BECCARIA, CESARE. - Man of letters, economist, jurist. Born in Milan on 15 March 1738, died there on 28 Nov. 1794. He was educated for eight years at Parma, in the Jesuit college, and then continued his studies at the University of Pavia, where, at the age of twenty, in 1758, he took his doctorate in law.
By his wife Teresa De Blasco he had two daughters, of whom the younger, Giulia, was the mother of Alessandro Manzoni.
Beccaria's philosophical and juridical formation came under the direct influence of the new doctrines that were spreading with great credit in Italy in his time through the works of Montesquieu, the Encyclopedists and Rousseau; these, with the aim of preparing a new civil order of justice and general well-being, proclaimed the rights of reason, the free manifestation of the tendencies of nature, and the origin of the social state in a tacit compact.
In Milan a group of friends adhering to the new ideas had formed, composed, besides Beccaria, of the two Verri brothers, that is Pietro (1728-97), the historian of that city, and Alessandro (1741-1816), the author of the Notti romane; of the mathematician and astronomer Paolo Frisi (1728-1784), a Barnabite; of the economist Gianrinaldo Carli (1720-1795), and of others. This group of innovators assumed the name of the "Società dei pugni," and had as its organ the periodical Il caffè, which lasted from June 1764 to May 1766.
This was the environment in which Beccaria's culture matured. As a man of letters, we have from him the Ricerche intorno alla natura dello stile, published in 1770; as an economist he delivered from the chair of cameral sciences the Elementi di economia pubblica, which saw the light, after his death, in 1804.
But it is not to these writings that Beccaria's renown is entrusted; almost at the commission of his friends, he was the author of one of the most successful books of the time: Dei delitti e delle pene, composed in the space of a few months, from March 1763 to Jan. 1764.
Among the various branches of law, the criminal field had remained the most confused and the most backward with respect to the movement of thought. There was no true code: the positive norms were often heterogeneous, disconnected, frequently contradictory; held together by a jurisprudence deduced from sentences, from practice, and from the conclusions of the most fashionable criminalists. The imperfection of procedure and of the punitive system and the excessive use of the death penalty had more than once raised the complaints of philosophers and jurists, calling for the lamented judicial cruelties to be tempered by humane criteria. Beccaria, under impulse and almost certainly with the collaboration of the Milanese circle and especially of the Verri, set about ordering the ideas on this arduous and delicate subject. He deplores the obscurity of the laws, the too broad and dangerous powers left to magistrates, the inquisitorial methods veiled in mystery; he inveighs against the use and abuse of torture to extort the confession of the accused; he condemns the brutality of punishments, and especially that of death, whose utility and necessity he denies, save in extreme cases. He reconstructs, albeit on the basis of the social contract, the criminalist theory with aims of justice and humanity.
This book, of barely a hundred pages, had a very wide resonance. Edition after edition and translations into the principal languages of Europe gave it an extraordinary diffusion; impassioned polemics gathered the opposing tendencies into two camps. The Encyclopedists of France acclaimed it: Morellet translated the book into French, giving the material a different order, which the author accepted. Voltaire and Diderot made an appreciative commentary on it and invited Beccaria to go to Paris, and he, after some hesitation, decided to go there, in 1766, hosted with enthusiastic honors, of which the Verri became jealous, since they felt themselves sharers, and not the least, in the success of the work, and there followed a cooling of the friendship. Even in his homeland he did not lack flattering manifestations of esteem and appreciation: in 1768 he was appointed professor of economics in the Palatine schools of Milan; in 1771 a member of the supreme economic councils; in 1791 a member of the junta for the reform of the civil and criminal judicial system.
In the opposing camp, with the Frenchmen Jusse and Muyart de Vouglans and with the Scotsman Ramsay, there appeared, more fervent than any other, the Vallombrosan monk Father Angelo Fachinei of Corfu, who in 1764 formulated against Beccaria 23 accusations of impiety and 7 of sedition. A resolute reply was at once drafted to justify the author, who had never had the intention of offending authority and still less religion.
The book was placed on the Index by decree of 3 Feb. 1766. The Church, in fact, could not look favorably on Beccaria's work, both because of the origin of its cultural foundation and because of the method he followed, and, to right-thinking people not adhering to the French areopagus, the book had seemed the fruit more of audacity than of ponderation: it set forth truths already acquired in a presumptuous tone; in the criminal system, if the vision of the new civilization discerned many excesses, there was no lack of good principles, established by experience and general acceptance. It was not lawful to censure everything out of a tendentious craving for innovation.
On the "forma mentis" of the author, the accusations made against him at the time struck home. Beccaria himself had to confess that he had been formed in an environment favorable to his ideas; yet it is to be held that the poison of Enlightenment theories had not taken away the good Milanese's Christian conscience. In his book, in a few points he touches on the contacts between religion and criminal law, between divine and human justice, between sin and crime; and he insists on making clear that from the themes of religion, of divinity, and of sin his theory intends to prescind. But it is evident that when the benefit of the concepts and canons of superior and eternal justice is taken away from the field of criminal law, it necessarily comes to lose much of its efficacy. Between the ethical world and the utilitarian world, Beccaria found himself constrained to pursue the latter. Beccaria's work is, in truth, the consequence of a common mentality already formed. The author lacked a true and proper originality of conception and initiative; yet the merit belongs to him of having attempted, first of all, to give a systematic construction to isolated and empirical affirmations and wishes, framing the principles in an ordered and logical theory, around a very clear informing criterion, though substantially fallacious.
His voice in any case had an echo, and the evolution of criminal rules and practice began to unfold with greater efficacy. In Tuscany, in Austria, in Russia, reforms inspired by his word were carried out. Torture, almost disappeared in fact, also disappeared in law, and the death penalty, gradually abolished and restored, constitutes a perpetual subject of discussion among philosophers, sociologists and jurists. Where it is in force, however, the cases of its application are much more limited: the methods of execution are simple and plain, and the attained accuracy of procedure gives assurance that the haunting nightmare of possible judicial errors, of irreparable outcome, can be averted.
Bibliography4 works
Oliviero Savini Nici