Defeat in the Franco-Prussian War stimulated an overhaul of the fiscal-military system, but in a way that largely suited the notables. The government rebuffed considerable pressure for an income tax, instead largely opting to raise indirect taxes and a new tax on securities; the post-Revolutionary tax system survived, minimising the burden on the landed classes. The greatest changes were for the army, with the imposition of universal military service. Thus, this concluding chapter underscores the durability of the post-Revolutionary fiscal system that emerged in the early nineteenth century.

Following Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo in 1815, the victorious allies imposed 700 million francs of reparations on the French – around 10 per cent of GDP. To pay these, the Restoration developed the final element of the nineteenth-century French fiscal system: public credit, which the government modelled largely on that of Britain. With the payment of reparations, the Restoration reintegrated France into the international order, facilitating the stabilisation of Europe and thus that of France’s domestic politics. At the same time, Napoleonic conscription was overhauled, and replaced with a system of limited military service that lasted until the 1870s. Though often overlooked by historians, the Restoration therefore did much to facilitate the creation of a sustainable, stable post-revolutionary fiscal-military state.

While the foundations of the fiscal-military state changed little either side of 1830, the new Orleanist regime did much to extend the state’s developmental dimension. The government took responsibility for the development of the railway network, which entailed extensive public investment in the 1840s. In part, this extension of public works was motivated by a desire to manage the ‘social question’, the fear of a potentially subversive underclass; indeed, despite the limited extension of the franchise after 1830, the July Monarchy was attentive to public opinion. The desire for popular legitimation also pushed the regime to seek glory abroad through the conquest of Algeria, which entailed higher military expenditure, as did an international crisis in 1840. As under the Restoration, the growth of public expenditure was financed through credit, which enabled the government to avoid painful tax reforms, while increasing the numbers of people invested in public credit and thus with a stake in the social and political order.

Medicolegal experts often struggled to discern whether a suspicious death was caused by poisoning or natural causes, particularly during cholera epidemics, and faced difficulties in detecting traces of poison in cadavers. Changing understandings of the absorption of poisons in the body and the advent of new techniques, including the Marsh apparatus test, presented possibilities for demonstrative evidence of poisoning and revealed the dangers of flawed forensic expertise. Some doctors, scientists, jurists, writers, and other commentators issued warnings about the high sensitivity of the Marsh test, the possibility of numerous sources of contamination, and the problem of incompetent practitioners operating beyond the bounds of their knowledge and training. Nonetheless, the prevalence and nature of poisonings shifted over the course of the nineteenth century, largely in response to the evolution of scientific knowledge. However, public battles over the state of scientific and medical knowledge in poisoning trials raised concerns that the very means by which forensic doctors sought to establish their authority might undermine it.

Malingering, the practice of feigning medical conditions for specific purposes, became a pressing concern for many practitioners of legal medicine following the introduction of conscription during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. A burgeoning medicolegal literature on malingering revealed that some doctors went to great lengths to detect and expose malingerers by using deceit, coercion, painful procedures, and altered states of consciousness as diagnostic tools. Doctors justified the far-reaching tactics used in adversarial contests with suspected malingerers in the name of the public good. Acting on behalf of the state to expose them, doctors engaged in adversarial relationships with suspected malingerers. These encounters also provided an impetus for debates about medical ethics; however, ethical concerns about doctors’ methods of detecting malingering were rarely raised and debated until the end of the nineteenth century.

Sexual crimes against children appeared before the courts with a dramatically increasing frequency over the course of the nineteenth century. But these prosecutions did not always translate into successful convictions of sexual offenders, in part due to contradictory and ambivalent understandings of childhood innocence and doctors’ frequent negative findings concerning the physical traces of these crimes. Medicolegal experts routinely cast moral judgements on the children, particularly working-class girls, identified as victims of sexual crimes. Influenced by bourgeois attitudes toward male honor and notions about the perceived immorality of the working class, these doctors warned that children’s accounts of sexual assault could not be trusted and could destroy men’s reputations. By discounting children’s accounts, doctors laid claim to their exclusive ability to evaluate proof of sexual offenses against children. Furthermore, by discrediting children identified as victims of sexual crimes, medical practitioners shaped attitudes toward sexual assault that presented long-lasting challenges to the pursuit of justice.

