CHAPTER 2 RELATIONS OF SUICIDE WITH OTHER SOCIAL PHENOMENA

SINCE suicide is a social phenomenon by virtue of its essential element, it is proper to discuss the place it occupies among other social phenomena.

The first and most important question which concerns the subject is to discover whether or not suicide should be classed among the actions permitted by morality or among those proscribed by it. Should it be regarded to any degree whatever as a criminal act? The question, as is well known, has always been warmly discussed. For its solution a certain conception of ideal morality is usually first formulated and then the question is raised whether or not suicide logically contradicts it. For reasons elsewhere set forth this cannot be our method. An uncontrolled deduction is always suspect, and as such, moreover, starts from a pure postulate of individual feeling; for everyone conceives in his own way the ideal morality so axiomatically assumed. Instead, let us first seek to discover how peoples actually have estimated suicide morally in the course of history; then try to find the reasons for this estimate. Then, we will have only to see whether and how far these reasons are founded in the nature of present-day societies.

I

As soon as Christian societies were formed, suicide was formally forbidden in them. In 452 the council of Aries declared suicide a crime and that it could only be caused by a diabolically inspired fury. But this order received a penal sanction only in the following century, at the council of Prague in 563. There it was decided that victims of suicide would be “honored with no memorial in the holy sacrifice of the mass, and the singing of psalms should not accompany their bodies to the grave.” Civil legislation followed the lead of canon law, adding material penalties to religious penalties. A chapter of St. Louis’ institutions especially regulates the matter; the body of the suicide was tried before the authorities otherwise competent in cases of the homicide of one person by another; the deceased’s property was diverted from the usual heirs and reverted to the baron. Many customs did not stop at confiscation but prescribed various tortures in addition. “At Bordeaux the corpse was hung by the feet; at Abbeville it was dragged through the streets on a hurdle; at Lille, if it was a man, the corpse was hung after being dragged to the crossroads, if a woman, burned. Even insanity was not always considered an excuse. The criminal ordinance issued by Louis XIV in 1670 codified these usages without much modification. A regular sentence of condemnation was spoken ad perpetuam rei memoriam; the body drawn on a hurdle, face down, through the streets and squares, was then hung or thrown upon the garbage heap. The property was confiscated. Nobles incurred the loss of nobility and were declared commoners; their woods were cut, their castles demolished, their escutcheons broken. We still have a decree of the Parliament of Paris, given January 31, 1749, in agreement with this legislation.

By an abrupt reaction the revolution of 1789 abolished all these repressive measures and erased suicide from the list of legal crimes. But all the religions numbering Frenchmen among their followers still prohibit and punish it, and common morality reproves it. It still inspires an aversion in popular consciousness extending to the place where the suicidal act was performed and to all persons closely related to the victim. It constitutes a moral flaw although opinion seems tending to become more indulgent on this point than formerly. But, it has preserved something of its old criminological character. According to the most widespread jurisprudence, an accomplice of suicide is prosecuted as a homicide. This would not be so if suicide were considered an act indifferent to morality.

This same legislation is found among all Christian peoples and has remained more severe almost everywhere else than in France. In England, in the 10th century, King Edward in one of his Canons associated suicides with robbers, assassins and criminals of every kind. Up to 1823 it was customary to drag the suicide’s body, pierced crossways with a stick, through the streets and bury it on a highway without any ceremony. Even today burial is separate. The suicide was declared a felon (felo de se) and his property reverted to the Crown. Only in 1870 was this provision abolished together with all confiscations for felony. To be sure, the excessive character of the punishment had made it inapplicable for a long time before; the jury evaded the law, usually by declaring that the suicide had acted in a moment of insanity and was therefore irresponsible. But the act is still designated as a crime; whenever committed it is regularly reported and sentenced, and the attempt is punished in principle. According to Ferri, even in 1889, 106 legal proceedings were instituted for the offence and 84 sentences of condemnation passed in England alone. This is still more the case with complicity.

Michelet relates that at Zurich the corpse was formerly subject to horrible treatment. If the man had stabbed himself, a bit of wood in which the dagger was fixed was driven into the body near the head; if he had drowned himself, he was buried under five feet of water in the sand. In Prussia until the Penal Code of 1871, burial had to be without any display and without religious ceremony. The new German penal code still punishes complicity with three years of imprisonment (art. 216). In Austria, the old canonical prescriptions are almost completely observed.

Russian law is more severe. If the suicide seems not to have acted under the influence of mental disturbance, chronic or temporary, his will is annulled and all the material dispositions he made in anticipation of death are likewise annulled. Christian burial is refused him. The mere attempt is punished by a fine which is fixable by ecclesiastical authority. Finally, whoever incites another to kill himself or helps him carry out his resolve in any way, as by supplying him with the necessary instruments, is treated as an accomplice of premeditated homicide. The Spanish Code, besides religious and moral penalties, imposes confiscation of property and punishes any complicity.

Finally, the Penal Code of the State of New York, though of recent date (1881), terms suicide a crime. To be sure, in spite of this, punishment has been given up for practical reasons, since the penalty could in no way affect the guilty person. But the attempt may incur a sentence either of imprisonment up to 2 years, a fine up to $200.00 or both penalties. The mere fact of advising the suicide or favoring its performance is associated with complicity in murder.

Mahometan societies prohibit suicide with equal vigor. “Man,” says Mahomet, “dies only by the will of God according to the book which fixes the term of his life.” “When the term has arrived they cannot delay or hasten it by a single moment.” “We have decreed that death shall strike you each in turn and no one shall anticipate us.” Nothing, in fact, is more contrary to the general spirit of Mahometan civilization than suicide; for the virtue set above all others is absolute submission to the divine will, the docile resignation “which makes one endure all patiently.” As an act of insubordination and revolt suicide could therefore only be regarded as a grave offense to fundamental duty.

If we turn from modern societies to the historically earlier ones of the Greco-Latin city-states, we find legislation concerning suicide there also, but not based wholly on the same principle. Suicide was only considered illegal if it was not authorized by the state. Thus at Athens a man who had killed himself was punished with “atimia” for having committed an injustice to the city; the honors of regular burial were denied him; also his hand was cut from his body and buried separately. It was the same at Thebes with variations in detail, and also at Cyprus. The rule was so severe at Sparta that Aristodemus was punished for the way he sought and found death at the battle of Plataea. But these punishments were applicable only when the person had killed himself without having previously asked permission of the proper authorities. At Athens, if he asked authority of the Senate before killing himself, stating the reasons which made life intolerable to him, and if his request was regularly granted, suicide was considered a legitimate act. Libanius reports some precepts on the matter, the period of which he does not state, but which were really enforced at Athens; besides, he praises these laws very highly and asserts that they had the desired effects. They read as follows: “Whoever no longer wishes to live shall state his reasons to the Senate, and after having received permission shall abandon life. If your existence is hateful to you, die; if you are overwhelmed by fate, drink the hemlock. If you are bowed with grief, abandon life. Let the unhappy man recount his misfortune, let the magistrate supply him with the remedy, and his wretchedness will come to an end.” The same law is found at Ceos. It was carried to Marseilles by the Greek colonists who founded the city. The magistrates had a supply of poison, the necessary quantity of which they gave to all who, after having told the Council of the Six Hundred the reasons they thought they had for killing themselves received its authorization.

We are less well informed concerning the provisions of early Roman law: the fragments of the law of the XII Tables which have come down to us do not mention suicide. But since this Code was largely inspired by Greek legislation it probably contained similar provisions. At least, in his commentary on the Aeneid, Servius tells us that according to the laws of the pontiffs, whoever had hung himself was deprived of burial. The statutes of a religious confraternity of Lanuvium prescribed the same penalty. According to the annalist Cassius Hermina, quoted by Servius, Tarquin the Proud, to combat an epidemic of suicides, ordered the bodies of the dead crucified after torture and left a prey to birds and wild beasts. The custom of denying burial to suicides seems to have persisted, at least in principle, for in the Digest one reads: Non soient autem lugeri suspendiosi nec qui manus sibi intulerunt, non taedio vitae, sed mala conscientia.

