Alexandre Lacassagne - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Alexandre Lacassagne was a French physician and criminologist who was a native of Cahors

Cahors

Cahors is the capital of the Lot department in south-western France.Its site is dramatic being contained on three sides within an udder shaped twist in the river Lot known as a 'presqu'île' or peninsula...

. He was the founder of the Lacassagne school of criminology, based in Lyon

Lyon

Lyon , is a city in east-central France in the Rhône-Alpes region, situated between Paris and Marseille. Lyon is located at from Paris, from Marseille, from Geneva, from Turin, and from Barcelona. The residents of the city are called Lyonnais....

and influent from 1885 to 1914, and main rival to Lombroso

Cesare Lombroso

Cesare Lombroso, born Ezechia Marco Lombroso was an Italian criminologist and founder of the Italian School of Positivist Criminology. Lombroso rejected the established Classical School, which held that crime was a characteristic trait of human nature...

's Italian school

Italian school of criminology

The Italian school of criminology was founded at the end of the 19th century by Cesare Lombroso and two of his Italian disciples, Enrico Ferri and Raffaele Garofalo .- Lombroso's conception of the "atavistic born criminal" :...

Biography

He studied at the military school in Strasbourg

Strasbourg

Strasbourg is the capital and principal city of the Alsace region in eastern France and is the official seat of the European Parliament. Located close to the border with Germany, it is the capital of the Bas-Rhin département. The city and the region of Alsace are historically German-speaking,...

, and for a period of time worked at Val-de-Grâce

Val-de-Grâce

This article describes the hospital and former abbey. For the main article on Mansart and Lemercier's central church, see Church of the Val-de-Grâce....

military hospital in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

. Later he attained the chair of Médecine Légale de la Faculté de Lyon (Forensic medicine of the Lyon Faculty

University of Lyon

The University of Lyon , located in Lyon and Saint Etienne, France, is a center for higher education and research comprising 16 institutions of higher education...

), and was also founder of the journal Archives de l'Anthropologie Criminelle. Among his assistants was famed forensics

Forensics

Forensic science is the application of a broad spectrum of sciences to answer questions of interest to a legal system. This may be in relation to a crime or a civil action...

scientist Edmund Locard (1877-1966).

Lacassagne was a principal founder in the fields of medical jurisprudence and criminal anthropology. He was a specialist in the field of toxicology

Toxicology

Toxicology is a branch of biology, chemistry, and medicine concerned with the study of the adverse effects of chemicals on living organisms...

, and was a pioneer regarding bloodstain pattern analysis and the research of bullet markings and their relationship to specific weapons.

He had a keen interest in sociology

Sociology

Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...

and psychology

Psychology

Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...

, and the correlation of these disciplines to criminal and "deviant" behaviour. He considered an individuals' biological predisposition, as well as his social environment to be important factors in criminal behaviour.

Lacassagne became famous with his expertises of various criminal affairs, including the "malle à Gouffé" in 1889, the assassination of President Sadi Carnot

Marie François Sadi Carnot

Marie François Sadi Carnot was a French statesman and the fourth president of the Third French Republic. He served as the President of France from 1887 until his assassination in 1894.-Early life:...

, stabbed in 1894 by the Italian anarchist

Anarchism in Italy

Italian anarchism as a movement began primarily from the influence of Mikhail Bakunin, Giuseppe Fanelli, and Errico Malatesta. From there it expanded to include illegalist individualist anarchism, and anarcho-syndicalism. It participated in the biennio rosso and survived fascism...

Caserio, or of Joseph Vacher

Joseph Vacher

Joseph Vacher was a French serial killer, sometimes known as "The French Ripper" or "L'éventreur du Sud-Est" due to comparisons to the more famous Jack the Ripper murderer of London, England in 1888...

(1869-1898), one of the first known French serial killers.

Politically, Lacassagne supported the initiative of his friend Léon Gambetta

Léon Gambetta

Léon Gambetta was a French statesman prominent after the Franco-Prussian War.-Youth and education:He is said to have inherited his vigour and eloquence from his father, a Genovese grocer who had married a Frenchwoman named Massabie. At the age of fifteen, Gambetta lost the sight of his right eye...

, an Opportunist Republican, in favour of the 27 May 1885 Act establishing penal colonies

Penal colony

A penal colony is a settlement used to exile prisoners and separate them from the general populace by placing them in a remote location, often an island or distant colonial territory...

, dubbed "Law on relegation of recidivist

Recidivism

Recidivism is the act of a person repeating an undesirable behavior after they have either experienced negative consequences of that behavior, or have been treated or trained to extinguish that behavior...

s" (the draft project had been deposed by Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau and Martin Feuillée). He also opposed the abolition of death penalty, proposed in 1906 by an alliance of Radicals and Socialists and rejected in 1908, as he considered that some criminals were unredeemable.

Lacassagne school

Lacassagne's School was widely influential in France from 1885 to 1914, and the main opponent to Lombroso

Cesare Lombroso

's Italian School

Italian school of criminology

, although its importance had been overshadowed and was recently re-discovered, under the influence of new historians' works. Resuming in 1913 his main thesis, Lacassagne stated:

"The social environment is the breeding ground of criminality; the germ is the criminal, an element which has no importance until the day where it finds the broth which makes it ferment."
"To the fatalism which ineluctably follows from anthropological theory, we oppose social initiative."
"Justice shrivels up, prison
Prison
A prison is a place in which people are physically confined and, usually, deprived of a range of personal freedoms. Imprisonment or incarceration is a legal penalty that may be imposed by the state for the commission of a crime...

corrupts and society has the criminals it deserves."

