Lombroso's Criminal People
Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909), the “father of criminology,” published his landmark L’uomo delinquente in 1876. Translated as Criminal Man in 1911, this seminal work — offered here in a very special presentation copy — was printed from the presses of Ulrico Hoepli and became enormously influential, being the first study devoted specifically to crime and criminals. In it, Lombroso theorises the correlation between somatic and mental deformities with reference to specific factors as atavism, degeneration, and epilepsy. Most significantly for the history of criminology and criminal anthropology, it argued that criminals were “born,” and that such biological predetermination could be “read” in a subject’s physical appearance, especially in their face and skull.
Photogravure of Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909). Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Born in Verona to a wealthy Jewish family, Lombroso studied literature, linguistics, and archaeology at the universities of Padua, Vienna and Paris, before becoming an army surgeon in 1859. In 1866 he was appointed visiting lecturer at Pavia and in 1871 he took charge of the mental asylum at Pesaro, a post he held until 1873. After the publication of L’uomo delinquente he became Professor of Forensic Medicine and Hygiene at Turin in 1878. Later he was appointed as Professor of Psychiatry (1896) and Criminal Anthropology (1906) at the same university.
Key to Lombroso’s work on the criminal man was Darwin’s recent theories on evolution. Seeking a scientific understanding of criminality, Lombroso drew on a misinterpretation of Darwin to develop his own theory of criminal atavism. The author himself traces the origin of the idea back to an examination he performed on the body of a deceased brigand named Giuseppe Villella. In L’uomo delinquente he explains how at the sight of the skull he noticed an indentation resembling that found in the typical crania of “lemurs, one family of prosimians, and some species of rodent,” thus suggesting an ancestral “atavistic” trait in Villella’s own cranium. “The criminal was biologically linked to inferior animals. His deviance was thus the consequence of his constitution (of which the median occipital depression was nothing other than a morphological trait), which in turn amounted to an evolutionary throwback. To Lombroso, the phenomenon of criminality, possibly the product of arrested development at a more primitive mental stage (atavism) or of a regression to a previous ‘atavistic’ phase of evolution, a process of degeneration, seemed ripe for investigation.” (Mazzarello, 2011, p. 98)
L’uomo delinquente proceeds to expound the theory Lombroso developed in great detail, illustrating how the “savage” criminal could be variously identified, both physically and ethically. Such tell-tale signs, according to the author, included protruding cheekbones, bulky jaw bones, pronounced brow ridges, heightened visual acuity, insensitivity to pain, certain types of ears, and darker skin. Tattooing and slang offered further evidence of criminality or criminal difference, as did impulsivity, moral insensitivity, and excessive idleness. According to Lombroso, these features corresponded to a “love of orgies and the irresistible craving for evil for its own sake, the desire not only to extinguish life in the victim, but to mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh, and drink its blood.” “Low level” humanity in a misguided evolutionary sense meant, for him, “low level” humanity in the moral, ethical sense.
Lombroso, Cesare (1835-1909). L’uomo delinquente studiato in rapporto alla antropologia, alla medicina legale ed alle discipline carcerarie. Milan, Ulrico Hoepli, 1876.
See the complete description of this presentation copy here.
Such “born” criminals could not be reformed and society, Lombroso felt, had the right to protect itself against them, just as one would against a wild animal. Certain delinquents, he opined, should be kept in prisons or asylums for life, regardless of their crime, since this is a way to protect society against what would assuredly be the criminal’s future misconducts. Later, Lombroso also categorized a group of criminals as “criminaloids”: generally presenting as respectable people, they are endowed with a greater degree of physical abnormalities than “normal” subjects but less than in born criminals and could possibly be rehabilitated to overcome their moral deficiencies.
In this way, Lombroso’s treatise was also addressed to judges and lawyers. Taking on a legal lens, Lombroso advised “scientific policing” which was later taken up by Salvatore Ottolenghi, a professor of forensic medicine who established the Scuola di Polizia Scientifica in Rome in 1907, which kept identification cards to track criminals. The French policeman Alphonse Bertillon (1853-1914) is another fine example of Lombroso’s ideas put into practice. Although Bertillon disagreed with Lombroso on the direct linkage between physical features and criminality, he nevertheless felt the systematic approach “scientific” enough to initiate the use of anthropometry in his law enforcement, along with the standardization of photographing criminals via his invention of the mug shot.
It is not a stretch to see how Lombroso’s theorising of biological determinism of behaviour, so in line with Social Darwinism more generally, helped pave the way for the horrifying development of eugenics, and the nature versus nurture debate persists today. Undersized and bad sampling, bias, and poor statistics all hampered Lombroso’s work, and in addition to the many ways of supposedly identifying and categorizing the “born” criminal, Lombroso’s “evolution”-based theory supported, even further entrenched, the contemporary status quo that that subordinated black people to white people and women to men.
