BECCARIA, CESARE. — Man of letters, economist, jurist. Born in Milan on 15 March 1738, died there on 28 November 1794. He was educated for eight years at the Jesuit college in Parma, and then continued his studies at the University of Pavia, where, at the age of twenty, in 1758, he received his doctorate in law.
By his wife Teresa De Blasco, he had two daughters, the younger of whom, Giulia, was the mother of Alessandro Manzoni.
B.’s philosophical and juridical formation was directly influenced by the new doctrines that were spreading with great authority in Italy in his time through the works of Montesquieu, the Encyclopedists, and Rousseau. In their intent to prepare a new civil order of justice and general well-being, these doctrines proclaimed the rights of reason, the free expression of natural tendencies, and the origin of the social state in a tacit compromise.
In Milan, a group of friends committed to the new ideas had formed. Besides Beccaria, it included the two Verri brothers, namely Pietro (1728–97), the historian of that city, and Alessandro (1741–1816), the author of the Notti romane; the mathematician and astronomer Paolo Frisi (1728–1784), a Barnabite; the economist Gianrinaldo Carli (1720–1795); and others. This group of innovators took the name «Società dei pugni» and had as its organ the periodical Il caffè, which ran from June 1764 to May 1766.
This was the milieu in which B.’s culture matured. As a man of letters, he produced the Ricerche intorno alla natura dello stile, published in 1770; as an economist, he composed, from his chair of cameral sciences, the Elementi di economia pubblica, which appeared after his death, in 1804.
But B.’s renown does not rest on these writings. Almost at the request of his friends, he was the author of one of the most successful books of the period: Dei delitti e delle pene, composed within a few months, from March 1763 to January 1764.
Among the various branches of law, criminal law had remained the most confused and backward in relation to the movement of thought. There was no true co-
code: the positive norms were often heterogeneous, disconnected, and frequently contradictory; they were held together by a jurisprudence derived from judgments, practice, and the conclusions of the most fashionable criminalists. The imperfection of the procedure and penal system, and the excessive use of the death penalty, had repeatedly provoked the protests of philosophers and jurists, who called for the criticized judicial cruelties to be tempered by humane criteria. B., prompted by and almost certainly assisted by the Milanese circle, especially the Verri brothers, undertook to bring order to ideas on this arduous and delicate subject. He deplores the obscurity of the laws, the excessively broad and dangerous powers left to magistrates, and inquisitorial methods veiled in secrecy; he attacks the use and abuse of torture to extort confessions from the accused; he condemns the brutality of punishments, especially the death penalty, whose usefulness and necessity he denies except in extreme cases. He reconstructs criminal theory, albeit on the basis of the social contract, with aims of justice and humanity.
This book, barely a hundred pages long, had a very wide resonance. Edition after edition, and translations into the principal languages of Europe, gave it extraordinary circulation; passionate controversies divided opposing tendencies into two camps. The French Encyclopedists acclaimed it: Morellet translated the book into French, giving the material a different arrangement, which was accepted by the author. Voltaire and Diderot wrote laudatory commentaries on it and invited B. to go to Paris. After some hesitation, he decided to do so in 1766, where he was received with enthusiastic honors. The Verri brothers, who felt themselves to have been no small participants in the work’s success, became jealous of these honors, and a cooling of the friendship followed. Nor did flattering demonstrations of esteem and appreciation fail to reach him in his homeland: in 1768 he was appointed professor of economics at the Palatine Schools of Milan; in 1771, a member of the supreme economic councils; and in 1791, a member of the commission for the reform of the civil and criminal judicial system.
On the opposing side, alongside the Frenchmen Jusse and Muyart de Vouglans and the Scotsman Ramsay, the Vallombrosan monk Fr. Angelo Fachinei of Corfu showed himself more fervent than anyone else; in 1764 he formulated against B. twenty-three accusations of impiety and seven of sedition. A firm response was immediately drafted to justify the author, who had never intended to offend authority, and still less religion.
The book was placed on the Index by decree of 3 February 1766. The Church, in fact, could not view B.’s work favorably, both because of the origin of its cultural foundation and because of the method he followed; and to right-minded men not affiliated with the French Areopagus, the book had seemed the product of audacity rather than deliberation: it expounded acquired truths in a presumptuous tone. In the criminal system, although the vision of the new civilization discerned many excesses, there were also sound principles, established by experience and general acceptance. It was not permissible to condemn everything out of a tendentious eagerness to innovate.
As regards the author’s «forma mentis», the accusations then made against him struck home. B. himself had to confess that he had been formed in an environment favorable to his ideas; nevertheless, it should be held that the poison of Enlightenment theories had not deprived the good Milanese of his Christian consciousness. In his book, he touches only at a few points upon the relations between religion and criminal law, divine and human justice, sin and crime; and he is insistent in making clear that his theory intends to set aside the subjects of religion, divinity, and sin. But it is evident that
when the benefit of the concepts and canons of higher and eternal justice is removed from the field of criminal law, that field necessarily loses much of its efficacy. Between the ethical world and the utilitarian world, B. found himself compelled to pursue the latter. B.’s work is, in fact, the consequence of a common mentality already formed. The author lacked any true originality of conception and initiative; he nevertheless deserves credit for having been the first to attempt to give a systematic construction to isolated and empirical assertions and aspirations, framing the principles within an orderly and logical theory around a clearly defined guiding criterion, although one that was substantially erroneous.
In any event, his voice found an echo, and the evolution of criminal rules and practice began to unfold with greater effectiveness. In Tuscany, Austria, and Russia, reforms inspired by his words were implemented. Torture, having almost disappeared in practice, also disappeared in law; and the death penalty, gradually abolished and reinstated, constitutes a perpetual subject of discussion among philosophers, sociologists, and jurists. Where it remains in force, however, cases of application are much more limited: the methods of execution are simple and expeditious, and the achieved precision of procedure provides assurance that the haunting specter of possible miscarriages of justice, with their irreparable outcome, can be averted.
Oliviero Savini Nici