The 'dangerous' Dei delitti e delle pene: Cesare Beccaria’s forbidden work on penal reform
On 3 February 1766, Cesare Beccaria’s Dei delitti e delle pene was entered into the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the list of books prohibited by the Roman Catholic Church, where it remained for 200 years. Published anonymously and without any indication of place on 12 April 1764 in Lovorno (Tuscany)—then one of the most advanced cities in Italy—Dei delitti e delle pene... represents the first full work of penology and takes as its central theme the reform of criminal justice. In it, Beccaria advocates for an egalitarian justice system, and traces a new metric for punishment and laws rooted in the concept of public happiness. “One of the most influential books in the whole history of criminology [...] his ideas have now become so commonplace that it is difficult to appreciate their revolutionary impact at the time” (PMM).
First edition of Beccaria’s Dei delitti e delle pene, containing the extremely rare errata leaf. This copy, currently available, was gifted by Ferdinando Bosi, lawyer for the British writer Osbert Sitwell, to the great collector, legal scholar, and co-founder of the British Institute in Florence, Walter Ashburner, and was later owned by the historian and politician Luigi Firpo.
See the full description of this copy here.
Indeed, the work enjoyed wide and immediate success, and its influence was enormous. Voltaire (who wrote a commentary on it), d’Alembert, Helvétius, Holbach, Hume and Hegel all counted among its enthusiastic readers. Beccaria’s ideas also inspired justice reforms introduced by Grand Duke Leopold of Tuscany (the Grand Duchy of Tuscany becoming the first State in the world to abolish the death penalty, an important point of Beccaria’s treatise), Emperor Joseph II, and Catherine II of Russia, and its influence on constitutionalism broadly, especially the Déclarations des droits de l’homme of 1789, is likewise evident.
It also played an important role in the founding of the United States. The work was translated into English in 1767, as On Crimes and Punishments, and “significantly shaped the views of American revolutionaries and lawmakers. The first four U.S. Presidents – George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison – were inspired by Beccaria’s treatise and, in some cases, read it in the original Italian. On Crimes and Punishments helped to catalyze the American Revolution, and Beccaria’s anti-death penalty views materially shaped American thought on capital punishment, torture and cruelty.” (J. D. Bessler, “The Italian Enlightenment and the American Revolution”, p. 1).
Evidently, Bessler is not alone in regarding Beccaria’s work as a cornerstone of judicial thought with such far-reaching implications that it effectively “changed Western civilization” (J. D. Bessler, “The Economist and the Enlightenment”, pp. 1-28). And yet, its utilitarian stance — apparently aligned with Christian ideals — was also immediately problematic. Just months after printing it was blocked from entering Venetian territory by the Venetian Inquisition, and in 1765 a Vallombrosan monk by the name of Ferdinando Facchinei attacked the work as heretical, indeed the most heretical: ‘the greatest and most blasphemous sedition ever encountered against the sovereign rulers and against the Christian religion from the most impious heretics and from all the irreligious, ancient and modern alike.’ (Facchinei, Note ed osservazioni, p. 187, as translated by Sophus A. Reinert, “Beccaria and His Critics”, p. 144)
So, why was it so problematic?
The young Milanese nobleman Cesare Beccaria Bonesana wrote Dei delitti e delle pene between March 1763 and January 1764, while an active member of the intellectual circle known as the Accademia dei pugni. This ‘Academy of Fisticuffs’ — founded in Milan in 1762 by Beccaria and the brothers Alessandro and Pietro Verri, among others — was, as its name suggests, not afraid to butt heads with established institutions and engage in friendly debate. Its own influence was great. As Sophus Reinert puts it, the ‘Academy’ was essentially “a caffeinated think tank of aristocratic intellectuals and reformers that did much to put Milan on the intellectual map of mid-eighteenth-century Europe. Baron Friedrich-Melchior Grimm dubbed the Academy of Fisticuffs the ‘coterie de Milan’; Voltaire referred to them as the ‘École de Milan.’ Because of Beccaria’s book, however, the group was soon known throughout the European world, from St. Petersburg to Philadelphia.” (Sophus A. Reinert, The Academy of Fisticuffs: Political Economy and Commercial Society in Enlightenment Italy, Harvard University Press, 2018).
Antonio Perego, L'Accademia dei Pugni, c. 1766. Public domain. From left to right: Alfonso Longo (back), Alessandro Verri, Giambattista Biffi, Cesare Beccaria, Luigi Lambertenghi, Pietro Verri and Giuseppe Visconti di Saliceto.
