"Pity must give way to justice": A Case Study of Cordélia Viau, Emotions, and Capital Punishment in Quebec, 1899
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis focuses on the emotional impact capital punishment had on families and communities in Québec during the late nineteenth century by examining the case of Cordélia Viau. On March 10, 1899, in the small town of Sainte-Scholastique, Cordélia Viau was executed alongside her accomplice, Samuel Parslow, for the homicide of her husband, Isidore Poirier, in their house in Saint-Canut. In the month preceding her execution, the Viau family – her parents, three of her sisters, and a brother-in-law – set out to campaign for mercy on behalf of Cordélia. Their efforts were a strategic appeal to the wife of the Governor General, Lady Minto, documented in the archival capital case file. This unusual strategy of appealing to the wife of the Queen’s representative rather than the Governor General demonstrates an understanding of the power of the emotions shared between the women, as mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives. Unfortunately for Cordélia, the emotions they hoped to provoke, such as sympathy, pity, and piety, were not compelling enough to save her life. At the same time, the press covered the case with sensational details. Newspapers such as La Presse, La Patrie, The Montreal Daily Star, and The Gazette sought to provoke emotions in their readers by using stereotypes about women and violent crime, highlighting the shame of murder and hangings, and dissecting the actions of the crowd that gathered to witness the execution. Alongside the private and public emotions raised by the case, early abolition sentiment appeared in articles describing the execution.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".