The Killer of Little Shepherds

by Douglas Starr

  Francis Galton, who coined the term eugenics (and introduced fingerprint technology to Britain), thoroughly admired Lombroso’s work and created a field guide to the criminal man. He collected photos of dozens of criminals and sorted them into categories, such as “bank sneaks” and “pickpockets,” for easy identification.14 As a further aid to spotting criminals, he invented a machine that made composite photographs. He used the technique to combine all the photos of miscreants he had collected to create a composite portrait of the “master criminal,” someone capable of committing a variety of crimes. Blurred and thick-browed, this was the face of depravity itself.

  In the United States, experts worried about rising crime rates, and “revolvers” (recidivists) took Lombroso’s ideas to heart. America was supposed to be a classless society—how comforting it must have been to use scientific measuring instruments to explain away the Gilded Age’s inequities. Later, eugenicists took up the cause, arguing that born criminals should be prohibited from marriage or, in the words of one penologist, suffer “a gentle, painless death” by “carbonic acid gas.”15 Arthur MacDonald, an American criminologist who dedicated his book Criminology to Lombroso, spent years petitioning Congress and President Theodore Roosevelt to set up a Lombroso-style laboratory to study the “criminal, pauper and defective classes.”16 He had hoped to identify born criminals and, if necessary, preventively confine them. William T. Harris, commissioner of education, called it “a fiendish method of treating the unfortunate,” and MacDonald’s proposal was soundly rejected.17

  Alphonse Bertillon, who had taken more measurements of criminals than anyone, disagreed with Lombroso. “I do not feel convinced that it is the lack of symmetry in the visage, or the size of the orbit, or the shape of the jaw, which makes a man an evil-doer,” he told journalist Ida Tarbell.18 “A certain characteristic may incapacitate him for fulfilling his duties, thus thrusting him down in the struggle for life, and he becomes a criminal because he is down.” He explained:

  Lombroso, for example, might say that, since there is a spot on the eye of the majority of criminals, therefore the spot on the eye indicates a tendency to crime; not at all. The spot is a sign of defective vision, and the man who does not see well is a poorer workman than he who has a strong, keen eyesight. He falls behind in his trade, loses heart, takes to bad ways, and it turns up in the criminal ranks. It was not the spot on his eye which made him a criminal; it only prevented his having an equal chance with his comrades. The same thing is true of other so-called criminal signs. One needs to exercise great discretion in making anthropological deductions.

  In fairness to Lombroso, there were progressive aspects to his philosophy. By focusing on the criminal and not just the crime, he encouraged other scientists to study the roots of criminal psychology and urged authorities to consider prison reform. Still, it is striking to see how thoroughly his ideas penetrated social thinking. When the Hungarian philosopher Max Nordau condemned modern art and culture as retrograde in his book Degeneration, he dedicated the work to Lombroso. Lombrosian villains populated literature. The leading characters in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) exemplify the contrast between the civilized man and his atavistic counterpart, albeit within the same body. Zola’s La Běte humaine (The Human Beast) borrows much from Lombroso’s portrayal of the criminal, although Zola disagreed with the scientist’s philosophy. Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula, leans heavily on Lombroso’s descriptions. At one point Van Helsing, the fictional Dutch professor who pursues Count Dracula, asks the book’s heroine, Mina Harker, to describe the villain.

  “The Count is a criminal and of criminal type,” she says.19 “Nordau and Lombroso would so classify him.” In a 1975 annotated version of the novel, the scholar Leonard Wolf juxtaposed Harker’s description of Dracula with Lombroso’s portrait of the criminal man:

  HARKER: “His face was … aquiline, with a high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils.”

  LOMBROSO: “[The criminal’s] nose on the contrary … is often aquiline like the beak of a bird of prey.”

  HARKER: “His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose.”

  LOMBROSO: “The eyebrows are bushy and tend to meet across the nose.”

  HARKER: “… his ears were pale and at the tops extremely pointed.”

  LOMBROSO: “… with a protuberance on the upper part of the posterior margin … a relic of the pointed ear.”