This latter point was borne out in book form in 1893, with the publication of La donna delinquente. La prostituta e la donna normale (Turin-Rome, L. Roux, 1893), presented here in a rare first edition. Considered the first modern criminology text to focus exclusively on the subject of women’s crime, it too was extremely influential. A first draft of the work, written in collaboration with the very Salvatore Ottolenghi mentioned above, had appeared two years earlier in the Giornale della R. Accademia di Medicina (nos. 9-10). The final draft was written in collaboration with the author's son-in-law, the talented law student Guglielmo Ferrero (1871-1942).
Lombroso, Cesare (1835-1909). La donna delinquente. La prostituta e la donna normale. Turin-Rome, L. Roux, 1893.
See the complete description of this copy here.
In La donna delinquente, Lombroso applies to women the same theories expressed in his Uomo delinquente while also attempting to scientifically prove women’s inferiority to men. To Lombroso, the counterpart to the male “born criminal” is the female “born prostitute,” even if she is considered “less perverse and less harmful to society.” Indeed, with an intense scrutiny of sexual pathology, Lombroso finds that it is prostitution (instead of criminality) that is “the main way in which degeneration manifests among women.” Although Lombroso also cautioned that his work should not be used to legitimize an intensification of restrictions and constraints on women that would “increase [their] inferiority,” it was, unsurprisingly, used to do just that. In the introduction to their recently edited English edition of Lombroso’s work, Rafter and Gibson conclude that La donna delinquente represents “perhaps the most extended proof of women's inferiority ever attempted.” (Rafter and Gibson, 2004, p. 32)
Physiognomies of Russian prostitutes in Lombroso’s La donna delinquente.
While much of Lombroso’s work is indeed discredited, its cultural influence was great, and it did offer important, long-lasting ideas. For example, central to Lombroso’s thesis is the idea that certain offenders are not entirely responsible for their criminal actions. Further, by focusing on the topic of crime itself, it opened the doors to the study of crime and mental pathologies in a more thorough, considered way, even by providing something to work against.“‘Criminal Man’ was a revolutionary work which not only caused a considerable stir when it first came out but had a practical effect which was wholly beneficial. The division which it indicated between the congenital criminal and those who were tempted to crime by circumstances has had a lasting effect on penal theory. Again, by connecting the treatment of crime with the treatment of insanity, Lombroso initiated a branch of psychiatric research which has cast new light on problems, such as criminal responsibility, which lie at the root of human society” (PMM).
The copy of Lombroso’s L’uomo delinquente offered here is a testament to the work’s important place in the inauguration of such focused discussions. It is a presentation copy bearing Lombroso's autograph address to the Società Freniatrica Italiana, dated 'Pavia, 6 Dic 1883'. The Società Freniatrica Italiana – the Italian Psychiatric Society – was established in 1873, and Lombroso was among its founders. Its fourth congress took place in Voghera, near Pavia, on 16-22 September 1883. Later the volume came into possession of Angiolo Filippi, who was the leading medical-legal authority in Italy at that time. Filippi published the first Italian treatises on forensic medicine – the Principii di medicina legale per gli studenti di legge ed i giurisperiti (Firenze 1889) and the Manuale di medicina legale conforme al nuovo codice penale per medici e giuristi (Milano 1889) – in which some sections are devoted to criminal anthropology. Filippi was in correspondence with Lombroso, with respect to whom he often had differing opinions. Some notes in the present volume, written in his own hand, confirm the critical approach he had towards Lombroso's work, offering striking testimony to the Italian debate on criminology that ensued following the publication of this seminal work.
References
CLIO, Catalogo dei libri italiani dell'Ottocento (1801-1900), IV, p. 2667 (MI185); Garrison-Morton 174; Norman 1384; PMM 394; H. Mannheim, Pioneers in Criminology, Chicago 1960, pp. 168-227; M. Gibson, Born to Crime: Cesare Lombroso and the Italian origins of Biological Criminology, Westport 2002; G. Seppilli - L. Bianchi (eds.), Atti del IV Congresso della Società Freniatrica Italiana tenuto in Voghera dal 16 al 22 settembre 1883, Milano 1883; C. Lombroso-G. Ferrero, Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman, Translated and with a new introduction by N.H. Rafter and M. Gibson, Durham 2004, p. 32; P. Mazzarello, “Cesare Lombroso: an anthropologist between evolution and degeneration,” Functional Neurology 26.2 (2011): 97-101; Philobiblon, One Thousand Years of Bibliophily, no. 275 and no. 279.
How to cite this information
Julia Stimac, “Lombroso's Criminal People,” PRPH Books, 10 March 2021, https://www.prphbooks.com/blog/lombroso. Accessed [date].This post is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.