Crimes and Punishments

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# book_title: Crimes and Punishments
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Men for the most part leave the regulation of their chief concerns to
the prudence of the moment, or to the discretion of those whose interest
it is to oppose the wisest laws—namely, such laws as naturally help
to diffuse the benefits of life, and check the tendency they have to
accumulate in the hands of a few, which ranges on one side the extreme
of power and happiness, and on the other all that is weak and wretched.
It is only, therefore, after having passed through a thousand errors in
matters that most nearly touch their lives and liberties—only after
weariness of evils that have been suffered to reach a climax—that men
are induced to seek a remedy for the abuses which oppress them, and to
recognise the clearest truths, which, precisely on account of their
simplicity, escape the notice of ordinary minds, unaccustomed as they
are to analysing things, and apt to receive their impressions at random, from
tradition rather than from inquiry.
We shall see, if we open histories, that laws, which are or ought to
be covenants between free men, have generally been nothing but the
instrument of the passions of a few men, or the result of some
accidental and temporary necessity. They have never been dictated by an
unimpassioned student of human nature, able to concentrate the actions
of a multitude of men into a single point of view, and to consider them
from that point alone—_the greatest happiness divided among the greatest
number_. Happy are those few nations which have not waited for the slow
movement of human combinations and changes to bring about an approach to better
things, after intolerable evils, but have hastened the intermediate steps
by good laws; and deserving is that philosopher of the gratitude of
mankind, who had the courage, from the obscurity of his despised study,
to scatter abroad among the people the first seeds, so long fruitless, of
useful truths.
The knowledge of the true relations between a sovereign and his subjects,
and of those between different nations; the revival of commerce by the
light of philosophical truths, diffused by printing; and the silent
international war of industry, the most humane and the most worthy of

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Rational men—these are the fruits we owe to the enlightenment of
this century. But how few have examined and combated the cruelty of
punishments and the irregularities of criminal procedures—a part of
legislation so elementary and yet so neglected in almost the whole of
Europe; and how few have sought, by returning to first principles, to
dissipate the mistakes accumulated over many centuries, or to mitigate,
with at least that force which belongs only to ascertained truths, the
excessive caprice of ill-directed power, which has presented up to this
time but one long example of lawful and cold-blooded atrocity! And yet
the groans of the weak, sacrificed to the cruelty of the ignorant or
to the indolence of the rich; the barbarous tortures, multiplied with
a severity as useless as it is prodigal, for crimes either not proved
or quite chimerical; the disgusting horrors of a prison, enhanced
by that which is the cruellest executioner of the miserable—namely,
uncertainty;—these ought to startle those rulers whose function it is to
guide the opinion of men's minds.
The immortal President, Montesquieu, has treated this matter cursorily;
and truth, which is indivisible, has forced me to follow in the
luminous footsteps of this great man; but thinking men, for whom I write,
will be able to distinguish my steps from his. I shall count myself
happy if, like him, I succeed in earning the secret gratitude
of the unknown and peaceable followers of reason, and if I inspire
them with that pleasing thrill of emotion with which sensitive minds
respond to the advocate of the interests of humanity.
To examine and distinguish all the different sorts of crimes and the
manner of punishing them would now be our natural task, were it not that
their nature, which varies with the different circumstances of times and
places, would compel us to enter into too vast and wearisome a mass of
detail. But it will suffice to indicate the most general principles and
the most pernicious and common errors, in order to undeceive no less
those who, from a mistaken love of liberty, would introduce anarchy,
than those who would be glad to reduce their fellow-men to the uniform
regularity of a convent.

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What penalty would be appropriate for such and such crimes?
Is death a penalty really _useful and necessary_ for the security and
good order of society?
Are torture and torments _just_, and do they achieve the _end_ that the
law aims at?
What is the best way to prevent crimes?
Are the same penalties equally useful in all eras?
What influence do they have on customs?
These problems deserve to be solved with such geometrical precision
as may suffice to overcome the clouds of sophistry, over
seductive eloquence, or timid doubt. If I had no other merit than that of
having been the first to make clearer to Italy what other nations
have dared to write and are beginning to put into practice, I should consider myself
fortunate; but if, in upholding the rights of men and of invincible
truth, I should help to rescue from the spasms and agonies of death
any unfortunate victim of tyranny or ignorance, both equally fatal,
the blessings and tears of a single innocent man in the transports of his
joy would console me for the contempt of mankind.

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THE ORIGIN OF PUNISHMENTS—THE RIGHT OF PUNISHMENT.
From political morality, unless it is founded on the immutable sentiments
of mankind, no lasting advantage can be hoped for. Whatever law deviates
from these sentiments will encounter a resistance which will ultimately
prevail over it, just as a force, however slight, if
constantly applied, will prevail over a violent motion applied to any
physical body.
If we consult the human heart, we shall therein discover the fundamental
principles of the sovereign's real right to punish crimes.
No man has gratuitously given up a portion of his own liberty with a
view to the public good; that is a chimera which exists only in romances.
Each one of us would wish, if it were possible, that the covenants which
bind others should not bind himself. There is no man but makes himself
the central object of all the combinations of the globe.
The multiplication of the human race, slight in the abstract, but far
in excess of the means afforded by nature, barren and deserted as it
originally was, for the satisfaction of men's ever-increasing wants,
caused the first savages to associate together. The first unions
necessarily led others to oppose them, and so the state of war passed
from individuals to nations.
Laws are the conditions under which men, leading independent and isolated
lives, joined together in society, when tired of living in a perpetual
state of war and of enjoying a liberty which the uncertainty of its
tenure rendered useless. Of this liberty they voluntarily sacrificed
a part in order to enjoy the remainder in security and quiet. The
sum total of all these portions of liberty, sacrificed for the good of
each individually, constitutes the sovereignty of a nation, and the
sovereign is the lawful trustee and administrator of these portions.
But, besides forming this trust fund, or deposit, it was necessary to
protect it from the encroachments of individuals, whose aim is ever
not only to recover their own deposit from the fund, but to avail
themselves of what others have contributed. 'Sensible motives,' then,
were needed to divert the despotic will of the individual from

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plunging the laws of society back into their primitive chaos. Such motives
were found in punishments established against transgressors of the
laws; and I call them _sensible_ motives, because experience has shown
that the majority of men adopt no fixed rules of conduct, nor avoid that
universal principle of dissolution, observable alike in the moral as in
the physical world, save by reason of motives which directly strike the
senses and constantly present themselves to the mind, counterbalancing
the strong impressions of private passions, opposed as they are to the
general welfare; neither eloquence, nor declamations, nor the most sublime
truths have ever sufficed to curb the passions for any length of time,
when excited by the lively force of present objects.
Since it was necessity, then, which constrained men to yield a part of
their individual liberty, it is certain that each would place in
the general deposit the least possible portion—only so much, that is,
as would suffice to induce others to defend it. The aggregate of these
least possible portions constitutes the right of punishment; all that
is beyond this is an abuse and not justice, a fact but not a right.[64]
Punishments which exceed what is necessary to preserve the deposit
of the public safety are in their nature unjust; and the more just
punishments are, the more sacred and inviolable is personal security, and
the greater the liberty that the sovereign preserves for his subjects.

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The first consequence of these principles is that the laws alone can
decree punishments for crimes, and this authority can only rest with
the legislator, who represents collective society as united by a social
contract. No magistrate (who is part of society) can justly inflict
punishments on another member of the same society. But since a
punishment that exceeds the legally fixed limit is the lawful punishment
_plus_ another one, a magistrate can, under no pretext of zeal or the
public good, add to the penalty already decreed against a delinquent
citizen.
The second consequence is that the sovereign, who represents society
itself, can only form general laws, binding on all; he cannot judge
whether any particular individual has broken the social compact, for in
that case the nation would be divided into two parties, one represented
by the sovereign, asserting the violation of such contract; the other by
the accused, denying the same. Hence the necessity of a third person to
judge the fact; in other words, of a magistrate, whose decisions shall
simply consist of affirmations or denials of particular facts, and shall
also be subject to no appeal.
The third consequence is this: if it were proved that the severity of
punishments were simply useless (to say nothing of being directly opposed
to the public good and to the very object of preventing crimes), even
in that case it would be contrary not only to those beneficent virtues
that flow from an enlightened reason, which prefers to rule over happy
than over a flock of slaves, the constant victims of timid
cruelty, but it would also be contrary to justice and to the nature of
the social contract itself.

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There is also a fourth consequence of the above principles: the
right to interpret penal laws cannot possibly rest with criminal
judges, for the very reason that they are not legislators. Judges
have not received the laws from our ancestors as a family tradition, as
a legacy that left posterity only the duty of obeying them; instead, they
receive them from living society, or from the sovereign that represents
it and is the lawful trustee of the actual result of men's collective
wills. They receive them not as obligations arising from an ancient
oath[65] (null, because it bound wills not then in existence, and
iniquitous, because it reduced men from a state of society to that of
a flock), but as the result of the tacit or expressed oath made to the
sovereign by the united wills of living subjects, as chains necessary for
curbing and regulating the disorders caused by private interests. This is
the natural and genuine source of the authority of the laws.
Who, then, is to be the rightful interpreter of the laws? Will it be the
sovereign, the trustee of the actual wills of all, or the judge, whose
sole function is to examine whether such and such a man has committed
an illegal act or not?
In every criminal case a judge ought to form a complete syllogistic
deduction, in which the statement of the general law constitutes the
_major premiss_; the conformity or non-conformity of a particular action
with the law, the _minor premiss_; and acquittal or punishment, the
conclusion. When a judge is obliged, or of his own accord wishes, to make
even no more than two syllogisms, the door is opened to uncertainty.
Nothing is more dangerous than that common axiom, 'We must consult the
spirit of the laws.' It is like breaking down a dam before the torrent
of opinions. This truth, which seems a paradox to ordinary minds,
more struck as they are by a little present inconvenience than by the
pernicious but remote consequences which flow from a false principle
…enrooted among a people, seems to me to be demonstrated. Our knowledge
and all our ideas are reciprocally connected; and the more
complicated they are, the more numerous are the approaches to them and

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the points of departure. Every man has his own point of view—a different
one at different times—so that "the spirit of the laws" would mean
the result of good or bad logic on the part of a judge, of an easy or
difficult digestion; it would depend now on the violence of his passions,
now on the feebleness of the sufferer, on the relationship between the
judge and the plaintiff, or on all those minute forces which change the
appearances of everything in the fluctuating mind of man. Hence it is
that we see a citizen's fate change several times as he passes from one
court to another; that we see the lives of wretches at the mercy of the
false reasonings or the temporary caprice of a judge, who takes as his
rightful canon of interpretation the vague result of all that confused
series of notions which affect his mind. Hence it is that we see the same
crimes punished differently by the same court at different times, owing
to its having consulted, not the constant and fixed voice of the laws,
but their unstable and erring interpretations.
No inconvenience that may arise from a strict observance of the letter
of penal laws is to be compared with the inconveniences of subjecting
them to interpretation. The momentary inconvenience in the former case
does, indeed, involve correcting the words of the law that cause the
uncertainty—a task both easy and necessary; but the fatal licence of
arguing, the source of so many arbitrary and venal disputes, is thereby
prevented. When a fixed code of laws, which must be observed to the
letter, leaves the judge no further trouble than to inquire into the
actions of citizens and to decide on their conformity to the written law;
when the standard of just and unjust, which should equally direct the
actions of the ignorant citizen as of the philosophical one, is not a
matter of controversy but of fact; then are people no longer subject to
the petty tyrannies of many men, which are all the more cruel by reason
of the smaller distance that separates the sufferer from the inflictor of
suffering, and which are more pernicious than the tyrannies of a single
man, inasmuch as the despotism of many can only be cured by that of one,

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and a despot's cruelty is proportioned, not to the power he possesses,
but to the obstacles he encounters. Under a fixed code of laws citizens
acquire that consciousness of personal security which is just, because
it is the object of social existence, and which is useful, because it
enables them to calculate exactly the evil consequences of a misdeed. It
is true they will also acquire a spirit of independence, but not such
a spirit as will seek to shake the laws and prove rebellious against
the chief magistrates, except against such of them as have dared to
apply the sacred name of virtue to a spiritless submission to their own
self-interested and capricious opinions. These principles will displease
those who have assumed the right to transfer to their subordinates the
strokes of tyranny they themselves have suffered from their superiors. I
personally should have everything to fear, if the spirit of tyranny and
the spirit of reading ever went together.

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If the interpretation of laws is an evil, it is clear that their
obscurity, which necessarily involves interpretation, must also be an evil,
and an evil that will be at its worst where the laws are written
in any language other than the vernacular of a country. For in that case
the people, being unable to judge for themselves how it may fare with
their liberty or their limbs, are made dependent on a small class of men;
and a book, which should be sacred and open to all, becomes, by virtue of
its language, a private and, so to speak, a family manual.
The greater the number of those who understand and have in their hands
the sacred code of the laws, the fewer crimes will be committed; for
it is beyond all doubt that ignorance and uncertainty of punishments lend
assistance to the eloquence of the passions. Yet what shall we think
of mankind when we reflect that such a condition of the laws is the
inveterate custom of a large part of cultivated and enlightened Europe?
One consequence of these last reflections is that without writing no
society will ever assume a fixed form of government, wherein the power
shall belong to the social whole, and not to its parts, and wherein the
laws, alterable only by the general will, shall not suffer corruption
in their passage through the crowd of private interests. Experience
and reason have taught us that the probability and certainty of human
traditions diminish in proportion to their distance from their source. So
that if there is no standing memorial of the social contract, how will
laws ever resist the inevitable force of time and passion?
From this we see how useful the art of printing is, which makes the
public, and not a few individuals, the guardians of the sacred laws, and
which has scattered that dark spirit of cabal and intrigue, destined to
disappear before knowledge and the sciences, which, however apparently
despised, are in reality feared by those that follow in their wake. This
is the reason that we see in Europe the diminution of those atrocious
crimes that afflicted our ancestors and rendered them by turns tyrants
or slaves. Whoever knows the history of two or three centuries ago and

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of our own can see that from the lap of luxury and effeminacy have
sprung the most pleasing of all human virtues, humanity, charity, and the
toleration of human errors; he will know what have been the results of
that which is so wrongly called 'old-fashioned simplicity and honesty.'
Humanity groaning under implacable superstition; the avarice and ambition
of a few dyeing with human blood the golden chests and thrones of kings;
secret assassinations and public massacres; every noble a tyrant to the
people; the ministers of the Gospel truth polluting with blood hands that
every day came in contact with the God of mercy—these are not the works
of this enlightened age, which some, however, call corrupt.

