Cesare Lombroso was born in Verona on 6 November 1835 into a wealthy Jewish family. In 1852, he enrolled at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Pavia, where he graduated in 1858. Lombroso’s fame rests above all on his theory of the atavistic or born criminal, the individual whose physical structure possesses the degenerative traits that differentiate him from the normal, socially well-adjusted man. Lombroso first showed an interest in the poor, the marginalized and the insane in his youth, when, as a young doctor, he travelled through the Lombardy countryside distributing pamphlets, printed at his own expense, to the peasants who were victims of pellagra. In 1859, he enrolled in the Military Medical Corps during the campaign against banditry and was invited to Calabria for three months. Here Lombroso studied the Calabrians, their language and folklore. His interest in crime dates from 1864, when he studied the soldiers’ tattoos and the obscene tattooed phrases that distinguished “the dishonest from the honest soldier”. Lombroso understood, however, that tattoos alone did not suffice in order to understand the criminal’s nature and that it was necessary to define the traits of the abnormal individual, the criminal and the madman by using the experimental method of positivist science. In 1866, he was nominated visiting lecturer at the University of Pavia. On 10 April 1870 he married Nina De Benedetti. They had five children including Gina, the second, who wrote her father’s biography. In 1871, Lombroso became the director of the Pesaro asylum, which proved to be a fruitful professional experience, during that period he drew up a proposal that he presented to the ministerial authorities, which was to establish criminal asylums for mentally disturbed individuals who committed crimes and for dangerous mentally disturbed individuals. The following year he returned to Pavia and began the studies that would lead to his “theory of the criminal man”.
The discovery of the “fossette” and the theory of the criminal man
In November 1872, Lombroso performed an autopsy on the body of Giuseppe Villella, a seventy-year-old Calabrian brigand, whom he had already examined in prison the previous year. The autopsy Lombroso performed on Villella’s skull revealed an anomaly in the cranial structure, a smooth concavity in the occipital area described as the median occipital fossette. The discovery of the fossette convinced Lombroso that this anomaly was not present in “normal” individuals, but only in the skulls of madmen and criminals and is the “proof” that criminals are born: the insane, criminals, wild individuals, humanoids and extinct species, criminal and psychiatric deviant behaviour all have a single atavistic cause. The studies on the cause of crime and the theory of atavistic crime are contained in the volume L’uomo delinquente (Criminal Man) first published in 1876, the year in which Lombroso moved to Turin to take up the chair in forensic medicine at the university. Later he set up a laboratory that was to become the forge for his researches in forensic medicine and criminal anthropology. Subsequently Lombroso partially modified his original theory of the criminal man.
Later editions of Criminal Man and the development of Lombroso studies
Already in the 1878 second edition of Criminal Man the author responded to the objections that had been raised to his theory, which, according to some critics, limited the explanation of crime to a constitutional trait in the criminal, thus neglecting the influence of the environment and the psychological aspect. The new edition was extended with studies on the meaning of tattoos, whose symbolic value Lombroso had already dealt with in his studies on soldiers and prisoners, which showed a larger number of tattoos on prisoners than on the rest of the population. In this edition he studies criminal slang, suicide and prostitution. He analyzes the crime phenomenon on the basis of age, sex, climate, diet and poverty. In the 1884 third edition of Criminal Man Lombroso returns to the theory of the morally insane, anticipated in an earlier text, and admits that the atavistic criminal is afflicted by moral insanity, which takes the individual back to primordial states thus depriving him of an ethical sense. Criticism from various quarters, from politicians to sociologists, drove Lombroso to publish a fourth edition of Criminal Man in 1889 and to take up a position with regard to the political criminal. Here he is aware of the difficulty of being able to state that this “criminal behaviour” may also be the consequence of an atavistic flaw in the biological structure of the individual. But there is only a change in perspective, in fact, Lombroso, aware that he cannot put the political criminal on the same plane as the born criminal, states that the political criminal differs from the born criminal and though he is a criminal from the legal standpoint he is never one from the moral and social standpoint. He therefore distinguishes “revolution”, understood as an intrinsic physiological fact of historical evolution, from “rebellion”, which is a dangerous, pathological phenomenon. In 1897, he published the fifth edition of Criminal Man, in four volumes, one of which contains illustrations. Here the analysis of criminal traits is increasingly detailed and the author presents the characteristic features of criminal types, differentiated according to the anomalies typical of the class to which they belong. Therefore the criminological profile of the morally insane and the epileptically insane is obtained by placing the morally insane, the epileptic criminals and born criminals together in the same class of the partially epileptic. Then there follows an analytic description of the partially insane, namely mentally disturbed individuals who pass for geniuses, but in actual fact are ordinary people affected by a pathological conception that leads them to devote themselves to jobs beyond their capacity. They act as politicians, preachers, doctors and so on and are over industrious. These individuals include Giovanni Passannante, an anarchist from Lucania and cook by profession, who attempted to assassinate King Umberto I in 1878 and Davide Lazzaretti, a carter who turned himself into a theologian and mystic, who drew the crowds and set up his headquarters on Monte Amiata. At this stage of Lombroso’s studies, the causes of crime are not exclusively biological but include the influence of the climate, the weather, the geographical area and intoxication. As regards female crime, Lombroso does not indicate “signs” of criminal diversity in the woman’s body and believes that the phenomenon of prostitution is the only deviant behaviour manifested by women. Finally, political crime is definitively excluded from the list of crimes deriving from atavistic anomalies and hence is classified as a “crime of passion”.
