One of the most curious applications, and perhaps the most practical, of Criminal Anthropology, (of that new science which has associated itself with sociology, psychiatry, and history,) is that which flows from the study of the physiognomy of the political criminal. For not only does it appear to succeed in furnishing us with the juridical basis of political crime, which hitherto seemed to escape all our researches, so completely that until now all jurists had ended by saying that there was no political crime; but it seems also to supply us with a method for distinguishing true revolution, always fruitful and useful, from utopia, from rebellion, which is always sterile. It is for me a thoroughly established fact, and one of which I have given the proofs in my "Delitto Politico,"[71] that true revolutionists, that is to say, the initiators of great scientific and political revolutions, who excite and bring about a true progress in humanity, are almost always geniuses or saints, and have all a marvellously harmonious physiognomy; and to verify this it is sufficient simply to look at the plates in my "Delitto Politico." What noble physiognomies have Paoli, Fabrizi, Dandolo, Moro, Mazzini, Garibaldi, Bandiera, Pisacane, la Petrowskaia, la Cidowina, la Sassulich! Generally we see in them a very large forehead, a very bushy beard, and very large and soft eyes; sometimes we meet with the jaw much developed, but never hypertrophic; sometimes, finally, with paleness of the face (Mazzini, Brutus, Cassius); but these characteristics seldom accumulate in the same individual to the extent of constituting what I call the criminal type.

[71] 1890.

In a study that I have made with three hundred and twenty-one of our Italian revolutionists, (against Austria etc.,) nearly all males, (there were twenty-seven women to one hundred men,) the proportion of the criminal type was 0·57 per cent.; i. e. 2 per cent. less than in normal men. Out of thirty celebrated Nihilists, eighteen have a very fine physiognomy, twelve present some isolated anomalies, two only present the criminal type (Rogagiew and Oklasdky), that is to say 6·8 per cent. And if from these unfortunate men who represent to us, even psychologically, the Christian martyrs, we pass to the regicides, to the presidenticides, such as Fieschi, Guiteau, Nobiling, and to the monsters of the French Revolution of 1789, such as Carrier, Jourdan, and Marat, we there at once find in all, or in nearly all, the criminal type. And the type again frequently appears among the Communards and the Anarchists. Taking fifty photographs of Communards I have found the criminal type in 12 per cent.; and the insane type in 10 per cent. Out of forty-one Parisian Anarchists that I have studied with Bertillon at the office of the police of Paris, the proportion of the criminal type was 31 per cent.

In the rebellion of the 1st of May last I was able to study one hundred Turin Anarchists. I found the criminal type among these in the proportion of 34 per cent., while in two hundred and eighty ordinary criminals of the prison at Turin the type was 43 per cent.

TABLE OF PERCENTAGE OF CHARACTERISTICS.

================================+==========+=========
" TURIN " ORDINARY
CHARACTERISTICS. "ANARCHISTS"CRIMINALS
————————————————+—————+————-
Exaggerated plagiocephaly " 11 " 21
Facial asymmetry " 36 " 60
Other cranial anomalies " "
(ultra-brachycephaly etc.) " 15 " 44
Very large jaw " 19 " 29
Exaggerated zygomas " 16 " 23
Enormous frontal sinus " 17 " 19
Dental anomalies " 30 " 20
Anomalies of the ears " 64 " 75
Anomalies of the nose " 40 " 57
Anomalous coloration of skin " 30 " 8
Old wounds " 10 " 26
Tattooing " 4 " 10
Neuro-pathological anomalies " 8 " 26

Among the 100 individuals arrested on the 1st of May, 30 per cent. were recidivists for common crimes; among the others, 50 per cent. Of true prison habituÉs there were 8 among the former and 20 among the latter.

Thanks to the assistance of Dr. Carus of The Open Court Publishing Company, who has sent me many curious data and also the work of Schaack, "Anarchy and Anarchists" (Chicago, 1889), which is very partial, although rich in facts, I have been able to study the photographs of 43 Chicago anarchists, and I have found among them almost the same proportion of the criminal type, that is 40 per cent. The ones that presented this type are the two Djeneks, Potoswki, Cloba, Seveski, Stimak, Sugar, Micolanda, Bodendick, Lieske, Lingg, Oppenheim, Engel and his wife, Fielden, G. Lehm, Thiele, and Most. Especially in Potowski, Sugar, and Micolanda I mark facial asymmetry, enormous jaws, developed frontal sinus, protruding ears; and the same (except the asymmetry) in Seveski and Novak. Fielden has a turned up nose and enormous jaws; Most has acrocephaly and facial asymmetry. On the contrary a very fine physiognomy has Marx, with his very full forehead, bushy hair and beard, and soft eyes; and likewise Lassalle, Hermann, Schwab, the two Spies, Neebe, Schnaubelt, Waller, and Seeger.

