CRIME

It is always difficult to measure the incidence of crime, and given the different legal definitions of offenses, it is equally difficult to draw clear contrasts or similarities between criminal activities in different states and regions. Nevertheless, the development of criminal statistics in the early nineteenth century enabled some significant assessments to be made of patterns and parallels. Across Europe as a whole the spread of the nation-state and of its powers of repression appears to have had some impact on crime. Changing ideas about how humankind had developed and functioned led to new and different emphases in the way people understood the causes of criminal offending; so too did anxieties about the burgeoning industrial cities and towns. Finally, the expansion of the popular press during the nineteenth century fed off and fed into people's perceptions of crime.

the pattern of crime

In the early nineteenth century European governments and intellectuals put tremendous faith in the ability of statistics to reveal the moral facts about a society and to enable rational, improved, and improving policies to be developed. The statistics of crime figured significantly in this faith. The British government began collecting statistics of this kind in the first decade of the century hoping that these would contribute usefully to debates about punishment and especially to debates about the death penalty. The French had begun collecting various forms of crime statistics toward the end of the Old Regime. During the Revolution such collection became more systematic, in part at least to enable checks to be made on the extent to which magistrates were doing what was expected of them. The most significant step forward, however, came in the 1820s with the annual publication of the Compte générale de l'administration de la justice criminelle (General account of the administration of criminal justice). By the end of the 1830s the Compte was providing a detailed breakdown of offenders by age, sex, place of birth, level of education, trade, and whether their residence was rural or urban. It provided a model for similar statistical collections in other countries.

The development of the Compte encouraged social thinkers to draw conclusions about patterns of criminality. The most important of the early analysts was the Belgian academic Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1894). Using the French statistics and such as he could glean from elsewhere, Quetelet made a series of deductions, some of which reflected the evolving opinions of his contemporaries about, for example, racial types, but others of which have stood the test of time. The statistics showed that, overwhelmingly, principal offenders were young men. They also suggested that the same number of crimes in roughly the same geographical regions were being committed year after year. But Quetelet was shrewd enough to appreciate that there were problems with the statistics. In particular he recognized the difficulty created by offenses that were never reported and hence never listed. Modern criminologists use the term the dark figure to describe the unknown number between the crimes reported and listed and the crimes that were actually committed. This makes any estimate of the actual level of crime impossible, though it did not discourage many nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century criminologists and has not discouraged attempts by historians to gauge the changing patterns of crime across the period.

In very general terms the figures show property crime represented a much greater overall percentage of the total than violent crime. This can be seen as a continuation and perhaps even culmination of an overall shift in offending from violence to theft that historians have detected as developing from the late medieval and early modern periods. During the nineteenth century violent crime was more apparent in southern Europe than in the north. This was especially the case in those regions such as Corsica, Greece, the south of Italy, and Sicily, where vendetta and honor killing were still practiced and where the state struggled to establish its authority. But throughout the century violent crime, particularly murder and rape—those crimes that most frightened and shocked people—constituted only a small proportion of the offenses in the statistics. The greatest proportion of offenses involved property crime, and the overwhelming majority of thefts were small. Often the stolen goods were taken to a pawnbroker's shop for a few coins. In very general terms too the statistics suggest a gradual increase in crime in the first half of the century with a general leveling out and, in some instances, even a decline in the second.

Early on some of the individuals working with the crime figures began to suggest a close link between economic downturns and criminality. Most significant here was Georg von Mayr (1841–1925), who, in the mid-1860s as a member of the Bavarian Statistical Bureau, produced two important statistical surveys. The first concerned beggars and vagrants while the second showed a correlation between a rise in the price of grain and a rise in the figures for theft. But the possible link between poverty and crime was not always one that many commentators were keen to stress.

economy and geography

Changes in economic structure and the power of the state appear to have generated changes in the pattern of crime across the nineteenth century. The assumption was made by some of the earliest serious academic historians of crime that industrialization, the capitalization of industry, and an increasing sanctity surrounding private property fostered crime as a form of protest among the growing and increasingly self-conscious working classes. Evidence for such a change has, however, been difficult to come by. On the other hand, the growth of financial institutions and of capitalist investment provided unscrupulous but outwardly respectable gentlemen with considerable opportunities to profit, sometimes criminally, at the expense of gullible investors.

