Crime, Madness and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline

by Robert A. Nye

Overview

Robert A. Nye places in historical context a medical concept of deviance that developed in France in the last half of the nineteenth century, when medical models of cultural crisis linked thinking about crime, mental illness, prostitution, alcoholism, suicide, and other pathologies to French national decline.

Originally published in 1984.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691612614
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #763
Pages:	386
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 1.00(d)

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Crime, Madness, & Politics in Modern France

The Medical Concept of National Decline

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By Robert A. Nye

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1984 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05414-8

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CHAPTER 1

The Historical Study of Deviance

Until quite recently, deviance has been terra incognita for historians of post-1815 European society. Historians have been studying the "underclasses," socially marginal individuals, and deviants in the early modern period for many years. For France, the work of the English historian Richard Cobb on bandits, criminals, prostitutes, and vagrants at the end of the eighteenth century would weigh respectably in the balance against the work done on the subsequent hundred years. Despite the great volume of writing on factory workers, poverty, and the poor, we still know relatively little about deviants in modern Europe or what contemporaries thought about them. Few archival monographs of the sort that abound for the early modern era have yet appeared; it is a sign of the relative immaturity of this field that modern historians still spend a disproportionate amount of time — even as this introduction does — writing and talking about the proper methods to use in exploring this new terrain. Though it seems strange to say so, the very abundance of materials available on modern deviance has provoked some of this emphasis on method. Guided in part by social science literature, historians have gradually discovered some of the pitfalls and complexities the sources conceal.

The scholar who sets out to study the history of deviance nowadays has a rich array of methodological alternatives readily at hand. Many of these new methodologies are the offspring of academic social scientists buttressed by extensive fieldwork in contemporary settings, though some practitioners have also studied aspects of deviance in historical societies. On a more theoretical plane, the study of historical deviance has also benefited from the revitalization of Marxian theory in the last few decades. Following the appearance of Rusche and Kirchheimer's Punishment and Social Structures in 1939, very little work appeared that attempted to relate changes in modes of punishment directly to economic and social evolution. However, the recent development of "critical criminology," particularly in Britain and the United States, has certainly done much to enrich Marxian social theory without necessarily making Marxists of all its adherents. Also on a largely theoretical level, the work of Michel Foucault and his collaborators and disciples has had a powerful influence on thinking about the history of deviance and social marginality on both sides of the Atlantic.

The attractiveness of these new — and renewed — theoretical perspectives seems to be a consequence of a crisis in the theoretical perspective that had until recently dominated studies of crime and deviance. This perspective, which we might call, for want of a better word, the criminological perspective, has taken as its point of departure the notion that deviance must be defined as the violation of social norms of conduct, of which mental illness is simply the most serious manifestation. This "criminological" theory of deviance grew out of a systematic effort by legal reformers in the last half of the nineteenth century to find a more reliable and empirically based conception of deviance than could be found in the "classical" law codes then in place throughout Europe. These reformers rejected the legal norms of the codes and concentrated on studying the social and biological origins of deviant behavior. In the long run, this concentration on etiology had the effect of convincing contemporaries that there was indeed a thing called deviance, which could be located, investigated, and treated. The origins of this optimistic variety of epistemological positivism in criminology are traced in later chapters of this book. Thus, it was the reluctance of the legal reformers of the 1880s — and their sociological and medical allies — to accept legal norms as the basis of definitions of deviance that led to their preference for the norms of society itself.

It is important to understand that, however much they argued about the proper method for identifying and scientifically studying deviant behavior, the reformers of the classical legal codes agreed that their efforts must be directed toward distinguishing the normal man from the deviant one. They ignored the legal criteria of the formal violation of laws by criminal offenders and the official commitment of the insane to asylum care, and preferred, moreover, to disregard the traditional distinction between the criminal and the lunatic and to shape a single, synthetic method for identifying both. Their methodological eclecticism, and their universal tendency to mix legal and medical categories, are apparent in the following remarks delivered by the great Belgian legal reformer Adolphe Prins at the Third Criminal Anthropology Congress in 1892:

One ought to be wary about generalizing. The psychiatrist has a tendency to see the insane everywhere; the physiologist has tried to explain everything as the consequence of actions of the nervous centers. The pure sociologist is disposed in favor of social causes; the jurist sees only a guilty man who must be punished; a religious individual sees only the possibility of amelioration. There is some truth in each of the sciences but none of them can dominate or be generalized. There are normal, degenerate, and obsessive individuals both in and outside of prisons. We must learn to distinguish the delinquent from the [normal] man.

