Farewell to the World

A History of Suicide

Marzio Barbagli, Lucinda Byatt

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780745662459
  9780745662442
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780745680422
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

What drives a person to take his or her own life? Why would an individual be willing to strap a bomb to himself and walk into a crowded marketplace, blowing himself up at the same time as he kills and maims the people around him? Does suicide or 'voluntary death' have the same meaning today as it had in earlier centuries, and does it have the same significance in China, India and the Middle East as it has in the West? How should we understand this distressing, often puzzling phenomenon and how can we explain its patterns and variations over time?

In this wide-ranging comparative study, Barbagli examines suicide as a socio-cultural, religious and political phenomenon, exploring the reasons that underlie it and the meanings it has acquired in different cultures throughout the world. Drawing on a vast body of research carried out by historians, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists and psychologists, Barbagli shows that a satisfactory theory of suicide cannot limit itself to considering the two causes that were highlighted by the great French sociologist Émile Durkheim – namely, social integration and regulation. Barbagli proposes a new account of suicide that links the motives for and significance attributed to individual actions with the people for whom and against whom individuals take their lives.

This new study of suicide sheds fresh light on the cultural differences between East and West and greatly increases our understanding of an often-misunderstood act. It will be the definitive history of suicide for many years to come.

Part I
In the West

1. Ajax prepares to impale himself on a sword in order to avenge himself on his enemies and regain his honour (amphora, 6th cent. BCE).

2. Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, The Death of Saul (1851–60). Saul, first king of the Kingdom of Israel, fell on his sword in front of his soldiers following his defeat by the Philistines.

3. The ritual of the barrel and Rinnen. The corpse of a monk who had committed suicide is placed in a barrel and cast into the Rhine (Basle, early 16th cent.). Die Schweizer Bilderchronik des Luzerners Diebold Schilling.

4. Beliefs regarding the consequences of suicide. A man whose marriage failed committed suicide in Rossau, near Zurich, and was buried in the cemetery. Fearing that this would provoke disasters, the villagers disinterred the body and burned it (1581). Zentralbibliothek Zürich, Ms. F 29a, f. 178r.

5. Ira se occidit (Anger commits suicide, 12th cent.), a capital in Notre-Dame du Port, Clermont-Ferrand.

6. The suicide of Judas depicted on a capital in Saint-Lazare Cathedral, Autun (12th cent.).

7. Giotto, Despair (c. 1302), Scrovegni Chapel, Padua.

8. Master E. S., Consolation against Despair. St Peter, St Mary Magdalene, the good thief and St Paul gathered around the dying man’s bed to ward off the temptation of despair.

9. Giovanni Canavesio, The Suicide of Judas (1492), fresco, Chapel of Notre-Dame-des-Fontaines, La Brigue.

10. Anonymous Alsatian artist, The Suicide of Judas (1520), polychrome stained glass, The Art Institute of Chicago.

11. In 1742 Maria Elisabetta Beckensteinerin strangled her six-month-old son in order to die and at the same time save her own soul through repentance. Left: the infant’s soul rises to heaven where it is greeted by an angel with open arms.

12. In 1740 fourteen-week-old Maria Magdalena Bertzin was killed by her father, who wanted to die but also desired eternal salvation. Both engravings are taken from Stuart, 2008.

13. Benezur Gyula, Cleopatra (1911), Déri Museum, Debrecen.

14. Paolo Veronese, Lucretia (c.1580), KHM-Museumsverband, Vienna.

15. William Blake, The Wood of the Self-Murderers: the Harpies and the Suicides (1824–7), Tate, London.

16. George Cruikshank, The Poor Girl Homeless, Friendless, Deserted, Destitute, and Gin-Mad Commits Self-Murder (1848), Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

17. George Grosz, The End of the Road (1913), Museum of Modern Art, New York, (c)Photo SCALA, Florence.

18. Édouard Manet, The Suicide (1877–81), Foundation E. G. Bührle Collection, Zürich.

