Jun 2023
On June 24, 1894, a young Italian anarchist, Sante Geronimo Caserio, assassinated the French President Sadi Carnot in Lyon. Acting in retaliation for the execution of his anarchist comrades by the French judiciary for their involvement in a series of bombings, Caserio stabbed Sadi Carnot in his open carriage, and the president died within hours. The murderer, a baker of humble origin, was just 20 years old and became an anarchist militant after coming into contact with libertarian ideas.
In the article “Social malaise… demonic agitation:” anarchism according to the criminology of the French physician Alexandre Lacassagne (HCSM v.30, 2023), Bruno Corrêa de Sá e Benevides, Doctoral candidate at the Graduate Program in the History of Science and Health /Casa de Oswaldo Cruz, Fiocruz, analyzes the way anarchism and its followers were understood in the book L’assassinat du président Carnot written by the French physician Alexandre Lacassagne.
The book was published a few months after Carnot’s death. Lacassagne was called upon to perform the autopsy of Carnot’s body and a psychiatric examination of Caserio. The results of these two analyses were published in the mentioned book. Lacassagne observed the anarchist in the broader context of criminological debates pursued in the late nineteenth century.
Benevide’s article sought to show that the growth of radical actions, such as the assassination perpetrated by Sante Caserio and explored in Alexandre Lacassagne’s book, brought anarchism to the center of the criminological debates taking place in France, Italy, Germany, Spain, and other parts of Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. Based on theories associating crime with madness, Lacassagne’s ideas in the book aimed to give multifactorial explanations for the phenomenon of anarchism (such as race, heredity, and social factors) while suggesting ways to curb the spread of libertarian ideas. Although Caserio was not declared insane, much of the analysis made by Lacassagne demonstrates an intention to fit the anarchist into the realm of mental “deviations.”
Read the article!
Benevides, B. C. de S. e .. (2023). “Mal-estar social… uma agitação demoníaca”: o anarquismo segundo a criminologia do médico francês Alexandre Lacassagne. História, Ciências, Saúde-manguinhos, 30, e2023002.