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The
discovery of the “fossette” and the theory of the criminal
man
Later editions of Criminal Man and the development of Lombroso studies
The last studies
The Cesare Lombroso Museum
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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”.
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