Breaking the Codes: Female Criminality in Fin-De-Siècle Paris - Paperbackby Ann Louise Shapiro (Author) Breaking the Codes is a cultural history of the fin de siecle that uses the "problem" of the criminal woman to examine both the debates around the appropriate place of women in French society and the ways in which issues of gender were central to the most important cultural transformations of the period. The author asserts that "female criminality" was a code that condensed and obscured larger concerns. For example, to