In studying the chief anarchists separately,—the martyrs of the Chicago anarchists, it might well be said,—there is found in them all an anomaly, very frequent in normal men as well; that is to say the ears are without lobes; the ears are also developed a little more than normally in all (except in Spies), they are protruding in Lingg, Fischer, and Engel; the jaw is much developed in Lingg, Spies, Fischer, and Engel; all have, however, except Spies,[72] the forehead fine and full, with great intelligence. In the plates of the journal Der Vorbote we find a Mongolic cast of feature in Engel and Lingg, both of whom should have much of the degenerative characters, enormous jaw and zygoma, and Lingg oblique eyes. But these characters are much less apparent in the photographs that I received from The Monist and in which the jaw of Fischer even decreases. Perhaps these photographs were taken some years before the crime, when they were very young. Certainly in both instances (in the Vorbote and the photographs from The Monist) I find a very noble and truly genial physiognomy in Parsons and Neebe. The physiognomy of August Spies is morbid. He has a senile auricle, voluminous jaw bones and a strongly developed frontal sinus. And, it is necessary to remark, the physiognomy corresponds with his autobiography, written with a fierce fanaticism; whilst in the posthumous writings of Parsons and in the writings of Neebe we remark a calm and reflective enthusiasm.

[72] Thus according to the portrait in Schaack's book; but according to information which I later received from General Trumbull of Chicago, this portrait is not true to life. It would seem, then, that the features upon which my opinion is based do not exist.

Schwab has the physiognomy of a savant, of a student; he much resembles the nihilist Antonoff, beheaded in Russia. (See Plate IV in my "Delitto Politico.") Neebe is quite like an Italian economist well known in America, Luigi Luzzatti.

Fielden has a wild physiognomy, not without sensuality. Parsons resembles Bodio, the great Italian statistician, and in the upper part of the face, Stanley.

When I say that the anarchists of Turin and of Chicago are frequently of the criminal type, I do not mean that political criminals, even the most violent anarchists, are true criminals; but that they possess the degenerative characters common to criminals and to the insane, being anomalies and possessing these traits by heredity; as a fact, the father of Booth was called Junius Brutus, and gave to his son the name of a revolutionist, Wilkes. The fathers of Guiteau and of Nobiling, and the mother of Staps were religious lunatics; and Staps also, like Ravaillac, Clement, Brutus, had hallucinations. In the autobiographies of the Vorbote I find that Parsons had a very religious Methodist mother and a father who had much to do with the movement of the Temperance League. Indeed, the Parsons since 1600 had as a family taken part in all revolutionary movements. A Tompkin, a relation of his mother, had taken part in the battles of Brandywine and of Monmouth; a General Parsons was an officer in the Revolution of 1776, and a captain Parsons engaged in the battle of Bunker Hill.

Spies was born in a chateau celebrated for feudal robberies—called on that account the "Raubschloss."

The father of Louis Lingg suffered through his labor as a workman a concussion of the brain—according to the Vorbote.

The father of Fielden, an orator of power notwithstanding his occupation as a workman, was one of the agitators of the question of agricultural lands for workingmen in England; he was one of the founders of the "Consumers' Co-operative Society" and a prime mover in the society of "Odd Fellows." For those who will object that in many of these relations they see only geniuses, I have only to cite my work "L'Homme de GÉnie," where I have proved how often genius is nervous epilepsy, and how almost all the sons of men of genius are lunatics, idiots, or criminals.

This hereditary influence is seen also in the great number of brothers charged together, the two Spies, the two Djeneks, the two Fieldens, and the two Lehms. According to their autobiographies also their fathers or their mothers died early; from which we may presume that they were old or diseased.

The morbid impressibility of Engel has been admitted by himself. "I cannot," he said to his wife, "hold within me what I feel. I must explode. The enthusiasm takes possession of me; it is a disease." Lingg could not remain quiet an instant; in his room he always had some dynamite in store. Bodendick was a thief and a mattoid; full of cunning, mischief and mad tricks, even according to the Arbeiter-Zeitung. He was always dreaming of new explosives. Though insane he was a genius as appears from his poetry, which is published by Schick and is in the style of the celebrated "Song of the Shirt." The suicide of Lingg with dynamite shows his moral insensibility, as do the words of Parsons addressed to the society of anarchists: "Strangle the spies and throw them out of the window." In Lingg we see a truly ungovernable epileptoid idea driving him to political action. "I cannot control myself;" he said, "it is stronger than I."