The wars at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries disrupted economies and left large numbers of draft dodgers, deserters, and army stragglers over much of continental Europe. Many of these men slipped in and out of banditry. At the same time there were sparsely populated districts, often spanning state frontiers, where banditry and smuggling throve among the poor peasantry. During the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars some of these bandits began to acquire the aura of anti-French Robin Hoods and guerrilla fighters. Johannes Buückler, known as Schinderhannes, was one such in the Rhineland, and Michele Pezza in Calabria, known as Fra Diavolo, was another. Several of the Spanish guerrilla gangs that claimed to be fighting Napoleon's armies were often bandits masquerading under more respectable colors. Theromantic image surrounding such figures was also often something that developed after the wars; the bandits themselves were usually cruel, violent, and as much a threat to the local peasantry and anyone else who crossed their path as they were to the French. The growth and greater effectiveness of the state's means of control and repression during the nineteenth century—the spread of gendarmerie corps in rural areas, for example—meant that the number of remote regions in which banditry could flourish became fewer and fewer.

By the second half of the century banditry was largely restricted to the south of Europe and to the vast expanses of the east where police were particularly thin on the ground. In Spain and Sicily, however, the bandit problem was aggravated by influential local landowners who recruited strong-arm men to discipline their workforces and to defend their properties. These strong-arm men slipped in and out of banditry but were protected by the landowners. Moreover, "bandit" and "brigand" are indeterminate labels present largely in the eye of a beholder. The draconian Pica Law of 1863 gave the army and the carabinieri a virtual free hand in suppressing peasant resistance in the south of the newly unified Italy. Under the directives issued to the forces of order in the south of Italy, even a small group of laborers carrying agricultural implements might be considered as "brigands."

Yet while there could be danger in the countryside, it was the towns and cities that during the nineteenth century were the principal focus of fears about crime and criminals. A variety of commentators worried that the wealth of expanding

towns and cities provided a temptation for thieves and that the anonymity of the urban world provided easy escape and plenty of hiding places for offenders. In the early nineteenth century particularly such fears became enmeshed with concerns about revolution and the assumption that the courts and tenements of towns and cities were infested with a dangerous, criminal class eager for revolutionary outbreaks that would furnish opportunities for mayhem, murder, and plunder.

class and heredity

In 1840 a French police administrator, Honoré Frégier (1789–1860), published Des classes danger-euses de la population dans les grands villes et des moyens de les rendre meilleurs (On the dangerous classes of the population in large cities and the means to make them better). Frégier was aware that corrupt and depraved individuals could be found in all social classes, but, he warned, when a poor man yielded to wicked passions and ceased to work seeking to exist by other means, then he became a dangerous enemy of society. In this he was echoing the kinds of comments made by his contemporaries elsewhere. In Britain, for example, in the Report of the Royal Commission on a Rural Constabulary, the Benthamite reformer Edwin Chadwick (1800–1890) argued that criminals were motivated by a general indolence and by a desire for excitement. According to Chadwick and his like-minded commissioners, men made a rational choice to follow a criminal career in the belief that the profits would be easier, quicker, and greater than those acquired by honest, respectable labor. What such commentators were doing was labeling as the cause of crime that behavior among the working class of which they most disapproved. This behavior included, most notably, drinking and gambling and also any leisure taken in the streets that looked like idleness. They ignored the fact that much labor in the first half of the nineteenth century remained seasonal, and consequently people were often on the move looking for work or on the streets passing time as a result of underemployment or simply unemployment.

Frégier's formulation "the dangerous classes" was employed in Britain and in Italy (classi pericolose), while the Germans preferred their traditional word Gauner to describe tricky, indolent, but always mobile working-class offenders. The assumption was that this was a kind of countersociety with its own hierarchy and language. Several of the commentators who described criminals wrote page after page on criminal argot and provided long lists of their words and phrases. At times the offenders could be described almost as a different race, and Friedrich Avé-Lallement (1809–1892), a German police official who wrote a massive four volumes on the German Gauner in the middle of the century, stressed the influence of Gypsies and Jews among them. Analyses of this sort also gendered the criminal classes: the men were thieves and murderers; the women were prostitutes. This kind of literature often warned that prostitutes led their clients to alleyways or rooms where their menfolk attacked and robbed them. It would be wrong to argue that

this never happened, though the evidence of the courts does not suggest that it happened with the frequency described in the popular accounts.

Criminal children also figured in the depictions of the criminal classes. There was an assumption that child offenders began their criminal careers as pickpockets and progressed from this to more serious crimes. Such offenders were sometimes portrayed as the offspring of criminals and thus bred to their careers, or else as the children of feckless or alcoholic parents who abandoned them on the streets. But again the evidence from the courts does not bear this out. A very few children and juveniles stole because they were put up to it by professional receivers such as Charles Dickens's Fagin. Some stole through need, but opportunism, peer pressure, and stealing or doing damage for fun all seem to have been at least as important. Moreover, the evidence does not suggest that these offenders were invariably the children of men and women who were known criminals or of drunken or otherwise bad parents. Often the parents appear to have been struggling for respectability and were distraught by the behavior of their offspring. Indeed, it was known for the police to be called upon by parents to discipline their difficult children.