But according to a text of Quintilian until a rather late period there was an institution at Rome similar to the one just mentioned in Greece, intended to modify the severity of the above provisions. The citizen who wished to kill himself had to submit his reasons to the Senate, which decided upon their acceptability and even determined the kind of death. What makes it probable that some such practice really existed at Rome is that something like it survived in the army even under the emperors. The soldier who tried to kill himself to avoid service was punished with death; but if he could prove that he was impelled by some plausible reason, he was only dismissed from the army. If, finally, his act was one of remorse for some military fault, his will was annulled and his property reverted to the public treasury. There is certainly no doubt that at Rome consideration of the motives leading to suicide always played a preponderant role in the moral or judicial estimation of it. Hence the precept: “Et merito, si sine causa sibi manus intulit, puniendus est: qui enim sibi non pepercit, multo minus aliis parcet. The public conscience, while reproving it as a general rule, reserved the right to authorize it in certain cases. Such a principle is close kin to that which forms the basis of the institution of which Quintilian speaks; and it was so fundamental in Roman legislation concerning suicide that it remained even under the emperors. In time, however, the list of legitimate excuses lengthened. Finally there was practically only one causa injusta: the wish to escape the consequences of a criminal sentence. There was even a moment when the law excluding this from tolerance seems not to have been applied.

If from the level of the city-state, we descend to the primitive peoples among whom altruistic suicide flourishes, it is hard to state anything exactly concerning the legislation that may obtain there. The complacency with which suicide is considered there, however, makes it probable that it is not formally forbidden. Yet it is possible that it is not absolutely tolerated in all cases. But however this may be, the fact remains that among all the societies above this lower level, none is known where the individual is unreservedly granted the right to kill himself. In both Greece and Italy, to be sure, there was a time when the old regulations concerning suicide became almost entirely a dead letter. But this was not until the city-state regime itself began to decline. This belated tolerance cannot be referred to as an example for imitation; for it is clearly interrelated with the serious disturbances which then afflicted these societies. It is the symptom of a morbid condition.

Such general reprobation, except for these cases of retrogression, is even in itself an instructive fact which should check moralists too much inclined to indulgence. An author must have great faith in the strength of his logic to venture such a revolt, in the name of a system, against the moral conscience of humanity; or, if he considers the prohibition of suicide founded on the past and advocates its abolition only for the immediate present, he should first prove that some profound change in the basic conditions of collective life has occurred recently.

A more striking conclusion springs from our sketch, practically excluding the possibility of such a proof. Regardless of differences in detail in repressive measures of different peoples, legislation on the subject clearly passed through two chief phases. In the first, the individual is forbidden to destroy himself on his own authority; but the State may permit him to do so. The act is immoral only when it is wholly private and without collaboration through the organs of collective life. Under specific circumstances, society yields slightly and absolves what it condemns on principle. In the second period, condemnation is absolute and universal. The power to dispose of a human life, except when death is the punishment for a crime, is withheld not merely from the person concerned but from society itself. It is henceforth a right denied to collective as well as to private disposition. Suicide is thought immoral in and for itself, whoever they may be who participate in it. Thus, with the progress of history the prohibition, instead of being relaxed, only becomes more strict. If the public conscience seems less assured in its opinion of this matter today, therefore, this uncertainty may rise from fortuitous and passing causes; for it is wholly unlikely that moral evolution should so far reverse itself after having developed in a single direction for centuries.

The ideas that set it in this direction are in fact still alive. It has occasionally been said that if suicide is and should be forbidden, it is because a man evades his obligations towards society by killing himself. But if we were moved only by this thought we, like the Greeks, should leave society free to abrogate a prohibition issued only for its own benefit. If we refuse it this authority, it is because we see in the suicide more than an unscrupulous debtor to society. A creditor may always remit a debt by which he benefits. Besides, if this were the only reason for disapproving suicide, the reprobation should be more formal the more strictly the individual is subject to the State; so that it would be at its height in lower societies. On the contrary, its rigor increases with the growth of individual as contrasted with State rights. If it has become so formal and severe in Christian societies, this is not because of the idea of the State held by these people but because of their new conception of the human personality. It has become sacred, even most sacred in their eyes, something which no one is to offend. Of course, even under the city-state regime the individual’s existence was no longer as self-effacing as among primitive tribes. Then it was accorded a social value, but one supposed to belong wholly to the State. The city-state could therefore dispose of him freely without the individual having the same right over himself. But today he has acquired a kind of dignity which places him above himself as well as above society. So long as his conduct has not caused him to forfeit the title of man, he seems to us to share in some degree in that quality sui generis ascribed by every religion to its gods which renders them inviolable by everything mortal. He has become tinged with religious value; man has become a god for men. Therefore, any attempt against his life suggests sacrilege. Suicide is such an attempt. No matter who strikes the blow, it causes scandal by violation of the sacrosanct quality within us which we must respect in ourselves as well as in others.

Hence, suicide is rebuked for derogating from this cult of human personality on which all our morality rests. Proof of this explanation is the difference between our view and that of the nations of antiquity. Once suicide was thought only a simple civil wrong committed against the State; religion had little or no interest in the matter. Now it has become an act essentially involving religion. The judges condemning it have been church councils, and lay power in punishing it has only followed and imitated ecclesiastical authority. Because we have an immortal soul in us, a spark of divinity, we must now be sacred to ourselves. We belong completely to no temporal being because we are kin to God.

But if this is why suicide has been classed among illicit actions, should we not henceforth consider the condemnation to be without basis? It seems that scientific criticism cannot concede the least value to these mystical conceptions, nor admit that man contains anything whatever that is superhuman. Reasoning thus, Ferri in his Omicidio-suicidio thought himself justified in regarding all prohibitions of suicide as survivals from the past, doomed to disappear. Considering it absurd from the rationalist point of view that the individual could have an extra-personal aim, he deduces that we are always free to renounce the advantages of community existence by renouncing life itself. The right to live seems to him logically to imply the right to die.

But this method of argument draws its conclusion too abruptly from form to content, from the verbal expression through which we translate our feeling to the feeling itself. It is true that, both intrinsically and abstractly, the religious symbols by means of which we explain the respect inspired in us by human personality are not adequate to reality, and this is easily proveable; but from all this it does not follow that this respect is itself unreasonable. On the contrary, its preponderant role in our law and in our morality must warn us against such an interpretation. Instead of taking a literal interpretation of this conception, let us examine it in itself, let us discover its make-up, and we shall see that in spite of the crudeness of the popular formula the conception nevertheless has objective value.

Indeed, the sort of transcendency we ascribe to human personality is not a quality peculiar to it. It is found elsewhere. It is nothing but the imprint of all really intense collective sentiments upon matters related to them. Just because these feelings derive from the collective the aims to which they direct our actions can only be collective. Society has needs beyond our own. The acts inspired in us by its needs therefore do not depend on our individual inclinations; their aim is not our personal interest, but rather involves sacrifices and privations. When I fast, when I accept mortification to be pleasing in God’s sight, when I undertake some inconvenience out of respect for a tradition the meaning and import of which are usually unknown to me, when I pay my taxes, when I give any labor or life to the State, I renounce something of myself; and by the resistance offered by our egoism to these renunciations, we readily see that they are forced from us by a power to which we have submitted. Even when we defer gladly to its commands we feel that our conduct is guided by a sentiment of reverence for something greater than ourselves. However willingly we obey the voice dictating this abnegation, we feel sure that its tone is imperative beyond that of instinct. That is why we cannot indisputably consider it our own, though it speaks within our consciences. We ascribe it to other sources, as we do our sensations; we project it outside of ourselves, referring it to an existence we think of as exterior and superior to ourselves, since it commands us and we obey. Of course, whatever seems to us to come from the same origin shares the same quality. Thus we have been forced to imagine a world beyond this one and to people it with realities of a different order.