Lacassagne was originally influenced by Lombroso, but started opposing himself to the latter's theory of the "born criminal," of a "criminal type" and to his insistence on heredity

Heredity

Heredity is the passing of traits to offspring . This is the process by which an offspring cell or organism acquires or becomes predisposed to the characteristics of its parent cell or organism. Through heredity, variations exhibited by individuals can accumulate and cause some species to evolve...

. Under the influence of the sociologist Gabriel Tarde

Gabriel Tarde

Jean-Gabriel De Tarde or Gabriel Tarde in short French sociologist, criminologist and social psychologist who conceived sociology as based on small psychological interactions among individuals , the fundamental forces being imitation and innovation.- Theory :Among the concepts...

, Lacassagne placed the main emphasis on environmental influence, although the environmental determinism did not exclude, from his viewpoint, hereditary matters nor physical anomalies.

Lacassagne shared with Paul Dubuisson, the co-founder of the Archives d'anthropologie criminelle, and Joseph Gouzer a common admiration for Franz Joseph Gall

Franz Joseph Gall

Franz Joseph Gall was a neuroanatomist, physiologist, and pioneer in the study of the localization of mental functions in the brain.- Life :...

(1758-1828), the founder of phrenology

Phrenology

Phrenology is a pseudoscience primarily focused on measurements of the human skull, based on the concept that the brain is the organ of the mind, and that certain brain areas have localized, specific functions or modules...

. He was also influenced by Auguste Comte

Auguste Comte

Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte , better known as Auguste Comte , was a French philosopher, a founder of the discipline of sociology and of the doctrine of positivism...

's positivism

Positivism

Positivism is a a view of scientific methods and a philosophical approach, theory, or system based on the view that, in the social as well as natural sciences, sensory experiences and their logical and mathematical treatment are together the exclusive source of all worthwhile information....

, beginning one of his article by a quote from Michelet

Jules Michelet

Jules Michelet was a French historian. He was born in Paris to a family with Huguenot traditions.-Early life:His father was a master printer, not very prosperous, and Jules assisted him in the actual work of the press...

which claimed that "Science of justice and science of nature are one." Lyon

Lyon

had in fact been an important center for phrenology, with the presence of Fleury Imbert (1796-1851), a disciple of Fourier

Charles Fourier

François Marie Charles Fourier was a French philosopher. An influential thinker, some of Fourier's social and moral views, held to be radical in his lifetime, have become main currents in modern society...

who married Gall's widow, and Émile Gromier (1811-78), who preceded Lacassagne in the Lyon Faculty. A third, important influence of Lacassagne was hygienism. From these influences, he retained two main principles: organicism

Organicism

Organicism is a philosophical orientation that asserts that reality is best understood as an organic whole. By definition it is close to holism. Plato, Hobbes or Constantin Brunner are examples of such philosophical thought....

and cerebral localisations.

Thus, the Lyon School defined crime as a "anti-physiological movement which occurs in the intimity of the social organism". They considered that the social environment had a physiological influence on the brain, and thus opposed Lombroso's theory which alleged that criminal factors were not only biological, but exclusively individual. Henceforth, the two most important factors for criminological studies were, according to Lacassagne, "biological" and "social", the social itself being considered as a biological organism. Following Gall's theory of cerebral localisations, he divided the brain

Brain

The brain is the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate and most invertebrate animals—only a few primitive invertebrates such as sponges, jellyfish, sea squirts and starfishes do not have one. It is located in the head, usually close to primary sensory apparatus such as vision, hearing,...

into three zones, the occipital

Occipital

The word occipital, in zoology, pertains to the occiput .Occipital is a descriptor for several areas of animal & human anatomy.*External occipital protuberance* Internal occipital crest* Greater occipital nerve...

zone, seat of animal instincts, the parietal

Parietal

Parietal may refer to:*Parietal placentation*Parietal lobe of the brain*Parietal bone of the skull*Parietal scales of a snake lie in the general region of the parietal bone*Parietal cell in the stomach*Parietal pleura...

zone, used for social activities, and the frontal zone, seat of superior faculties. Furthermore, he divided society itself according to these zones, which produced according to him three "type" of criminals, "thought criminals", "act criminals" and "sentimental or instinctual criminals", respectively corresponding to the frontal social zone, the parietal social zone, and the occipital social zone.

Lacassagne's overshadowing by the Lombroso School was probably due to his insistence on the value of phrenology, which at that time had become decredibilized in most scientific circles. Criminology was at the time divided into two main tendencies, one relative more to "biopsychological" theories straining the importance of individual factors and aiming at establishing an essential

Essentialism

In philosophy, essentialism is the view that, for any specific kind of entity, there is a set of characteristics or properties all of which any entity of that kind must possess. Therefore all things can be precisely defined or described...

difference between honest citizens and criminals, and the other opposing to this medical determinism social determinism

Social determinism

Social determinism is the hypothesis that social interactions and constructs alone determine individual behavior ....

, mainly influenced by Durkheim

Émile Durkheim

David Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline and, with Karl Marx and Max Weber, is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science and father of sociology.Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies could maintain...

. Thus, Lacassagne's approach, which combined both biological and social factors, was too ambiguous to last.

Main publications

(1872)
(1876) On-line
(1878) On-line
(1881)
(1887)
(1891) On-line
(1891)
(1892) On-line
(1894) On-line
(1898) On-line
(1899) On-line
(1906)
(1908)
(1913)
(1920)

Biography

Lacassagne school

Main publications

See also