Another effect of regarding deviance as antisocial behavior was the implication that the aim of social intervention should be to return the deviant to the behavioral norms of society itself. In their efforts to achieve legitimacy and to make themselves as useful as possible to the courts and administrative authorities, the new experts on deviance concentrated on the practical penal strategies or the medical therapies that might promote normalization. Nor was the defining of normality itself simply left to other experts; deviance experts were intensely interested in locating the boundary between the normal and the pathological. But they could never manage to do this abstractly, or in the absence of some crisis requiring their direct intervention. They felt most secure when pronouncing on this boundary within their own fields of technical expertise, and their conclusions were usually quite practical and nicely adapted to what they believed was required of them by the public authorities and by informed opinion.

The chief consequence of this pragmatic attitude of deviance experts has been to make the theoretical matrix they constructed analytically useless for comprehending how definitions of normality gain acceptance, or how they change over time. Since the 1880s, deviance experts have resorted to general social or medical theory for concepts that might aid them in their correctional or therapeutic work, but they have displayed a singular lack of curiosity about seeking a better understanding of the profound social and historical forces that have shaped these concepts within the larger setting of their own societies. As a result, mainstream theorists of deviant and criminal behavior have been notoriously uncritical of their own activities and unreflective about the roles deviance experts play in social control. In criminology, for example, Clarence Ray Jeffrey has argued that criminologists fail to understand that "the term 'crime' refers to the act of judging or labelling the behavior, rather than to the behavior itself. Why people behave as they do and why the behavior is regarded as criminal are two separate problems requiring different types of explanation."

The renewal of thinking about deviance and social marginality that has occurred since the 1960s has promoted assaults on these blind spots, stimulating lively debates within the medical, academic, and criminological communities throughout Europe and North America. The general orientation of the criticism has inclined toward a leftist or libertarian political point of view and has favored methodologies that analyze deviance as part of larger social or historical processes. The militant political tone is in part a reaction to the fact that asylum directors and psychiatrists, penologists and criminologists, and other members of the "helping professions" have often played pliant roles as functionaries in the modern social welfare state. Deviance experts and the "total" institutions they maintain have been subjected to withering criticism on the grounds that they have failed to respect the rights and dignity of the individuals in their charge and have uncritically abetted the extension and strengthening of mechanisms for controlling marginal social types.

The well-known work of Thomas Szasz has been in the forefront of the attack on the moral and political bankruptcy of the modern asylum and institutional psychiatry. Michel Foucault has also written extensively on the modern asylum as a new historical form of social control.*' Criminology and penology have been attacked by the new school of critical criminology, many of whose adherents are outspokenly leftist in their orientation. One of the best known of these texts, Taylor, Walton, and Young's The New Criminology: For asocial Theory of Deviance (1973) has analyzed criminology as an ideology that has traditionally reflected the political aims of the dominant classes and served the function of social repression.

It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss these attacks on the theories and institutions of traditional deviance control as simple political axe grinding. Many of these apparently politically motivated writings have been extremely fruitful methodologically. Moreover, the criticism of the traditional theories of deviance and its management is not simply the product of a militant political program; philosophers, academic social scientists, and historians have also contributed to this criticism without raising charges of political bias. It is probably impossible, and perhaps undesirable, to eliminate all ideological and politically charged concepts from any historical account of deviance; for historians, it makes sense simply to identify what is methodologically productive in recent work and distill from it insights that may benefit their own studies.

Within academic sociology, labeling theory has provided the best-known example of the effort to escape the theoretical bind of the correctional orientation of mainstream deviance theory. The work of Howard Becker, J. I. Kitsuse, Kai Erikson, Edwin Schur, and others in the early sixties attempted to describe the processes whereby individuals were labeled as deviants by agents of police, legal, or welfare authorities. Many of these theorists, employing an interactionist perspective, also postulated a kind of secondary deviance to explain how individuals labeled as deviants accepted their deviant identities and were accordingly reinforced in their deviant behavior. By the late sixties a considerable opposition to labeling had appeared, and a debate was engaged that continues to the present time. Though far from settled, this debate has produced a few instructive lessons for the historian of deviance.