Such is the source of all the ideas of transcendency which form the bases of religions and morals; for moral obligation is explicable only in this way. To be sure, the definite form in which we usually clothe these ideas is without scientific value. Whether we ascribe them to a personal being of a special nature or to some abstract force which we vaguely hypostasize under the title of moral ideal, they are solely metaphorical conceptions, giving no adequate explanation of the facts. But the process which they symbolize is none the less real. It remains true that in every case we are urged to act by an authority exceeding ourselves, namely society, and that the aims to which it attaches us thus enjoy real moral supremacy. If so, all the objections applicable to the common conceptions by which men have tried to represent this sensed supremacy to themselves cannot lessen its reality. Such criticism is superficial, not reaching to the basis of things. If it is demonstrable that exaltation of human personality is one of the aims pursued, and which should be pursued, by modern societies, all moral regulation deriving from this principle is justified by that fact itself, whatever the manner of its usual justification. Though the reasons satisfying the crowd are open to criticism, they need only be transposed into another idiom to be given their full import.

Now, not only is this aim really one of the aims of modern societies, but it is a law of history that peoples increasingly detach themselves from every other objective. Originally society is everything, the individual nothing. Consequently, the strongest social feelings are those connecting the individual with the collectivity; society is its own aim. Man is considered only an instrument in its hands; he seems to draw all his rights from it and has no counter-prerogative, because nothing higher than it exists. But gradually things change. As societies become greater in volume and density, they increase in complexity, work is divided, individual differences multiply, and the moment approaches when the only remaining bond among the members of a single human group will be that they are all men. Under such conditions the body of collective sentiments inevitably attaches itself with all its strength to its single remaining object, communicating to this object an incomparable value by so doing. Since human personality is the only thing that appeals unanimously to all hearts, since its enhancement is the only aim that can be collectively pursued, it inevitably acquires exceptional value in the eyes of all. It thus rises far above all human aims, assuming a religious nature.

This cult of man is something, accordingly, very different from the egoistic individualism above referred to, which leads to suicide. Far from detaching individuals from society and from every aim beyond themselves, it unites them in one thought, makes them servants of one work. For man, as thus suggested to collective affection and respect, is not the sensual, experiential individual that each one of us represents, but man in general, ideal humanity as conceived by each people at each moment of its history. None of us wholly incarnates this ideal, though none is wholly a stranger to it. So we have, not to concentrate each separate person upon himself and his own interests, but to subordinate him to the general interests of humankind. Such an aim draws him beyond himself; impersonal and disinterested, it is above all individual personalities; like every ideal, it can be conceived of only as superior to and dominating reality. This ideal even dominates societies, being the aim on which all social activity depends. This is why it is no longer the right of these societies to dispose of this ideal freely. While we recognize that they too have their reason for existence, they have subjected themselves to the jurisdiction of this ideal and no longer have the right to ignore it; still less, to authorize men themselves to do so. Our dignity as moral beings is therefore no longer the property of the city-state; but it has not for that reason become our property, and we have not acquired the right to do what we wish with it. How could we have such a right if society, the existence greater than ourselves, does not have it?

Under these conditions suicide must be classed among immoral acts; for in its main principle it denies this religion of humanity. A man who kills himself, the saying goes, does wrong only to himself and there is no occasion for the intervention of society; for so goes the ancient maxim Volenti non fit injuria. This is an error. Society is injured because the sentiment is offended on which its most respected moral maxims today rest, a sentiment almost the only bond between its members, and which would be weakened if this offense could be committed with impunity. How could this sentiment maintain the least authority if the moral conscience did not protest its violation? From the moment that the human person is and must be considered something sacred, over which neither the individual nor the group has free disposal, any attack upon it must be forbidden. No matter that the guilty person and the victim are one and the same; the social evil springing from the act is not affected merely by the author being the one who suffers. If violent destruction of a human life revolts us as a sacrilege, in itself and generally, we cannot tolerate it under any circumstances. A collective sentiment which yielded so far would soon lose all force.

Of course, this does not mean that we must revert to the ferocious penalties imposed on suicide during the past centuries. They were established at a time when, under the influence of temporary circumstances, the entire system of public repression was enforced with excessive severity. But the principle that homicide of one’s self should be reproved must be maintained. It remains to determine by what external tokens this reprobation is to be shown. Are moral sanctions enough or must there be juridical ones, and if so, what? This is a question of application which shall be treated in the next chapter.

II

But in order better to decide to what extent suicide partakes of immorality, let us examine first its relation with other immoral acts, especially crimes and misdemeanors.

According to Lacassagne there is consistently an inverse relation between the variations of suicide and those of crimes against property (qualified thefts, incendiarism, fraudulent bankruptcies, etc.). This thesis was defended in his name by one of his pupils, Dr. Chaussinand, in his Contribution a l’étude de la statistique criminelle But there are absolutely no proofs for it. According to the author, the two curves need only to be compared to show that they vary inversely with one another. Actually, no trace of relation, direct or inverse, can be seen between them. No doubt, property crimes have decreased since 1854 while suicides are increasing. But this decrease is in part fictitious; it is due merely to the fact that at about that time judges began to send certain crimes before courts of summary jurisdiction, in order to remove them from the jurisdiction of courts of assizes, by which they had hitherto been judiciable. A certain number of offences therefore vanished from then on from the list of crimes, only to reappear in that of misdemeanors. Crimes against property have benefited most by this now established departure in jurisprudence. So that, if statistics suggest a smaller number, this decrease is probably due merely to a procedure in bookkeeping.

But no one can decide whether the decrease was real; for though starting from 1854 the two curves follow an inverse direction, from 1826 to 1854 the curve of crimes against property either rises conjointly with that of suicides; though less rapidly, or is stationary. From 1831 to 1835 an average of 5,095 indicted was annually recorded; this rose to 5,732 during the following period, was still 4,918 in 1841-45, 4,992 from 1846 to 1850, a reduction of only 2 per cent from 1830. Besides, the general shape of the two curves precludes any thought of comparison. That of property-crimes is very erratic; it makes abrupt leaps from year to year; its apparently capricious changes clearly depend on a quantity of fortuitous circumstances. That of suicide, on the contrary, rises regularly and uniformly; with rare exceptions there are neither abrupt jumps nor sudden falls. Ascent is steady and progressive. Between phenomena the development of which is so different no connection of any sort can exist.

Moreover, Lacassagne seems to have been alone in his opinion. But it is otherwise with another idea, relating suicide with crimes against persons and especially with homicide. It numbers many defenders and deserves serious examination.

As early as 1833 Guerry pointed out that crimes against persons are twice as numerous in the southern as in the northern departments, while the reverse is true of suicide. Later, Despine estimated that in the 14 departments where sanguinary crimes are most frequent there were only 30 suicides per million inhabitants, whereas 82 occurred in 14 other departments where such crimes were much more infrequent. The same author adds that in the Seine only 17 crimes against persons are found per 100 proceedings and an average of 427 suicides per million, while in Corsica the proportion of the former is 83 per cent and that of the latter only 18 per million inhabitants.

These remarks, however, had attracted no notice until the Italian school of criminology took them up. Ferri and Morselli especially made them the basis of an entire theory.

According to them the polar character of suicide and homicide is an absolutely general law. Whether as regards their geographical distribution or their evolution in time, they are always found changing inversely with one another. But this antagonism, once granted, may be explained in either of two ways. Either homicide and suicide form two opposite currents, so opposed that one can gain only through the other’s loss, or they are two different channels of a single stream, fed by a single source, which consequently cannot move in one direction without receding to an equal extent in the other. The Italian criminologists adopted the second of these explanations. In suicide and homicide they see two manifestations of the same state, two effects of the same cause, expressing itself at times in one form, at times in another, but unable to assume both simultaneously.

