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Family is paradoxically a place of violence. The author tries to define from the perspective of law history the violences inflicted by a woman to her husband. As a most often caricatured figure the battered husband is perceived as a man in a state of weakness that is socially punished in the 12th-17th century, then in a state of suffering that must remain concealed from the 18th century to our days. Juridical norms, trials and the social discourses they induce enable to trace the evolution with time of the social perception of battered husbands.