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# book_title: Crimes and Punishments
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An error, no less common than it is contrary to the purpose of
society—that is, to the consciousness of personal security—is leaving a
magistrate to be the arbitrary executor of the laws, free at his pleasure
to imprison a citizen, to deprive a personal enemy of his liberty on
frivolous pretexts, or to leave a friend unpunished in spite of the
strongest proofs of his guilt. Imprisonment is a punishment which, unlike
every other, must of necessity precede the declaration of guilt; but
this distinctive character does not deprive it of the other essential
element of punishment, namely, that the law alone shall determine the cases
in which it shall be merited. It is for the law, therefore, to point
out the amount of evidence of a crime which shall justify the detention
of the accused, and his subjection to examination and punishment. For
such detention there may be sufficient proofs in common report, in a
man's flight, in a non-judicial confession, or in the confession of
an accomplice; in a man's threats against or constant enmity with the
person injured; in all the facts of the crime, and similar indications.
But these proofs should be determined by the laws, not by the judges,
whose decisions, when they are not particular applications of a general
maxim in a public code, are always adverse to political liberty. The
more that punishments are mitigated, that misery and hunger are banished
from prisons, that pity and mercy are admitted within their iron doors,
and are set above the inexorable and hardened ministers of justice, the
slighter will be the evidences of guilt requisite for the legal detention
of the suspected.
A man accused of a crime, imprisoned and acquitted, ought to bear
no mark of disgrace. How many Romans, accused of the gravest crimes
and then found innocent, were revered by the people and honoured
with magisterial positions! Why, then, is the lot of a
man innocently accused so different in our own times? Because, in the
criminal system now in vogue, the idea of force and might is stronger in
men's minds than the idea of justice; because the accused and the convicted are
thrown in confusion into the same dungeon; because imprisonment is rather

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a man's punishment than his mere custody; and because the two forces
which should be united are separated from one another, namely, the
internal force, which protects the laws, and the external force, which
defends the throne and the nation. Were they united, the former, through
the common sanction of the laws, would possess in addition a judicial
capacity, although independent of that possessed by the supreme judicial
power; and the glory that accompanies the pomp and ceremony of a military
body would remove the infamy, which, like all popular sentiments, is more
attached to the manner than the thing, as is proved by the fact that
military prisons are not regarded in public estimation as so disgraceful
as civil ones. There still remain among our people, in their customs and
in their laws (always a hundred years, in point of merit, in arrear of
the actual enlightenment of a nation), there still remain, I say, the
savage impressions and fierce ideas of our ancestors of the North.

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**PROOFS AND FORMS OF JUDGMENT:**
There is a general theorem which is most useful for calculating the
certainty of a fact, as, for instance, the force of the proofs in the
case of a given crime:—
1. When the proofs of a fact are dependent one on another—that is to say,
when each single proof rests on the weight of some other—then the more
numerous the proofs are, the smaller is the probability of the fact in
question, because the chances of error in the preliminary proofs would
increase the probability of error in the succeeding ones.
2. When the proofs of a fact all depend equally on a single one, their
number neither increases nor diminishes the probability of the fact in
question, because their total value resolves itself into that of the
single one on which they depend.
3. When the proofs are independent of each other—that is to say, when
they do not derive their value one from the other—then the more numerous
the proofs adduced, the greater is the probability of the fact in
question, because the falsity of one proof affects in no way the force of
another.
I speak of probability in connection with crimes, which, to deserve
punishment, ought to be proved. But the paradox is only apparent, if one
reflects that, strictly speaking, moral certainty is only a probability,
but a probability which is called certainty, because every sensible
person necessarily assents to it, by a force of habit which arises
from the necessity of acting, and which is prior to all speculation.
The certainty requisite for certifying that a man is a criminal is,
therefore, the same that determines everyone in the most important
actions of his life. The proofs of a crime may be divided into 'perfect'
and 'imperfect,' the former being of such a nature as to exclude the
possibility of a man's innocence, and the latter such as fall short of
this certainty. Of the first kind one proof alone is sufficient for
condemnation; of the second, or imperfect kind, as many are necessary as
suffice to make a single perfect proof; that is to say, when, though each
proof taken separately does not exclude the possibility of innocence,
yet their convergence on the same point makes such innocence impossible.

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**PROOFS AND FORMS OF JUDGMENT:**
But let it be noted that imperfect proofs, from which an accused has it
in his power to justify himself and declines to do so, become perfect.
This moral certainty of proofs, however, is easier to feel than to define
with exactitude: for which reason I think that the best law is one which
attaches to the chief judge assessors, taken by lot, not by selection,
there being in this case more safety in the ignorance which judges by
sentiment than in the knowledge which judges by opinion. Where the laws
are clear and precise, the function of a judge consists solely in the
certification of fact. If searching out the proofs of a crime requires ability
and cleverness, and if presenting the result requires
clarity and precision, then all that is needed to judge
the result is simple, common good sense—a faculty that is less
fallible than the learning of a judge, accustomed as he is to wanting to
find men guilty and to reducing everything to an artificial system borrowed
from his studies. Happy the nation where the laws are not a science! It
is a most useful law that everyone shall be judged by his equals, because
where a citizen's liberty and fortune are at stake, those sentiments that
inequality inspires should have no voice; that feeling of superiority
with which the prosperous man regards the unfortunate one, and that
feeling of dislike with which an inferior regards his superior, have no
scope in a judgment by one's equals. But when the crime in question is an
offence against a person of a different rank from the accused, then one
half of the judges should be the equals of the accused, the other half
equals of the plaintiff, so that, with every private interest balanced,
by which the appearances of things are involuntarily modified, only the
voice of the laws and of truth may be heard. It is also in accordance
with justice that an accused person should have the power, up to a certain
point, to refuse judges whom he may suspect; and if he is allowed the
exercise of this power for some time without opposition, he will seem
to condemn himself. Verdicts should be public, and the proofs of guilt

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**PROOFS AND FORMS OF JUDGMENT:**
public, in order that opinion—which is, perhaps, the only bond of society
there is—may place a check on outbursts of force and passion, and that
the people may say, 'We are not slaves without defence': a feeling
which both inspires them with courage and is as good as a tribute to a
sovereign who understands his real interest. I refrain from pointing
out other details and precautions which require similar regulations.
I should have said nothing at all, had it been necessary for me to say
everything.

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# book_title: Crimes and Punishments
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# chapter_title: Chapter VIII: Witnesses
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It is a great point in every good system of laws to determine exactly
the credibility of witnesses and the proofs of guilt. Every reasonable
man—that is, every man with a certain connection between his ideas and
with feelings like those of other men—is capable of bearing witness. The
true measure of his credibility is only the interest he has in speaking
or in not speaking the truth; so that nothing can be more frivolous than
to reject the evidence of women on the pretext of their feebleness,
nothing more childish than to apply the results of real death to civil
death as regards the testimony of the condemned, nothing more meaningless
than to insist on the mark of infamy in the infamous when they have no
interest in lying.
Among other abuses of grammar, which have no slight influence on human
affairs, that one is notable which makes the evidence of a condemned
criminal null and void. 'He is _dead civilly_,' say gravely the
peripatetic lawyers, 'and a _dead man_ is incapable of any action.' In
support of this silly metaphor many victims have been sacrificed, and
it has very often been disputed with all seriousness whether the truth
should not yield to judicial formulas. Provided that the testimony of
a condemned criminal does not go so far as to halt the course
of justice, why should a suitable period not be allowed, even after
condemnation, both for the extreme wretchedness of the criminal and for the
interests of truth, so that, by bringing forward new matter that changes the
character of the fact, he may justify himself or others in a new trial?
Forms and ceremonies are necessary in the administration of justice,
because they leave nothing to the free will of the administrator; because
they give the people an idea of a justice that is not tumultuous and
self-interested, but steadfast and regular; and because men, the slaves
of habit and imitation, are more influenced by their feelings than by
arguments. But such forms can never, without fatal danger, be so firmly
fixed by the laws as to be injurious to truth, which, from being either
too simple or too complex, needs some external pomp to conciliate the
ignorant populace.

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The credibility, therefore, of a witness must diminish in proportion
to the hatred, friendship, or close connection between himself and the
accused. More than one witness is necessary, because, as long as one
affirms and another denies, nothing is proved, and the right which
everyone has to be presumed innocent prevails. The credibility of a
witness decreases appreciably the greater the atrocity of the
crime imputed,[66] or the improbability of the circumstances, as in
charges of magic and gratuitously cruel actions. It is more likely, as
regards the former accusation, that many men should lie than that such
an accusation should be true, because it is easier for many men to be
united in an ignorant mistake or in persecuting hatred than for one man
to exercise a power which God either has not conferred or has taken away
from every created being. The same reasoning holds good also of the
second accusation, for man is only cruel in proportion to his interest
in being so, to his hatred or to his fear. Properly speaking, there is no
superfluous feeling in human nature, every feeling being always in strict
accordance with the impressions made on the senses. In the same way the
The credibility of a witness may sometimes be lessened by the fact that he
is a member of some secret society whose purposes and principles are
either not well understood or differ from those generally accepted;
for such a man has not only his own passions but those of others as well.
Lastly, a witness's testimony is almost worthless when spoken words are
construed as a crime. For the tone, the gesture, all that precedes or
follows the different ideas men attach to the same words, so alter
and modify a man's utterances that it is almost impossible to repeat
them exactly as they were spoken. Moreover, actions of a violent and
unusual character, such as real crimes are, leave their traces in the
countless circumstances and effects that flow from them; and of such
actions, the greater the number of circumstances adduced in proof, the
more numerous are the chances for the accused to clear himself. But words
remain only in the memory of their hearers, and memory is for the most

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part unfaithful and often deceitful. It is on that account ever so much
easier to fix a calumny on a man's words than on his actions.

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# book_title: Crimes and Punishments
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Palpable but sanctioned abuses, which in many nations are the necessary
result of a weak political constitution, are secret accusations. For
they make men false and reserved, and anyone who suspects he sees
an informer in his neighbour will see an enemy in him. Men then come to
mask their true feelings, and by the habit of hiding them from others
they at last come to hide them from themselves. Unhappy are those who have come
to that; who, without clear and fixed principles to guide them, wander
lost and confused in the vast sea of opinions, ever busy saving
themselves from the horrors that oppress them, with the present moment
ever embittered by the uncertainty of the future, and without the lasting
pleasures of quiet and security, devouring in unseemly haste those few
pleasures which occur at rare intervals in their melancholy lives and
scarcely console them for the fact of having lived! Is it of such men that we
can hope to make intrepid soldiers, defenders of their country and crown?
Is it among such men that we shall find incorrupt magistrates, able with their
free and patriotic eloquence to sustain and develop the true interests
of their sovereign, ready, with the tribute they bear, to carry to the
throne the love and blessings of all classes of men, and thence to bring
back to palaces and cottages alike peace and security, and that active
hope of improving their lot which is so useful a leaven—indeed, which is
the life of States?
Who can protect himself from calumny when it is armed with the strongest
shield of tyranny, secrecy? What kind of government can that ever be
where a ruler suspects every subject as an enemy and is obliged, for the
sake of general tranquillity, to rob each individual of what he possesses?
What are the pretexts by which secret accusations and punishments are
justified? Are they the public welfare, the security and maintenance of
the form of government? But how strange a constitution is that where
he who has force on his side, and opinion, which is even stronger than
force, is afraid of every citizen! Is the accuser's indemnity, then,
the excuse? In that case the laws do not sufficiently defend him; and

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shall there be subjects stronger than their sovereign? Or is it to save
the informer from infamy? What! secret calumny be fair and lawful, and an
open one deserving of punishment! Is it, then, the nature of the crime?
If indifferent actions, or even useful actions, are called crimes, then
of course accusations and trials can never be secret enough. But how
can there be crimes, that is, public injuries, unless the publicity of
this example, by a public trial, be at the same time the interest of
all men? I respect every government, and speak of none in particular.
Circumstances are sometimes such that to remove an evil may seem utter
ruin when it is inherent in a national system. But had I to dictate new
laws in any forgotten corner of the universe, my hand would tremble and
all posterity would rise before my eyes before I would authorise such a
custom as that of secret accusations.
It has already been remarked by Montesquieu that public accusations are
more suited to republics, where the public good ought to be the citizens'
first passion, than to monarchies, where such a sentiment is very feeble,
owing to the nature of the government itself, and where the appointment
of officers to accuse transgressors of the law in the name of the public
is a most excellent institution. But every government, be it republican
or monarchical, ought to inflict on a false accuser the same punishment
which, had the accusation been true, would have fallen on the accused.

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# book_title: Crimes and Punishments
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Our laws prohibit _suggestive_ (leading) questions in a lawsuit:
those, that is (according to the doctors of law), which, instead of
applying, as they should do, to the _genus_ in the circumstances of
a crime, refer to the _species_; those, in other words, which from
their immediate connection with a crime suggest to the accused a direct
answer. Questions, according to the criminal lawyers, ought, so to speak,
'to envelop the main fact spirally and never to attack it in a direct
line.' The reasons for this method are, either that an answer may not
be _suggested_ to the accused which may place him face to face with
the charge against him, or perhaps because it seems unnatural for him
directly to criminate himself. But, whichever of these reasons it may be,
the contradiction is remarkable between the existence of such a custom
and the legal authorization of torture; for what interrogation can be
more suggestive than pain? The former reason applies to the question of
torture, because pain will suggest to a strong man obstinate silence,
so that he may exchange the greater penalty for the lesser, while
it will suggest to a weak man confession, so that he may escape
from present torment, which has more influence over him than pain which
is to come. The other reason evidently applies too, for if a special
question leads a man to confess against natural right, the agonies of
torture will more easily do the same. But men are more governed by the
difference of names than by that of things.
Finally, a man who, when examined, persists in an obstinate refusal to
answer, deserves a punishment fixed by the laws, and one of the heaviest
they can inflict, so that men may not in this way escape the necessary
example they owe to the public. But this punishment is not necessary when
it is beyond all doubt that such a person has committed such a crime,
questions being useless, in the same way that confession is, when other
Proofs sufficiently demonstrate guilt. And this last case is the most
usual, for experience proves that in the majority of trials the accused
are wont to plead “Not guilty.”