In the last third of the century assumptions about a criminal class were given a significant scientific underpinning. Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) claimed that it was while he was serving as a doctor with the Italian army that he was presented with the head of a notorious brigand and that this inspired him to develop his theory of the born criminal. Over the following decade Lombroso combined his empirical study of the skulls of "inferior" and "primitive" peoples with the theoretical work of men such as Auguste Comte and Ernst Haeckel. Then, in 1876, he published the first edition of L'uomo delinquente (The delinquent man). Over the next twenty years the book went through five editions and increased eightfold in size to two thousand pages. At the same time his ideas shifted from the notion of criminal man carrying the atavistic tendencies of ancient and savage peoples and publicly demonstrating these through his facial and physical characteristics, to a much broader perception of criminality. While he continued to insist that some criminals were born, Lombroso's later work also pointed to other offenders formed through alcoholism, malnutrition, venereal disease, and other forms of degeneracy.

Lombroso rapidly acquired a school in Italy; indeed, it was one of his disciples, Enrico Ferri, rather than Lombroso himself, who coined the term born criminal. But during the 1880s, at a series of international congresses on what began to be called criminal anthropology, Lombroso and his Italian followers clashed heatedly with French experts. The French attacked Lombroso's use of ill-defined words as well as the idea of primitive anatomical characteristics being an indication of criminal propensities. At the same time they put much greater emphases on environment and nurture. The key figure here was Gabriel Tarde

(1843–1904), who had begun his working life as a provincial magistrate, went on to head up the Bureau of Statistics in the Ministry of Justice, and concluded his career as professor of sociology at the Collège de France. Tarde's La criminalité comparée (Criminality compared, 1886) and La philosophie pénale (Penal philosophy, 1890) rejected the idea of the born criminal, stressing environment and individual choice in the making of a criminal offender. But he was also wedded to the notion of the criminal career beginning with an apprenticeship in small offending and progressing to more serious crimes.

While one set of experts argued over the relative importance of heredity and milieu as causes of crime, another group focused their attention on gender and sexuality. From early on in the century there were some members of the new science of psychiatry who described some forms of theft as the result of a kind of madness. The idea of kleptomania became particularly popular in the last quarter of the century to explain why some bourgeois women, who appeared to want for nothing, were found stealing from the new retail phenomenon the department store. While there were some men who suffered from the same "disease," kleptomania was rapidly linked to assumptions about female weakness, the impact of the menstrual cycle, a difficult pregnancy, menopause, or becoming a widow.

Taking the nineteenth century as a whole, a broad shift can be detected in the way that criminal behavior was understood. In the first half of century the assumption was that committing a crime was a matter of choice by an individual. By the end of the century, however, the arguments of medical men and of exponents of the new science of criminal anthropology or criminology suggested that offenders were damaged individuals whose behavior was dictated by heredity, by nurture and environment, or by some combination of these. This shift in thinking led to shifts in arguments about how convicted offenders should be treated. Thus, at the beginning of the century there were attempts to establish equality of punishment and essentially to make punishments fit crimes. By the end of the century, encouraged by the arguments of criminologists and medical men, judges across Europe began to think increasingly in terms of passing sentences that involved a punishment designed to fit the individual criminal.

writing about crime

Few people experience crime on a regular basis. What most people know about crime is what they have learned from the media. This can have a distorting effect on the way that the population as a whole understands crime. Sensational and thrilling stories sell books and newspapers. Petty, opportunist theft does not attract an audience; major thefts and murders do. It was the same in the nineteenth century.

The eighteenth century witnessed the beginning of the gradual demise of the chapbook and the broadside that recounted the tale of a brigand, a highwayman, or a murderer and reported his farewell speech from the scaffold. These accounts of last words were usually coupled with a warning not to follow in the offender's footsteps and to avoid strong drink and loose women. By the middle years of the century this kind of literature had largely been replaced, at least in much of central and western Europe, with sensational novels and a few books written by former police officers and even by criminals. The books by policemen and criminals had an aura of authority even though they usually embroidered the truth. Indeed, François-Eugène Vidocq (1775–1857), the former convict who subsequently became head of the Paris police detective squad, was so outraged by the way in which a ghostwriter embellished his story that he refused to sign off the fourth volume of his memoirs. Pierre-François Lacenaire, a thief and multiple murderer, in turn was keen to portray himself as a poet of crime, and in the France of Louis-Philippe there were sufficient woolly headed romantics to encourage him and to romanticize his memory long after he had been guillotined.

