![]()
1
LOMBROSO AND HIS SCHOOL
From anthropology to medicine and law
Renzo Villa
Cesare Lombroso was officially appointed to the chair of Forensic Medicine and Public Hygiene at the University of Turin by Royal Decree of the 4 January 1876. The Faculty Board went on to approve the separation of Forensic Medicine from Public Hygiene ‘at his request’. This was the price that the 40-year-old professor from Verona was prepared to pay for Jakob Moleschott’s crucial help in attaining the chair. Lombroso venerated the Dutch maestro, ‘not just as a disciple but as a novice’ (Patrizi 1930, 230). The right gesture had been made, but it was a hard one. Far more than forensic medicine where his contributions had been somewhat desultory, public hygiene had actually been Lombroso’s chosen field of study throughout his career, from his graduate dissertation. It was also the battlefield for fiery and bitter disputes over the pellagra issue.
The 30-year-old Luigi Pagliani, who had graduated only seven years before and was promptly appointed assistant in the experimental physiology laboratory, was immediately called to take up the public hygiene teaching post. Pagliani would take the new chair’s prestige to great heights. In a mere ten years, he received an invitation to Rome from Crispi to organise the entire national health system. With public hygiene gone, at least psychiatry might have been the subject where Lombroso could count on putting his original methods and research into practice, thereby realising the ambitions he had brought with him to Turin. But this was not to be. The university only granted him an optional course in clinical psychiatry to be held in the newly finished prisons, while clinical teaching was entrusted to the elderly, but well-deserving, Giovanni Stefano Bonacossa. He, at the very least, died the following year.
This event illustrates the heights reached by the clash between the ‘experimental’ and clinical approaches in psychiatry. The Turin University world was in fact deeply divided between traditionalists, who advocated a passion-related, medical-psychological approach, and the physiopathologists, who gathered around Moleschott, the standard bearer of a materialism that hegemonised theoretical subjects. Consequently, Lombroso endured a bad reception from his colleagues, who knew him solely via the controversies relating to the research he conducted on toxins produced by rancid corn, and regarded his method of inquiry as little more than superficial. In addition, he was considered little more than an ‘original’ in relation to the many subjects he was interested in, from the relationship between genius and insanity to the anthropological identity of criminals or the origin of phrenosis. For this and more, the man from Verona enjoyed neither special favour nor attention.
Also his L’uomo delinquente, a no-longer-original collection of material from previously published articles, was largely ignored owing to poor sales in the troubled and hectic year of the first Depretis government. The fact that he came from a Jewish family but did not associate with this influential community, openly proclaimed free-thinking beliefs and declared his interest in studying unfortunates (to put it gently), meant he was marginalised by the circles that counted. Life in Turin was not initially a happy one for Lombroso and his family, who crowded into a small flat on the third floor of via della Zecca 33. So, the biography prepared by Lombroso’s daughters, Paola and Gina (distributed to the participants at the Sixth Congress of Criminal Anthropology), recalled that the chair had been won due to ‘the least important of all of his scientific activities’. They explained that
the first year that he spent in Turin . . . was one of despair, due to the change in his life which had been so unexpected and to our father’s attachment to those old walls of Pavia’s in spite of everything . . . he particularly missed the Lunatic Asylum with its living material and patients renewed every day.
(Lombroso 1906, 82–3)1
Luckily for him, the group of materialists had been growing. Giulio Bizzozero was the general pathologist: extremely precocious (he was a professor in Pavia at 21 years of age, under the auspices of Paolo Mantegazza), Bizzozero embodied Rudolf Virchow’s insights in the best possible way. He distinguished himself as one of Italy’s top scientists, among the foremost innovators as a methodologist; he became rector in 1885 and senator from 1890 on. After Bizzozero, Lombroso and Pagliani, Angelo Mosso, another formidable exponent of experimentalism, arrived. He occupied the Moleschott’s chair, after his transfer to Rome. Mosso had graduated from Moritz Schiff’s laboratory in Florence and specialised in Leipzig with Carl Ludwig: a highly gifted physiologist, a famous and brilliant populariser in great demand with publishers. Mosso’s great popularising skills and Pagliani’s organisational abilities enhanced the quality of the physiological experimentalism. These ‘four musketeers’, exceptional in so many ways, formed not only prestigious schools of physiology, pathology and public hygiene, and fortified with internationally renowned journals and research, but also moulded generations of doctors inspired by a common intellectual mind-set and corresponding public hygiene programme. In his inaugural lecture of the 1875/76 academic year, Giacinto Pacchiotti exhorted his audience to fight for a social commitment, to be defined more precisely over the following years: by tackling and solving the water, sewerage and energy problems of a rapidly expanding industrial city, and by the creating a true prophylaxis and prevention model, with children particularly borne in mind.
