“Social malaise... demonic agitation:” anarchism according to the criminology of the French physician Alexandre Lacassagne

Abstract

This article analyzes the way anarchism and its followers were understood in L’assassinat du président Carnot, by the French physician Alexandre Lacassagne. A few months before the book was published, in June 1894, the president of France, Sadi Carnot, had been killed by the Italian anarchist Sante Geronimo Caserio. 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 aforementioned book. He made his observations on the anarchist in the broader context of criminological debates pursued in the late nineteenth century, which were not restricted solely to the authors of Italian criminology.