I repeat that among the anarchists there are no true criminals; even Schaack, the police historian, can name but two criminals, and certainly he would not have spared them if he could have stigmatised them.

Their heroic-like deaths, with their ideal on their lips, proves that they were not common criminals. Nevertheless the psychology of the leaders of the Commune shows in them a true moral insensibility, an innate cruelty, which found a pretext and a scope in politics; and which accords too well with their criminal physiognomies. Marat demands two hundred and ten thousand heads; VallÉs speaks of his family with a true hatred; Carrier wrote, "We will make a cemetery of France"; FerrÉ smiled while by his orders they killed Veisset; and Rigault said in slang to his pistol, "Il faut peter sur le chipau." The last words of Spies before the court express a ferocious hatred towards the rich; and the project of the anarchists of Chicago (if it is true) to blow up a part of the city with bombs attests an absence of the moral sense. We know that many anarchists regard brigands and thieves, such as Pini, Kammerer, and Gasparoni, as their brothers in arms. Booth had for accomplice Payne, a true murderer by profession. See also the journal published at Geneva L'Explosion, and the Como journal Le Poignard.

But it is necessary to note that hereditary anomaly, if it provokes an anomaly in the moral sense, also suppresses misoneism, the horror of novelty which is almost the general rule of humanity; it thus makes of them innovators, apostles of progress, though the education is too rude: and the fight with relative misery of which all the anarchists of Chicago except Neebe have been the victims, not affording material for useful novelties made of them only failures and rebels, hindering them from comprehending that humanity as a part of nature, which it is, cannot progress at a gallop, non facit saltus. Spies on his last day discovered that humanity is misoneic, the slave of custom, and said, quoting the lines in German, "I now understand the poet's words,

'Denn aus Gemeinem ist der Mensch gemacht,
Und die Gewohnheit nennt er seine Amme.'"

[Man has been shaped of what is common,
And habit is the nurse by whom he's reared.]

Evidently if he had understood it before he would not have been an anarchist. Whoever has observed in asylums the conduct of lunatics, will understand that one of their characteristics is originality, just as in men of genius; only the originality of the insane and of moral lunatics, or of born criminals, is very often absurd or unavailable.

This is why I, although I am an extremist in my partisanship for the death-penalty, cannot approve the shooting of the Communards and the hanging of the anarchist martyrs of Chicago. I deem it highly necessary to suppress born criminals, when they reach the persuasion that being born for evil they can do nothing but evil; and I believe that their death thus saves the lives of many honest men. But we have to do with a very different thing here, where the criminal type is, as shown above, less frequent than among born criminals.

It is also necessary to consider here the youthful condition of almost all these persons—Lingg 23 years, Schwab 33 years, Neebe 32 years. For at this age men are at the maximum point of their audacity and misoneism; and I remember a leading Russian Nihilist saying to me that there was not an honest man in Russia who was not a nihilist at 20 years of age and ultra-moderate at 40 years. If the inclination to evil here exists in greater proportion than in law-abiding men, it nevertheless takes an altruistic turn, which is quite the contrary to that which is observed among born criminals, and which commands our admiration and arouses our just pity. This inclination, in associating itself with the want of the new, which is also abnormal in humanity, could, if it were properly directed and were not crossed by misery, prove itself of great value to humanity; it could trace for it new routes, and in every case be practically useful to it. A born criminal imprisoned for life will kill some gaoler, in a colony will ally himself with the savages, and will never work; while political criminals in a colony will become more useful pioneers even than law-abiding men. An example is seen in Louise Michel, who in New Caledonia was the most charitable of the sick nurses.

And then there is no political crime against which the punishment of death can be directed. An idea is never stifled with the death of its abettors: it gains with the death of the martyrs if it is good, as is the case in revolutions; and it falls at once into vacuity if it is sterile, as is the case, perhaps, with the anarchists. And then, as judgment cannot be formed of a great man during his life, so a generation cannot in its ephemeral life judge with certainty of the justice of an idea, and for that reason it is not proper to inflict so radical a punishment on its abettors.

CESARE LOMBROSO.