They chose this interpretation because, according to them, the inversion of the phenomena in certain respects does not exclude a certain parallelism. While they vary inversely in terms of some conditions, other conditions make them vary not inversely. Thus, says Morselli, temperature has the same effect on both; they reach their maximum at the same time of year, the beginning of the hot season; both occur more frequently among men than among women; both, finally, according to Ferri, increase with age. Therefore, while opposite in certain aspects they are partially of the same nature. Now, the factors under the influence of which they react similarly, are all individual; for they either consist directly of certain organic states (such as age or sex), or belong to the cosmic environment which can affect the moral individual only through the medium of the physical individual. Individual conditions would thus serve to bind suicide and homicide together. The psychological constitution predisposing to one or the other is supposed to be the same: the two inclinations are one. Following Lombroso, Ferri and Morselli have even tried to define this temperament. It is supposedly characterized by a decay of the organism, which puts the person at a disadvantage, in the struggle of life. Both the murderer and the suicide accordingly are degenerates and impotents. Equally unable to play a useful part in society, they are consequently doomed to defeat.

But, supposedly, this single predisposition which itself inclines no more one way than the other prefers the form of homicide or of suicide depending on the nature of the social environment; and so these contrasting phenomena are produced which, though real, nevertheless conceal a fundamental identity. Where customs generally are gentle and pacific, where the shedding of blood is abhorred, the defeated person will resign himself, confess his impotence, and anticipating the effects of natural selection will withdraw from the fight by withdrawing from life. Where average morality has a ruder character and human life is less respected, he will revolt, declare war on society and kill, instead of killing himself. In short, the murder of one’s self and of another are two violent acts. But sometimes the violence which is their source, finding no resistance in the social environment, overruns it and then it becomes homicide. Sometimes, incapable of outward expression because of the pressure of the public conscience, it reverts to its source, and then the same person from whom it springs is its victim.

Suicide is, then, a transformed and attenuated homicide. In this view, it seems almost salutary; for if it is not a good, it is at least a lesser evil, which spares us a greater. It would even seem that one should not try to restrain its scope by prohibitive measures; for by so doing one would be giving rein to homicide. It is a safety-valve which is useful to leave open. In short, suicide would have the very great advantage of ridding us of a number of useless or harmful persons without social intervention, and hence in the most simple and economical way. Is it not better to let them put themselves out of the way voluntarily and quietly, than to force society to eject them from its midst by violence?

Is this ingenious thesis well-founded? The question is twofold and each part must be examined separately. Are the psychological conditions of crime and suicide the same? Is there a polarity between the social conditions on which they depend?

III

Three facts have been alleged to prove the psychological unity of the two phenomena.

First there is the similar effect which sex is supposed to have upon suicide and homicide. To be exact, this influence of sex is an effect rather of social than of organic causes. Woman kills herself less, and she kills others less, not because of physiological differences from man but because she does not participate in collective life in the same way. Moreover, she is far from having the same antipathy to these two forms of immorality. Indeed we are inclined to forget that there are murders of which she has a monopoly, infanticides, abortions and poisonings. Whenever homicide is within her range she commits it as often or more often than man. According to Oettingen, half the total number of domestic murders is attributable to her. So there is no reason to suppose that she has greater respect for another’s life because of her congenital constitution; she merely lacks as frequent opportunities, being less deeply involved in the struggle of life. The causes impelling to sanguinary crimes affect her less than man because she is less within their sphere of influence. For the same reason she is less exposed to accidental forms of death; out of 100 of this sort, only 20 are women.

Besides, if a single classification is made to cover all sorts of intentional homicide—premeditated and unpremeditated murders, parricides, infanticides, poisonings—woman’s share in the total is still very high. In France, 38 or 39 out of 100 such crimes are committed by women, and even 42 if abortions are included. In Germany, the proportion is 51 per cent, in Austria 52 percent. To be sure, involuntary homicides are omitted in this calculation, but homicide is truly homicide only when it is intentional. On the other hand, the characteristically feminine forms of murder, such as infanticides, abortions, and domestic murders, are by their nature hard to discover. Many therefore are committed which escape justice and, accordingly, statistics. Remembering that woman must probably benefit by the same indulgence in preliminary investigations as she certainly does in sentences, where she is much more often acquitted than man, it is clear, finally, that aptitude for homicide cannot be very different in the two sexes. On the contrary, we know how great is woman’s immunity to suicide.

The influence of age on each phenomenon shows equal differences. According to Ferri, homicide and suicide both become more frequent as man advances in life. To be sure, Morselli expresses the opposite view. The truth is that there is neither inversion nor agreement. While suicide increases regularly until old age, premeditated and unpremeditated murder reach their height in maturity, at about 30 or 35 years of age, and then decrease. This appears in Table XXXI. Not the shadow of proof appears here that suicide and sanguinary crime are of identical or opposite character.

The effect of temperature remains to be considered. If all crimes against persons are combined, the curve thus obtained seems to confirm the theory of the Italian school. It rises until June and descends regularly to December, like that of suicides. But this results merely from the fact that under this common expression of crimes against persons not only homicides, but indecent assaults and rape are included. Since these crimes reach their maximum in June and are much more numerous than attempts against life, they give the curve its shape. But they have no relation to homicide; so that if we wish to know the variations of the latter at different times of year, we must isolate it from the others. If this is done, and especially if we carefully distinguish from each other the different forms of homicidal criminality, no trace of the supposed parallelism is found (see Table XXXII).

TABLE XXXI—Comparative Development of Murders (Premeditated and Unpremeditated) and Suicides at Different Ages, in France(1887)

TABLE XXXII—Monthly Variations of the Different Forms of Homicidal Criminality * (1827-1870)

Indeed, while the growth of suicide is constant and regular from January to about June, like its decrease during the rest of the year, premeditated and unpremeditated murder, and infanticide oscillate from month to month most capriciously. Not only is the general development different, but neither the maxima nor the minima coincide. Unpremeditated murders have two maxima, one in February and the other in August. Premeditated murders also have two, one being the same, February, but the other is in November. The maximum for infanticides is in May; for manslaughter in August and September. If the seasonal, not the monthly variations are calculated, the divergencies are equally striking. Autumn has almost as many unpremeditated murders as Summer (1,968 as against 1,974) and Winter has more than Spring. For premeditated murder, Winter leads (2,621), Autumn follows (2,596), then Summer (2,478) and finally Spring (2,287). For infanticide Spring surpasses the other seasons (2,111) and is followed by Winter (1,939). For manslaughter, Summer and Autumn are on the same level (2,854 for one and 2,845 for the other); then comes Spring (2,690) and, not far away, Winter (2,653). The distribution of suicide is entirely different, as we have seen.

Besides, if the tendency to suicide were only a repressed tendency to murder, as soon as murderers and assassins are arrested and their violent instincts can no longer find external expression, they should become their own victims. The homicidal tendency should therefore be transformed into the suicidal tendency under the influence of imprisonment. On the contrary, it seems from the testimony of several observers that great criminals rarely kill themselves. Cazauvieilh gathered from the physicians of our different convict prisons information concerning the frequency of suicide among convicts. At Rochefort only a single case had been observed in thirty years; none at Toulon, where the population was usually from 3,000 to 4,000 ( 1818-1834). At Brest the results obtained were a little different; in seventeen years, in an average population of about 3,000, 13 suicides had been committed, making an annual rate of 21 per 100,000. Although higher than the preceding, this figure is not excessive, since it refers to a population chiefly male and adult. According to Dr. Lisle, “out of 9,320 deaths registered in convict prisons from 1816 to 1837 inclusively, only 6 suicides were recorded.” From a study by Dr. Ferrus it appears that only 30 suicides occurred in seven years in the different regional jails, in an average population of 15,111 prisoners. But the proportion was still lower in the convict prisons, where only 5 suicides were recorded from 1838 to 1845 in an average population of 7,041. Brierre de Boismont confirms the fact last mentioned, adding: “Professional assassins and great criminals have less frequent recourse to this violent means of escaping penal atonement than prisoners of less perversity.“ Dr. Leroy similarly remarks that “professional rogues, habitual convicts” rarely make attempts upon their own lives.