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A contradiction between the laws and the natural feelings of mankind
arises from the oaths required of an accused, to the effect
that he will be a truthful man when it is in his greatest interest to
be false; as if a man could really swear to contribute to his own
destruction, or as if religion would not be silent with most men when
their interest spoke on the other side. The experience of all ages has
shown that men have abused religion more than any other of the precious
gifts of heaven; and for what reason should criminals respect it, when
men esteemed as the wisest have often violated it? Too weak, because too
far removed from the senses, are for the mass of people the motives
which religion opposes to the tumult of fear and the love of life.
The affairs of heaven are governed by laws absolutely different from
those which govern human affairs; so why compromise the latter by the former?
Why place men in the terrible dilemma of either sinning against God or
agreeing to their own ruin? The law, in fact, which enforces such an
oath commands a man either to be a bad Christian or to be a martyr. The
oath gradually becomes a mere formality, thus destroying the force of
religious feelings, which for most men are the only guarantee of
their honesty. Experience has shown how useless oaths are, for
every judge will bear me out when I say that no oath has ever yet made
any criminal speak the truth; and reason shows the same thing,
declaring all laws to be useless, and consequently harmful, which
are opposed to the natural sentiments of man. Such laws meet the same
fate as dams placed directly in the main stream of a river: either they
are immediately thrown down and overwhelmed, or a whirlpool formed by
themselves corrodes and undermines them imperceptibly.

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# book_title: Crimes and Punishments
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A cruelty consecrated among most nations by custom is the torture of the
accused during his trial, on the pretext of compelling him to confess his
crime, of clearing up contradictions in his statements, of discovering
his accomplices, of purging him in some metaphysical and incomprehensible
way from infamy, or finally of discovering other crimes of which he may
possibly be guilty, but of which he is not accused.
A man cannot be called _guilty_ before sentence has been passed on him by
a judge, nor can society deprive him of its protection until it has been
decided that he has broken the condition on which it was granted. What,
then, is that right but one of mere might, by which a judge is empowered
to inflict punishment on a citizen while his guilt or innocence is
still undetermined? The following dilemma is no new one: either the crime
is certain or uncertain; if certain, no other punishment is suitable for
it than that affixed to it by law; and torture is useless, for the same
reason that the criminal's confession is useless. If it is uncertain, it
is wrong to torture an innocent person, such as the law adjudges him to
be, whose crimes are not yet proved.
What is the political object of punishments? The intimidation of other
men. But what shall we say of the secret and private tortures which the
Does the tyranny of custom weigh equally on the guilty and the innocent? It
is important, indeed, that no open crime shall go unpunished; but the
public exposure of a criminal whose crime was hidden in darkness is
utterly useless. An evil that has been done and cannot be undone can
be punished by civil society only insofar as it may influence others with
the hope of impunity. If it is true that there are more
men who respect the laws, whether from fear or from virtue, than of those
who transgress them, the risk of torturing an innocent man should be
estimated according to the probability that any man will have been more
likely, other things being equal, to have respected than to have despised
the laws.
But I say in addition: it is to seek to confound all the relations of
things to require a man to be at the same time accuser and accused, to

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make pain the crucible of truth, as if the test of it lay in the muscles
and sinews of an unfortunate wretch. The law which ordains the use of
torture is a law which says to men: 'Resist pain; and if Nature has
created in you an inextinguishable self-love, if she has given you an
inalienable right of self-defence, I create in you a wholly contrary
affection, namely, a heroic self-hatred, and I command you to accuse
yourselves, and to speak the truth amid the laceration of your muscles
and the dislocation of your bones.'
This infamous crucible of truth is a still-existing monument of that
primitive and savage legal system which called trials by fire and
boiling water, or the accidental decisions of combat, _judgments of
God_, as if the links of the eternal chain in the control of the First
Cause must at every moment be disarranged and disrupted for the petty
institutions of mankind. The only difference between torture and the
trial by fire and water is that the result of the former seems to depend
on the will of the accused, and that of the other two on a fact which is
purely physical and extrinsic to the sufferer; but the difference is only
apparent, not real. The avowal of truth under tortures and agonies is as
little free as was in those times the prevention without fraud of the
the usual effects of fire and boiling water. Every act of our will is always
proportioned to the force of the sensory impression that causes it, and
every man's sensibility is limited. Hence the impression produced by
pain may be so intense as to occupy a man's entire sensibility and leave
him no other freedom than the choice of the shortest way of escape, for
the present moment, from his punishment. Under such circumstances the answer
of the accused is as inevitable as the impressions produced by fire
and water; and the innocent man who is sensitive will declare himself
guilty, when by so doing he hopes to bring his agonies to an end. All
the difference between guilt and innocence is lost by virtue of the very
means that they profess to employ for its discovery.
Torture is a certain method for the acquittal of robust villains and for

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the condemnation of innocent but feeble men. See the fatal drawbacks of
this pretended test of truth—a test, indeed, that is worthy of cannibals;
a test that the Romans, barbarous as they too were in many respects,
reserved for slaves alone, the victims of their fierce and too highly
lauded virtue. Of two men, equally innocent or equally guilty,
the robust and courageous will be acquitted, the weak and the timid will be
condemned, by virtue of the following exact train of reasoning on the
part of the judge: 'I as judge had to find you guilty of such and such
a crime; you, A B, have by your physical strength been able to resist
pain, and therefore I acquit you; you, C D, in your weakness have yielded
to it; therefore I condemn you. I feel that a confession extorted amid
torments can have no force, but I will torture you afresh unless you
corroborate what you have now confessed.'
The result of torture, then, is a matter of temperament and calculation,
which varies with each man according to his strength and sensibility;
so that by this method a mathematician might solve better than a judge
this problem: 'Given the muscular force and the nervous sensibility of an
innocent man, to find the degree of pain which will cause him to plead
guilty to a given crime.'
The object of examining an accused man is the ascertainment of truth.
But if this truth is difficult to discover from a man's air, demeanor,
or countenance, even when he is quiet, much more difficult will it be
to discover from a man on whose face all the signs by which most men,
sometimes in spite of themselves, express the truth, are distorted
by pain. Every violent action confuses and causes to disappear those
trifling differences between objects by which one may sometimes
distinguish the true from the false.
A strange consequence that flows naturally from the use of torture is
that an innocent man is thereby placed in a worse condition than a guilty
one, because if both are tortured, the former has every alternative
against him. For either he confesses the crime and is condemned, or he
is declared innocent, having suffered an undeserved punishment. But the

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guilty man has one chance in his favor, since, if he resists the torture
firmly and is acquitted in consequence, he has exchanged a greater
penalty for a smaller one. Therefore the innocent man can only lose, the
guilty may gain, by torture.
This truth is, in fact, felt, though in a confused way, by the very
people who place themselves farthest from it. For a confession made
under torture is of no use unless it is confirmed by an oath taken
afterward; and yet, if the criminal does not confirm his confession, he is
tortured anew. Some doctors of law and some nations allow this
infamous begging of the question to be used only three times, while other
nations and other doctors leave it to the discretion of the judge.
It would be superfluous to shed more light on the matter by mentioning
the countless instances of innocent people who have confessed
themselves guilty under the agonies of torture; there is no nation, no age that
cannot mention its own; but men neither change their natures nor draw
conclusions. There is no man who has ever raised his ideas beyond the
common needs of life but runs occasionally toward Nature, who with
a secret and confused voice calls him to herself; but custom, that tyrant
of human minds, draws him back and frightens him.
The second pretext for torture is its application to supposed criminals
who contradict themselves under examination, as if the fear of the
punishment, the uncertainty of the sentence, the legal pageantry, the
majesty of the judge, the state of ignorance that is common alike to
innocent and guilty, were not enough to plunge into self-contradiction
both the innocent man who is afraid, and the guilty man who seeks to
shield himself; as if contradictions, common enough when men are at their
ease, were not likely to be multiplied, when the mind is perturbed and
wholly absorbed in the thought of seeking safety from imminent peril.
Torture, again, is employed to discover if a criminal is guilty of other
crimes besides those with which he is charged. It is as if this argument
were employed: 'Because you are guilty of one crime you may be guilty of
a hundred others. This doubt weighs on me: I wish to ascertain about it

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by my test of truth: the laws torture you because you are guilty, because
you may be guilty, because I mean you to be guilty.'
Torture, again, is inflicted on an accused man in order to discover
his accomplices in crime. But if it is proved that it is not a fitting
method for the discovery of truth, how will it serve to disclose
accomplices, which is part of the truth to be discovered? As if a man
who accuses himself would not more readily accuse others. And is it just
to torment men for the crimes of others? Will not the accomplices be
disclosed from the examination of the witnesses and of the accused, from
the proofs and whole circumstances of the crime; in sum, from all those
very means which should serve to convict the accused himself of guilt?
Accomplices generally fly immediately after the capture of a companion;
the uncertainty of their lot of itself condemns them to exile, and
frees the country from the danger of fresh offences from them; while
the punishment of the criminal who is caught attains its precise object,
namely, the averting of other men by terror from a similar crime.
Another ridiculous reason for torture is the purgation from infamy; that
is to say, a man judged infamous by the laws must confirm his testimony
by the dislocation of his bones. This abuse ought not to be tolerated in
the eighteenth century. It is believed that pain, which is a physical
sensation, purges from infamy, which is merely a moral condition. Is
pain, then, a crucible, and infamy a mixed impure substance? But infamy
is a sentiment, subject neither to laws nor to reason, but to common
opinion. Torture itself causes real infamy to the victim of it. So the
result is that, by this method, infamy will be taken away by the very fact
of its infliction!
It is not difficult to go back to the origin of this ridiculous law,
because the absurdities themselves that a whole nation adopts have always
some connection with other common ideas which the same nation respects.
The custom seems to have been derived from religious and spiritual ideas,
which have so great an influence on the thoughts of men, on nations,
and on generations. An infallible dogma assures us that the stains

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contracted by human weakness and undeserving of the eternal anger of
the Supreme Being must be purged by an incomprehensible fire. Now,
infamy is a civil stain; and as pain and fire take away spiritual and
incorporeal stains, why should not the agonies of torture take away the
civil stain of infamy? I believe that the confession of a criminal, which
some courts insist on as an essential prerequisite for conviction, has
a similar origin;—because in the mysterious tribunal of repentance the
confession of sins is an essential part of the sacrament. This is how
men abuse the surest lights of revelation; and since these are the only ones
that exist in times of ignorance, it is to them on all occasions that
docile humanity turns, making of them the most absurd and far-fetched
applications.
These truths were recognized by the Roman legislators, for they inflicted
torture only on slaves, who in law had no personality. They have
been adopted by England, a nation whose literary glory, whose
superiority in commerce and wealth, and consequently in
power, and whose examples of virtue and courage leave us no doubt as
to the goodness of her laws. Torture has also been abolished in Sweden;
it has been abolished by one of the wisest monarchs of Europe, who,
taking philosophy with him to the throne, has made himself the friend
and legislator of his subjects, rendering them equal and free in their
dependence on the laws—the only kind of equality and liberty that
reasonable men can ask for in the present condition of things. Nor has
torture been deemed necessary in the laws that govern armies, composed
though they are for the most part of the dregs of different countries,
and for that reason more than any other class of men the more likely
to require it. It is a strange thing—for whoever forgets the power of the
tyranny exercised by custom—that peaceful laws should be obliged to learn
from minds hardened to massacre and bloodshed the most humane method of
conducting trials.

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# book_title: Crimes and Punishments
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As soon as the proofs of a crime and its reality are fully established,
the criminal must be allowed time and opportunity for his defence;
but the time allowed must be so short as not to interfere with the
speediness of his punishment, which, as we have seen, is one of the
principal restraints from crime. A false philanthropy seems opposed to
this shortness of time; but all doubt will vanish on reflection that the
The more defective any system of law is, the greater the dangers to which
innocence is exposed.
But the laws should fix a certain period of time both for the defence of
the accused and for the discovery of proofs against him. It would place
the judge in the position of a legislator if it were his duty to fix the
time necessary for the latter. In the same way, those atrocious crimes
whose memory lingers long in men's minds deserve, once proved, no
prescription in favour of a criminal who has fled from his country; but
lesser and obscure crimes should be allowed a certain prescription, which
may free a man from uncertainty concerning his fate, because the obscurity
in which his crimes have long been involved detracts from the
bad example of his impunity, and the possibility of reform in the meantime
remains open to him. It is enough to indicate these principles, because I
cannot fix a precise limit of time, except for a given system of laws and
in given social circumstances. I will only add that, the advantage of
moderate penalties in a nation being proved, the laws which shorten or
lengthen, according to the gravity of crimes, the term of prescription
or of proofs, thus making of prison itself or of voluntary exile a part
of the punishment, will supply an easy classification of a few mild
punishments for a very large number of crimes.
But these periods of time will not be lengthened in exact proportion to
the atrocity of crimes, since the probability of a crime is in inverse
ratio to its atrocity. It will, then, be necessary to shorten the period
for inquiry and to increase that of prescription; which may appear to
contradict what I said before, namely, that it is possible to inflict

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equal penalties on unequal crimes, by counting as a penalty that period
of imprisonment or of prescription which precedes the verdict. To explain
to the reader my idea: I distinguish two kinds of crimes—the first,
atrocious crimes, beginning with homicide and including all the excessive
forms of wickedness; the second comprising less considerable crimes. This
distinction is founded in human nature. Personal security is a natural
right, the security of property a social one. The number of motives
which impel men to violate their natural affections is far smaller than
those which impel them, through their natural longing for happiness, to
violate a right which they do not find written in their hearts but only
in the conventions of society. The very great difference between the
probability of these two kinds of crime respectively makes it necessary
that they should be governed by different principles. In cases of the more
atrocious crimes, because they are more uncommon, the time for inquiry
ought to be correspondingly shorter, since the probability of the
accused's innocence is greater; and the period of limitation ought to be longer,
since on a final definitive sentence of guilt or innocence depends the
destruction of the hope of impunity, the harm of which is proportioned
to the atrocity of the crime. But in cases of lesser criminality, where
the presumption in favour of a man's innocence is less, the time for
inquiry should be longer; and as the harm of impunity is less, the
period of limitation should be shorter. But such a division of crimes
ought, indeed, not to be admitted, if the danger of impunity decreased
exactly in proportion to the greater probability of the crime. One should
remember that an accused man, whose guilt or innocence is uncertain, may,
though acquitted for lack of evidence, be subjected for the same crime to
a fresh imprisonment and inquiry, should fresh legal evidence
arise against him, so long as the period of prescription allowed by
the laws has not elapsed. Such at least is the compromise that I think
best fitted to preserve both the liberty and the security of the subject,

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since it is only too easy to favor the one at the expense of the other,
so that these two blessings, the inalienable and equal patrimony of every
citizen, are left unprotected and undefended, the one against declared or
veiled despotism, the other against the turbulence of civil anarchy.
There are some crimes which are at the same time of common occurrence
and of difficult proof. In them the difficulty of proof is equivalent
to a probability of innocence; and since the harm of their impunity is so
much the less to be considered as their frequency depends on principles
other than the risk of punishment, the time for inquiry and the period
of prescription ought both to be proportionately less. Yet cases of
adultery and pederasty, both difficult to prove, are precisely those
in which, according to accepted principles, tyrannical presumptions
of _quasi-proofs_ and _half-proofs_ are allowed to prevail (as if
a man could be _half-innocent_ or _half-guilty_, in other words,
_half-punishable_ or _half-acquittable_); in which torture exercises its
cruel sway over the person of the accused, over the witnesses, and even
over the whole family of an unfortunate wretch, according to the coldly
wicked teaching of certain doctors of law, who set themselves up as the rule
and standard for judges to follow.
In view of these principles it will appear strange (to anyone who does
not reflect that reason has, so to speak, never yet legislated for a
nation), that it is precisely the most atrocious crimes, or the most secret and
chimerical ones—that is, those of the least probability—which are proved
by conjectures or by the weakest and most equivocal proofs: as if it were
in the interest of the laws and of the judge, not to search for the truth,
but to discover the crime; as if the danger of condemning an innocent
man were not so much the greater, the greater the probability of his
innocence over that of his guilt.
The majority of mankind lack that vigour which is equally necessary for
the greatest crimes as for the greatest virtues; whence it would appear,
that both extremes are contemporaneous phenomena in nations which depend

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rather on the energy of their government and of the passions that tend to
the public good, than on their size and the constant goodness of their
laws. In the latter the weakened passions seem more adapted to maintain
than to improve the form of government. From which flows an important
consequence, namely, that great crimes in a nation do not always prove
its decline.