The emergence of forensic medicine as a distinct specialty in the nineteenth century sparked debates about the extent which it could reveal truth, furnish legal proof, and serve justice. This question was particularly salient in the context of the institutional and juridical changes that the French Revolution had created, which transformed the field of legal medicine. This introduction provides an overview of the legal landscape in which medicolegal experts operated, the professionalization of medicine, and the rising influence of medical experts in French criminal courts and beyond.

With the collapse of the ancien régime following a fiscal crisis, the Revolutionaries of the 1790s sought to design a more equitable tax system, based on direct taxes; most indirect taxes were abolished. These new taxes, though, proved insufficient to meet France’s needs, particularly given the collapse of public credit due to political instability. Committed to honouring the debt incurred by the ancien régime, and facing the mounting expenses of a major European war after 1792, the Revolutionary governments failed to stabilise the fiscal situation. Instead, they were pushed to compensate for insufficient tax receipts by levying forced loans, imposing price controls and printing money, which produced hyperinflation by the mid-1790s. These drastic measures, and their failure to resolve the fiscal problems of the 1790s, did much to discredit the Revolutionary regimes, and consequently facilitated the emergence of post-revolutionary politics under Napoleon.

Male medical experts faced challenges and uncertainty in examining presumably pregnant or postpartum women, particularly condemned women facing execution who declared pregnancy, as well as women accused of infanticide. Forensic doctors’ efforts and methods to establish the facts of infanticide cases commonly elicited criticism from other medical men or judicial authorities, and their conclusions were frequently at odds with the accused’s version of events. In many cases, forensic reports and testimony appeared to be the most decisive factor in shaping jury verdicts. However, all-male juries often weighed forensic evidence against evaluations of the character and life circumstances of the accused, and the sympathies of jurors shaped the interpretation of forensic evidence as well as judicial verdicts. Medical men’s role in the search for material proof of the crime was often both crucial and problematic, and changing, ambivalent social attitudes towards infanticide shaped the interpretations and consideration of forensic evidence.

The stature of the medicolegal expert grew in France over the course of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. Although the trajectories of medicolegal experts in France and in the American adversarial system diverged, both American and French citizens today have relatively high levels of confidence in forensic expertise. This conclusion and epilogue explores the legacy of the rise of forensic medicine in nineteenth-century France, the enduring public interest in forensics, the dangers of the TV-induced “CSI effect,” and changing attitudes towards expertise in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

France was at the centre of a transnational process of nineteenth-century European state formation. Since states have often reformed themselves as a result of interaction with one another, the book begins by taking a wide angle on the development of the French case, situating it within the context of state formation in Europe and the Americas. Not only were the French influenced by the progress of rival states, they also shaped the way in which other European and American states were formed. Under Napoleon, for instance, the French exported their tax system across Europe, shaping the subsequent development of taxation in large parts of Germany, Italy and the Low Countries. Also discussed here is the historiography of the French state, and its emphasis on the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period of 1789–1815 as the formative years of the nineteenth-century French state. This book, by contrast, demonstrates the importance of the post-Napoleonic period in state formation, and the opening chapter outlines this argument.

The mid-1850s were years of economic boom, which gave way to a slump at the end of the decade. To maintain railway construction, the ongoing rebuilding of French cities and to counter economic malaise, government spending on public works rose. The regime also sought to stimulate the economy through fiscal reform; a trade treaty with Britain in 1860 formed part of a programme intended to reduce taxes and streamline the state. Affairs abroad, though, complicated this agenda. Profiting from the destabilisation of the international order that followed the Crimean War, France intervened militarily in support of Italian unification, while simultaneously seeking greater prestige through a policy of all-out global interventionism in the Middle and Far East and Mexico. The costs of interventionism abroad, combined with ongoing expenses in Algeria and on public works, eroded the regime’s latitude to lower taxes, straining the legitimacy of the fiscal system. Meanwhile, defeat in Mexico added to this discontent, producing a crisis of the fiscal-military system, which weakened the regime, easing its collapse in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War.