The discovery of the “fossette” and the theory of the criminal man
In November 1872, Lombroso performed an autopsy on the body of Giuseppe Villella, a seventy-year-old Calabrian brigand, whom he had already examined in prison the previous year. The autopsy Lombroso performed on Villella’s skull revealed an anomaly in the cranial structure, a smooth concavity in the occipital area described as the median occipital fossette. The discovery of the fossette convinced Lombroso that this anomaly was not present in “normal” individuals, but only in the skulls of madmen and criminals and is the “proof” that criminals are born: the insane, criminals, wild individuals, humanoids and extinct species, criminal and psychiatric deviant behaviour all have a single atavistic cause. The studies on the cause of crime and the theory of atavistic crime are contained in the volume L’uomo delinquente (Criminal Man) first published in 1876, the year in which Lombroso moved to Turin to take up the chair in forensic medicine at the university. Later he set up a laboratory that was to become the forge for his researches in forensic medicine and criminal anthropology. Subsequently Lombroso partially modified his original theory of the criminal man.
Later editions of Criminal Man and the development of Lombroso studies
Already in the 1878 second edition of Criminal Man the author responded to the objections that had been raised to his theory, which, according to some critics, limited the explanation of crime to a constitutional trait in the criminal, thus neglecting the influence of the environment and the psychological aspect. The new edition was extended with studies on the meaning of tattoos, whose symbolic value Lombroso had already dealt with in his studies on soldiers and prisoners, which showed a larger number of tattoos on prisoners than on the rest of the population. In this edition he studies criminal slang, suicide and prostitution. He analyzes the crime phenomenon on the basis of age, sex, climate, diet and poverty. In the 1884 third edition of Criminal Man Lombroso returns to the theory of the morally insane, anticipated in an earlier text, and admits that the atavistic criminal is afflicted by moral insanity, which takes the individual back to primordial states thus depriving him of an ethical sense. Criticism from various quarters, from politicians to sociologists, drove Lombroso to publish a fourth edition of Criminal Man in 1889 and to take up a position with regard to the political criminal. Here he is aware of the difficulty of being able to state that this “criminal behaviour” may also be the consequence of an atavistic flaw in the biological structure of the individual. But there is only a change in perspective, in fact, Lombroso, aware that he cannot put the political criminal on the same plane as the born criminal, states that the political criminal differs from the born criminal and though he is a criminal from the legal standpoint he is never one from the moral and social standpoint. He therefore distinguishes “revolution”, understood as an intrinsic physiological fact of historical evolution, from “rebellion”, which is a dangerous, pathological phenomenon. In 1897, he published the fifth edition of Criminal Man, in four volumes, one of which contains illustrations. Here the analysis of criminal traits is increasingly detailed and the author presents the characteristic features of criminal types, differentiated according to the anomalies typical of the class to which they belong. Therefore the criminological profile of the morally insane and the epileptically insane is obtained by placing the morally insane, the epileptic criminals and born criminals together in the same class of the partially epileptic. Then there follows an analytic description of the partially insane, namely mentally disturbed individuals who pass for geniuses, but in actual fact are ordinary people affected by a pathological conception that leads them to devote themselves to jobs beyond their capacity. They act as politicians, preachers, doctors and so on and are over industrious. These individuals include Giovanni Passannante, an anarchist from Lucania and cook by profession, who attempted to assassinate King Umberto I in 1878 and Davide Lazzaretti, a carter who turned himself into a theologian and mystic, who drew the crowds and set up his headquarters on Monte Amiata. At this stage of Lombroso’s studies, the causes of crime are not exclusively biological but include the influence of the climate, the weather, the geographical area and intoxication. As regards female crime, Lombroso does not indicate “signs” of criminal diversity in the woman’s body and believes that the phenomenon of prostitution is the only deviant behaviour manifested by women. Finally, political crime is definitively excluded from the list of crimes deriving from atavistic anomalies and hence is classified as a “crime of passion”.
The last studies
Lombroso was aware that his atavistic theory of the criminal had been questioned in the writings of his own pupils and followers, including Enrico Ferri, and while remaining faithful to his early development of the anthropological theory of the criminal, introduced new elements into the study of the phenomenon of crime, in an attempt to avoid the sometimes barbed and scornful criticism levelled at him by other experts. In the Funzione sociale del delitto (Social Function of Crime), published in 1896, the perspective broadens and Lombroso attempts a social analysis of crime on a vast scale, suggesting an interpretation of society and crime that includes not only the atavistic criminal, but sectors of public and political life, where new crimes “new branches of fraud or political intrigue, or of embezzlement” increase “as civilization advances”. Lombroso dares to challenge public opinion by putting forward a view of crime that also encompasses men of government, parliamentarians who perpetrate lies, fraud, vice, amorality and crime. The conclusion Lombroso reaches regarding the social function of crime is that in the long run it generates, in its excesses, a reaction, which takes the form of a renewal of Lombroso’s ideas and a distrust of his positivist approach, which is replaced by a secular faith in the moral renewal of society, and the conviction that from crime (sin) regeneration is born. During the last years of his life, Lombroso became passionately interested in paranormal and medium- istic phenomena, spiritualism and hypnosis in an incompatible attempt to explain these phenomena by resorting to positivist science. Cesare Lombroso died of angina in his home in Turin on 19 October 1909. He expressed the wish that an autopsy should be performed on his body by the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Turin. Today nobody would support the scientific validity of Lombroso’s theories, but it is essential to stress the thrust and novelty of Lombroso’s work which, in taking bioanthropological data as its starting point paved the way for a multifaceted approach that also included social factors, which his pupils Ferri and Garofalo developed. Through Lombroso, Italy began to question aspects that had been neglected until then and the study of crime as a human and social phenomenon was confronted for the first time.
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