Cesare Lombroso and the Anarchists

Introduction

I expect that this work, published completely outside of the political parties which tear apart and ruin our country like "The Courtrooms," or "Antisemitism," or "Political Crimes," will suffer the same fate as the others and receive a poor reception all around.

Perhaps even the dagger of the Anarchist, which believes it refutes as it kills, and the knife of the Italian police which, with a similar logic, pretends to be the arbiter of thought, will decide to refute [this book] in general consensus and in the same way: through violence. And yes, it would be the unique and the best reward that I could desire, as I must prove (perhaps too experimentally) the impartiality of the psychiatric-anthropological method applied to the most gripping current questions.

—Cesare Lombroso, Preface to Gli anarchici, 12 July 1894.

Introducing his first edition of Gli anarchici, the famed Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso qualified anarchist violence and accompanying police repression as "gripping current questions." Indeed, in the 1880s and 1890s, France, Russia, Spain, the United States, Argentina, and other countries were marked by an unprecedented number of attacks and attempted assassinations of heads of state that were attributed—rightfully or not—to the specter of anarchism. This led to multilateral police and criminological responses that spanned North and South America, Europe, Russia, East Asia, and the Middle East in what was the first international criminal justice collaboration of its kind.¹

The criminological response to anarchist violence consisted of explanations and case studies of anarchist criminality along with suggested penal solutions debated in international criminology congresses and publications. In turn, European and American courts and journalists turned to celebrity criminologists to provide medical analyses of arrested anarchists.

Precisely during this apogee of anarchist violence, the newly developed positivist criminology was at its height of legal legitimacy, public visibility, and professionalization. Positivist criminologists drew from traditions in phrenology, physiognomy, and, more generally, from the medical diagnostic model, to attribute crime to mental defects (degeneracy, atavism, epilepsy, and so on) identifiable through visible anomalies such as facial asymmetry or jaw size.² Many of their explanations included larger social, political, and economic causes as well. Of these criminologists, Lombroso, who first conceptualized the notion of the "born criminal," was among the best known.

French and American scholarship has largely addressed the criminological response to the late-nineteenth-century anarchist threat by focusing on how criminology pathologized anarchists by attributing their political beliefs to mental deficiencies or disorders. Some historians propose that criminologists cast anarchism as a disease instead of a legitimate political affinity, which provided support for repressive measures like the application of the death penalty or the lois scélérates in France.³ Others emphasize that criminologists called for greater judicial leniency for convicted anarchists whose "pathologies," according to criminological theory, lessened their legal responsibility. For example, in France and Italy, criminologists made such arguments in court, often against the will of anarchists who insisted on their own sanity even at the risk of capital punishment.⁴

The aforementioned research provides a valuable description of the complex political and legal effects of casting anarchists as mentally degenerate or unwell. Yet it ignores the shared discursive space, common actors, and exchange between criminology and anarchist theory.

Lombroso's criminological texts on anarchists and anarchist violence constitute a valuable entryway for acknowledging and exploring this intersection of criminology and anarchist theory. Lombroso was the world's leading criminological reference for anarchism, having written about anarchists in Italy, France, Spain, Russia, and the United States in publications that were quickly translated and republished in multiple languages. Although Lombroso pathologized some anarchists, he also lauded others, engaged in dialogue with them, and acknowledged their shared political views. In return, prominent anarchists responded (both positively and negatively) to Lombroso's theories, revealing their own involvement and investment in the nascent field of criminology. This intersection of criminology and anarchist theory has been omitted from historiography, due in part to some laxness on the part of Lombroso himself: his tendency to use the word anarchist to refer only to violent anarchists creates an ambiguity that not...