Lacassagne, Alexandre (1843–1924)

Between 1885 and 1914, Lyon was the capital of French criminology. Alexandre Lacassagne, professor of legal medicine at the University of Lyon, became [Page 908]the dominant figure of that time, both through his own publications and as director of Les archives d'anthropologie criminelle(Criminal Anthropology Archives) from 1886 to 1914.

Lacassagne believed that crime was not the expression of an innate human faculty but the result of an interaction between the individual and the social environment. The criminal is the “microbe” and the social environment is the “nutrient broth.” Society is a collection of individuals whose nervous systems have not all evolved in the same way. Just as there are three levels in every brain, so also every society contains three “social layers”: frontal, parietal, and occipital. These three sociophrenological layers produced three main categories of criminal: thought-based criminals (frontal), action-based criminals (parietal), and criminals acting by feeling or instinct (occipital).

Insane criminals are frequently in the first category. Criminals governed by impulse or by events are mainly in the second category; in this category, chastisement and penalties could be effective. The third, occipital-dominated category, contains the true criminals, or “unsociables.” Lacassagne held that penal philosophy should be derived from criminal anthropology data. The repression of crime becomes difficult when society is too “soft” and can no longer be defended against incorrigible criminals. To be effective, the fight against crime should incorporate necessary security measures and adopt a penal code whose penalties had a dissuasive effect. In extreme cases, authorities can also use penalties to eliminate asocial people.

François Gall's (1758–1828) phrenology inspired this theory, but it met with little response at the time. However, Lacassagne was an important expert witness in many big cases of the era and coordinated opposition to Cesare Lombroso's (1836–1909) theory of the “born criminal.” The annual publication of Les archives and Lacassagne's responsibility for a large number of medical students allowed him to create a “social environment” school that came to dominate the field of criminal anthropology in France.

Lacassagne's reading of criminality placed him at the interface between two radically different interpretations of the subject. The first, which had its roots in early nineteenth-century legal medicine, psychiatry, and anthropology, was the basis for what is now the biopsychological or psychobiological approach. In essence, this approach sought to establish the differences between the honest population and lawbreakers. The second interpretation, created by Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) in the 1890s, clearly separated criminology from biological influence. Lacassagne's sociophrenological theory lay halfway between medicine and sociology and was one of the last expressions of the naturalistic human science movement. As such, it deserves a place in the history of both disciplines, and one can confirm Lacassagne as the cofounder, with Lombroso, of criminal anthropology.