All of the musketeers extolled the pre-eminence and prestige of the scientific vision. Starting from 1877 with Michele Lessona’s rectorship,
the progress of science and lay morality, based on the fundamental values and ‘emancipators’ of labour, saving and education, came together and empathised. Neither was the notion of utility, which contained forms of anti-metaphysical, observational and experimental knowledge, alien to that alliance.
(Pogliano 1988, 33)2
Famed for his Volere è potere (1869), one of the very first best-sellers, Lessona was Darwin’s translator and populariser. He became a powerful advisor to Loescher and Pomba (the most important publishers in Turin), and from 1892, a senator.
Now the wind had changed. From the 1880s to the end of the century, Lombroso created his own national and international reputation by forming a school that rewarded him with loyalty, esteem and personal affection, even though he was certainly not on a scientific par with his colleagues, and actually occupied a marginal position on the faculty. The school resulted from special meetings and occasions linked to university activities; from the city’s scientific, industrial and cultural climate; and not least, from the maestro’s energy for controversy. A tireless worker, he had a gift for attracting young people, for arousing enthusiasm and stimulating research. His provocative arguments, and the speed at which he was able to write, meant his articles quickly became a regular fixture in newspapers and journals. He thereby procured entry into Turin’s social and intellectual life, although his ‘furies and rash words’, his support of socialism, and his often spectacular interventions in well-known judicial and criminal cases, meant that he was never completely accepted. From the end of the century on, when the so-called crisis of positivism had become evident, Lombroso managed to become a regular contributor to international rather than national dailies and journals; editors outside Italy received him with favour and curiosity, partly due to his new exploits, not least of all spiritualism.3 And it was just these freelance journalistic activities, for which he was well paid, that together with his political excesses, lowered his status in the eyes of the university world.
He knew how to inspire and stimulate talent, especially among the youngest and most ambitious such as Ferri, but even more so in the case of the sharper-witted and more impatient Guglielmo Ferrero, and also in the case of the methodical, precise and analytic Mario Carrara. Ferrero and Carrara became his sons-in-law, as well as guarantors of the relationships and personal cult nurtured in particular by Gina Lombroso Ferrero, but also by Paola Lombroso Carrara. Lombroso’s family represents the primary reason for Lombroso’s lasting fame, together with the ‘mythical’ criminal anthropology museum. By comparison, Raffaele Garofalo, the first person to write a Criminologia text, who publicised and acquired recognised status for the subject, and Ferri, authentic founder not just of criminal sociology, but also of the multi-subject criminological approach, missed their chance at posthumous fame, not only because of their support of fascism, but perhaps even more by the absence of custodians and devotees of family icons.
That Lombroso’s reputation had been wrought in the intellectual environment of a special city is absolutely essential to an understanding of the emergence of criminal anthropology. If criminal anthropology was to be studied outside this particular, extremely Italian cultural context, and if Lombroso’s fame was not seen as the powerful outcome of a school, we would confirm the claims of his disciples who proclaimed him a ‘genius’. We would accord him ‘national glory’ during the patriotic claims distinguishing the start of the twentieth century, thereby creating a myth parallel to that of the other Cesare: Beccaria. In the case of Lombroso, this myth was created during his lifetime by the festschrift that was L’opera di Cesare Lombroso nella scienza e nelle sue applicazioni. The second edition of 1908, for which Lombroso himself supplied the preface, should be studied with an eye to rhetorical analysis; it provides a model for panegyrics, with its profusion of superlatives and grandiose phrases; dramatisation of the obstacles, dangers and defences needed to affirm his own theories, not to mention the evidence and the unpredictability of the discovery (remember Villella). This book pursued a commemorative reasoning adorned with an ornamentation suitable for an ‘apostle’ of ‘Italianate superiority’; a figure worthy of ‘great palpitations’ and ‘religious trepidation’. Such deceptive and emphatic hyperbole was to suggest that the foundation of the School, built onto the praises of its own disciples, was utterly ‘memorable’.
The ‘Lombrosian myth’s’ main creator had been Enrico Ferri, a man of personal glamour with tremendous appeal as a conference speaker. On the occasion of Lombroso’s death, he announced that ‘the sole scientific goods to be exported, that conferred glory on the name of Italy in the world’, had disappeared and, yet again, ‘at that admirable time Darwin, Spencer, Pasteur, Charcot and Virchow were the giants of international science and like them, armed with the science of the nineteenth century, Lombroso had represented the marvellous ascent of contemporary human thought’ (Ferri 1909, 548). During the unveiling celebrations in 1921 of the monument to Lombroso in Verona, he would proclaim even more nationalistically: ‘He is an Italian thinker, as well as a universal scientist’, thus placing him alongside Galileo and Volta (Onoranze 1921, 723). Privately, however, say, as Leon Radzinowicz recalled in his Adventures in Criminology: ‘But always remember that Lombroso was a genius without talent.’ And also:
he was a genius at guessing, but when he had to expound, to demonstrate, he was lost. You had to know him personally, intimately. I saw him for the first time in 1878. I had just published my graduation dissertation, containing daring statements regarding the renewal of the criminal justice system, and he wrote to me with that goodness of heart which was the most precious of the gems in his many-sided personality. ... When I went to Turin for the first time, I was like a believer going to his Mecca. But, to be honest, I was disappointed by his lessons and saw that other disciples shared the same feeling.