  ——

  Lombroso was at the peak of his influence in 1885, when he and his adherents hosted the first International Congress of Criminal Anthropology in Rome.20 They proposed to convene an international forum every four years in a different European city. The first meeting, held at the Palazzo delle Belle Arti from November 17 to 23, “opened a new epoch in the history of crime,” according to an observer from the Smithsonian Institution. “It was proposed to investigate crime scientifically, biologically, fundamentally; to investigate its origins, its causes.” The main hall, crowded with graphic and disturbing exhibits, was closed to women and children.21 Hundreds of skulls were spread on display tables, along with body parts from criminals, epileptics, prostitutes, the mentally deficient, and others deemed undesirable. Researchers displayed brains conserved in alcohol, molded in plaster, and, using a new process, preserved in a gelatin to allow for fine slicing and microscopic examination. The prison doctors from Genoa displayed the body parts of the murderous brigand Giona La Gala: a bronze death mask of his face, a plaster cast of his skull, and several artifacts from his autopsy, including his brain, tattoos, and gallstones, all preserved in alcohol-filled jars.

  Lombroso brought an impressive exhibit. He displayed seventy skulls of Italian criminals, thirty skulls of epileptics, and the entire skeleton of a thief, showing an undersize head attached to a large, solid body. He brought plaster molds of two criminals’ heads, three hundred photos of epileptics, another three hundred photos of German criminals, twenty-four life-size drawings of criminals, and samples of criminal handwriting and those of preserved skin with tattoos. They were all designed to illustrate that the criminal was a physical type.

  Lacassagne, in contrast, brought no skulls or skeletons. He set up a more modest display of twenty-six maps and charts. They were color-coded to show the level of crime in various parts of France; whether they were committed against persons or property; and their correlation with season, alcohol consumption, and the price of grain. They served to make his point that crime was not a biological phenomenon, but something related to the social milieu. He also brought a collection of about two thousand tattoo designs—some were on preserved skin samples, but the majority had been transferred onto fabric—not to show a biological tendency, but to illustrate the criminals’ culture.

  Early in his career, Lacassagne had “adopted with enthusiasm” Lombroso’s point of view.22 He visited Lombroso in 1880, listened with fascination to his theory of atavism, and followed his advice on directions for his research. One of those projects was a survey in which he measured the arm spans of eight hundred criminals and found them to be expansive, like an ape’s.23 “We can say from the point of view of criminal anthropology that criminals resemble primitive races in their large arm spans,” he reported. “This observation is an additional contribution to the theory of our friend Lombroso.”

  Yet Lacassagne had always felt a degree of ambivalence about Lombroso’s research, and as Lombroso became more entrenched in his beliefs, Lacassagne found himself pulling away. Lombroso’s system was too rigid for him, too dismissive of free will and the possibility of self-improvement. Lacassagne saw the brain as a malleable organ, subject to growth if trained the right way. In one study, he compared hundreds of brains of doctors, people with a rudimentary education, illiterates, and prisoners, correlating their education levels to their brain size. Like many measurement-based studies at the time, the basis of the study was scientifically ludicrous and his methods were laughable—there was no demonstration of causality, fo
r example. Moreover, within certain normal parameters, brain volume bears no relation to intelligence, as Lacassagne and his colleagues later came to realize. But the thought behind his study signaled his emerging belief that physiology does not equal fate. Over the years, after conducting countless autopsies, interviewing numerous criminals, and investigating scores of cases, Lacassagne saw the development of the criminal as a multifactored process.24 Someone might be temperamentally predisposed to criminality, but that tendency would flower only under certain social conditions, usually involving alcoholism or poverty, he believed. In sum, crime was not a product of biology, but of the conditions in which the criminal lived.

