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Like the English nouns femicide and feminicide, the French noun féminicide designates the misogynistic killing of a woman or girl by a man.
I have found two 17th-century precursors of this French noun: famicide and femmicide.
The latter form, femmicide, obviously refers to the noun femme (i.e., woman, also: wife), while the former, famicide, perhaps refers to the French pronunciation of femme, which is [fam].
—Cf. also:
– more on French ‘femmicide’ & early occurrences of English ‘femicide’;
– Why the French language is intrinsically sexist;
– femiphobia & feminophobia;
– cherchez la femme.
The two precursors of the noun féminicide are as follows:
1-: From Les trois Dorotées ou Le Jodelet souffleté (Paris: Toussaint Quinet, 1648), by the French poet, playwright and novelist Paul Scarron (1610-1660) [page 7]:
—Context: The scene is Toledo, Spain. In the following passage, Jodelet, servant to Dom Felix de Fonseque, a dissolute nobleman and seducer of women, criticises his master’s behaviour:
Et que vous a donc fait ce beau sexe à Tolede,
Que vous voulez ainsi l’exterminer par feu ?
[…]
A l’Eglise, où l’on doit seulement prier Dieu,
Vous n’allez qu’à dessein d’y mettre tout en feu ?
Là vos yeux trauaillant à faire famicides,
Tantost sont veus mourans, & de larmes humides ;
Tantost jettant le feu comme miroirs ardans,
Vont sur les pauures cœurs, fleches de feu dardans.
translation:
And what have this fair sex done to you at Toledo,
That you want to exterminate them by fire?
[…]
To church, where one must but pray to God,
You only go with the design of setting fire to everything?
There your eyes endeavouring to commit femicides,
Now are seen languishing, and moist with tears;
Now throwing fire like ardent mirrors,
Go onto the poor hearts, shooting arrows of fire.
Note: Paul Scarron reworked Les trois Dorotées ou Le Jodelet souffleté as Le Jodelet duelliste (Paris: Toussaint Quinet, 1652). I have not found the first edition, but in a later edition of Le Jodelet duelliste (Paris: Guillaume de Luyne, 1684) [page 7], the spelling of the plural noun is no longer famicides, but femmicides.
2-: From Act III, scene 4, of La Foire Saint Germain, a comedy first performed on 26th December 1695—as published in Tome VI of Le Theatre Italien de Gherardi, ou Le recueil general de toutes les Comedies & Scenes Françoises jouées par les Comediens Italiens du Roy, pendant tout le temps qu’ils ont été au Service (Paris: Jean-Baptiste Cusson et Pierre Witte, 1700) [page 306]:
Arlequin. Mais de ta seconde femme qu’en as-tu fait ?
Mezzetin. Helas, Monsieur, elle est morte, & on m’avoit accusé de l’avoir tuée ; & sans l’argent & les amis, j’aurois été pendu pour un femmicide.
The English noun is femmicide in the following translation of La Foire Saint Germain, The Fair of St. Germain. As it is Acted at the Theatre in Little Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields, by the French Company of Comedians, lately Arriv’d from the Theatre-Royal at Paris. All in the Characters of the Italian Theatre. Done into English by Mr. Ozell (London: Printed for W. Chetwood, 1718) [page 55]:
Harlequin. But what have you done with your second Wife.
Mezzetin. Alack! Sir, she’s dead: Her Relations wou’d have it that I had murder’d her; and, but for Money and good Friends, I had swung for Femmicide.