Novelists of the 1830s and 1840s built on the image of the dangerous, criminal classes described by Frégier. Dickens's Oliver Twist (1837–1839)—with its evil receiver, Fagin, directing a gang of trained juvenile pickpockets and in league with a brutal burglar-murderer, Bill Sikes, who in turn lives with a young prostitute, Nancy—is simply the best known and arguably the best written of many. In the early 1840s the French novelist Eugène Sue published Les Mystères de Paris and set a trend of a variety of similar "mysteries" fancifully describing the criminal underworlds of cities all over Europe. More than thirty such appeared in Germany in 1844, and in the following year the Chartist G. W. M. Reynolds commenced publishing the weekly installments of The Mysteries of London, a popular underworld saga that continued until 1848.

The cheap popular press that began to appear in the middle of the century recognized from the start that sensational crime sold newspapers. It was the London newspaper press that, during the series of brutal murders of prostitutes in Whitechapel in the fall of 1888, popularized the murderer with the name Jack the Ripper. At the same time, the press pushed back the frontiers of decency in detailing the wounds inflicted by the Ripper on his victims. Some twenty years later the world's largest-selling newspaper of the time, Le Petit Parisien, which had always devoted a large amount of space to sensational crimes, launched a "Great Referendum" on capital punishment. The referendum was accompanied by an increase in the column space devoted to crime and was carefully constructed both to sell more copies of the newspaper and to generate a resounding "no" to proposals for the abolition of the death penalty.

Crime may have been leveling out according to the statistics, but that was not how the press chose to see the problem. In addition to the opportunities provided by such exceptional killings as those of Jack the Ripper, of Jean-Baptiste Troppmann on the edge of Haussmann's Paris, of Imre Balentics in Budapest and so on, the press also chose to construct threats from gangs and to link various forms of offending with the concerns for racial purity and preservation that influenced many politicians and commentators at the turn of the century. In the 1890s the British press made much of the threat from the youth gangs that acquired the new name of "hooligans." Youth gangs existed; they wore distinctive clothes and they fought ferocious battles with each other over territory and girlfriends. Yet while some of their members committed other offenses, the gangs were organized to fight each other rather than to assault and rob ordinary members of the public. In Paris an arguably greater panic focused on the so-called apaches. The French bourgeoisie's fascination with Native Americans went back at least to the July Monarchy and to translations of the novels of James Fenimore Cooper. During Napoleon III's Mexican adventure, stories had come back about the alleged cold cruelty of the Apache, and when, at the end of the century, a name was felt necessary for young, violent street thieves, the French press looked no further.

Finally, it is worth emphasizing that, on occasions even as late as the turn of the century, when dreadful crimes were committed old scapegoats were pointed at anew. There were suggestions that Jack the Ripper was a Jew and that his butchery was linked with a myth that Orthodox Jewish men were required ritually to murder any gentile woman with whom they had been sexually intimate. In several parts of Europe the discovery of a murdered child

or juvenile ignited the old panic about ritual murder by Jews. In such instances there were all too often vicious anti-Semites, sometimes in clerical robes, prepared to fan the flames or even to provoke the disorder by fabricating the rumors themselves. In the 1890s there was a series of such outbreaks, most notably in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Prussia. Among the best researched is that which occurred in the small West Prussian town of Konitz in March 1900. A high school student, Ernst Winter, disappeared. When parts of his dismembered body began to be found, rumors spread that he was the victim of a ritual murder. Several weeks of sporadic anti-Semitic violence ensued, and the only individuals to be prosecuted in the whole affair were the young men arrested for their part in the rioting.

By the beginning of the twentieth century it was possible to look back on a cluster of distinct changes that had taken place over the previous hundred years. The press continued to delight in bandit gangs when there was an opportunity, but except in remote areas such as the Russian steppes or parts of the Mediterranean where state power had yet to exert control, the old-style bandits and highwaymen had disappeared. Picking pockets remained possible, and the development of the bustle as part of women's fashion facilitated theft from pockets and purses that were carried in this new accoutrement. Goods remained exposed in markets and in front of shops, but they were also exposed in the new department stores, providing new opportunities for the shoplifter. Automobiles and trains were said to enable major offenders to make fast getaways. But motor transport and trains also made it difficult for thieves to jump onboard a freight vehicle and pull things from the back while it was moving. The telegraph made it possible to pass on a suspect's description before a train or boat arrived at its destination. At the same time, the photograph and the fingerprint, together with Alphonse Bertillon's system of physical recognition by measuring certain parts of the body, made the apprehension of the recidivist a little easier.

See alsoCities and Towns; Class and Social Relations; Degeneration; Lombroso, Cesare; Quetelet, Lambert Adolphe Jacques; Statistics; Working Class.

bibliography

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Chevalier, Louis. Labouring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century. Translated by Frank Jellinek. London, 1973.

Emsley, Clive. Crime and Society in England 1750–1900. 3rd ed. London, 2004.

——. Crime, State and Society in Europe 1750–1940. Oxford, U.K., 2007.

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Clive Emsley