Two statistical records, one quoted by Morselli and the other by Lombroso, do indeed tend to prove that prisoners are in general unusually disposed to suicide. But as these documents do not distinguish murderers and assassins from other criminals, nothing can be concluded as to the question before us. They even seem rather to confirm the above observations. In fact they prove that imprisonment by itself develops a very strong tendency to suicide. Even if no account is made of persons who kill themselves immediately upon arrest and before condemnation, a considerable number of suicides remains which can only be attributed to the influence of prison life. But then the imprisoned murderer ought to have a very pronounced disposition for voluntary death, if the aggravation resulting from his mere imprisonment were reenforced by the congenital predisposition ascribed to him. The fact that, from this point of view, he is rather below than above the average, is therefore hardly favorable to the hypothesis that merely because of his temperament he has a natural affinity for suicide, ever ready to manifest itself as soon as circumstances favor its development. Besides, we do not mean to affirm that he enjoys a real immunity; the information at our disposal is not sufficient to settle the question. Possibly, under certain conditions, great criminals hold their lives fairly cheaply and surrender them without great reluctance. But at least the fact does not have the generality and inevitability that the Italian thesis logically involves. And this is all we had to establish.

IV

But it remains to discuss this school’s second proposition. Granted that homicide and suicide do not stem from the same psychological state, we must see if there is any real antagonism between the social conditions on which they depend.

The question is more complex than the Italian authors and several of their adversaries have thought. Certainly, the law of inversion is not verified in a number of cases. Fairly often the two phenomena develop in a parallel manner instead of repulsing and excluding one another. Thus in France unpremeditated murders have shown a certain tendency to increase since the end of the war of 1870. In annual average they numbered only 105 during the years 1861-65; from 1871 to 1876 they rose to 163 and during the same time premeditated murders rose from 175 to 201. Now suicides were increasing in considerable proportions at the same time. The same phenomenon had occurred during the years 1840-50. In Prussia suicides, which from 1865 to 1870 had not gone beyond 3,658, reached 4,459 in 1876, 5,042 in 1878, an increase of 36 per cent. Premeditated and unpremeditated murders followed the same course; from 151 in 1869 they rose successively to 166 in 1874, 221 in 1875, 253 in 1878, an increase of 67 per cent. The same thing happend in Saxony. Before 1870 suicides oscillated between 600 and 700; only once, in 1868, there were 800. Beginning with 1876 they rose to 981, then to 1,114, to 1,126, until finally in 1880 they were 1,171. In parallel manner attempts at murder rose from 637 in 1873 to 2,232 in 1878. In Ireland, from 1865 to 1880, suicide increased 29 per cent, and homicide also increased and in almost the same degree (23 per cent). In Belgium, from 1841 to 1885, homicides increased from 47 to 139 and suicides from 240 to 670; an increase of 195 per cent for the first and 178 per cent for the second. These figures agree so little with the law that Ferri is reduced to questioning the exactness of the Belgian statistics. But even if we confine ourselves to the most recent years, the data for which are least suspect, the same result is reached. From 1874 to 1885 the increase for homicides is 51 per cent (139 cases as against 92) and, for suicides, 79 per cent (670 cases as against 374).

The geographical distribution of the two phenomena gives rise to similar comment. The French departments with most suicides are: the Seine, Seine-et-Marne, Seine-et-Oise, Marne. Now, though they are not also highest in homicide, they still occupy a fairly high rank, the Seine being 26th in unpremeditated murders and 17th in premeditated murders, Seine-et-Marne 33rd and 14th, Seine-et-Oise 15th and 24th, Marne 27th and 21st respectively. Var, which is 10th for suicides, is 5th for premeditated and 6th for unpremeditated murders. In Bouches-du-Rhône, where suicides are frequent, murders are likewise so; it is in the 5th rank for unpremeditated and the 6th for premeditated. On the suicide-map as on that for homicide, Ile-de-France is represented by a dark area like that of the strip containing the Mediterranean departments, with the only difference that the former region is of a less deep shade on the map of homicides than on the suicide-map and that the reverse is true of the second region. Likewise in Italy, Rome which is the third judicial district for suicides is also the fourth for qualified homicides. Finally, as we have seen, suicides are often very numerous in lower societies where there is little respect for life.

But incontestable as these facts are, and important as it is not to lose sight of them, there are contradictory facts equally stable and even much more numerous. If the two phenomena agree at least partially in certain cases, in others they are obviously in opposition:

1. Although at certain moments during the century they move in the same direction, the two curves taken as wholes contrast very clearly, at least where they can be followed for any considerable period. In France, from 1826 to 1880, suicide regularly increases, as we have seen; homicide on the contrary tends to decrease, though less rapidly. In 1826-30 there were on the average 279 annual indictments for unpremeditated murder, only 160 in 1876-80 and, during the interval, the number had fallen to 121 in 1861-65 and to 119 in 1856-60. At two periods, about 1845 and just after the war, there was a tendency to rise; but if these secondary oscillations are disregarded, the general tendency to decrease is clear. The diminution is 43 per cent, all the more noticeable since the population increased by 16 per cent at the same time.

Regression is less clear for premeditated murder. There were 258 indicted in 1826-30, there were still 239 in 1876-80. The fall is notable only if the increase in population is taken into account. This difference in the evolution of this type of murder has nothing surprising about it. It is actually a crime of mixed nature, having elements in common with unpremeditated murder but also different ones; in part it springs from other causes. Sometimes it is merely a more deliberate and intentional murder, sometimes only the incident of a crime against property. On the last score it depends on other factors than those determining homicide. These are not the sum of the varied tendencies which lead to the shedding of blood but the very different motives which lie at the root of robbery. The dual nature of both crimes was obvious even in the table of their monthly and seasonal variations. Premeditated murder reaches its height in Winter and especially in November, just as do attempts at robbery. The evolution of the trend of homicide cannot therefore be best observed through the variations of premeditated murder; its general orientation is better brought out by the curve of unpremeditated murder.

The same phenomenon is observed in Prussia. In 1834, 368 preliminary investigations were instituted for murders or manslaughter, or one per 29,000 inhabitants; in 1851 there were only 257, one for 53,000 inhabitants. The movement then continued though a little more slowly. In 1852 there was still one preliminary investigation for 76,000 inhabitants; in 1873 only one for 109,000. In Italy, from 1875 to 1890, the decrease in simple and qualified homicides was 18 per cent (2,660 as against 3,280) while suicides increased 80 per cent. Where homicide does not lose, neither does it gain. In England, from 1860 to 1865, there were annually 359 cases, but only 329 in 1881-85; in Austria there were 528 in 1866-70, but only 510 in 1881-85, and if in these countries homicide were differentiated from premeditated murder, the regression would probably be more marked. During the same time, suicide was increasing in all these States.

Nevertheless, Tarde undertook to show that this diminution of homicide in France was only apparent. It is supposed to be due simply to the failure to combine cases judged by the courts of assize and those classified by the lawyers as not to be carried further, which ended in decrees of insufficient grounds. According to Tarde, the number of murders which were thus not prosecuted and which for this reason do not figure in the totals of judicial statistics has grown constantly; by adding them to like crimes on which judgment has been passed, a constant increase would appear instead of the regression above mentioned. Unfortunately, his proof of this assertion depends on too ingenious an arrangement of the figures. He merely compares the number of premeditated and unpremeditated murders not deferred to jurisdiction at the courts of assize during the five years 1861-65 with that of the years 1876-80 and 1880-85, and shows that the second and especially the third is greater than the first. But it happens that the period 1861-65 is the one of all the century when there were much the fewest such cases estopped before judgement; the number is exceptionally minute, for unknown reasons. So it was the most improper period for comparison possible. Moreover, a law cannot be arrived at from the comparison of two or three figures. If Tarde, instead of choosing such a starting point, had observed the variations of the number of these cases over a longer period, he would have reached a wholly different conclusion. The following is the result suggested by doing so.