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# book_title: Crimes and Punishments
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It does not follow, because the laws do not punish intentions, that
therefore a crime begun by some action, significative of the will to
complete it, is undeserving of punishment, although it deserves less than
a crime actually committed. The importance of preventing an attempt at a
crime justifies a punishment; but since there may be an interval between
the attempt and the execution, reserving a greater punishment
for a consummated crime may provide a motive for not completing it.
The same may be said, though for a different reason, where there
are several accomplices to a crime, not all of them its immediate
perpetrators. When several men join together in an undertaking, the
greater its risk is, the more they will seek to make it equal for all
of them; the more difficult it will therefore be to find one of them
willing to carry the deed out, if by doing so he incurs
a greater risk than that incurred by his accomplices. The only exception
would be where the perpetrator received a fixed reward, for then, since the
perpetrator has compensation for his greater risk, the punishment
should be equalized between him and his accomplices. Such reflections may
appear too metaphysical to anyone who does not consider that it is of the
utmost advantage for the laws to afford as few grounds for agreement as
possible between companions in crime.
Some courts promise impunity to an accomplice in a serious crime who will
expose his companions—an expedient that has drawbacks as well as
advantages. Among the drawbacks must be counted the state's official
authorization of treachery, a practice that even criminals detest; for crimes of
courage are less harmful to a people than crimes of cowardice, courage
being no ordinary quality and needing only a beneficent guiding force
to make it serve the public welfare, while cowardice is more
common and contagious, and always more self-centered than the other.
Besides, a tribunal that calls for the aid of the lawbreaker proclaims
its own uncertainty and the weakness of the laws themselves. On the other
hand, the advantages of the practice are the prevention of crimes and
the intimidation of the people, owing to the fact that the results are

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visible while the perpetrators remain hidden; moreover, it helps to show that
a man who breaks his faith with the laws—that is, with the public—is likely
also to break it in private life. I think that a general law promising
impunity to an accomplice who exposes a crime would be preferable to
a special declaration in a particular case, because in this way the
mutual fear that each accomplice would have of his own risk would tend
to prevent their association; the tribunal would not make criminals
audacious by showing that their aid was called for in a particular case.
Such a law, however, should accompany impunity with the banishment of
the informer.… But to no purpose do I torment myself to dissipate the
remorse I feel in authorizing the inviolable laws, the monument of
public confidence, the basis of human morality, to resort to treachery
and dissimulation. What an example to the nation it would be if the
promised impunity were not observed, and if the man who had responded to
the invitation of the laws were dragged by learned quibbles to punishment, in
spite of the public troth pledged to him! Such examples are not rare in
different countries; nor, therefore, is the number small of those
who consider a nation in no other light than that of a complicated
machine, whose springs the cleverest and the strongest move at their
will. Cold and insensible to all that forms the delight of tender and
sensitive minds, they arouse, with imperturbable sagacity, either the
softest feelings or the strongest passions, as soon as they see them of
service to the object they have in view, handling men's minds just as
musicians do their instruments.

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From the simple consideration of the truths thus far demonstrated, it is
evident that the object of punishment is neither to torment and inflict
pain on a sensitive creature nor to undo a crime already committed. Can he
whose function it is, so far from acting from passion, to tranquillise
the private passions of his fellows, harbour in the body politic such
useless cruelty, the instrument either of furious fanatics or of weak
tyrants? Shall perchance the shrieks of an unhappy wretch call back from
never-receding time actions already executed? The object, therefore,
of punishment is simply to prevent the criminal from injuring anew his
fellow-citizens, and to deter others from committing similar injuries;
and those punishments and that method of inflicting them should be
preferred which, duly proportioned to the offence, will produce a more
produce an efficacious and lasting impression on the minds of men while inflicting the
least torture on the body of a criminal.
Who can read history without being horror-struck at the barbarous and
useless torments which men who were called wise cold-bloodedly devised
and carried out? Who is there who would not feel his blood boil when he regards
the thousands of wretches whom misery, whether intended or tolerated by
the laws (which have always favoured the few and outraged the many),
has driven to a desperate return to the original state of nature; when
he sees them either accused by men endowed with the same senses, and
consequently with the same passions as themselves, of impossible crimes,
the fiction of timid ignorance, or guilty of nothing but fidelity to
their own principles; and when he sees them lacerated by slow tortures,
subject to well-contrived formalities, a pleasing sight for a fanatical
multitude?
In order that a punishment may attain its object, it is enough if the
evil of the punishment exceeds the advantage of the crime, and in this
The excess of evil, the certainty of punishment, and the loss of the possible
advantage from the crime ought to be considered as part; all beyond this
is superfluous and consequently tyrannical. Men regulate their conduct by

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the reiterated impression of evils they know, not by reason of evils they
ignore. Given two nations, in one of which, on the scale of punishments
proportioned to the scale of crimes, the severest penalty is perpetual
servitude, and in the other the wheel; I say that the former will have as
great a dread of its severest punishment as the latter will have; and if
there be any reason for transporting to the former country the greater
penalties of the other, the same reasoning will serve for increasing
still more the penalties of this latter country, passing imperceptibly
from the wheel to the slowest and most elaborate tortures, nay, even to
the last refinements of that science which tyrants understand only too
well.
The more cruel punishments become, the more human minds harden, adjusting
themselves, like fluids, to the level of objects around them; and the
The ever-living force of the passions brings it about that, after a hundred
years of cruel punishments, the wheel frightens men only just as much as
the punishment of prison did at first.
The very severity of a punishment leads men to dare so much the more to
escape it, in proportion to the greatness of the evil in prospect; and many
crimes are thus committed to avoid the penalty of a single one. Countries
and times where punishments have been most severe have ever been those
where the bloodiest and most inhuman deeds have been committed, the same
spirit of ferocity that guided the hand of the legislator having guided
also that of the parricide and assassin; on the throne dictating iron
laws for the villainous souls of slaves to obey, and in the obscurity of
private life urging to the slaughter of tyrants, only to create fresh
ones in their stead.
Two other fatal consequences flow from the cruelty of punishments,
and are contrary to their very purpose, the prevention of crimes. The
first is that it is not so easy to preserve the essential proportion
between crime and punishment, because however much a studied cruelty
may diversify its forms, none of them can go beyond the extreme limit of
endurance that is a condition of human organization and sensibility.

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Once this extreme limit is reached, it would be impossible to
invent a corresponding increase in punishment for still more
injurious and atrocious crimes as would be necessary to prevent them.
The other consequence is that impunity itself arises from the severity
of punishments. People are restrained within limits in both good and evil;
and a sight too atrocious for humanity can only be a passing rage, not a
constant system, such as the laws ought to be; if the latter are really
cruel, either they are changed, or they themselves give rise to a fatal
impunity.
I conclude with this reflection: that the scale of punishments should be
relative to the condition of a nation. On the hardened minds of a people
scarcely emerged from the savage state, the impressions made should be
stronger and more perceptible. One needs a thunderbolt for the destruction
of a fierce lion that turns around at the shot of a gun. But in proportion
as men's minds become softened in the social state, their sensibility
increases, and commensurate with that increase should be the diminution
of the force of punishment, if it be desired to maintain any proportion
between the object and the sensation that attends it.

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This useless prodigality of punishments, by which men have never been
made any better, has driven me to examine whether the punishment
of death be really useful and just in a well organised government.
What kind of right can that be which men claim for the slaughter of
their fellow-beings? Certainly not that right which is the source of
sovereignty and of laws. For these are nothing but the sum-total of
the smallest portions of individual liberty, and represent the general
will, that is, the aggregate of individual wills. But who ever wished to
leave to other men the option of killing him? How in the least possible
sacrifice of each man's liberty can there be a sacrifice of the greatest
of all goods, namely, of life? And if there could be that sacrifice, how
Would such a principle accord with the other, that a man is not the
master of his own life? Yet he must have been so, if he could have given to
himself or to society as a body this right of killing him.
The death penalty therefore is not a right; I have proved that it cannot
be so; but it is a war of a nation against one of its members, because
his annihilation is deemed necessary and expedient. But if I can show
that his death is neither necessary nor expedient, I shall have won the
cause of humanity.
The death of a citizen can only be deemed necessary for two reasons.
The first is when, though deprived of his personal freedom, he has
still such connections and power as threaten the national security;
when his existence is capable of producing a dangerous revolution in
the established form of government. The death of a citizen becomes
then necessary when the nation is recovering or losing its liberty, or
in a time of anarchy, when confusion takes the place of laws; but in
times when the laws hold undisturbed sway, when the form of government
corresponds with the wishes of a united nation, and is defended
internally and externally by force, and by opinion, which is perhaps even
stronger than force, where the supreme power rests only with the true
sovereign, and riches serve to purchase pleasures but not offices, I see
no necessity for destroying a citizen, except when his death might be the

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real and only restraint for deterring others from committing crimes; this
latter case constituting the second reason for which one may believe
capital punishment to be both just and necessary.
Since mankind in general, always suspicious of the language of reason but
ready to bow to that of authority, remains unpersuaded by the experience
of all ages, in which the supreme punishment has never deterred resolute
men from committing offences against society; since they are also equally
unmoved by the example of the Romans and by twenty years of the reign
of the Empress Elizabeth of Russia, during which she presented this
illustrious example to the fathers of their people, an example which
is at least equivalent to many conquests bought by the blood of her
country's sons, it is sufficient merely to consult human nature itself,
to perceive the truth of the assertion I have made.
The greatest effect that any punishment has on the human mind is not
to be measured by its intensity but by its duration, for our sensibility
is more easily and permanently affected by very slight but repeated
impressions than by a strong but brief shock. Habit holds universal sway
over every sentient being, and as we speak and walk and satisfy our
needs with its aid, so moral ideas are imprinted on our mind only by
long and repeated impressions. It is not the terrible yet brief sight of
a criminal's death, but the long and painful example of a man deprived
of his liberty, who, having become, as it were, a beast of burden,
repays with his toil the society he has offended, that is the strongest
restraint from crimes. Far more potent than the fear of death, which men
always have before their eyes in the remote distance, is the thought, so
efficacious from its constant recurrence: 'I myself shall be reduced to
as long and miserable a condition if I commit similar misdeeds.'
Capital punishment makes an impression in prospect which, with all
its force, does not fully counteract that ready spirit of forgetfulness, so
natural to man even in his most important concerns, and so liable to
be accelerated by his passions. As a general rule, men are startled

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by the sight of violent sufferings, but not for long, and therefore
such impressions tend to transform them in such a way as to make ordinary
men either Persians or Spartans; but in a free and settled government
impressions should be frequent rather than strong.
Capital punishment becomes a spectacle for the majority of mankind, and
a subject for compassion and abhorrence for others; the minds of the
spectators are more filled with these feelings than with the wholesome
terror the law claims to inspire. But in moderate and continuing
penalties the latter is the predominant feeling, because it is the only
one. The limit which the legislator should affix to the severity of
penalties appears to lie in the first signs of a feeling of compassion
becoming uppermost in the minds of the spectators, when they look on
the punishment as their own rather than as the criminal's.
For a punishment to be just, it must contain only such
degrees of intensity as suffice to deter men from crimes. But since there
is no one who on reflection would choose the total and perpetual loss
of his liberty, however great the advantages offered him by a crime,
the intensity of the punishment of servitude for life, substituted for
capital punishment, has in it what is sufficient to daunt the most
determined courage. I will add that it is even more deterrent than death.
Very many men face death calmly and firmly, some from fanaticism, some
from vanity, which almost always attends a man to the tomb; others from a
last desperate attempt either no longer to live or to escape from their
misery; but neither fanaticism nor vanity have any place among fetters
and chains, under the stick, under the yoke, in a cage of iron; the
wretch thus punished is so far from ending his miseries that with
his punishment he only begins them.
The mind of man offers more resistance to violence and to extreme but
It takes less effort to bear brief pains than to endure time and incessant weariness; for while
the mind can, so to speak, gather itself together for a moment to repel the
former, its vigorous elasticity is insufficient to resist the long and
repeated action of the latter. In the case of capital punishment, each

