“Misfits” in Fin-de-Siecle France and Italy: Anatomies of Difference by Susan A. Ashley (review)

The “misfits” of this book’s title represents the author’s effort to find a term that might encompass the vast range of physical and mental abnormalities that were identified by late-nineteenth-century “experts” in mental illness, developmental disorders, criminal deviance, and other antisocial behavior. Most of these “experts” were medically trained, but many were lawyers and jurists or social scientists who ventured into the medical domain to make their contributions to what appeared at the time to be a degenerative biological and social crisis of epic proportions. French and Italians did draw on the work of other European and American specialists, but the most consequential work and debates took place within and between these expert communities.

The author sets up this great crisis as an emerging disjunction between the recently established liberal parliamentary regimes of the two nations and worrisome developments in their populations that suggested dramatic increases in human and social pathologies: mental illnesses, crime, vagrancy, and sexual disorders. She occasionally acknowledges the differences between French and Italian “expert” communities, but she is more interested in their common analyses of these problems. Thus, in each of her chapters on different kinds of “misfits” she finds more similarities than differences in the medical and social science literature, despite a sometimes fierce national competition between “Italian” and “French” schools of social deviance and human anomalies, which she believes to have been more about national pride than doctrinal or scientific issues.

Her exhaustive discussions of the principal French and Italian texts by Cesare Lombroso, Raffaelle Garofalo, Giuseppe Sergi, Alexandre Lacassagne, Charles Féré, Jean-Martin Charcot, and dozens of other specialists reveal many agreements on the causes of these morbid phenomena, some of which were “occasional” or contingent, while others were embedded in inherited pathologies or functional disorders. She occasionally acknowledges the manifold contradictions in this literature, but systematically pursues the shared etiologies and links between degenerative illnesses through case studies and textbooks in wearying and repetitive detail, summarizing everything again in each chapter. As has been well documented in earlier historical work, epilepsy, vagrancy, crime, neurasthenia, mental alienation, sexual abnormalities, and a host of other social and developmental pathologies were seen as symptoms of dégénérescence, the syndrome invented by the midcentury French psychiatrist B. A. Morel in which functional, physical, and moral flaws produced by a pathological environment were acquired and passed on to following generations in ever-worsening forms.

The author’s elaborate textual analysis identifies the dizzying range of disorders that fell into this syndrome and were acknowledged by experts in both countries to a greater or lesser extent. She indicates how rising rates of mental illness, crime, and vagrancy provoked these investigations and reveals how all but the most pessimistic experts outlined penal and therapeutic policies to cope with the social conditions that contributed to the problems. She appropriates Ian Hacking’s notion of how certain historical illnesses have occupied an “ecological niche” reflective of their times and concludes that many degenerative conditions, neurasthenia and hysteria among them, thrived briefly then faded away to be redistributed among “modern” disease categories.

The author’s concentration on the interrelated interpretations of these “misfits” overlooks the real differences between French and Italian specialists and the professional and disciplinary contexts in which they worked. The French psychiatrists and criminologists were sensitive to the free-will convictions of French penologists and politicians and sought a doctrinal middle way that they believed would strengthen their professional credibility and lead to practical policy outcomes, while relations between Italian penologists and criminal anthropologists were anything but smooth. There is no examination in this book of the political processes that produced the few reforms that eventually emerged, no acknowledgment of the influence of public opinion, nor of French fears of degeneration that were based on stagnant population growth and how this affected marital family “norms” and the crucial importance of procreative sexuality...