Droit de cuissage

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Shombit Sengupta : Feb 17 2013, 02:02 IST

Droit de seigneur literally means the right of the lord. This custom from the European Middle Ages (5th-15th century) and beyond allowed a feudal lord to deflower the bride of his serf on her wedding night. In plain fact, it amounted to rape. So it’s appropriate that on St Valentine’s Day, last Friday, we observed One Billion Rising, a global call to protest violence against women by dancing publicly. “One in three women on the planet (adding up to a billion women) will be raped or beaten in her lifetime,” said Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues that humorously vents attitudes towards women. She rightly says this is as critical a goal as ending poverty, AIDS or global warming.

This social practice of sexually overpowering the physically weaker sex, and exerting economic power over her chosen husband is also known as droit de cuissage, literally meaning the right over her thigh. Another such French expression jui primae noctis also amounts to rape rights over women subservient to the ruler. This ultimate symbol of feudal barbarism has been recorded in umpteen stories and paintings such as Vasily Polenov’s 1874 painting of an old man bringing his daughters to their feudal lord and Paja Jovanovic’s 1998 painting Adornment of the Bride, which became a Yugoslavian postage stamp. The plot of the opera The Marriage of Figaro by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is mainly based on jus primae noctis too.

Greek “Father of History” Herodotus (484-425 BC) wrote about a Libyan custom of “bringing all

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