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example of it that is presented is all that a single crime affords; in penal
servitude for life, a single crime serves to present numerous and lasting
warnings. And if it is important that the power of the laws should often
be witnessed, there ought to be no long intervals between the examples
of the death penalty; but this would presuppose a frequency of crimes,
so that, to render the punishment effective, it must not make on men
all the impression that it ought to make—in other words, it must be
useful and not useful at the same time. And should it be objected that
perpetual servitude is as painful as death, and therefore equally cruel,
I will reply that, taking into consideration all the unhappy moments of
servitude, it will perhaps be even more painful than death; but while
these moments are spread over the whole of a lifetime, death exercises
all its force in a single moment. There is also this advantage in penal
servitude: it holds more terror for the one who sees it than for the one
who suffers it, for the former thinks of the whole sum of unhappy
moments, while the latter, through the unhappiness of the present moment, has
his thoughts diverted from what is to come. All evils are magnified
in imagination, and every sufferer finds resources and consolations
unknown to and unbelieved by spectators, who substitute their own
sensibility for the hardened soul of a criminal.
The following is the kind of reasoning adopted by the thief or the
assassin, whose only motives for not breaking the laws are the gallows
or the wheel. (I know that the analysis of one's own thoughts is an art
only learnt by education, but a thief does not the less act according to
certain principles because he is unable to express them.) "Of what sort,"
he argues, "are these laws that I am bound to observe, that leave so
great an interval between myself and the rich man? He denies me the penny
I ask of him, and excuses himself by ordering from me a work of which
he himself knows nothing. Who made these laws? Were they not made
by rich and powerful men, who have never deigned to visit the wretched
hovels of the poor, who have never divided a musty loaf of bread amid

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the innocent cries of famished children and the tears of a wife? Let
us break these bonds, which are fatal to the greater number and only
useful to a few indolent tyrants; let us attack injustice at its source.
I will return to my state of natural independence; I will live for some
time happy and free on the fruits of my courage and address; and if
the day should ever come when I have to suffer and repent for it, the
time of suffering will be short, and I shall have one day of misery for
many years of liberty and pleasure. As the king of a small band, I will
correct the errors of fortune, and see these tyrants pale and tremble
before one whom in their insolent arrogance they rated lower than their
horses or their dogs.' Then religion hovers before the mind of the
criminal, who turns everything to a bad use, and offering him an easy
repentance and an almost certain eternity of bliss does much to diminish
in his eyes, the horror of that last tragedy of all.
But the man who sees ahead a great number of years, or perhaps the
whole of his life, to be spent in servitude and suffering before the
eyes of fellow citizens with whom he lives in freedom and friendship,
the slave of those laws that had once protected him, makes a useful
comparison of all these circumstances with the uncertain outcome of his
crimes and with the brevity of the time for which he would enjoy their
fruits. The ever-present example of those whom he actually sees as
victims of their own imprudence impresses him much more strongly than
the sight of a punishment that hardens rather than corrects him.
Capital punishment is harmful because of the example of barbarity it presents.
If human passions, or the necessities of war, have taught men to shed
one another's blood, the laws, which are intended to moderate human
conduct, ought not to extend the savage example, which in the case of a
legal execution is all the more pernicious in that it is carried out with
studied formalities. To me it seems absurd that the laws, which
are the expression of the public will, which abhors and punishes
murder, should themselves commit one; and that, to deter citizens from

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private assassination, they should themselves order a public murder. What
are the true and most useful laws? Are they not those covenants and
conditions that everyone would wish to see observed and proposed, when the incessant
voice of private interest is hushed or is united with the interest of the
public? What are every man's feelings about capital punishment? Let us
read them in the gestures of indignation and scorn with which everyone
looks on the executioner, who is, after all, an innocent administrator
of the public will, a good citizen contributing to the public welfare,
an instrument as necessary for the internal security of a State as
brave soldiers are for its external. What, then, is the source of this
contradiction; and why is this feeling, in spite of reason, ineradicable
in mankind? Because men in their most secret hearts, that part of them
which more than any other still preserves the original form of their
first nature, have always believed that their lives lie at no one's
disposal, save in that of necessity alone, which, with its iron sceptre,
rules the universe.
What should men think when they see wise magistrates and grave priests
of justice with calm indifference causing a criminal to be dragged
by their slow procedure to death; or when they see a judge, while a
miserable wretch in the convulsions of his last agonies is awaiting the
fatal blow, pass away coldly and unfeelingly, perhaps even with a secret
satisfaction in his authority, to enjoy the comforts and pleasures of
life? 'Ah' they will say, 'these laws are but the pretexts of force,
and the studied cruel formalities of justice are but a conventional
language, used for the purpose of immolating us with greater safety, like
victims destined in sacrifice to the insatiable idol of tyranny. That
assassination which they preach to us as so terrible a misdeed we see
nevertheless employed by them without either scruple or passion. Let us
profit by the example. A violent death seemed to us a terrible thing in
the descriptions of it that were made to us, but we see it is a matter of
a moment. How much less terrible will it be for a man who, not expecting

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# book_title: Crimes and Punishments
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it, is spared all that is painful in it.'
Such are the fatal arguments employed, if not clearly, at least vaguely,
by men disposed to crimes, among whom, as we have seen, the abuse of
religion is more potent than religion itself.
If I am confronted with the example of almost all ages and almost all
nations that have inflicted the punishment of death for certain crimes, I
will reply that example counts for nothing against truth, which
is not overridden by the passage of time; and that the history of mankind conveys
to us the idea of an immense sea of errors, among which a few truths,
confusedly and at long intervals, float on the surface. Human sacrifices
were once common to almost all nations, yet who on that account will dare
defend them? That a few states, and for a short time only, should
have abstained from inflicting death rather favours my argument than
otherwise, because such a fact is in keeping with the lot of all great
truths, whose duration is but as a lightning flash in comparison with
the long and dark night that envelops mankind. That happy time has
not yet arrived when truth, as error has hitherto done, shall belong to
the majority of men; and from this universal law of the reign of error
those truths alone have hitherto been exempt which supreme wisdom has
seen fit to distinguish from others by making them the subject of a
special revelation.
The voice of a philosopher is too feeble against the noise and cries
of so many followers of blind custom, but the few wise men scattered
over the face of the earth will respond to me from their inmost hearts;
and, amid the many obstacles that keep it from a monarch, should truth
perchance arrive in spite of him at his throne, let him know that it
comes there attended by the secret wishes of all men; let him know that
before his praises the bloody fame of conquerors will be silenced, and
that posterity, which is just, will assign him the foremost place among
the pacific triumphs of a Titus, an Antonine, or a Trajan.
Happy would humanity be, if laws were now dictated to it for the first
time, when we see on the thrones of Europe beneficent monarchs, men

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who encourage the virtues of peace, the sciences and the arts, who are
fathers to their people, who are crowned citizens, and the increase of
whose authority forms the happiness of their subjects, because it removes
that intermediate despotism, more cruel because less secure, by which the
people's wishes, always sincere, and always attended to when they can
reach the throne, have usually been intercepted and suppressed. If they,
I say, allow the ancient laws to remain, it is owing to the infinite
difficulties of removing from errors the revered rust of many ages; which
is a reason for enlightened citizens to desire with all the greater
ardour the continual increase of their authority.

# book_id: ab55b0ea559542f085841b0c39fb8b59
# book_title: Crimes and Punishments
# chapter_id: 17-chapter-xvii-banishment-and-confiscations
# chapter_title: Chapter XVII: Banishment and confiscations
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Whoever disturbs the public peace, or does not obey the laws—that is, the
conditions under which men bear with and defend one another—ought to be
excluded from society, that is, banished from it.
Banishment, it would seem, should be employed in the case of those
against whom, when accused of an atrocious crime, there is a great
probability but not a certainty of guilt; but for this purpose a statute
is required, as little arbitrary and as precise as possible, condemning
to banishment any man who shall have placed his country in the fatal
dilemma of either fearing him or of injuring him, leaving him, however,
the sacred right of proving his innocence. Stronger reasons then should
exist to justify the banishment of a native than of a foreigner, of a man
criminated for the first time than of one who has been often so situated.
But should a man who is banished and excluded for ever from the society
of which he was a member be also deprived of his property? Such a
question may be regarded from different points of view. The loss of
property is a greater punishment than banishment; there ought, therefore,
to be some cases in which, according to his crime, a man should lose
the whole, or part, or none of his property. The confiscation of the
whole will occur, when the legal sentence of banishment is of a kind to
annihilate all the ties that exist between society and its offending
member; for in such a case the citizen dies, and only the man remains;
and with regard to the political body, civil death should produce the
same effect as natural death. It would seem, then, that the confiscated
property should pass to a man's lawful heirs rather than to the head
of the State, since death and banishment in its extreme form are the
same with regard to the body politic. But it is not by this subtlety
that I dare to disapprove of confiscations of property. If some have
maintained that confiscations have acted as checks on acts of revenge
and on the great power of individuals, it is because they have neglected to consider
that, however much good punishments may effect, they are not for that
reason always just, because to be just they must be necessary; and

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an expedient injustice can be tolerated by no legislator, who wishes
to close all doors against watchful tyranny, ever ready to hold out
flattering hopes, by temporary advantages and by the prosperity of a few
persons of celebrity, in disregard of future ruin and of the tears of
numberless persons of obscurity. Confiscations place a price on the heads
of the feeble, cause the innocent to suffer the punishment of the guilty,
and make the commission of crimes a desperate necessity even for the
innocent. What sadder sight can there be than that of a family dragged
down to infamy and misery by the crimes of its head, unable to prevent
them through the submission imposed on it by the laws, even supposing such
prevention to have been within its power!

# book_id: ab55b0ea559542f085841b0c39fb8b59
# book_title: Crimes and Punishments
# chapter_id: 18-chapter-xviii-infamy
# chapter_title: Chapter XVIII: Infamy
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Infamy is a mark of public disapproval, depriving a criminal of the
goodwill of his countrymen, of their confidence, and of that feeling
almost of brotherhood that a common life inspires. It does not depend on
the laws. Hence the infamy that the laws inflict should be the same
as that which arises from the natural relations of things, the same as
that taught by universal morality, or by that particular morality which
depends on particular systems and sets the standard for ordinary opinions
or for this or that nation. If the one kind of infamy is different
from the other, either the law loses in public esteem, or the ideas of
morality and honesty disappear, in spite of declamations, which are never
efficacious against facts. Whoever declares actions to be infamous that
are in themselves indifferent, detracts from the infamy of actions that
are truly infamous in themselves.
Corporal and painful punishments should not be inflicted for those
crimes which have their foundation in pride, and draw their glory and
nourishment from pain itself. For such crimes, ridicule and infamy are
better suited, since these are penalties that curb the pride of fanatics
through the pride of the beholders, and only let truth itself escape their
tenacity by slow and obstinate efforts. By such an opposition of forces
against forces, and of opinions against opinions, the wise legislator
destroys that admiration and astonishment among a people which a false
principle causes, whose original absurdity is usually hidden from view by
the plausible conclusions deduced from it.
Penalties of infamy ought neither to be too common, nor to fall on too
many persons at a time; not too common, because the real and too frequent
effects of matters of opinion weaken the force of opinion itself; not too
general, because the disgrace of many persons resolves itself into the
disgrace of none of them.
This, then, is the way to avoid confounding the relations and invariable
nature of things, which, being unlimited by time and in ceaseless
operation, confounds and overturns all narrow regulations that depart
from it. It is not only the arts of taste and pleasure that have as

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their universal principle the faithful imitation of nature; the art
of politics itself—at least that which is true and permanent—is subject
to this general maxim, since it consists in nothing other than the art
of directing in the best way and toward the same ends the immutable
sentiments of mankind.

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# book_title: Crimes and Punishments
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The more swiftly and the more closely punishment follows upon the crime
committed, the more just and useful it will be.
I say more just, because a criminal is thereby spared those useless and
fierce torments of suspense, which are all the greater in a person of
vigorous imagination and fully conscious of his own weakness; more just
also, because the deprivation of liberty, in itself a punishment, can only
Precede the sentence by the shortest possible interval compatible with
the requirements of necessity. Imprisonment, therefore, is simply the
safe custody of a citizen pending the verdict on his guilt; and this
custody, being essentially disagreeable, ought to be as brief and easy
as possible. The shortness of the time should be measured both by the
necessary length of the preparations for the trial and by the seniority
of claim to a judgment. The strictness of confinement should be no more
than is necessary either to prevent escape or to guard
against the concealment of the proof of crimes. The trial itself should
be finished in the shortest time possible. What contrast more cruel
than that between a judge's ease and a defendant's anguish? between
the comforts and pleasures of an unfeeling magistrate on the one hand,
and the tears and wretchedness of a prisoner on the other? In general,
the weight of a punishment and the consequence of a crime should be as
efficacious as possible for the restraint of other men and as little hard
as possible for the individual who is punished; for one cannot call that
A proper form of society, in which it is not an infallible principle that
its members intended, in constituting it, to subject themselves to as few
evils as possible.
I said that the promptness of punishment is more useful, because the
shorter the interval of time between the punishment and the misdeed,
the stronger and the more lasting in the human mind is the association
of these ideas, crime and punishment, so that insensibly they come to
be considered, the one as the cause and the other as its necessary and
inevitable consequence. It is a proven fact that the association of
ideas is the cement of the whole fabric of the human intellect, and

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that without it pleasure and pain would be isolated and ineffective
feelings. The further removed men are from general ideas and universal
principles—that is, the more commonplace they are—the more they act
by their immediate and nearest associations, to the neglect of remoter
and more complex ones, the latter being of service only to men strongly
impassioned for a given object of pursuit, inasmuch as the light of
Attention illuminates a single object while leaving the others
obscure. They are also of service to minds of a higher quality, because,
having acquired the habit of rapidly covering many subjects at a
time, they have a facility for setting many things in contrast with one another
partial feelings, so that the result of their thoughts—in other words,
their action—is less perilous and uncertain.
The close connection, therefore, between crime and punishment is of the
utmost importance, if it is desirable that in rough and common minds
There should, together with the seductive idea of an advantageous crime,
immediately arise the associated idea of its punishment. Long delay
has no other effect than to separate these two ideas forever;
and whatever impression the punishment of a crime produces, it
produces it less as a punishment than as a spectacle, and produces it only
when the horror of the particular crime, which would serve to strengthen
the feeling of the punishment, has been weakened in the minds of the
spectators.
Another principle would serve admirably to draw still closer the
important connection between a misdeed and its punishment, and that is,
that the latter should as far as possible conform to the nature of the
crime. This analogy greatly facilitates the contrast that ought to
exist between the impulse to the crime and the counter-influence of the
punishment, the one, that is, diverting the mind and guiding it to an end
quite different from that to which the seductive idea of transgressing
the law endeavours to lead it.
Persons guilty of lesser crimes are usually either punished in the
obscurity of a prison, or transported, as an example to nations who have
given no offence, to a distant and therefore almost useless servitude.

