The Devil and Modernity in Late Nineteenth-Century Buenos Aires

In the late nineteenth century, the move away from classical criminology toward positivist criminology brought with it new categories of crime and new definitions of the criminal. A great deal of scholarship has focused on positivism's new approach, which grew out of research in Europe, especially in France and Italy, and later took hold in Argentina and other Latin American countries. It might be supposed that as a state's judicial and penal authorities and doctors of forensic medicine were becoming more professionalized and positivist at this time, and as state and society were becoming more secularized and urbanized, such a traditional figure as the devil would have disappeared from criminal court cases.

Jeffrey Burton Russell argued that this was the case in the fields of literature and art, namely, that the rise of positivism in the second half of the nineteenth century "returned the focus on evil to the human personality" and away from the devil. ¹ While this is an accurate analysis of the new trend in criminology—that is, that the focus turned toward the criminal's anatomy, psyche, and so on—it does not necessarily mean that the devil was eclipsed in all fields. In fact, at least in Argentina, the devil seems to have fit nicely into positivist criminology's search for the biological and "environmental" factors in crime. It could even be argued that the very shift of focus to the criminal and away from the crime was the context within which the devil was secured a place in the late nineteenth-century courtroom. This is because almost any anomaly in the bodies and backgrounds of accused persons—a position elaborated especially by the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909)—was of interest to examining magistrates and medical doctors. The more details investigators knew about a person's body and life, the more they could analyze his or her guilt or innocence, and/or potential danger to society.

Thus, the devil remained, or in some cases was retained, in his previous role as an actor in the new approach to the treatment of crime as a social disease and the criminal as a sick person. Rather than ridiculing the invisible manifestations of the devil which were introduced into court testimonies, magistrates and forensic doctors carefully recorded them, and even used references themselves to the "diabolical." Since any number of conditions could predispose "normal" people to crime, especially people already weakened by an inherited history of hysteria, epilepsy, madness, masturbation, mental exhaustion, or alcoholism, there was no reason to eliminate a person's reported contact with the devil as a possible weakening agent. There is also nothing surprising about the association of "deviance" and the "devil."

Although the publication of Cesare Lombroso's Criminal Man in 1876, with its focus on the "born criminal," created an uproar in the field of criminology, there was actually already a wide consensus among medical doctors, and government and police officials, that a distinctive kind of criminal existed, consistent with the Lombrosian concept of the born criminal, who had an innate propensity to commit crime and needed to be controlled and segregated from the rest of the community, especially as he could transmit this propensity to the next generation. In spite of the heated debates among the various schools of criminology over the Lombrosian model, the number of significant differences between schools was limited. Lombroso and other criminologists described a set of anatomical measurements and physical anomalies, such as deformities and asymmetries, as identifiers of the born criminal. The techniques for defining and cataloging these stigmata had become widely used by the late nineteenth century, such as skull measurements and hierarchical tables establishing the innate criminal propensity of the "lower orders" or races, and of women and children. ² A reading of criminal trial records of late nineteenth-century Buenos Aires reveals that the devil appears to have had a role in the makeup of this...