BECCARIA, CESARE. — A scholar, economist, and jurist. Born in Milan on 15 March 1738, died there on 28 November 1794. He received eight years of education at the Jesuit college in Parma, and later continued his studies at the University of Pavia, where he earned his doctorate in law at the age of twenty in 1758.
From his wife Teresa De Blasco, he had two daughters, the younger of whom, Giulia, was the mother of Alessandro Manzoni.
Beccaria’s philosophical and legal formation was directly influenced by the new doctrines that were gaining widespread acceptance in Italy at the time through the works of Montesquieu, the Encyclopedists, and Rousseau. These doctrines, aiming to establish a new civil order of justice and general welfare, proclaimed the rights of reason, the free expression of natural tendencies, and the origin of the social state from a tacit compromise.
In Milan, a group of friends formed around these new ideas, composed not only of Beccaria but also of the two Verri brothers—namely Pietro (1728–97), the historian of that city, and Alessandro (1741–1816), author of *Notti romane*; the Barnabite mathematician and astronomer Paolo Frisi (1728–1784); the economist Giannibaldo 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.
It was in this environment that Beccaria’s intellectual development matured. As a man of letters, he authored *Ricerche intorno alla natura dello stile*, published in 1770; as an economist, he lectured on cameral sciences and composed *Elementi di economia pubblica*, which appeared posthumously in 1804.
However, it is not these writings that secured Beccaria’s renown. Almost at the urging of his friends, he authored one of the most successful books of the time: *Dei delitti e delle pene*, written in just a few months, from March 1763 to January 1764.
Among the various branches of law, the criminal field remained the most confused and backward in relation to the movement of thought. There was no true code: positive norms were often heterogeneous, disjointed, and frequently contradictory, held together by a jurisprudence derived from sentences, practice, and the conclusions of the most fashionable criminalists. The imperfections of procedure and the punitive system, along with the excessive use of the death penalty, had repeatedly provoked complaints from philosophers and jurists, who called for judicial harshness to be tempered by humane principles. Beccaria, prompted—almost certainly with the collaboration of the Milanese Neocatholic and especially the Verri brothers—set out to systematize ideas on this difficult and delicate subject. He deplored the obscurity of laws, the overly broad and dangerous powers granted to magistrates, and the inquisitorial methods shrouded in mystery. He railed against the use and abuse of torture to extract confessions from defendants, condemned the brutality of punishments, and especially the death penalty, whose utility and necessity he denied except in extreme cases. He reconstructed, albeit on the basis of the social contract, a criminal theory with aims of justice and humanity.
This book, barely a hundred pages long, achieved enormous resonance. Edition after edition and translations into the principal European languages gave it extraordinary diffusion; impassioned polemics divided opinions into opposing camps. The French Encyclopedists acclaimed it: Morellet translated the book into French, reorganizing the material in a way that the author accepted. Voltaire and Diderot wrote an acclaimed commentary and invited Beccaria to Paris, and after some hesitation, he decided to go in 1766. He was received with enthusiastic honors, which aroused the jealousy of the Verri brothers, who felt they were, if not the least, participants in the work’s success, and this led to a cooling of their friendship. Even in his homeland, he did not lack flattering demonstrations 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; and in 1791, a member of the commission for the reform of the civil and criminal judicial system.
On the opposing side, with the French jurists Jousse and Muyart de Vouglans and the Scotsman Ramsay, the Vallombrosan monk Fr. Angelo Fachinei of Corfu stood out in particular, who in 1764 leveled 23 charges of impiety and 7 of sedition against Beccaria. A decisive response was immediately drafted to defend the author, who had never intended to offend authority, let alone religion.
The book was placed on the Index by decree of 3 February 1766. The Church, in fact, could not look favorably upon Beccaria’s work, both because of the origin of its cultural foundations and the method he employed. To those of sound mind who were not aligned with the French *areopagus*, the book seemed more the product of audacity than of careful consideration: it presented truths already established in a presumptuous tone. While the vision of the new civilization in the criminal system recognized many excesses, it did not lack sound principles, grounded in experience and general acceptance. It was not permissible to condemn everything out of a tendentious desire for innovation.
The accusations leveled against the author at the time struck close to the mark regarding his *forma mentis*. Beccaria himself had to admit that he had been formed in an environment conducive to his ideas; yet it must be acknowledged that the venom of Enlightenment theories had not entirely stripped the good Milanese of his Christian conscience. In his book, he touches on the relationship between religion and criminal law, divine and human justice, sin and crime only in a few places, and he repeatedly insists on clarifying that his theory intends to prescind from themes of religion, divinity, and sin. Yet it is evident that
when the field of criminal law is stripped of the benefit of concepts and canons of superior and eternal justice, it necessarily loses much of its efficacy. Between the ethical world and the utilitarian world, Beccaria found himself compelled to pursue the latter. His work is, in truth, the consequence of a mentality already formed. The author lacked true originality of conception and initiative; yet he deserves credit for having been the first to attempt a systematic construction of isolated and empirical assertions and wishes, framing principles into an orderly and logical theory around a clear guiding criterion, though one that was substantially flawed.
His voice, in any case, had an echo, and the evolution of criminal rules and practice began to unfold with greater efficacy. In Tuscany, Austria, and Russia, reforms were implemented inspired by his words. Torture, which had practically disappeared in practice, also disappeared in law, and the death penalty, gradually abolished and then reinstated, remains a perpetual subject of debate among philosophers, sociologists, and jurists. Where it still exists, its application is far more limited: execution methods are simple and straightforward, and the increased precision of procedure inspires confidence that the nightmare of irreparable judicial errors can be averted.