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Since the gravest crimes are not those which men are tempted to commit
on the spur of the moment, the public punishment of a great misdeed will
be regarded by most men as strange and of impossible occurrence; but the
public punishment of lighter crimes, to which men's thoughts more readily
incline, will make an impression, which, at the same time that it diverts
the mind from them, will restrain it still more from crimes of greater
gravity. Punishments should be proportioned not only to one another and
to crimes in point of force, but also in the mode of their infliction.

# book_id: ab55b0ea559542f085841b0c39fb8b59
# book_title: Crimes and Punishments
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One of the greatest preventives of crimes is, not the cruelty of the
punishments attached to them, but their infallibility, and consequently
that watchfulness on the part of the magistrates and that inexorable
severity on the part of the judge which, to be a useful virtue, must
coincide with a mild system of laws. The certainty of a punishment,
moderate though it be, will ever make a stronger impression than the
fear of another, more terrible, perhaps, but associated with the hope
of impunity; for even the least evils, when certain, always terrify men's
minds, and hope, that gift of heaven, which often makes up to us for
everything, always throws into the distance the idea of greater evils,
especially when its force is increased by impunity, which avarice and
weakness so often grant.
It is sometimes the custom to release a man from the punishment of a
a slight crime when the injured person pardons him: an act, indeed, which
is in accordance with mercy and humanity but contrary to public policy;
as if a private citizen could by his remission do away with the necessity
of the example in the same way that he can excuse the reparation due for
the offence. The right to punish does not rest with an individual,
but with the community as a whole, or the sovereign. An individual can
only renounce his particular portion of that right, not annul that of all
the rest.
In proportion as punishments become milder, clemency and pardon become
less necessary. Happy the nation in which their exercise should be
baneful! Clemency, therefore—that virtue which has sometimes made up
in a sovereign for failings in all the other duties of the throne—ought
to be excluded in a perfect system of legislation, where punishments
are mild and the method of trial regular and expeditious. This truth
will appear a hard one to anyone living in the present chaotic state
of the criminal law, where the necessity of pardon and favours accords
with the absurdity of the laws and with the severity of sentences of
punishment. This right of pardon is indeed the fairest prerogative of
the throne, the most desirable attribute of sovereignty; it is, however,

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the tacit mark of disapproval that the beneficent dispensers of the
public happiness exhibit towards a code which, with all its imperfections,
claims in its favour the prejudice of ages, the voluminous and imposing
array of innumerable commentators, the weighty apparatus of unending
formalities, and the adherence of those persons of half-learning who,
though less feared than real philosophers, are really more dangerous.
But let it be remembered that clemency is the virtue of the maker, not
of the executor, of the laws; that it should be conspicuous in the code
of laws rather than in particular judgments; that showing men
that crimes may be pardoned and that punishment is not their necessary
consequence encourages the hope of impunity and creates the belief
that sentences of condemnation, which might be remitted and are not, are
rather violent exhibitions of force than emanations of justice. What
What should be said, then, when the sovereign grants a pardon—that is, public
immunity to an individual—and when a private act of unenlightened
kindness constitutes a public decree of impunity? Let the laws, therefore,
be inexorable, and let their administrators be inexorable in particular cases,
but let the lawmaker be mild, merciful, and humane. Let him, as a wise architect, found his
edifice on the basis of self-love; let the general
interest be the sum of the interests of each, and he will no longer be
constrained by partial laws and violent remedies to separate at every
moment the public welfare from that of individuals, and to raise the
appearance of public security on fear and mistrust. As a profound and
feeling philosopher, let him allow men—that is, his brethren—to enjoy in
peace that small share of happiness which is given them to enjoy in this
corner of the universe, in that immense system established by the First
Cause, by Him Who Is.

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# book_title: Crimes and Punishments
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There remain two questions for me to examine: the first, whether asylums
of refuge are just, and whether international agreements of extradition
are expedient or not. There should be no place within the boundaries of
any country that is independent of the laws. Every citizen should be accompanied
by their power, as every substance is accompanied by its shadow. There is
only a difference of degree between impunity and the right of asylum;
and since the effective influence of punishment consists more in its
inevitability than in its severity, asylums do more to invite crimes
than punishments do to deter from them. The multiplication of asylums is
the formation of so many petty sovereignties; for where there are no laws
to command, it is easy for new laws, opposed to the general laws of
a country, to be formed, and consequently for a spirit opposed to that of
the whole collective social body to arise. All history shows that from
asylums have issued great revolutions in States and in the opinions of
mankind.
Some persons have maintained that a crime, that is, an action contrary
to the laws, is punishable wherever committed, as if the character of
subject were indelible, or, in other words, synonymous with, nay, worse
than the character of a slave; as if a man could be the subject of one
kingdom and a resident of another, or as if his actions could without
contradiction be subordinate to two sovereign powers and to two legal
systems that are often contradictory. Thus some think that a cruel action committed, say,
at Constantinople is punishable at Paris, for the abstract reason that
he who offends humanity deserves to have collective humanity as his
enemy and merits universal execration; as if judges were the avengers
of human sensibility in general, and not rather of the covenants that
bind men together. The place of punishment is the place of the crime,
because there, and there only, is it a compulsory duty to injure an
individual in order to prevent an injury to the public. A villain, but one who
has not broken the covenants of the society of which he was not a member,
may be an object of fear, and for that reason be expelled and exiled by

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the superior power of that society; but he cannot be legally and formally
punished, since it is for the laws to avenge, not the intrinsic malice of
particular actions, but the violation of compacts.
But whether the international extradition of criminals is useful I would
not venture to decide, until laws more in conformity with the needs of
humanity, until milder penalties, and until the emancipation of law from
the caprice of mere opinion, shall have given security to oppressed
innocence and hated virtue; until tyranny shall have been confined,
by the force of universal reason which ever more and more unites the
interests of kings and subjects, to the vast plains of Asia; however much
the conviction of finding nowhere a span of earth where real crimes were
pardoned might be the most efficacious way of preventing their occurrence.

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The second question is whether it is expedient to place a reward on the
head of a known criminal, and to make every citizen an executioner
by arming him against the offender. Either the criminal has fled from
his country or he is still within it. In the first case the sovereign
encourages the commission of a crime and exposes its author to a
punishment, being thereby guilty of an injury and of a usurpation of
authority in the dominions of another, and authorising other nations
to do the same by himself. In the second case the sovereign displays
his own weakness, for he who has the power to defend himself
does not seek to purchase it. Moreover, such an edict overturns all ideas of
morality and virtue, which are always ready to vanish from the human
mind at the slightest breath. Now the laws invite treachery,
and then they punish it; with one hand the legislator tightens the
bonds of family, kindred, and friendship, while with the
other he rewards whoever violates and despises them; always in
self-contradiction, he at one moment invites the suspicious
natures of men to confidence, and at another spreads mistrust broadcast among them.
Instead of preventing one crime, he causes a hundred. These are the
resources of weak nations, whose laws are merely the temporary repairs of
a ruined building that tot­ters throughout. In proportion as a nation
becomes enlightened, good faith and mutual confidence become necessary,
and tend ever more to identify themselves with true policy. Tricks,
intrigues, dark and indirect paths, are for the most part foreseen, and
The general quickness of all men collectively overreaches and blunts
that of single individuals. The very ages of ignorance, in which public
morality inclines men to obey the dictates of private morality, serve
as instruction and experience for the ages of enlightenment. But laws
which reward treachery and stir up clandestine hostility by spreading
mutual suspicion among citizens are opposed to this union of private and
public morality, a union which is so necessary, and to the observance of
which individuals might owe their happiness, nations their peace, and

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the universe a somewhat longer period of quiet and repose from the evils
which at present pervade it.

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**PROPORTION BETWEEN CRIMES AND PUNISHMENTS:**
It is in the general interest not only that crimes should not be committed,
but that they should be rare in proportion to the evils they cause
to society. The more opposed therefore that crimes are to the public
welfare, and the more numerous the incentives to them, the stronger
should be the deterrent obstacles. This principle accordingly establishes
The necessity of a certain proportion between crimes and punishments.
If pleasure and pain are the motors of sensitive beings, if the invisible
lawgiver of humanity has decreed rewards and punishments as one of the
motives impelling men even to their noblest endeavours, the imprecise
distribution of these motives will give rise to that contradiction, as
little noticed as it is common, namely, that the laws
punish crimes that are entirely of their own creation. If an equal
penalty is attached to two crimes of unequal injury to society, the
greater crime of the two, if it promises a greater advantage than the
other, will have no stronger motive restraining its perpetration.
Whoever, for example, sees the same punishment of death decreed for the
man who kills a pheasant and the man who slays his fellow or falsifies
an important document, will draw no distinction between such crimes;
and thus moral sentiments, the product only of many ages and of much
bloodshed, the slowest and most difficult attainment of the human mind,
dependent, it has been thought, on the aid of the most sublime motives
and in a display of the gravest formalities, will be destroyed and lost.
It is impossible to prevent all the disorders that may arise in the
universal conflict of human passions. Their increase depends on that of
population and on the clashes of private interests, which cannot be
directed with geometrical exactness toward the public welfare. In political
arithmetic, the calculation of probabilities must be substituted for
mathematical exactness. Look at the history of the world, and you
will see disorders increase as the bounds of empire increase;
thus, as national feeling is diminished to the same extent, the general

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inducement to crime increases with each individual's greater interest in
such disorders, and for this reason the need for
aggravating penalties continues to increase.
That force, similar to the force of gravitation, which constrains us
to seek our own well-being, admits of counteraction only in proportion
to the obstacles opposed to it. The effects of this force make up the
confused series of human actions; if these clash together and impede one
another set of punishments, which I would call _political obstacles_, prevent
bad effects from arising, without destroying the impelling cause, which
lies in the sensibility inseparable from humanity; and in enacting them,
the legislator acts the part of a clever architect, whose function it is
to counteract the tendency of gravitation to cause a building to fall,
and to bring to bear all the lines which contribute to its strength.
Given the necessity of the aggregation of mankind, and given the
covenants which necessarily result from the very opposition of private
interests, a scale of offences may be traced, beginning with those which
tend directly to the destruction of society, and ending with acts of
the smallest possible injustice committed against individual members
of it. Between these extremes are comprised all the actions opposed to
the public welfare which are called crimes, and which by imperceptible
degrees decrease in enormity from the highest to the lowest. If
the infinite and obscure combinations of human actions admitted of
mathematical treatment, there ought to be a corresponding scale of
punishments, ranging from the severest to the slightest penalty. If there
were an exact and universal scale of crimes and punishments, we would
have an approximate and general standard by which to gauge the degrees of
tyranny and liberty in different governments, and the relative state of
humanity or wickedness in different nations. But the wise legislator will
rest satisfied with marking out the principal divisions in such a scale,
so as not to invert their order or to attach to crimes of the first
degree the punishments due to those of the last.

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We have seen that the true measure of crimes is the injury done to
society. This is one of those palpable truths which, however little
dependent on quadrants or telescopes for their discovery, and fully

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within the reach of any ordinary intelligence, are yet, through a marvelous
combination of circumstances, recognized clearly and firmly only by
a few thinkers belonging to every nationality and to every age. But
Asiatic ideas, and passions clothed with authority and power, have,
generally by imperceptible movements, sometimes by violent assaults on
The timid credulity of mankind dissipated those simple notions which
perhaps formed the first philosophy of primitive communities, and to
which the enlightenment of this age seems likely to lead us back, but
to do so with that greater certainty which can be gained from an exact
investigation into things, from a thousand unhappy experiences, and from
the very obstacles that militate against it.
Those who have thought that a criminal's intention was the true measure
of crimes were mistaken. For the intention depends on the actual
impression of things on a man, and on his previous mental disposition,
things which vary in all men and in each man, according to the very
rapid succession of his ideas, his passions, and his circumstances. It
would, therefore, be necessary to form not only a particular code for
each citizen, but a fresh law for every crime. Sometimes with the best
intentions men do the greatest evil to society; and sometimes with the
very worst they do it the greatest good.
Others again measure crimes rather by the rank of the person injured
than by their importance in regard to the public good. Were this the
true measure of crimes, any act of irreverence toward the Supreme Being
should be punished more severely than the assassination of a monarch,
whereas the superiority of His nature affords an infinite compensation
for the difference of the offence.
Lastly, some have thought that the gravity of an act's sinfulness should
be an element in the measure of crimes. But an impartial observer of the
true relations between man and man, and between man and God, will easily
perceive the fallacy of this opinion. For the former relationship is one
of equality; necessity alone, arising from the clash of passions and opposing
interests, having given rise to the idea of _public utility_, the

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basis of human justice. But the other relationship is one of dependence
on a perfect Being and Creator, who has reserved to Himself alone the
right of being at the same time legislator and judge, and can alone
unite the two functions without bad effects. If He has decreed eternal
punishments to those who disobey His omnipotence, what insect shall
dare to take the place of Divine justice, or wish to avenge that
Being, who is all-sufficient to Himself, who can receive from things no
impression of pleasure or pain, and who alone of all beings acts
without reaction? The degree of sinfulness in an action depends on the
unsearchable wickedness of the heart, which finite beings cannot know
without a revelation. How, then, can a standard for the punishment of
crimes be founded on it? In such a case men might punish when God pardons,
and pardon when God punishes. If men can act contrary to the Almighty by
offending Him, they may also do so in the punishments they inflict.

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Some crimes tend directly to the destruction of society or of the
sovereign who represents it; others affect individual citizens, by
imperilling their life, their property, or their honour; while others,
again, are actions contrary to the positive or negative obligations which
bind every individual to the public weal.
Any action that is not included between the two above-indicated extremes
can only be called a _crime_ or punished as such by those who find their
interest in calling it so. The uncertainty of these limits has produced
in different nations a system of ethics contrary to the system of laws,
has produced many actual systems of laws at total variance with one
another, and a quantity of laws which expose even the wisest man to the
severest penalties. Consequently the words _virtue_ and _vice_ have
become of vague and variable meaning, and from the uncertainty thus
surrounding individual existence, listlessness and a fatal apathy have
spread over political communities.
The opinion that each citizen should have liberty to do whatsoever is
not contrary to the laws, without fear of any other inconvenience than
such as may arise from the action itself—this is the political dogma
that should be believed by the people and promulgated by the chief
magistrates, a dogma as sacred as that of the incorrupt guardianship
of the laws, without which there can be no legitimate society; a just
compensation to mankind for their sacrifice of that entire liberty of
action which belongs to every sensitive being, and is only limited by the
extent of its force. It is this that forms liberal and vigorous souls,
and enlightened minds; that makes men virtuous with a virtue capable of
resisting fear, and not with that flexible kind of prudence that is only
worthy of a man who can endure a precarious and uncertain existence.
Whoever reads with a philosophical eye the codes and annals of
different nations will find almost always that the names of _virtue_ and
_vice_, of _good citizen_ and _criminal_, change over the course of
ages, not in accordance with the changes that occur in the circumstances
of a country, and consequently in conformity with the general interest,

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but in accordance with the passions and errors that have swayed different
legislators in succession. He will observe very often that the passions
of one age form the basis of the morality of later ones; that strong
passions, the offspring of fanaticism and enthusiasm, weakened and, so
to speak, gnawed away by time (which reduces to a level all physical and
moral phenomena), become little by little the prudence of the age, and a
useful instrument in the hands of the strong man and the clever. In this
way the vaguest notions of honour and virtue have been produced; for they
change with the changes of time, which causes names to survive things; as
also with the changes of rivers and mountains, which often form the
boundaries of moral no less than of physical geography.

