THE study of our great neighbor's rats and ferrets; in other words, of her criminals and police, has long been a favorite one with English writers. Not, as Mr. Irving justly observes, because French crimes are more atrocious than those of other nations, but because their criminal procedure gives to a great trial a dramatic and fascinating interest which our methods in England do not allow. But while the author has traversed a somewhat well-worn road and tells of trials, some of which have been described in a recent work, his narrative is so well written as to justify the book. We feel in reading his account of a series of great crimes and their unraveling that Mr. Irving is telling us just what we wanted to learn. At the same time it may be well to say that this sort of book, while interesting and sometimes fascinating reading, does no more to advance the scientific study of crime than well-written reports of remarkable trials. They are evidence, and are so far valuable, but for a summing-up of such cases, and for deductions which may lead to reform in crude criminal methods and the ultimate elimination of crime, as distinct from disease, we shall have to look elsewhere. Mr. Irving remarks that the study of criminal anthropology has attained considerable dimensions on the Continent but he considers the results to have been disappointing, the attempt to connect criminals with savages having broken down, and he quotes the observation of Mr. Goldwin Smith that the persistent criminal has his status in nature and society as an organism to whom altruistic pleasure simply does not appeal. We cannot admit that the scientific study of the criminal has failed, rather it has only just begun. As to the imaginary status of the evil-doer in nature and society, nature and society are more strongly differentiated than Mr. Irving seems to imagine. The tiger must be indifferent to suffering, to live; the pike must be voracious to exist; the parasite will prey, by very instinct, upon the creature in which it has its habitation; but man is a family, living by ideals as well as instincts. To apply to him the laws that govern the lower animals and the unconscious world, is unsound, because they have largely ceased to operate on him. The nature of the human race is to be unnatural, if one may venture to employ that misused term; the whole of civilization is of course artificial, and neither the laws nor the instincts which fashion and guide the animal kingdoms have unrestricted application in the world of men. The question to be considered is what are the ways of human nature; how far are men and women prone to evil, and how much of it is forced unwillingly upon them either by twists of temperament or by bad social conditions? We agree that the root of all real crime is selfishness, indifference to the sufferings of others; insensibility to the feelings of surrounding life. And Mr. Irving gives us a glimpse of an ideally bad sample of humanity in his opening chapter. This interesting specimen was Lacenaire; a man of considerable capacity although apparently wanting in balance and application, for he tried his hand at several sorts of employment but stuck to none of them. And going through the other cases in the book we find much evidence of that subtle "something wrong" which might explain and may excuse so much. Campi, the double murderer, hides his head like an ostrich in the bedclothes to avoid arrest; Troppmann writes to the wife of one of his victims that he had given her husband the great sum of £20,000, which from a young man of his class was surely not a probable event. Euphrasie Mercier lived with two mad sisters and an insane brother-a truly ghastly household-for these she worked and strove and ultimately committed murder; who knows her responsibility? -Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, Vol. 92

Excerpt from Studies of French Criminals of the Nineteenth Century "The annals of criminal jurisprudence," wrote Edmund Burke, "exhibit human nature in a variety of positions, at once the most striking, interesting, and affecting. They present tragedies of real life, often heightened in their effect by the grossness of the injustice, and the malignity of the prejudices which accompanied them. At the same time, real culprits, as original characters, stand forward on the canvas of humanity as prominent objects for our special study." The last sentence in this passage applies directly to the cases set out in this volume, which have been selected from the French criminal records of the nineteenth century. They are studies of real culprits, whose guilt is, in all but one instance, beyond the suspicion of a doubt. As studies of character, and as examples of the administration of criminal justice in France, they may be of some interest or value to those who look to the human document for specimens of human character as it actually is, or for suggestions on which to build some work of fiction. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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In this wide-ranging analysis, Marie-Christine Leps traces the production and circulation of knowledge about the criminal in nineteenth-century discourse, and shows how the delineation of deviance served to construct cultural norms. She demonstrates how the apprehension of crime and criminals was an important factor in the establishment of such key institutions as national systems of education, a cheap daily press, and various welfare measures designed to fight the spread of criminality. Leps focuses on three discursive practices: the emergence of criminology, the development of a mass-produced press, and the proliferation of crime fiction, in both England and France. Beginning where Foucault's work Discipline and Punish ends, Leps analyzes intertextual modes of knowledge production and shows how the elaboration of hegemonic truths about the criminal is related to the exercise of power. The scope of her investigation includes scientific treatises such as Criminal Man by Cesare Lombroso and The English Convict by Charles Goring, reports on the Jack the Ripper murders in The Times and Le Petit Parisien, the Sherlock Holmes stories, Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and novels by Zola and Bourget.

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