  The differences between the two colleagues surfaced dramatically during the conference in Rome.25 At the time, Lombroso was an intellectual hero—so revered that no one in criminology circles would contradict him; Lacassagne had not yet become famous from his work on the Gouffé affair. Early in the conference, Lombroso gave a long talk, in which he described the state of the field. In addition to identifying a born criminal’s physiognomy, he claimed to have detected special sensitivities, as well. According to his research, the born criminal possessed a diminished sense of smell, taste, and pain; an acute sense of sight, like that of an animal; and an inability to blush. He had conducted his research with exotic new instrumentation, such as the Zwaardemaker olfactometer for smell, the Sieveking esthesiometer for touch, and the Nothnagel thermesthesiometer for temperature sensitivity.26 He had tested pain sensitivity by using a Ruhmkorff induction coil to administer shocks to the gums, nipples, eyelids, soles, and genitals of “normal” volunteers. He found that they felt the electrical shocks more acutely than did prisoners and inmates of asylums. The insensitivity of criminals reminded him of tribal peoples, “who in their puberty rituals could be affronted with tortures that a man of the white race never could tolerate.”27 To Lombroso, the born criminal was a savage out of time and place and on the loose in civilized Europe.

  Lacassagne listened patiently as one speaker after another discussed the physical differences between criminals and honest folk. At one point, he cautioned against using the “seductive hypotheses” of natural selection to oversimplify the causes of crime. On the third day of the conference, Lacassagne could no longer restrain himself. He announced that having studied criminals for ten years, he could only conclude that Lombroso’s hypothesis was “an exaggeration and a false interpretation” of evolution.28 “What is atavism, after all?” he asked. “An accidental bit of heredity that might be influenced by one’s grandfather.” The theory lacked proof and was scientifically unsupportable. Beyond that, he found Lombroso’s theory fundamentally disheartening. Once a person was branded an atavist, the label, he said, “will become a kind of indelible scar, an original sin … against which there will be nothing to do.” Furthermore, it would play into the worst instincts of lawmakers. “The savants could take measurements, record angles and indexes, but the legislators will do nothing but cross their arms or begin to construct prisons and asylums in which to gather these misshapen creatures.” Using Pasteur’s work as a metaphor, as Lombroso had used Darwin’s, Lacassagne described the criminal tendency as a germ that would proliferate only if placed in a nourishing medium. In other words: “The social milieu is the bouillon of criminality; the [born] criminal has no importance until the day that it finds the bouillon that allows it to ferment.”

  The Italians were shocked, having expected only the elaborate collegiality that was the norm at scientific meetings. Lombroso’s colleague Giulio Fioretti was “profoundly surprised” by Lacassagne’s “severe” and “unjust” critique. “The criminal type is a definite fact, acquired by science,” he said; “on this point no further discussion is admissible.” Lombroso lamented the “disdain” his French colleague showed for his theories. His disciple Garofalo argued that if the social milieu was responsible for crime, “in that case we would all become criminals.”

  Lacassagne said he regretted if his words were taken the wrong way—“I don’t mean to have attacked a man for whom I have the greatest respect”—but it was clear to him that while certain biological factors might exist, social factors had to take “preponderance.” As for whether he had insulted the Italian school of criminal anthropology, he asserted that “ ‘schools’ don’t exist—there is only the truth.”

  If the Rome conference had set up the battle lines, the Paris meeting intensified the conflict. The scientific press characterized the proceedings as a “duel” between Lombroso and Lacassagne’s colleague, Léonce Manouvrier. According to Manouvrier, Lombroso’s criminal type was nothing more than a “harlequin” upon which to heap the faults of society. He attacked Lombroso’s selective use of statistics and compared his work to Gall’s discredited phrenology. French anthropologist Paul Topinard doubted whether the median occipital fossa, Lombroso’s key to criminal identity, had any anatomical significance at all. During the field trip to the Sainte-Anne asylum, chief physician Magnan challenged Lombroso to find the signs of atavism in young delinquents. Lacassagne said that if criminals seemed to have a misshapen appearance, it was because “the evils of misery and deprivation” made them so. Lombroso and his followers defended themselves poorly, perhaps because their statistics had been selective and difficult to support. In the end, both sides agreed to form an international commission to study one hundred criminals and one hundred honest men and report their findings at the next congress.

  The commission never completed the task. They found it impossible to carry out a study that correlated body measurements to criminality while ruling out variables such as ethnicity, psychological background, and nutrition. Lombroso took that failure as an affront. He and the Italian delegation boycotted the 1892 meeting in Brussels, calling it “barren of any foundations in facts.”29 They came back strongly in 1896 in Geneva. “They say I am dead and buried,” Lombroso proclaimed.30 “Do I look like it?” A French observer who watched the presentations of Lombroso and his disciple Enrico Ferri compared the two men to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, tilting against the preponderance of social theory. The 1906 conference in Turin saw another strong showing for Lombroso, mainly because it marked the fiftieth anniversary of his scientific career. Yet by then, the energy had drained from the meetings. Each school had embraced its philosophy on crime, and each country a method for how it would deal with its criminals. The conferences limped along until World War I, when European intellectual life dissolved into chaos.

  The conferences were not the only battleground of ideas. Anytime a major case came along, the arguments would reignite in the press. During the Gouffé affair, in December 1890, a correspondent for the newspaper Le Gaulois sent Lombroso a dossier, including photos and the handwriting of the accused.31 The case had received spectacular coverage. Gabrielle Bompard had cast herself as the victim of a melodrama, the pawn of her strong-willed companion, Michel Eyraud. During their interviews, police were astonished at her combination of sangfroid, self-pity, and inappropriately coquettish behavior. Not for one minute did they believe her claims of victimhood. Yet something about her captivated the public. When police took her by train to Lyon so she could show them where she had disposed of the body, mobs of well-wishers cheered her at the station. “Look at all the people!” she was heard to declare.32 “There wouldn’t be this many for the queen of England!”

  Lombroso examined the information he had received from Le Gaulois and reported that even though Michel Eyraud had committed the murder, the woman was the real born killer of the two. Eyraud had the physiognomy of a con man at worst. True, he possessed several “degenerative” characteristics—large ears, an asymmetrical face, and thick, sensuous lips (especially the lower one)—but none of these characteristics was especially exaggerated. “He lacks the ensemble of features that constitute, for me, the criminal type,” wrote Lombroso. “Without Bompard, I am absolutely persuaded that Michel Eyraud would be nothing more than a simple crook.” Bompard was another story entirely. Her thick,
curly hair, large lower jaw, facial asymmetry, and generally “Mongolian” face shape truly marked her as a female born criminal. Her well-known sensuality and indifference to the suffering of others marked her as the type “very easily associated” with murder, wrote Lombroso. Her willingness to betray her accomplice and play the victim was a behavioral trait of the born criminal, he added, for it displayed a ratlike survival instinct. Lombroso did not recommend reversing the sentences—Eyraud’s of death and Bompard’s of twenty years. He simply wanted to make it clear that contrary to the public’s sympathy for Bompard, she was “organically” more of a criminal than Eyraud.

  Lacassagne published Lombroso’s analysis without comment in the Journal of Criminal Anthropology. Perhaps he felt no need to refute a pseudoscience already in decline.

  In 1896, seven years after the brouhaha over the skull of Charlotte Corday, a Parisian doctor named Augustin Cabanès made a curious discovery.33 He had wondered about the provenance of the skull. How had it gotten from the graveyard of the Madeleine in Paris, where it was buried in 1793, to Prince Roland’s collection nearly a century later? He followed the trail backward from the prince, who said that a friend named George Duruy had given him the skull after learning of his interest in anthropology. Duruy told Cabanès that he had received it from a relative, Madame Rousselin de Saint-Albin. She had inherited the skull from her husband, who had bought it from a curio dealer. Cabanès found the shop owner, who said he had purchased the skull from the estate of Baron Dominique Denon, the noted savant, collector, and friend of Napoléon. Cabanès obtained the catalog of Denon’s estate, in which he found no mention of the skull. The catalog listed many fascinating relics, including bone fragments from El Cid, Héloïse and Abelard, and Molière; a clipping from the mustache of King Henri IV of France; a fragment from the Shroud of Turin; and half of a tooth from the mouth of Voltaire. But there was nothing recorded about Corday. Cabanès knew that during the Reign of Terror a lively commerce existed in selling the body parts of executed notables and that the family of Corday’s executioner, Charles-Henri Sanson, had suddenly became wealthy. But there was no actual evidence that Sanson or anyone else had looted the body. In conclusion, wrote Cabanès, the skull that had caused such a furor at the conference had no proven connection to Corday. It could easily have been “an ordinary specimen from a collection or from an anatomical museum.”