Abstract
In 1891, at the height of the ère des attentats (1878–1914)—a constellation of assassinations and bombings identified by many today as the beginning of modern terrorism—Cesare Lombroso published an analysis comparing the faces of ordinary criminals with those of “political” criminals, including in the latter category a motley assortment ranging from John Wilkes Booth to Italian nationalist insurrectionaries and the men accused of Chicago’s Haymarket bombing. Lombroso drew attention to the numerous similarities between the photographs of these self-described idealists and those of common thieves and murderers. For example, 29 percent of the ordinary criminals had massive jaws, while a full 60 percent displayed “facial asymmetry”; the corresponding numbers for political criminals were 19 and 36 percent respectively. The tightest correlation was on “anomalies of the ears,” which appeared in 75 percent of ordinary criminals, and 64 percent in the political category. Lombroso did not claim that there was no difference between the two classes of malefactor; indeed, he argued against imposing the death penalty for political crime, hoping that these criminals could be rehabilitated.
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Notes
Cesare Lombroso, “La physionomie des anarchistes,” Nouvelle Revue, May 15, 1891, 225–230.
Wilbur R. Miller, Cops and Bobbies: Police Authority in New York and London, 1830–1870 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 142.
Robert A. Nye, The Origins of Crowd Psychology: Gustave Le Bon and the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the Third Republic (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1975), 22; Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–c.1918 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 71.
Allan Pinkerton, Strikers, Communists, Tramps, and Detectives (New York: G. W. Carleton, 1900), 229–230.
Eric Rauchway, Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), 100.
Edward James Erickson, Jr., The Anarchist Disorder: The Psychopathology of Terrorism in Late Nineteenth-Century France, Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 1998.
Melissa Percival, The Appearance of Character: Physiognomy and Facial Expression in Eighteenth-Century France (Leeds: W. S. Maney, 1999), 141, 166.
Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).
George Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York: Howard Fertig, 1978), 1–16.
John Thomas Smith, Remarks on Rural Scenery (London: Nathaniel Smith, 1797), 12; Uvedale Price, Essay on the Picturesque (London: J. Robson, 1796), 203–228.
Tim Hitchcock, Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London (London: Hambledon and London, 2004).
Charles and Mary Lamb, The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E.V. Lucas (London: Methuen, 1903), 116, 119; see however, Carrie Tirado Bramen, “William Dean Howells and the Failure of the Urban Picturesque,” The New England Quarterly, 73, no.1 (March 2000): 82–99.
Johann Caspar Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy (London: Holloway and Hunter, 1789–98), 3 vol., 1:135.
Ellis Shookman, “Pseudo-Science, Social Fad, Literary Wonder: Johann Caspar Lavater and the Art of Physiognomy,” in The Faces of Physiognomy: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Johann Caspar Lavater, ed. Ellis Shookman (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1993), 1–24; Sharrona Pearl, “As Plain as the Nose on Your Face: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century England,” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2005.
Katherine Hart, “Physiognomy and the Art of Caricature,” in Faces, ed. Shookman, 126–138; Ross Woodrow, “Lavater and the Drawing Manual,” in Physiognomy in Profile: Lavater’s Impact on European Culture, ed. Melissa Percival and Graeme Tytler (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 71–93.
Graeme Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel: Faces and Fortunes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982).
Ibid., 1:30–31; 2, Part 1:12; 2, Part 2:256; Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 70–71.
Louis Chevalier, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Frank Jellinek (New York: Howard Fertig, 1973), 144; Rob Sindall, Street Violence in the Nineteenth Century: Media Panic or Real Danger? (Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press, 1990), 58; Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (New York: Knopf, 1984); John Thomas Smith, Vagabondiana: Anecdotes of Mendicant Wanderers on the Streets of London (London: J. T. Smith, 1817) 43.
Michael Hollington, “Dickens and Cruikshank as Physiognomers in Oliver Twist,” Dickens Quarterly 7, no. 2 (June 1990): 243–254; Robert L. Patten, George Cruikshank’s Life, Times, and Art, 2 vol. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 2: 23–94.
Judith Weschler, A Human Comedy: Physiognomy and Caricature in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 98, 126–127.
For background on the rise of the modern police force, see Clive Emsley, Policing and its Context, 1750–1870 (New York: Schocken Books, 1984); Eric H. Monkkonen, “The Urban Police in the United States,” in Crime History and Histories of Crime: Studies in the Historiography of Crime and Criminal Justice in Modern History, ed. Clive Emsley and Louis A. Knafla (Westport, CN: Greenwood, 1996), 201–228.
Alf Lüdtke, Police and State in Prussia, 1815–1850, trans. Pete Burgess (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 159. The cartoon appeared in Kladderadatsch 2 (1849), 148.
Eugène Sue, Les Mysteres de Paris, 4 vols. (Paris: Gallimard Jeunesse, 1980), 4: 283.
Paul Metzner, Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill, and Self-Promotion in Paris during the Age of Revolution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 84–112.
Graham Robb, “Walking through Walls,” London Review of Books, 26, no. 6 (March 18, 2004).
Sidney Monas, The Third Section: Police and Society in Russia under Nicholas I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 48.
See also Amy Gilman Srebnick, The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers: Sex and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
Raymond B. Fosdick, European Police Systems (Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1969), 126, 270; Miller, Cops and Bobbies, 39, 116; Robert M. Fogelson, America’s Armories: Architecture, Society, and Public Order (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Herbert Reinke, “‘Armed as if for a War’: The State, the Military and the Professionalisation of the Prussian Police in Imperial Germany,” in Policing Western Europe: Politics, Professionalism, and Public Order, 1850–1940, ed. Clive Emsley and Barbara Weinberger (New York: Greenwood, 1991), 55–73; Clive Emsley, Gendarmes and the State in Nineteenth-Century Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Jennifer Davis, “The London Garotting Panic of 1862: A Moral Panic and the Creation of a Criminal Class in Mid-Victorian England,” in Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe since 1500, ed. Victor A. C. Gatrell, Bruce Lenman, and Geoffrey Parker (London: Europa, 1980), 200.
Roger Lane, Policing the City: Boston, 1822–1885 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 66; Simon A. Cole, Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 6–31.
A. E. Murch, The Development of the Detective Novel (New York: Greenwood, 1968); Frank Morn, “The Eye that Never Sleeps”: A History of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 80–88; Ronald R. Thomas, “Making Darkness Visible: Capturing the Criminal and Observing the Law in Victorian Photography and Detective Fiction,” in Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination, ed. Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 134–168.
Miller, Cops and Bobbies, 108–109.
Kevin Kenny, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Joshua Brown, Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 132–133.
Erickson, Anarchist Disorder; Marc Renneville, Crime et Folie: Deux siècles d’enquêtes médicales et judiciaires (Paris: Fayard, 2003), 282.
Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 24–33; compare Walter Laqueur, Terrorism: A Study of National and International Political Violence (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1977), 14.
Fredric Scott Zuckerman, The Tsarist Secret Police Abroad: Policing Europe in a Modernising World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 61.
Hsi-huey Liang, The Rise of Modern Police and the European State System from Metternich to the Second World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 163.
David Cole, Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism (New York: New Press, 2003), 109.
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© 2008 Isaac Land
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Land, I. (2008). Men with the Faces of Brutes: Physiognomy, Urban Anxieties, and Police States. In: Land, I. (eds) Enemies of Humanity. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230612549_7
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