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# book_title: Crimes and Punishments
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The first class of crimes—that is, the worst, because they are the most
injurious to society—are those known as crimes of high treason. Only
tyranny and ignorance, which confuse words and ideas of the clearest
meaning, can apply this name, and consequently the heaviest punishment,
to different kinds of crimes, thus making men, as in a thousand other
cases, the victims of a word. Every crime, however private, injures
society; but not every crime aims at its immediate destruction.
Moral actions, like physical ones, have their limited sphere of activity, and
are circumscribed differently, like all the movements of nature, by time
and space; and therefore only a sophistical interpretation, which is
generally the philosophy of slavery, can confuse what eternal truth has
distinguished by immutable differences.

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CRIMES AGAINST PERSONAL SECURITY—ACTS OF VIOLENCE—PUNISHMENTS OF NOBLES.
After crimes of high treason come crimes against the personal security
of individuals. Since this security is the primary end of every properly
constituted society, it is impossible not to attach to the violation of
any citizen's right to personal security one of the severest punishments
that the laws allow.
Some crimes are injuries to a man's person, others to his property, and
the former should certainly be punished with corporal punishments.
Offences, therefore, against personal security and liberty are among the
greatest of crimes. Under this heading fall not only the assassinations and
thefts committed by the common people, but also those committed by the nobles and
magistrates, whose influence, acting with greater force and over a greater
distance, destroys in those subject to them all ideas of justice and
duty, and gives strength to those ideas of the right of the strongest,
which are equally perilous ultimately to him who exercises it no less than
to him who endures it.
Neither the noble nor the rich man should be able to pay a price for
injuries committed against the weak and the poor; otherwise riches, which,
under the protection of the laws, are the reward of industry, become the
nourishment of tyranny. Whenever the laws allow a man in certain cases
to cease being a _person_ and to become a _thing_, there is no liberty;
for then you will see the man of power devoting all his industry to
finding, among the countless combinations of civil life, those that the law
grants in his favor. This discovery is the magic secret that turns
citizens into beasts of burden and, in the hand of the strong man, forms
the chain with which to fetter the actions of the imprudent and the weak.
This is why in some governments that have every appearance
of liberty, tyranny lies hidden or insinuates itself unforeseen, in some
corner neglected by the legislator, where it insensibly gains strength and
grows.
Men raise the strongest barriers against open tyranny, but they do
not see the imperceptible insect that gnaws them away and makes for the

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invading stream an opening that is all the more certain by the very fact of
its concealment from view.
Of what kind, then, will be the punishments due for the crimes of nobles,
whose privileges form so great a part of the laws of different countries?
I will not here inquire whether this traditional distinction between
nobles and commoners is advantageous in a government, or necessary in a
monarchy; nor whether it is true that a nobility forms an intermediate
power restraining the excesses of the two extremes, and not
rather a caste which, in slavery to itself and to others, confines all
circulation of merit and hope to a very narrow circle, like those fertile
and pleasant oases scattered among the vast sand-deserts of Arabia; nor
whether, supposing it to be true that inequality is inevitable and useful
in society, it is also true that such inequality should exist between
classes rather than individuals, and should remain with one part of the
body politic rather than circulate through the whole; whether it should
rather perpetuate itself than be subject to constant self-destruction and
renovation. I will confine myself to the punishments proper for nobles,
affirming that they should be the same for the greatest citizen as for
the least. Every distinction of honour or of riches presupposes, to be
legitimate, a prior state of equality, founded on the laws, which regard
all subjects as equally dependent on themselves. One must suppose the
men, who renounced their natural state of despotic independence, to have
said: 'Let him who is more industrious than his fellows have greater
honours, and let his fame be greater among his successors; let him who
is more prosperous and honoured hope even to become more so, but let him
fear no less than other men to break those conditions by virtue of which
he is raised above them.' True it is that such decrees did not emanate in
a convocation of the human race, but such decrees exist in the eternal
relations of things; they do not destroy the supposed advantages of a
nobility, though they prevent its abuses; and they make laws feared,
by closing every admission to impunity. And if any one shall say that

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the same punishment inflicted on a noble and on a commoner is not
really the same, given the diversity of their education, and
the disgrace spread over an illustrious family, I will reply that the
sensibility of the criminal is not the measure of punishment, but the
public injury, and that this is all the greater when committed by the
more highly favoured man; that equality of punishment can only be so when
considered extrinsically, being really different in each individual; and
that the disgrace of a family can be removed by public proofs of kindness
on the part of the sovereign towards the innocent family of the criminal.
And who is there who does not know that formalities which strike the senses serve
as reasonings with the credulous and admiring populace?

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**OF INJURIES AND OF HONOUR:**
Injuries that are personal and affect a man's honour—that is, the fair
share of favour that he has a right to expect from others—should be
punished with disgrace.
There is a remarkable contradiction between the civil laws, which set
so jealous and supreme a guard on individual life and property, and
the laws of so-called _honour_, which place opinion above all else. This
word _honour_ is one of those terms that have served as the basis for long
and brilliant arguments, without any fixed or permanent idea being
attached to it. How miserable is the condition of the human mind, which
is more distinctly aware of the remotest and least important ideas about
the movements of the heavenly bodies than of those near and important
moral notions that are forever fluctuating and confused, according as the
winds of passion drive them and a well-guided ignorance receives and
transmits them! But the seeming paradox will vanish if one considers
that, just as objects become blurred when they are too close to the eyes, so the excessive
nearness of moral ideas easily causes the numerous simple ideas that
compose them to merge together, confounding those clear
lines of demarcation demanded by the geometrical spirit, which would
gladly measure exactly the phenomena of human sensibility. And the wonder
will vanish altogether for the impartial student of human affairs, who
will suspect that so great a moral machinery and so many restraints are
Perhaps not needed in order to make men happy and secure.
This _honour_, then, is one of those complex ideas that are
an aggregate not only of simple ideas but of ideas no less complex than
themselves, and which, in their various presentations to the mind, now admit
and now omit some of their different component elements, retaining only
a few common ideas, just as in algebra several complex quantities
admit of a common divisor. To find this common divisor in the different
ideas that men form of _honour_, we must cast a rapid glance over the
first formation of communities.
The necessity of remedying the disorders caused by the physical despotism
of each man singly produced the first laws and the first magistrates;

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**OF INJURIES AND OF HONOUR:**
this was the end and object of the institution of societies, and this
end has always been maintained, whether in reality or in appearance, at the
head of all codes, even of those that operated otherwise. But the closer
contact of men with one another and the progress of their knowledge
brought about an endless series of mutual actions and needs, which
ever lay beyond the foresight of the laws and below the actual power
of individuals. From this epoch began the despotism of opinion, which
afforded the only means of obtaining from others those benefits and
averting those evils for which the laws failed to provide. It is this
opinion that is the trouble equally of the wise man and the fool; that
has raised the semblance of virtue to higher credit than virtue itself;
that even makes the rascal turn missionary, because he finds his own
interest therein. Hence the favour of men became not only useful but
necessary, if a man would not fall below the general level. Hence, not
only does the ambitious man seek after such favour as useful to himself,
and the vain man go begging for it as a proof of his merit, but the man
of honour also may be seen to require it as a necessity. This _honour_ is
a condition that very many men attach to their own existence. Born after
the formation of society, it could not be placed in the general deposit;
it is rather a momentary return to the state of nature, a momentary
withdrawal of one's self from the dominion of those laws which, under the
circumstances, fail to provide the sufficient defense required of them.
Hence, both in the state of extreme political liberty and in that of
extreme political subjection, the ideas of honor disappear or become
completely confused with others. For in the former, the despotism of the
laws renders the pursuit of the favor of others of no avail; and in
the latter state, the despotism of men, by destroying civil existence,
reduces everyone to a precarious and temporary personality. Honor,
therefore, is one of the fundamental principles of those monarchies that
are a mitigated form of despotism, being to them what revolutions are to

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**OF INJURIES AND OF HONOUR:**
despotic states, namely, a momentary return to the state of nature and a
reminder to the chief ruler of the condition of primitive equality.

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# book_title: Crimes and Punishments
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From this necessity of the favor of other people arose private duels,
which sprang up precisely in an anarchical state of the laws. It is said
they were unknown to antiquity, perhaps because the ancients did not
meet suspiciously armed in the temples, the theaters, or with friends;
perhaps because the duel was an ordinary and common sight, presented to
the people by gladiators, who were slaves or low people, and freemen
disdained to be thought and called private gladiators. In vain has it
been sought to extirpate the custom by edicts of death against any man
accepting a challenge, for it is founded on that which some men fear
more than death; since without the favour of his fellows the man of
honour foresees himself exposed either to becoming a merely solitary being,
a condition insufferable to a sociable man, or to becoming the butt of
insults and disgrace which, from their constant operation, prevail over
the fear of punishment. Why is it that the lower orders do not for the
most part fight duels like the great? Not only because they are disarmed,
but because the need for the favour of others is less general among the
people than among those who, in higher ranks, regard themselves with
greater suspicion and jealousy.
It is not useless to repeat what others have written, namely, that the
best method of preventing this crime is to punish the aggressor—in other
words, the man who gives rise to the duel—declaring him to be innocent
who, through no fault of his own, has been forced to defend what
existing laws do not guarantee him, namely opinion.

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# book_title: Crimes and Punishments
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Theft without violence should be punished by fine. Whoever enriches
himself at another's expense ought to suffer at his own. But since theft is
generally only the crime of wretchedness and despair, the crime of that
unhappy portion of mankind to whom the right of property (a terrible,
and perhaps not necessary right[67]) has left nothing but a bare subsistence;
and since pecuniary penalties increase the number of criminals beyond the
number of crimes, depriving the innocent of their bread in order to give
it to the wicked, the fittest punishment will be that kind of servitude
which alone can be called just, namely, the temporary servitude of a
man's labour and person for the compensation of society, the personal
and absolute dependence due from a man who has attempted to exercise
an unjust superiority over the social compact. But when the theft is
accompanied by violence, the punishment should also be a combination
of corporal and servile punishment. Some previous writers have shown the
The evident abuse that arises from not distinguishing the punishments for thefts
of violence from those for thefts of cunning, thus creating an absurd
equivalence between a large sum of money and the life of a man. For they
are crimes of a different nature; and in politics, as in mathematics,
this axiom is most certain: that between heterogeneous quantities the
terms of difference are infinite; but it is never superfluous to repeat
what has hardly ever been put into practice. Political machinery, more
than anything else, retains the motion originally given to it, and is the
slowest to adapt itself to a new one.

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# book_title: Crimes and Punishments
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Smuggling is a real crime against the sovereign and the nation; but its
punishment should not be one of disgrace, because its commission incurs
no disgrace in public opinion.
But why does this crime never bring disgrace on its perpetrator, seeing
that it is a theft against the prince, and consequently against the
nation? I answer that offences which men do not consider can be
committed against themselves do not interest them enough to produce
Public indignation against the perpetrator. Smuggling is an offence
of this kind. Men in general, on whom remote consequences make
very feeble impressions, do not perceive the harm that smuggling can
do them; indeed, they often enjoy a present advantage from it. They only
perceive the injury done to the sovereign; they are not interested,
therefore, in withdrawing their favour from a smuggler as much as they
are in doing so from a man who commits a theft in private life, who
forges a signature, or brings other evils upon them. The principle is
self-evident, that every sensitive being takes an interest only in the
evils of which he is aware. This crime arises from the law itself, since the
benefit it promises increases with the increase of the import duty, and
therefore the temptation and the facility of committing it increase with
the extent of territory to be guarded and the small size of the
prohibited wares. The penalty of losing both the prohibited goods and
whatever effects are found with them is most just; but its efficacy will
be greater in proportion as the import duty is lower, because men only
incur risks relative to the advantage to be gained from the successful outcome
of their undertaking.
But should such a crime go unpunished in the case of a man who
has no assets to lose? No: there are kinds of smuggling of such
importance to the revenue (which is so essential and so difficult a part
of a good system of laws) that such a crime deserves a considerable
punishment, even imprisonment or servitude; but imprisonment and
servitude suited to the nature of the crime itself. For example,
the prison of the tobacco smuggler ought not to be the same as that of

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the assassin or the thief; and the labours of the former, limited to the
work and service of the very treasury he wished to defraud, will be the
punishments most suited to the nature of his crime.