One of the group’s main topics of conversation was the promotion of human rights and welfare in response to oppression by the privileged elite. Upon the urging of his friend Pietro Verri, Becarria channeled this interest into Dei delitti e delle pene. In it, Beccaria productively analyses the value of punishment relative to the protection of society and argues for an established set of laws, written clearly and accessibly, which should be employed by an impartial body equally, and to all people. A speedy trial should be conducted by a jury composed of one’s peers, and the severity of a punishment should reflect the severity of the crime committed against society. Arguing that the goal should be to prevent crime rather to inflict pain, he argued that education is the best way to deter criminal activity and achieve a more peaceful society.
“So that any punishment be not an act of violence of one or of many against another, it is essential that it be public, prompt, necessary, minimal in severity as possible under given circumstances, proportional to the crime, and prescribed by the laws.”
Of course, these ideas are hardly controversial today (and one can see in them the grains of much of the present American judicial system), but this is so precisely because of the effectiveness of Beccaria’s work, which appeared at a moment of ‘Enlightenment’ when many were ready to hear it. (Beccaria had not been the first to propose some of the ideas included in the work, but he was the first to put them down in such a complete and compelling account.) In terms of the judicial system, the context within which the text was composed was very different from today’s. Across eighteenth-century Europe, criminal law was arcane and inaccessible; it was applied arbitrarily and often (for the less fortunate) cruelly, with inconsistent sentencing issued at the unlimited discretion of judges, and generally dependent on the accused’s station in life. Corruption was rampant.
It was against this backdrop that Beccaria set forth his treatise, and it’s clear why many of the powerful elite would take issue with such a challenge to the established order that had long served them so well. But what could the monk Facchinei have against Beccaria’s fair-minded, utilitarian thinking? Moreover, what prompted Facchinei to charge Beccaria with being a ‘socialist’ in what was, remarkably, the first known vernacular usage of that word?
Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794).
While the egalitarian emphasis of Beccaria’s work clearly aligns with our use of the term ‘socialist’ today, Facchinei was actually thinking of the social contract as famously championed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his eponymous work of 1762 — a crucial inspiration for Beccaria. The social contract requires people to give up a portion of their freedom for the benefit and security of the whole. This is the framework for Beccaria’s whole treatise. As he explained in the first chapter, each portion of relinquished freedom combines to make up the sovereign and this is what provides for the sovereignty’s right to punish crimes that are committed against society. This is also what requires the severity of the punishment to reflect the severity of the crime. Facchinei took issue with the way such ‘socialists’ perceived people as entering into society, and he thought the fear of severe punishment was far more powerful than Beccaria gave it credit for.
Most importantly, though, Facchinei understood that Beccaria was fundamentally reconsidering the place of law in society. Crime, according to Beccaria, is a breach of the social contract, not a sin, making it a matter to be dealt with via political rather than divine justice. Therein lies the greatest problem for Facchinei and the Church in general. “In the end, Facchinei argued, On Crimes and Punishments based itself on the fatal assumption that human society could be experienced, understood, and reformed on its own terms. ‘If our Politics is not a visible part of the true Religion’, he thundered, ‘it will never be a good Politics, but a vague, broken Philosophy’. One could simply not consider this world in isolation from the next, a mere ‘part’ compared to the ‘whole’ of ‘eternity’.” (Sophus A. Reinert, “Beccaria and His Critics”, p. 142). Of course, that’s precisely what Beccaria saw was needed: a total detachment of these two worlds and a secular reappraisal of the value of law and justice in society as we (all) know and live it.
References Einaudi 3362; PMM 209; B. E. Harcourt, Beccaria’s ‘On Crimes and Punishments’: A Mirror on the History of the Foundations of Modern Criminal Law, Chicago 2013; M. Palumbo – E. Sidoli (eds.), The Books that Made Europe, Bruxelles 2016, pp. 248-249; J. D. Bessler, “The Economist and the Enlightenment: How Cesare Beccaria Changed Western Civilization,” European Journal of Law and Economics, 42.2 (2016); J. D. Bessler, “The Italian Enlightenment and the American Revolution: Cesare Beccaria’s Forgotten Influence on American Law”, Hamline Journal of Public Law and Policy, 37.1 (2017); B. Kapossy – I. Nakhimovsky – R. Whatmore (eds.), Commerce and Peace in the Enlightenment, Cambridge 2017, pp. 125-154; S. Reinert, The Academy of Fisticuffs: Political Economy and Commercial Society in Enlightenment Italy Cambridge, M.A. 2018.
How to cite this information
Julia Stimac and Margherita Palumbo, “The 'dangerous' Dei delitti e delle pene: Cesare Beccaria’s forbidden work on penal reform,” PRPH Books, 3 February 2021, https://www.prphbooks.com/blog/beccaria. Accessed [date].This post is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.