The variation of the figures is not very regular; but from 1835 to 1885 they have perceptibly decreased in spite of the rise about 1876. The diminution is 37 per cent for unpremeditated murders and 24 per cent for premeditated. Nothing therefore permits the conclusion that there was an increase in the criminality in question.

2. If there are countries which accumulate suicides and homicides, it is never in the same proportions; the two manifestations never reach their maximum intensity at the same point. It is even a general rule that where homicide is very common it confers a sort of immunity against suicide.

Spain, Ireland and Italy are the three countries of Europe where there is least suicide; the first has 17 cases per million inhabitants, the second 21 and the third 37. Inversely, nowhere else is murder so common. These are the only countries where the number of murders exceeds that of voluntary deaths. Spain has thrice as many of one as of the other (1,484 homicides on the average during the years 1885-89 and only 514 suicides); Ireland twice as many (225 of one and 116 of the other); Italy one and a half times as many (2,322 as against 1,437). On the contrary, France and Prussia abound in suicides (160 and 260 cases per million); homicides there are only one-tenth as numerous: France has only 734 cases and Prussia 459 per average year for the period 1882-88.

The same proportions appear within each country. In Italy, on the map of suicides, the entire North is dark, the South absolutely clear; but exactly the reverse is true on the map of homicides. Moreover, if the Italian provinces are divided into two classes according to their suicide-rates and if the average rate of homicides in each is sought, the contrast appears most strikingly:

1st class   From   4.1 suicides to 30 per million   271.9 homicides per million

2nd class   From 30  suicides to 80 per million   95.2 homicides per million

The province where there are most murders is Calabria, with 69 qualified homicides per million; there is none where suicide is so rare.

In France, the departments where most murders are committed are Corsica, Pyrénées-Orientales, Lozère and Ardèche. With respect to suicides, Corsica falls from first place to 85th, Pyrénées-Orientales to 63rd, Lozère to 83rd and Ardèche to 68th.

In Austria suicide is at its maximum in Lower Austria, in Bohemia and in Moravia, while it is rare in Carniola and Dalmatia. On the contrary Dalmatia has 79 homicides per million inhabitants and Carniola 57.4, while Lower Austria has only 14, Bohemia 11 and Moravia 15.

3. We have shown that wars have a restraining effect on the development of suicide. They have the same effect on robberies, frauds, abuses of confidence, etc. But one crime is an exception: homicide. In France, in 1870, unpremeditated murders which averaged 119 for the years 1866-69 rose abruptly to 133 and then to 224 in 1871, an increase of 88 per cent, falling to 162 in 1872. This increase will appear still more important if we reflect that the age at which most murders are committed is about thirty and that all young men were then with the colors. So that the crimes they would have committed in time of peace do not appear in statistical calculations. No doubt moreover, the confusion of judicial administration must have prevented more than one crime from being known or more than one preliminary investigation from ending in prosecution. If the number of homicides increased in spite of these two causes of diminution, the seriousness of the real rise may be surmised.

In Prussia, likewise, when war broke out against Denmark in 1864, homicides rose from 137 to 169, a level they had not reached since 1854; in 1865 they fell to 153, but rose again in 1866 (159), although the Prussian army had been mobilized. In 1870 a slight fall in comparison with 1869 is registered (151 cases as against 185) which is accentuated in 1871 (136 cases), but how much less than for other crimes! At the same time, robberies qualified as crimes sank by one half, 4,599 in 1870 as against 8,676 in 1869. Moreover, unpremeditated and premeditated murders are included together in these figures; but these two crimes do not have the same significance and we know that in France also only the former increase in wartime. So that if the whole decrease of all sorts of homicides is not greater, one may believe that if premeditated murders were eliminated the unpremeditated would show a considerable rise. Besides, if all cases undoubtedly omitted for the two reasons above mentioned were added, this apparent fall would be reduced to very little. Finally, it is very strange that involuntary murders rose then very perceptibly, from 268 in 1869 to 303 in 1870 and 310 in 1871. Does this not prove that less value was set upon life at that time than in time of peace?

Political crises have the same effect. In France, while the curve of unpremeditated murders had remained stationary from 1840 to 1846, it rose abruptly in 1848 and reached a maximum of 240 in i849. The same thing had already happened during the first years of Louis Philippe’s reign. The struggles of political parties were then very violent. It was just then that unpremeditated murders reached their highest point throughout the entire century. From 204 in 1830 they rose to 264 in 1831, a figure never exceeded; in 1832 they were still 253 and in 1833, 257. In 1834 an abrupt fall occurred which increased steadily; in 1838 there were only 145 cases, a reduction of 44 per cent. During this time suicide was developing in the opposite direction. In 1833 it was at the same level as in 1829 (1,973 cases on the one hand, 1,904 on the other) ; then in 1834 a very rapid rise began. In 1838 the increase was 30 per cent.

4. Suicide is much more urban than rural. The opposite is true of homicide. By combining unpremeditated murders, parricides and infanticides, we find that in 1887, 11.1 crimes of this nature were committed in the country and only 8.6 in cities. In 1880 the figures are about the same; respectively 11.0 and 9.3.

5. We have seen that Catholicism reduces the tendency to suicide while Protestantism increases it. Inversely, homicides are much more frequent in Catholic countries than among Protestant peoples:

The contrast between these two groups of societies is especially striking as regards simple homicide.

The same contrast appears within Germany. The districts most above the average are all Catholic: Posen (18.2 premeditated and unpremeditated murders per million inhabitants), Donau (16.7), Bromberg (14.8), Upper and Lower Bavaria (13.0). Within Bavaria, likewise, the fewer Protestants in a province, so much the greater its abundance in homicides:

Only the Upper Palatinate is an exception to the law. Besides, we need only compare the above table with that on page 353 for the inverse proportion between the distribution of suicide and that of homicide to appear clearly.

6. Finally, while family life has a moderating effect upon suicide, it rather stimulates murder. During the years 1884-87, a million married men showed on the average 5.07 murders per year; a million unmarried above 15 years, 12.7. The former therefore seem to enjoy a coefficient of preservation with relation to the latter of about 2.3. Only we must remember that the two categories of persons are not of the same age and that the intensity of the homicidal tendency varies at the different periods of life. The unmarried average from 25 to 30 years, married men about 45. Now the tendency to murder is maximal between 25 and 30 years; a million individuals of this age show 15.4 murders annually while at 45 years the rate is only 6.9. The proportion of the first to the second number is 2.2. Thus, merely because of their greater age, married men would commit only half as many murders as unmarried. Their apparently privileged situation therefore does not depend on the fact that they are married, but on the fact that they are older. Domestic life gives them no immunity.

Not only does it furnish no protection against homicide but it more probably supplies a stimulus to it. It is probable indeed that the married population has, on principle, a higher morality than the unmarried. We believe that it owes this superiority less to matrimonial selection, the effects of which however are not negligible, than to the actual influence of the family on each of its members. A person is almost certainly less well insured morally when isolated and left to himself than when constantly under the beneficent discipline of family surroundings. If then, so far as homicide is concerned, married men are not better off than unmarried men, it is because the moralizing influence they undergo, which should deflect them from all sorts of crime, is partly neutralized by an aggravating influence, which impels them to murder and which must be connected with family life.

By way of summary, then, suicide sometimes coexists with homicide, sometimes they are mutually exclusive; sometimes they react under the same conditions in the same way, sometimes in opposite ways, and the antagonistic cases are the most numerous. How explain these apparently contradictory facts?

The only way to reconcile them is by admitting that there are different sorts of suicide, some of which have a certain kinship to homicide, while it is repugnant to others. For the identical phenomenon cannot possibly behave so differently under the same circumstances. The suicide which varies in the same proportion with murder and that which varies inversely with it cannot be of like nature.

