Punishing the mad bomber: questions of moral responsibility in the trials of French anarchist terrorists, 1886-1897

Abstract

In late nineteenth-century France, several criminologists maintained that the perpetrators of the contemporary wave of anarchist terrorism were victims of mental disorders who deserved judicial leniency. French courts did not accept this theory, but instead declared the principal terrorists sane and fully responsible for their crimes and, based on this view, handed down severe sentences. Many criminologists accused the jurists of deliberately ignoring the mental illness of the anarchists because of government and public pressures to impose the death penalty, but evidence from the anarchist trials fails to support this charge. The controversy highlights the conflicts between the judicial establishment and the emerging discipline of criminology, whose pathological explanations of anarchist terrorism reflected a positivist attack on the traditional concepts of free will and moral responsibility, concepts the jurists viewed as fundamental to the legal system.