “had forbidden [Françisca] from exposing [Antoine] to a chill.”^[6] When he returned home to find Françisca and the baby out of the house, only then did Fernandes begin to beat her and accidentally strike the child, reframing his violent outburst as the result of concern for the child and anger over his lover’s disobedience.

Fernandes’s explanation aligns with early modern beliefs about the less common issue of paternal infanticide. While mothers were believed to premeditate their killings, infanticides by fathers were typically understood as retributive and spur-of-the-moment.^[7] Violence against wives, romantic partners, children, and other intimate relations was a routine form of punishment for disobedience in the eighteenth century.^[8] Early modern patriarchal structures protected or excused such violence as part of men’s expected role as the pater familias, responsible for disciplining members of their household. From this perspective, Fernandes’s actions against Françisca could be viewed as within his rights. This reframing was intricately tied to Fernandes’s claim that he “did not want to strike the child but his mother, and that it was by accident which he hit [Antoine].”^[9] Fernandes needed to convince the investigators that his actions against Antoine were accidental; while violent physical punishment for a partner’s disobedience was accepted, intentionally killing a child to punish his mother was not.

With all the evidence collected, the case now fell to the Councilors to pass judgment. Was this an infanticide case where, like so many others, an unwed parent intentionally disposed of an unwanted illegitimate child? Or, to take the word of the father, had the death been a tragic accident, the result of a punishment gone wrong?

Ultimately, the Superior Council chose to “absolve” Fernandes of the charge. Though the court’s deliberations were not recorded, we can surmise that the Council based its decision at least in part on gender dynamics. Unwed mothers accused of infanticide had few lines of defense to plead their innocence when brought up on charges, because the simple fact of their social circumstances – namely, the heavy social stigma associated with bearing an illegitimate child – was viewed as evidence of criminality. While Fernandes may have faced some censure for fathering a child out of wedlock, it would not rise to nearly the same level. To the Councilors, this lesser degree of shame may have translated to a lack of motive. Why kill the child, when he could simply abandon him and his mother?

Further, Fernandes could reframe his violence against Françisca as maintaining domestic order – a defense out of reach for most early modern women in similar circumstances. His actions fit neatly into the Council’s preconceived notions of paternal infanticide as a crime of anger and impulse, rather than premeditation. While Fernandes had many of the same characteristics that damned most women accused of infanticide, he benefited from ingrained beliefs about men and their perceived role in upholding the domestic order. These gendered assumptions and narratives likely won Fernandes his freedom and were woven into the fabric of early modern European courts, both on the continent and in the colonies. Thus the Council was inherently less suspicious of men than women when it came to issues of pregnancy, illegitimate children, and domestic violence.

Featured image caption: Courtesy Nino Caré.

Jakob Burnham

Dr. Jakob Burnham is a Lecturer of Early Modern Europe and the World in the History Department at the University of North Texas. He received his Ph.D. in Early Modern European History from Georgetown University in May 2024. His research centers on early French colonialism in the Indian Ocean during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Dr. Burnham is particularly interested in the complicated intersections of social practice and colonial development, which he explores through a variety of themes including, medicine, domesticity, and slavery—among others. While Writer-in-residence, he will continue to examine how the archives of eighteenth-century French Indian Ocean history can reveal dynamic questions about the histories of medicine, health, race, and gender.

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