El crimen de la calle de San Vicente : Crime Writing and Bourgeois Liberalism in Restoration Spain

Abstract

����� ��� ❦ Although crime has been written about in literature of all ages, it is generally acknowledged that modern crime and detective fiction came into being in the nineteenth century. The categories of delinquency and justice that shape this fiction are born with the liberal bourgeois state. As legal scholar David Garland points out, during this period two important projects—the “governmental” and the “Lombrosian” 1 —converge to give rise to criminology, a discipline that produces its object (a particular conception of criminality) as it sets out to contain it. In a wider context, Michel Foucault has observed how the birth of criminology, together with the establishment of modern juridical and penal institutions, is part of “the emergence of a new form of ‘law’: a mixture of legality and nature, prescription and constitution, the norm” (Discipline 304). This juridical order serves the interests of the new ruling classes by distinguishing, condemning, and concentrating attention on certain “illegalities” (257), while effacing and legitimizing others: those that support the prevailing economic structure, with all its inherent inequalities. 1 Garland explains: “By talking about a ‘governmental project’ I mean to refer to the long series of empirical inquiries, which, since the eighteenth century, have sought to enhance the efficient and equitable administration of justice by charting the patterns of crime and monitoring the practice of police and prisons. . . . The ‘Lombrosian project’, in contrast, refers to a form of inquiry which aims to develop an etiological, explanatory science, based on the premise that criminals can somehow be scientifically differentiated from non-criminals” (8).