19. Frida Kahlo, The Suicide of Dorothy Hale (1939), Phoenix Art Museum.

20. Paul Lafargue and Laura Marx.

21. Primo Levi.

22. Prague: Monument to Jan Palach who killed himself by setting himself on fire on 16 January 1969 to protest against the Soviet occupation of his country.

23. Mario Mieli, militant of the gay movement, who committed suicide in 1983 at the age of thirty-one. Portrait by David Hill.

1
The Worst Sin and the Gravest Crime

1.1 The rise in suicide, ‘a most tragic fact’

Concern for the fate of the society in which they lived prompted many European scholars to study suicide in the second half of the nineteenth century. In their search for a response to these fears, they immersed themselves in the flood of statistics that the governments of some countries had begun to publish a few years earlier and they tried to verify the reliability of the data, and to process and interpret them. While coming from very different scientific backgrounds and with diverse religious and political convictions, they all arrived at the same conclusion. From the existing data, wrote Enrico Morselli in 1879, ‘is demonstrated this most painful fact, that suicide has increased from the beginning of the century, and goes on continually increasing in almost all the civilized countries of Europe and of the New World’.¹ Some twenty years later, Durkheim would reiterate that ‘the enormous increase in the number of voluntary deaths within a century’ constituted ‘a pathological phenomenon becoming daily a greater menace’.²

As will be seen, similar fears had already been expressed on countless occasions in the past, at least since the sixteenth century. However, the explanation furnished by the nineteenth-century scholars was different. The annual number of suicides, Karl Marx observed in 1846, has simply ‘to be viewed as a symptom of the deficient organization of our society’.³ ‘For suicide’, added Friedrich Engels, ‘formerly the enviable privilege of the upper classes, has become fashionable among the English workers, and numbers of the poor kill themselves to avoid the misery from which they see no other means of escape.’⁴ Suicides were unquestionably the ‘fatal plague of our age’,⁵ commented Enrico Morselli. It was a sentiment that was reiterated by Émile Durkheim, who wrote: ‘Our social organization, then, must have changed profoundly in the course of this century, to have been able to cause such a growth in the suicide rate.’

Four years earlier, in another work, the great French sociologist had explained how this change had come about: ‘[…] our societies are, or tend to be, essentially industrial. A form of activity which in this way has acquired such a position in the overall life of society can clearly not remain unregulated without very profound disturbances ensuing. Specifically, this is a source of general moral deterioration.’⁶ The growing number of suicides was therefore due to a fall in the degree of social integration and regulation resulting from industrialization, rapid economic development, the cyclical alternation of expansion and recession, as well as increased social mobility. The clearest proof of this theory’s validity lay in the chronological succession of the two processes, namely the fact that this ‘enormous increase’ had commenced in the early decades of the nineteenth century, immediately after the industrial revolution, which was regarded as the great watershed between traditional society and the modern world.

A comparison between the situations in the various countries during the nineteenth century raises some doubts as to the validity of this interpretation. First and foremost, in Britain, home of the industrial revolution, the number of voluntary deaths rose more slowly than in other less economically advanced countries in central and southern Europe. In the mid nineteenth century, the suicide rate in Britain was much lower than those in Belgium, France, Germany and Denmark. By the early twentieth century, the difference between the most industrialized country and other continental states was even more evident, in this respect.⁷ Second, the United States retained a lower suicide rate than France, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Belgium, Denmark and Sweden throughout the nineteenth century. Durkheim did not offer any explanation for these two anomalies. Morselli was surprised by the latter. ‘Certainly it is to be wondered at’, he observed, ‘that the proportion of suicides is so small, considering the feverish business activities and the effects of the extremely rapid civilization of the Anglo-Americans.’⁸ Third, in contrast to these nineteenth-century scholars, today we know of other unusual cases: in particular, two countries far removed from the Old World, namely minute Cuba and enormous China, where there was a much higher risk than in Europe, in the nineteenth century, that a person might take his or her own life. Moreover, between the closing years of last century and the start of the twenty-first, industrialization and urbanization in China led to a major fall in suicide rates, and not a rise.

But more serious doubts as to the validity of these nineteenth-cent...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Introduction
• Part I In the West
• Part II In the East
• Appendix
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement