9 - Criminology, Hygienism, and Eugenics in France, 1870-1914: The Medical Debates on the Elimination of “Incorrigible” Criminals

Summary

a european movement, 1850–1900

The growing radicalism with which deviant behavior came to be naturalized starting in the mid-nineteenth century, and especially once the notions of degeneration and criminal heredity began to spread, is common knowledge. Prosper Lucas's Traité philosophique et physiologique de l'hérédité naturelle (1847), and even more, Bénédict-Augustin Morel's Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales (1857) and Jacques Moreau de Tours's La psychologie morbide dans ses rapports avec la philosophie de l'histoire (1857) are major landmarks in this respect. All of these authors postulate the existence of “hereditary morbid predispositions,” indicated by external physical “stigmata.” The notions of “moral folly” and “epilepsy,” later adopted by Cesare Lombroso, were already found in the writings of Morel, who took some of his inspiration from James Cowles Prichard, an English physician. It is not surprising, then, that the publication of L'Uomo delinquente (1876) was preceded by writings elsewhere in Europe, whose biological determinism was equally adamant.

Like Lombroso, Henri Maudsley (1835–1918) studied medicine in the mid-1850s and specialized in neurophysiology, psychiatry, and forensic medicine. Thanks to The Physiology and Pathology of Mind (1867), followed by Body and Mind (1870) he soon became renowned throughout Europe. His writings contained all of the elements of the naturalization of crime, along with the claim that medicine is capable of ridding society of its deviants. His reasoning rested on a belief in the absolute natural determinism of behavior: “The fixed and unchanging laws by virtue of which events occur are as powerful in the domain of the mind as in any other part of nature’s domain.” Even the traditional boundary between the “normal” and the “pathological” disappeared, to be replaced by completely mechanical biological functioning. The willpower of the mentally ill was considered of no consequence, even if the exact way in which these neurophysiological mechanisms functioned was still unknown.