the Week of Proper 28 / Ordinary 33
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Cesare Lombroso
1911 Encyclopedia Britannica
or CESARE LOMBROSO (1836-1909), Italian criminologist, was born on the 18th of November 1836 at Verona, of a Jewish family. He studied at Padua, Vienna and Paris, and was in 1862 appointed professor of psychiatry at Pavia, then director of the lunatic asylum at Pesaro, and later professor of forensic medicine and of psychiatry at Turin, where he eventually filled the chair of criminal anthropology. His works, several of which have been translated into English, include L' Uomo delinquente (1889); L'Uomo di genio (1888) Genio e follia (1877) and La Donna delinquente (1893). In 1872 he had made the notable discovery that the disorder known as pellagra was due (but see Pellagra) to a poison contained in diseased maize, eaten by the peasants, and he returned to this subject in La Pellagra in Italia (1885) and other works. Lombroso, like Giovanni Bovio (b. 1841), Enrico Ferri (b. 1856) and Colajanni, well-known Italian criminologists, and his sons-in-law G. Ferrero and Carrara, was strongly influenced by Auguste Comte, and owed to him an exaggerated tendency to refer all mental facts to biological causes. In spite of this, however, and a serious want of accuracy and discrimination in handling evidence, his work made an epoch in criminology; for he surpassed all his predecessors by the wide scope and systematic character of his researches, and by the practical conclusions he drew from them. Their net theoretical results is that the criminal population exhibits a higher percentage of physical, nervous and mental anomalies than non-criminals; and that these anomalies are due partly to degeneration, partly to atavism. The criminal is a special type of the human race, standing midway between the lunatic and the savage. This doctrine of a " criminal type "has been gravely criticized, but is admitted by all to contain a substratum of truth. The practical reform to which it points is a classification of offenders, so that the born criminal may receive a different kind of punishment from the offender who is tempted into crime by circumstances (see also Criminology). Lombroso's biological principles are much less successful in his work on Genius, which he explains as a morbid, degenerative condition, presenting analogies to insanity, and not altogether alien to crime. In 1899 he published in French a book which gives a résumé of much of his earlier work, entitled Le Crime, causes et remedes. Later works are: Delitti vecchi e delitti nuovi (Turin, 1902); Nuovi studi sul genio (2 vols., Palermo, 1902); and in 1908 a work on spiritualism (Eng. trans., After Death - What? 1909), to which subject he had turned his attention during the later years of his life. He died suddenly from a heart complaint at Turin on the 19th of October 1909.
See Kurella, Cesare Lombroso and die Naturgeschichte des Verbrechers (Hamburg, 1892); and a biography, with an analysis of his works, and a short account of their general conclusions by his daughters, Paola Carrara and Gina Ferrero, written in 1906 on the occasion of the sixth congress of criminal anthropology at Turin.
Lomenie De Brienne, Etienne Charles De (1727-1794), French politician and ecclesiastic, was born at Paris on the 9th of October 1727. He belonged to a Limousin family, dating from the 15th century, and after a brilliant career as a student entered the Church, as being the best way to attain to a distinguished position. In 1751 he became a doctor of theology, though there were doubts as to the orthodoxy of his thesis. In 1752 he was appointed grand vicar to the archbishop of Rouen. After visiting Rome, he was made bishop of Condom (1760), and in 1763 was translated to the archbishopric of Toulouse. He had many famous friends, among them A. R. J. Turgot, the Abbe A. Morellet and Voltaire, and in 1770 became an academician. He was on three occasions the head of the bureau de jurisdiction at the general assembly of the clergy; he also took an interest in political and social questions of the day, and addressed to Turgot a number of memoires on these subjects, one of them, treating of pauperism, being' especially remarkable. In 1787 he was nominated as president of the Assembly of Notables, in which capacity he attacked the fiscal policy of Calonne, whom he succeeded as head of the conseil des finances on the 1st of May 1787. Once in power, he succeeded in making the parlement register edicts dealing with internal free trade, the establishment of provincial assemblies and the redemption of the corvee; on their refusal to register edicts on the stamp duty and the proposed new general land-tax, he persuaded the king to hold a lit de justice, to enforce their registration. To crush the opposition to these measures, he persuaded the king to exile the parlement to Troyes (August 15th, 1787). On the agreement of the parlement to sanction a prolongation for two years to the tax of the two vingtiemes (a direct tax on all kinds of income), in lieu of the above two taxes, he recalled the councillors to Paris. But a further attempt to force the parlement to register an edict for raising a loan of 120 million livres met with determined opposition. The struggle of the parlement against the incapacity of Brienne ended on the 8th of May in its consenting to an edict for its own abolition; but with the proviso that the states-general should be summoned to remedy the disorders of the state. Brienne, who had in the meantime been made archbishop of Sens, now found himself face to face with almost universal opposition; he was forced to suspend the Cour pleniere which had been set up to take the place of the parlement, and himself to promise that the states-general should be summoned. But even these concessions were not able to keep him in power, and on the 29th of August he had to retire, leaving the treasury empty. On the 15th of December following, he was made a cardinal, and went to Italy, where he spent two years. After the outbreak of the Revolution he returned to France, and took the oath of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in 1790 (see French Revolution). He was repudiated by the pope, and in 1791 had to give up the biretta at the command of Pius VI. Both his past and present conduct made him an object of suspicion to the revolutionaries; he was arrested at Sens on the 9th of November 1793, and died in prison, either of an apoplectic stroke or by poison, on the 16th of February 1794.
The chief works published by Brienne are: Oraison funebre du Dauphin (Paris, 1766); Compte-rendu au roi (Paris, 1788); Le Conciliateur, in collaboration with Turgot (Rome, Paris, 1754). See also J. Perrin, Le Cardinal Lomenie de Brienne ... episodes de la Revolution (Sens, 1896).
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Chisholm, Hugh, General Editor. Entry for 'Cesare Lombroso'. 1911 Encyclopedia Britanica. https://www.studylight.org/encyclopedias/eng/bri/c/cesare-lombroso.html. 1910.