In the first place, critics have challenged the notion of secondary deviance as merely another failed effort to explain the etiology of deviant behavior. How, they have asked, does one explain the initial action of the individual who receives a deviant label, even if one can explain his subsequent behavior? It is not the label, in other words, that creates deviance in the first instance.' In the face of these and other criticisms, labeling theorists have retreated from some of their initial positions. Some have suggested that labeling may be salvaged by incorporating the research methods of ethnomethodology and small group research. Historians cannot easily follow social scientists onto that terrain; they can, however, learn from the theorists' retreat from specific theoretical claims and their movement toward a consideration of labeling as "a perspective whose value will appear, if at all, in increased understanding of things formerly obscure." The "more modest aims," in Becker's words, of this perspective are simply "to enlarge the area taken into consideration in the study of deviant phenomena by including in it activities of others than the allegedly deviant actor." Taken as a simple heuristic prescription, labeling theory may be useful for historical investigation.

Another criticism of labeling deserves mention. By concentrating closely on the social agencies and processes that engaged in labeling, theorists have often ignored the broader context of values from which those labels were shaped. They have also, one critic has asserted, overlooked "the ways in which such labels changed, and especially the political processes underlying the development and imposition of labels." Conceptions of what constitutes deviant behavior are not created ex nihil to meet the practical requirements of the agents in institutions of social control. These conceptions of deviance are constructed out of the social and intellectual elements of the culture itself, of which the political process and its ideational components are important parts. A related development has been the recent "rebirth" of the sociology of law as a method for analyzing social control and deviance. We shall have the opportunity to return to this point about the renewed importance of politics for the study of deviance.

After one has acknowledged the principal criticisms made of its shortcomings, the labeling perspective appears to offer some useful insights to historians. A few social scientists have applied some of these methods to historical subjects with interesting results. George Becker, for instance, has revealed the considerable ironies in the growth of a deviant label of "mad genius" out of the self-advertising eccentricities of the "Romantic genius" of an earlier era. Without adhering directly to labeling mechanisms, a few historians have studied deviant stereotyping in ways that suggest the heuristic value inherent in the general labeling perspective.

The resuscitation of Marxist and conflict-oriented theories of deviance has also generated a considerable amount of controversy and has raised interest in a few quarters about their application to historical investigation. The work of Richard Quinney and Austin Turk, and the collaborative volume by Taylor, Young, and Walton have probably been the most influential in this field. The adherents of this approach have attempted to show that power and its uses are crucial to any complete understanding of how certain social elements receive deviant status and attract the attention of the forces of social order. By focusing on the elite groups that make law and enforce it, and by attempting to explain the variations in the policies they formulate on the basis of the social and economic interests of these elites, conflict theorists, like labeling theorists, have reversed the traditional concentration on the criminal and his act. They have effectively introduced into the study of deviance the genuinely historical problem of the relationship of political change to underlying social and economic change.

But conflict theory, and the Marxian echoes in much of critical criminology, suffer from the usual problem with economic determinist theories of political action, namely reducing the exercise of power to a conflict of interest groups. This emphasis undervalues the obvious aspects of autonomy and continuity in the modern state, but it also risks the accusation of resembling a conspiracy theory of policy making that cannot effectively explain issues about which there is evident public consensus. This latter weakness is particularly manifest when conflict theorists leave the realm of property crime, where their class-based explanation works fairly well, to address the questions of violent crime, capital punishment, or definitions of insanity. No doubt, as this book endeavors to show, public consensus on issues of deviance is often highly influenced by the information about deviant behavior presented by elites, but one would be hard pressed to explain all episodes of general public anxiety about deviance as a product of the interests of those who dominate state power.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Crime, Madness, & Politics in Modern France by Robert A. Nye. Copyright © 1984 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• Acknowledgments, pg. ix
• Introduction, pg. xi
• Chapter I. The Historical Study of Deviance, pg. 1
• Chapter II. Criminal Law, Medicine, and Justice in the Nineteenth Century, pg. 22
• Chapter III. Between MacMahon and Boulanger: Crime and the "Moral Order" of the Opportunist Republic, pg. 49
• Chapter IV. Heredity or Milieu: The Born-Criminal Debate and the Foundations of Criminology, pg. 97
• Chapter V. Metaphors of Pathology in the Belle Epoque: The Rise of a Medical Model of Cultural Crisis, pg. 132
• Chapter VI. The Politics of Social Defense: Violent Crime, "Apaches," and the Press at the Turn of the Century, pg. 171
• Chapter VII. The Boundaries of Responsibility: Asylum Law and Legal Medicine in an Era of Social Defense, pg. 227
• Chapter VIII. 1908: The Capital-Punishment Debate in the Chamber of Deputies, pg. 265
• Chapter IX. Sport, Regeneration, and National Revival, pg. 310
• Chapter X. Conclusion: Comparative Reflections on Great Britain and Germany, pg. 330
• Bibliography, pg. 341
• Index, pg. 361