Actually we have shown that there are different types of suicide, the characteristics of which are not at all the same. The conclusion of the preceding book is thus confirmed, while also serving to explain the facts just set forth. They would have sufficed by themselves to suggest the inner diversity of suicide; but the hypothesis ceases to be only an hypothesis when confronted with the results just previously obtained, while these receive a supplementary confirmation from this interconnection. Now that we know the different sorts of suicide and of what they consist, we may even easily perceive which are incompatible with homicide; which, on the contrary, depend partly on the same causes; and why incompatibility is the more common phenomenon.

The type of suicide actually the most widespread and which contributes most to raise the annual total of voluntary deaths is egoistic suicide. It is characterized by a state of depression and apathy produced by exaggerated individuation. The individual no longer cares to live because he no longer cares enough for the only medium which attaches him to reality, that is to say, for society. Having too keen a feeling for himself and his own value, he wishes to be his own only goal, and as such an objective cannot satisfy him, drags out languidly and indifferently an existence which henceforth seems meaningless to him. Homicide depends on opposite conditions. It is a violent act inseparable from passion. Now, whenever society is integrated in such a way that the individuation of its parts is weakly emphasized, the intensity of collective states of conscience raises the general level of the life of the passions; it is even true that no soil is so favorable to the development of the specifically homicidal passions. Where family spirit has retained its ancient strength, offences against the family are regarded as sacrileges which cannot be too cruelly avenged and the vengeance for which cannot be left to third persons. This is the source of the practice of vendetta which still leaves its bloody trace on our Corsica and certain southern countries. Where religious faith is very intense, it often inspires murders and this is also true of political faith.

Moreover and above all, the homicidal current, generally speaking, is more violent the less it is restrained by the public conscience, that is, the more venial attempts against life are considered; and since less weight is attached to them, the less value common morality attaches to the individual and his interests, weak individuation or, to use our term again, a state of excessive altruism, impels to homicides. This is why they are both frequent and little repressed in lower socities. This frequency and the relative indulgence accorded homicides spring from one and the same cause. The less respect there is for individual persons, the more they are exposed to violence, while this violence at the same time appears less criminal. Egoistic suicide and homicide, therefore, spring from antagonistic causes, and consequently it is impossible for the one to develop readily where the other flourishes. Where social passions are strong, men are much less inclined either to idle revery or to cold, epicurean calculation. When man is used to set little value on individual destinies, he is not inclined to much self-interrogation concerning his own destiny. When he cares little for human pain, he feels the weight of his personal sufferings less.

On the contrary, and for the same reasons, altruistic suicide and homicide may get along very well together; for they depend on conditions different only in degree. When one is trained to think little of his own life, he cannot have much regard for another’s. For this reason homicides and voluntary deaths are equally endemic among certain primitive peoples. But the cases of parallelism which we have found among civilized nations probably cannot be attributed to the same source. A state of exaggerated altruism cannot have produced the suicides which we have occasionally found to coexist in great numbers with murders in the most cultivated environments. For altruism must be extraordinarily strong to impel to suicide, even stronger than to give the impulse to homicide. In fact, however low an estimate I put on individual life in general, I shall always value my own individual life more than that of others. All things being equal, the average man tends to respect human personality in himself more than in his fellows; consequently, a more powerful cause is required to destroy this sentiment of respect in the first case than in the second. Now today, outside of some few special environments like the army, the taste for impersonality and renunciation is too little pronounced and the opposite feelings too strong and general to make self-immolation so easy as this. There must therefore be another, more modern form of suicide, equally capable of combination with homicide.

This is anomic suicide. Anomy, in fact, begets a state of exasperation and irritated weariness which may turn against the person himself or another according to circumstances; in the first case, we have suicide, in the second, homicide. The causes determining the direction of such over-excited forces probably depend on the agent’s moral constitution. According to its greater or less resistance, it will incline one way rather than the other. A man of low morality will kill another rather than himself. We have even seen that these two manifestations sometimes occur one after the other and that they are only two aspects of a single act, which shows their close relationship. The exacerbated condition of the individual is then such that it requires two victims to be assuaged.

This is why there exists today, especially in great centers and regions of intense civilization, a certain parallelism between the development of homicide and that of suicide. It is because anomy is in an acute state there. The same cause prevents murders from decreasing as rapidly as suicides increase. Though the advance of individualism closes off one of the sources of homicide, anomy, accompanying economic development, opens another. It is particularly probable that if in France and especially in Prussia the slaying of one’s self and the slaying of others have increased simultaneously since the war, the reason is the increase of moral instability in both countries, though for different causes. This is, finally, also the explanation why antagonism is the commoner relation, in spite of these partial correspondences. Anomic suicide occurs in large numbers only at special points, where industrial and commercial activity are very great. Egoistic suicide is probably the most widespread; but this precludes sanguinary crime.

We thus reach the following conclusion. If suicide and homicide often vary inversely to one another, it is not because they are two different aspects of the same phenomenon; but because in some respects they form two opposed social currents. In these respects they are as mutually exclusive as day and night, just as the diseases of extreme drought preclude those of extreme humidity. If this general opposition still does not completely prevent harmony, it is because certain types of suicide, instead of depending on causes opposed to those which occasion homicide, are on the contrary expressions of the same social condition and develop in the midst of the same moral environment. Besides, it may be anticipated that homicides which coexist with anomic suicide and those which are reconcilable with altruistic suicide cannot be of the same nature; that homicide, therefore, like suicide is not a single, indivisible criminological entity, but must include a variety of species very different from one another. But this is not the place to dwell on this important proposition of criminology.

It is inexact, then, to say that suicide has desirable counter-effects which lessen its immorality, and that it may therefore be well not to interfere with its spread. It is not a derivative of homicide. Doubtless, the moral constitution on which egoistic suicide depends and that which retards murder among the most civilized peoples are closely related. But the victim of this sort of suicide, far from being an abortive murderer, has nothing of the murderer about him. He is a sad, depressed person. His act may accordingly be condemned without transforming those in the same class with him into assassins. Will it be objected that condemning suicide is a simultaneous condemnation, and consequent weakening of the state of mind which gives rise to it, that is, a condemnation and weakening of that hyperaesthesia for everything relating to the individual? And that by so doing we risk strengthening the taste for impersonality and for the homicide which springs from this impersonality? But to restrain the inclination to murder, individualism need not attain this excessive intensity which makes it a source of suicide. For the individual to be averse to shedding the blood of his fellows, it is not imperative that he care for nothing but himself. He need only love and respect human personality generally. The tendency to individuation may therefore be restrained within proper limits without the tendency to homicide being thereby strengthened.

As for anomy, since it produces both homicide and suicide, whatever checks it checks both of these. There need be no fear that, if prevented from appearing in the form of suicide, it may be translated into more numerous murders; for a man sensitive enough to moral discipline to renounce suicide out of respect for the public conscience and its prohibitions will be much less inclined to homicide which is more severely reproved and repressed. Besides, we have seen that the best types kill themselves in such cases, so that there is no reason to favor a selection which would be retrogressive.

This chapter may help to solve an often debated problem.

The discussions are well-known that are occasioned by the question whether our feelings for our fellow-men are only extensions of egoistic sentiments or, on the contrary, independent of them. We have just seen that both hypotheses are baseless. Certainly, pity for another and pity for ourselves are not foreign to each other, since their development or recession is parallel; but one does not spring from the other. If a bond of kinship exists between them, it is their common derivation from a single state of the collective conscience, of which they are only different aspects. What they express is the manner in which public opinion estimates the moral value of the individual in general. If the individual looms large in public estimation, we apply this social judgement to others as well as to ourselves; their persons, as well as our own, assume more value in our eyes, and we become more sensitive to whatever concerns each of them individually as well as to what concerns us particularly. Their griefs, like our own, are more readily intolerable to us. Our sympathy for them is not, accordingly, a mere extension of what we feel for ourselves. But both are effects of one cause and constituted by the same moral state. Of course this varies, depending on whether it is applied to ourselves or to others; in the first case our egoistic instincts reenforce it, in the second, weaken it. But it exists and is active in both cases. So true is it that even the feelings apparently most associated with the individual’s personal temperament depend on causes greater than himself! Our very egoism is in large part a product of society.

