International audience “We are the voices of those who speak no more”: theorizing femicidein the absence of womenThis article presents a genealogical reflexion about femicide in France froman historical and political perspective. While the conceptualization offemicide from a feminist perspective is recent (see Jill Radford & Diana E.H.Russell, Femicide : the politics of woman killings, 1992), nineteenth-centurynewspaper archives show that there have already been attempts to name theproblem. However, it was perceived essentially through the prism ofmarriage – the murder of the wife rather than the murder of a woman – andwithout taking into account the importance of gender in the very existenceof the problem, often referred to as a family drama or a crime of passion.This article aims to show that, on the one hand, femicide is difficult to nameand to identify in gender terms, and, on the other hand, the lack of testimonycaused by the victim’s death makes it difficult to gr