Punishing the mad bomber: questions of moral responsibility in the trials of French anarchist terrorists, 1886-1897

In late nineteenth-century France, several criminologists maintainedthat the perpetrators of the contemporary wave of anarchistterrorism were victims of mental disorders who deserved judicialleniency. French courts did not accept this theory, but insteaddeclared the principal terrorists sane and fully responsiblefor their crimes and, based on this view, handed down severesentences. Many criminologists accused the jurists of deliberatelyignoring the mental illness of the anarchists because of governmentand public pressures to impose the death penalty, but evidencefrom the anarchist trials fails to support this charge. Thecontroversy highlights the conflicts between the judicial establishmentand the emerging discipline of criminology, whose pathologicalexplanations of anarchist terrorism reflected a positivist attackon the traditional concepts of free will and moral responsibility,concepts the jurists viewed as fundamental to the legal system.