See Division du travail social, Introduction.

Bibliography on the question. Appiano Buonafede, Histoire critique et philosophique du suicide, 1762, Fr. trans., Paris, 1843.—Bourquelot, Recherches sur les opinions de la législation en matière de morts volontaires, in Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Chartes, 1842 and 1843.—Guernesey, Suicide, History of the Penal Laws, New York, 1883.—Garrison, Le suicide en droit romain et en droit francais, Toulouse, 1883.—Wynn Westcott, Suicide, London, 1885, PP. 43-58.—Geiger, Der Selbstmord im klassischen Altertum, Augsburg, 1888.

Garrison, op. cit., p. 77.

Omicidio-suicidio, pp. 61-62.

Origines du droit français, p. 371.

Ferri, op. cit., p. 62.

Garrison, op. cit., pp. 144, 145.

Ferri, op. cit., pp. 63 and 64.

Koran, III, v. 139.

Ibid., XVI, v. 63.

Ibid., LVI, v. 60.

Ibid., XXXIII, v. 33.

Aristotle, Eth. Nic., V. II, 3.

Aeschines, Against Ctesiphon.—Plato, Laws, IX, 12.

Dion Chrysostom, Orations, 4, 14 (Teubner ed. V, 2, p. 207)

Melet. Ed. Reiske, Altenburg, 1797, p. 198 ff.

Valerius Maximus, 2, 6, 8.

Valerius Maximus, 2, 6, 7.

XII, 603.

See Lasaulx, Ueber die Bücher des Koenigs Numa, in his Etudes d’antiquité classique. We quote from Geiger, p. 63.

Servius, loc. cit.—Pliny, Natural History, XXXVI, 24.

III, title II, bk. II, par. 3.

Inst. orat. VII, 4, 39.—Orations, 337.

Digest, bk. XLIX, title XVI, law 6, par. 7.

Ibid., bk. XXVIII, title III, law 6, par. 7.

Digest, bk. XLVIII, title XXI, law 3, par. 6.

Towards the end of the Republic and the beginning of the Empire; see Geiger, p. 69.

And even in this case the right of society is beginning to be disputed.

See Geiger, op. cit., pp. 58-59.

See my Division du travail social, bk. II.

Lyons, 1881. At the Congress on Criminology held at Rome in 1887, Lacassagne claimed responsibility for this theory.

Bibliography.—Guerry, Essai sur la statistique morale de la Prance.—Cazauvieilh, Du suicide, de l’aliénation mentale et des crimes contre les personnes, comparés dans leurs rapports reciproques, 2 vols., 1840.—Despine, Psychologie natur., p. III.—Maury, Du mouvement moral des sociétés, in Revue des Deux-Mondes, 1860.—Morselli, Il suicidio, p. 243 ff.—Actes du premier congrès international d’Anthropologie criminelle, Turin, 1886-87, p. 202 ff.—Tarde, Criminalité comparée, p. 152 ff.—Ferri, Omicidio-suicidio, 4th ed., Turin, 1895, p. 253 ff.

Moralstatistik, p. 526.

Throughout this chapter, Durkheim uses several technical, French legal terms for the varieties of homicide. These terms are somewhat different from those employed in English and American law. In French law there are five varieties of what is called homicide volontaire; they are assassinat, meurtre, parricide, infanticide, empoisonnement. The two most important for Durkheim’s analysis are assassinat and meurtre. Assassinat is intentional homicide with aggravating circumstances such as premeditation or prearrangement. Meurtre is simple intentional homicide (homicide volontaire simple) without aggravating circumstances such as premeditation or prearrangement. Assassinat has been translated, therefore, as “premeditated murder,” while meurtre has been translated as “unpremeditated murder.”—Ed.

Op. cit., p. 333.—In the Actes du congrès de Rome, p. 205, the same author expresses doubt, however, as to the reality of this antagonism.

The French legal terms “coups mortel” and “blessures mortels”—mortal blows and mortal wounds—refer in this context to that variety of homicide which we know as “manslaughter” and they are so translated here. They constitute unintentional homicide resulting from an act of violence itself not unintentional.—Ed.

Op. cit., pp. 310 ff.

Op. cit., p. 67.

Des prisonniers, de l’mprisonnement et des prisons, Paris, 1850 p. 133.

Op. cit., p. 95.

Le suicide dans le département de Seine-et-Marne.

Op. cit., p. 377.

L’homme criminel, Fr. trans. p. 338.

Of what does this influence consist? It seems due in part, certainly, to cell life. But we should not be surprised if the community-life of the prison were apt to have the same effects. The society of evil-doers and prisoners is known to be very coherent; the individual disappears completely and prison discipline has the same effacing tendency. Something similar to what we have observed in the army may take place. What confirms this hypothesis is that epidemics of suicide are frequent in prisons as well as in barracks.

Statistics reported by Ferri (Omicidio, p. 373) are no more conclusive. From 1866 to 1876, 17 suicides were committed in Italian convict prisons by convicts condemned for crimes against persons, and only 5 committed by convicts guilty of crimes against property. But the former are much more numerous in convict prisons than the latter. These figures are therefore wholly inconclusive. Besides, we do not know whence the author of these statistics took the data he uses.

According to Oettingen, Moralstatistik, supplement, table 61.

Ibid., table 109.

Ibid., table 65.

According to Ferri’s own tables.

This classification of departments is from Bournet, De la Criminalité en Prance et en Italie, Paris, 1884, pp. 41 and 51.

Starke, Verbrechen und Verbrecher in Preussen, Berlin, 1884, pp. 144 ff.

According to Ferri’s tables.

See Bosco, Gli Omicidii in alcuni Statt d’Europa, Rome, 1889.

Philosophie pénale, pp. 347-48.

Certain of these cases are not prosecuted because they are neither crimes nor delicts. They should therefore be deducted. However we avoided this in order to follow our author on his own ground ; besides, we are confident that this deduction would change nothing in the results shown by the above figures.

A secondary consideration, offered by the same author in support of his thesis, is no less unconvincing. According to this, one should also consider the homicides erroneously classed among voluntary or accidental deaths. Now, since the number of both has increased since the beginning of the century, he concludes that the sum of homicides under one or the other of these two classifications must have grown equally. Here, he says, is another serious increase which we must consider in order to estimate the course of homicide correctly.—But his reasoning is based on a confusion of ideas. It does not follow from the fact that the number of accidental and voluntary deaths has grown, that the same is true of the homicides wrongly assigned to this classification. From the increase in suicides and accidents it does not follow that there are also more false suicides and false accidents. For such a hypothesis to possess any probability, it would have to be shown that the administrative or judicial inquests in the doubtful cases are more poorly conducted than formerly; a supposition for which we know of no foundation. Tarde, to be sure, is surprised at the contemporary increase in deaths by submersion, and in this increase is inclined to see a hidden increase in the number of homicides. But the number of deaths by lightning has increased much more; it has doubled. Criminal malevolence had nothing to do with this. The truth is, first, that statistical tabulations are computed more exactly and, as for the cases of submersion, that more frequent sea bathing, more active harbors and more numerous river vessels occasion more accidents.

The inversion is less marked for premeditated murder; which confirms what was said above of the mixed character of this crime.

Premeditated murders, on the contrary, which were 200 in 1869, 215 in 1868, fall to 162 in 1870. The great difference between these two kinds of crime is clear.

According to Starke, op. cit., p. 133.

Premeditated murders remain stationary.

These remarks, however, are intended rather to raise than to settle the question. It could be settled only if the influences of age and of marital status were isolated, as we have done for suicide.