(Onoranze 1921, 729)
For young Ferri in 1878, Lombroso was the author of the Uomo delinquente, the second edition. He was the scientist who had put together the gains of phrenology, forensic medicine and psychopathology; and linked them to a simplified evolutionary anthropology, enriched by a relatively original study of cultural expressions, from argot to tattoos, along the lines of folk psychology. The text offered an anthropology in the Vichian and linguistic sense, derived by Paolo Marzolo, but also an anthropology in the vaster and more generic sense of a naturalistic vision where the human being is an organism genealogically intertwined with other living creatures and subject to the effects of heredity, an object to be studied ‘using the methods of the physical sciences’ as he himself would attempt to do. This criminal-centred anthropology could not have arrived at a better time, offering as it did the readiest and most easily acceptable answer to a public appetite increasingly interested in criminal phenomena.4 With its apparently scientific language, completed with anatomical measurements, numbers and terminology, Lombroso’s writings appeared to be a perfect match with the conventions surrounding ‘scientificity’: that is, the implementation of a positive science’s programme and assumptions. The fascination by the professor also derived from the topics he dealt with: insanity, crime, geniality, abnormal and borderline psychological manifestations. He contributed to the discovery of a world that the literature of the time, from Verism to the Scapigliatura movement, was exploring and thus orienting the taste of a vast constituency. Nor should it be forgotten that one of the reasons both for Lombroso’s fame and popularity in Turin accrued from his appearances as an expert in some of the most notorious local and national trials; relived and celebrated in the news for weeks on end, and discussed passionately especially by the city’s middle classes. Due to the Gazzetta piemontese and La Stampa newspapers, and to the illustrated crime literature, his name became extremely popular.
In any case, the fortunes of Lombroso and his criminological approach must be seen within the more specifically Italian context. In a country where modernisation processes required longer times and were more difficult compared with other nations, and where institutions were often immobile and unmovable, any talk about crime, criminals and punishment that aspired to the status of scientific knowledge by defining itself as criminology, was a basic reply (however partial) to a criminal question which drew through fierce debates the attention of an emerging middle class in a newly unified Italy. In order to understand the dynamics of crimes, the motives of perpetrators, and the effectiveness and limits of punishment, many people committed themselves to reforming practices that were possible, in accordance with the laws governing society, to the principles of realism and to social defence, thereby laying the foundations for one of the most lively and versatile criminological theories, which was always intended to be rational, rigorous and anchored on the certainty of facts.
FIGURE 1.1 Lombroso together with his daughter, Gina Lombroso Ferrero. Pastel on paper, (Durio, 1910)
Source: Archivio storico del Museo di Antropologia criminale “Cesare Lombroso” dell’Università di Torino (Italia).
The sciences of crime followed a national path where three paradigms – legal, medical-anthropological, economic-sociological – alternated and intertwined, marked by the complex relationship with a delinquency polarised between organised crime, intimately and necessarily related to the management of the state, and criminal policies. The transformation of banditry into a public order issue and into a manifestation of primitivism, the mafioso evidence in the Notarbartolo case, the early scandals involving the Banca Romana, and the study of the popular origins of the camorra, provided the materials for a criminal anthropology. The chief merit of this lay neither in arguments nor in research methods, often already outdated, but in the will to investigate, in a recognition of that ‘criminal nation’ which we still find exactly the same a hundred years later in an inextricable web formed between organised crime and politics; in the most spectacular and unpunished financial corruption; in the eco-mafias; and in the unscrupulous use of crime as a vehicle of political consensus. In short, the country of today, where deaths due to wars between and within criminal organisations far exceed the number of common murders, and where domestic violence, which constitutes the greater part of violent crime, appears unchanged from generation to generation.
But, more than anything, Lombroso had demolished the passage of penal science which had been established by Beccaria on some certainties. An undisputed implication derived from the utilitarian approach: people who commit crimes are independent and rational individuals, able to calculate the consequences of their actions, and therefore capable of choice. This is a necessary presupposition if law and punishment are to be the same for everyone, thereby denying the existence of inequality and libero arbitrio, ‘free will’. Like Beccaria, penal science theoreticians avoided any reference to criminals as socially and historically pre-determined individuals: but in his Sul governo e sulla riforma delle carceri in Italia: Saggio storico e teorico (1867) Martino Beltrani-Scalia had already concluded that prison did not ‘regenerate fallen men’ and that crime was a ‘fault of will’. So that
in order to prevent people not born criminal...