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The good faith of contracts and the security of commerce compel the
legislator to assure creditors of the persons of insolvent debtors. But
I think it important to distinguish the fraudulent from the innocent
bankrupt, of whom the former should receive the same punishment as that
assigned to false coiners, since it is no greater crime to falsify a
piece of coined money, the pledge of men's mutual obligations, than
to falsify those obligations themselves. But the innocent bankrupt—he
who, after a searching inquiry, has proved before his judges that
the wickedness or misfortune of some one else, or the inevitable
vicissitudes of human prudence, have despoiled him of his substance—for
what barbarous reason ought such a one to be thrown into prison, and
deprived of the only poor benefit that remains to him, a barren liberty,
in order to suffer the agonies of the really guilty, and, in despair at
his ruined honesty, to repent perhaps of that innocence, by which he
lived peacefully under the protection of those laws that it was not in
his power not to offend against? Laws, too, dictated by the powerful
by reason of their rapacity, and endured by the feeble by reason of
that hope, which generally glimmers in the human heart, and leads us
to believe that unfavourable contingencies are reserved for others,
favourable ones for ourselves! Men left to their natural feelings love
Cruel laws, however much those who are subject to them may themselves find it in their interest to
their individual interest that they should be mitigated; because their
The fear of being injured by others is greater than their desire to inflict
injuries themselves.
To return to the innocent bankrupt. Granting that his obligation should
not be extinguishable by anything short of total payment; granting that
he should not be allowed to withdraw from it without the consent of the
parties interested, nor to transfer his
industry, which he should be forced to work under penalty in order to enable
him to satisfy his creditors in proportion to his profits—what fair
pretext, I ask, can there be, such as the security of commerce or the
sacred right of property, to justify depriving him of his liberty? Such

# book_id: ab55b0ea559542f085841b0c39fb8b59
# book_title: Crimes and Punishments
# chapter_id: 32-chapter-xxxii-of-debtors
# chapter_title: Chapter XXXII: Of debtors
# book_page: 79 / 103
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# language: en
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a deprivation is only useful when the aim is to discover the secrets
of a supposedly innocent bankrupt through the hardships of servitude—a most unusual
circumstance when a rigorous inquiry is undertaken. I believe it to be a
maxim of legislation that the number of political inconveniences varies
directly in proportion to the injury they do the public, and inversely in
proportion to the difficulty of proving it.
It would be possible to distinguish a case of fraud from a grave fault, a
grave fault from a light one, and this again from perfect innocence; then
to attach to the first the penalties due for crimes of falsification; to
the second, lesser penalties, but with the loss of personal liberty; and,
reserving for the last degree the free choice of the means of recovery,
to deprive the third degree of such liberty, while leaving it to a man's
creditors. But the distinction between grave and light should be fixed by
the blind impartiality of the laws, not by the dangerous and arbitrary
wisdom of a judge. The fixing of limits is as necessary in politics as
in mathematics, equally in the measurement of the public welfare as in
the measurement of magnitudes.[68]
How easily might the farseeing legislator prevent a large part of culpable
bankruptcy, and relieve the misfortunes of the industrious and innocent!
The public and open registration of all contracts; freedom for every
citizens to consult them in well-kept documents; a public bank formed by
wisely apportioned taxes on prosperous commerce, and intended for the
timely relief of any unfortunate and innocent member of the company;—such
measures would have no real drawback and might produce numberless
advantages. But easy, simple, and great laws, which await only the signal
of the legislator in order to scatter riches and strength through a
nation—laws which would be celebrated from generation to generation in
hymns of gratitude—are either the least thought of or the least desired
of all. An uneasy and petty spirit, the timid prudence of the present
moment, and a circumspect stiffness against innovations master the
feelings of those who govern the complex actions of mankind.

# book_id: ab55b0ea559542f085841b0c39fb8b59
# book_title: Crimes and Punishments
# chapter_id: 33-chapter-xxxiii-of-the-public-tranquillity
# chapter_title: Chapter XXXIII: Of the public tranquillity
# book_page: 80 / 103
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Lastly, among the crimes of the third kind are especially those which
disturb the public peace and civic tranquillity, such as noises and riots
in the public streets, which were made for the convenience of men and
traffic, or fanatical sermons that excite the easily roused passions of
the curious multitude. For their passions gather force from the number
of hearers, and more from a certain obscure and mysterious enthusiasm,
than from clear and quiet reasoning, which never has any influence over a
large mass of men.
The lighting of a city by night at public expense; the distribution
of guards in the different quarters; simple moral discourses on
religion, but only in the silent and holy quiet of churches, protected
by public authority; speeches on behalf of private and public interests
in national assemblies, parliaments, or wherever else the majesty of
sovereignty resides—all these are efficacious means for preventing the
dangerous condensation of popular passions. These means are a principal
branch of that magisterial vigilance which the French call _police_;
but if this is exercised by arbitrary laws, not laid down in a code of
general circulation, a door is opened to tyranny, which ever surrounds
all the boundaries of political liberty. I find no exception to this
general axiom, that 'Every citizen ought to know when his actions
are guilty or innocent.' If censors, and arbitrary magistrates in
general, are necessary in any government, it is due to the weakness
of its constitution, and is foreign to the nature of a well-organized
government. More victims have been sacrificed to obscure tyranny by the
uncertainty of their lot than by public and formal cruelty, for the
latter revolts men's minds more than it abases them. The true tyrant
always begins by mastering opinion, the precursor of courage; for the
latter can only show itself in the clear light of truth, in the fire of
passion, or in ignorance of danger.

# book_id: ab55b0ea559542f085841b0c39fb8b59
# book_title: Crimes and Punishments
# chapter_id: 34-chapter-xxxiv-of-political-idleness
# chapter_title: Chapter XXXIV: Of political idleness
# book_page: 81 / 103
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Wise governments do not permit political idleness in the midst of work and
industry. By political idleness I mean that existence which contributes
nothing to society either by its work or by its wealth; which gains
without ever losing; which, stupidly admired and reverenced by the
vulgar, is regarded by the wise man with disdain, and with pity for the
beings who are its victims; which, being destitute of that stimulus of
an active life, the necessity of preserving or increasing the store of
worldly goods, leaves to the passions of opinion, not the least strong
ones, all their energy. This kind of idleness has been confused by
austere declaimers with that of riches gathered by industry; but it is
not for the severe and narrow virtue of some censors, but for the laws,
to define what is punishable idleness. He is not guilty of political
idleness who enjoys the fruits of the virtues or vices of his ancestors
and sells in exchange for his pleasures bread and existence to the
industrious poor, who carry on peacefully the silent war of industry
against wealth, instead of by force a war uncertain and sanguinary. The
latter kind of idleness is necessary and useful, in proportion as society
becomes wider and its government more strict.

# book_id: ab55b0ea559542f085841b0c39fb8b59
# book_title: Crimes and Punishments
# chapter_id: 35-chapter-xxxv-suicide-and-absence
# chapter_title: Chapter XXXV: Suicide and absence
# book_page: 82 / 103
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Suicide is a crime to which a punishment properly so called seems
inadmissible, since it can only fall on the innocent or else on a
cold and insensible body. If the latter mode of punishing the crime
makes no more impression on the living than would be made by inflicting
violence on a statue, the other mode is unjust and tyrannical, inasmuch
as political freedom necessarily presupposes the purely personal
nature of punishment. Men love life only too much, and everything
around them confirms them in this love. The seductive image of
pleasure, and hope, that sweetest illusion of mortals, for the sake of
which they swallow large draughts of evil mixed with a few drops of
contentment, are too attractive for anyone ever to fear that the necessary
impunity of such a crime should exercise any general influence. He who
fears pain obeys the laws; but death puts an end in the body to all the
sources of pain. What, then, will be the motive that shall restrain the
desperate hand of the suicide?
Whoever kills himself does a lesser evil to society than he who for
ever leaves the boundaries of his country, for while the former leaves
therein all his substance, the latter transports himself together
with part of his property. Nay, if the power of a community consists
in the number of its members, the man who withdraws himself to join
a neighbouring nation does twice as great an injury as he who simply
by death deprives society of his existence. The question, therefore,
reduces itself to this: whether leaving each member of a nation
a perpetual liberty to absent himself from it be advantageous or
detrimental.
No law ought to be promulgated that has not force to back it, or that the
nature of things deprives of validity; and as minds are ruled by opinion,
which itself follows the slow and indirect impressions of legislation,
while it resists those that are direct and violent, the most salutary
laws become infected with the contempt felt for useless laws, and are
regarded rather as obstacles to be surmounted than as the deposit of the
public welfare.
Moreover, if, as was said, our feelings are limited in quantity, the

# book_id: ab55b0ea559542f085841b0c39fb8b59
# book_title: Crimes and Punishments
# chapter_id: 35-chapter-xxxv-suicide-and-absence
# chapter_title: Chapter XXXV: Suicide and absence
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greater respect men may have for things outside the laws, the less will
remain to them for the laws themselves. From this principle the wise
administrator of the public happiness may draw some useful consequences,
the exposition of which would lead me too far from my subject, which is
to demonstrate the uselessness of making a prison of the State. A law
Using such an object is useless, because unless inaccessible rocks or
an unnavigable sea separate a country from all others, how can it be
possible to close every point along its circumference and keep watch over
the guards themselves? A man who carries away everything he owns with
him cannot be punished once he has done so. Such a crime, once committed,
can no longer be punished, and to punish it in advance would be to punish
men's wills rather than their actions—to exercise control over their intentions,
the freest part of human nature and entirely independent of the
control of human laws. Punishing an absent man through the property he
leaves behind would ruin all international commerce, not to mention
how easy collusion would be, which could not be avoided except through
tyrannical control of contracts. And punishing him on his return as a
criminal would prevent reparation for the harm done to society by
making every removal permanent. The very prohibition against leaving a country
increases people's desire to do so and warns foreigners not to

# book_id: ab55b0ea559542f085841b0c39fb8b59
# book_title: Crimes and Punishments
# chapter_id: 35-chapter-xxxv-suicide-and-absence
# chapter_title: Chapter XXXV: Suicide and absence
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enter it.
What should we think of a government that has no other means than fear
of keeping men in a country to which they are naturally attached from
the earliest impressions of infancy? The surest way of keeping them
in their country is to increase the relative welfare of each of them. As
every effort should be made to turn the balance of commerce in our
own favour, it is in the greatest interest of a sovereign and a nation
that the sum of happiness, compared with that of neighbouring nations,
should be greater at home than elsewhere. The pleasures of luxury are
not the principal elements in this happiness, however much they may be
a necessary remedy for that inequality which increases with a country's
progress, and a check on the tendency of wealth to accumulate in the
hands of a single ruler.[69]
But commerce and the interchange of the pleasures of luxury have this
drawback: however many persons are engaged in their production, they
still begin and end with a few, with the great majority of men enjoying
only the smallest share of them, so that the feeling of misery, which depends
more on comparison than on reality, is not prevented. But the principal
basis of this happiness I speak of is personal security and liberty under
the limitations of the law; with these, the pleasures of luxury favour
population, and without them they become the instrument of tyranny. Just as
the noblest wild beasts and the freest birds withdraw to solitudes and
inaccessible forests, leaving the fertile and smiling plains to the wiles
of man, so men themselves flee from pleasures when tyranny acts as their
distributor.
It is proved, then, that the law which imprisons subjects in their own
country is useless and unjust. The punishment of suicide is therefore
equally so; and consequently, although it is a fault punishable by God,
for He alone can punish after death, it is not a crime in the eyes of
men, for the punishment they inflict, instead of falling on the criminal
himself, falls on his family. If anyone objects that such a punishment
can nevertheless draw a man back from his determination to kill himself,
I reply that he who calmly renounces the advantages of life, who hates

# book_id: ab55b0ea559542f085841b0c39fb8b59
# book_title: Crimes and Punishments
# chapter_id: 35-chapter-xxxv-suicide-and-absence
# chapter_title: Chapter XXXV: Suicide and absence
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his existence here below to such an extent that he would prefer an eternity
of misery to it, is not likely to be moved by the less effective and more
remote consideration of his children or his relations.

# book_id: ab55b0ea559542f085841b0c39fb8b59
# book_title: Crimes and Punishments
# chapter_id: 36-chapter-xxxvi-crimes-of-difficult-proof
# chapter_title: Chapter XXXVI: Crimes of difficult proof
# book_page: 86 / 103
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There are some crimes that are at once frequent in society and
yet difficult to prove, such as adultery, pederasty, and infanticide.
Adultery is a crime which, considered politically, derives its force and
direction from two causes, namely, from the variable laws in force among
mankind, and from that strongest of all attractions which draws one sex
towards the other.[70]
Were I addressing nations still destitute of the light of religion, I
would say that there is yet another considerable difference between
adultery and other crimes. For it springs from the abuse of a constant
and universal human impulse, an impulse anterior to, nay, the cause of
the institution of society; whereas other crimes, destructive of society,
derive their origin rather from momentary passions than from a natural
impulse. To anyone acquainted with history and with his fellow man, such an impulse
will seem equivalent, in the same climate, to a constant quantity;
and if this is so, those laws and customs that seek to diminish the
total sum will be useless or dangerous, because their effect will be to
burden one half of humanity with its own needs and those of others;
but, on the contrary, those laws will be the wisest which, following,
so to speak, the gentle inclination of the plain, divide the total
amount, causing it to ramify into so many equal and small portions
that aridity or overflowing are equally prevented everywhere. Conjugal
fidelity is always proportioned to the number and to the freedom of
marriages. Where marriages are governed by hereditary prejudices, or
bound or loosened by parental power, there the chains are broken by
secret intrigue, in defiance of ordinary morality, which, while conniving
at the causes of the offence, makes it its duty to declaim against the
results. But there is no need of such reflections for the man who,
living in the light of true religion, has higher motives to correct the
force of natural effects. Such a crime is of so instantaneous and secret
commission, so concealed by the very veil the laws have drawn round it
(a veil necessary, indeed, but fragile, and one that enhances, instead

# book_id: ab55b0ea559542f085841b0c39fb8b59
# book_title: Crimes and Punishments
# chapter_id: 36-chapter-xxxvi-crimes-of-difficult-proof
# chapter_title: Chapter XXXVI: Crimes of difficult proof
# book_page: 87 / 103
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of diminishing, the value of the desired object), the occasions for it
are so easy, and the consequences so doubtful, that the legislator has
it more in his power to prevent than to punish it. As a general rule,
in every crime which by its nature must most frequently go unpunished,
the penalty attached to it becomes an incentive. It is a quality of our
imagination, that difficulties, if they are not insurmountable nor too
difficult, relatively to the mental energy of the particular person,
excite the imagination more vividly, and place the object desired in
larger perspective; for they serve as it were as so many barriers to
prevent an erratic and flighty fancy from quitting hold of its object;
and, while they compel the imagination to consider the latter in all its
bearings, it attaches itself more closely to the pleasant side, to which
our mind most naturally inclines, than to the painful side, which it
places at a distance.
Pederasty, so severely punished by the laws and so readily subjected
to the tortures that triumph over innocence, is founded less on the
necessities of man when living in a state of isolation and freedom
than on his passions when living in a state of society and slavery. It
derives its force not so much from satiety of pleasure as from the system
of education now in vogue, which, beginning by making men useless to
themselves in order to make them useful to others, causes, by its too
strict seclusion, a waste of all vigorous development and accelerates
the approach of old age.
Infanticide equally is the result of the unavoidable dilemma in which
a woman is placed who from weakness or by violence has fallen. Finding
herself placed between the alternative of infamy on the one side and
the death of a being insentient of its pains on the other, how can she
fail to prefer the latter to the infallible misery awaiting both herself
and her unhappy offspring? The best way to prevent this crime would be
to give efficient legal protection to weakness against tyranny, which
exaggerates those vices that cannot be hidden by the cloak of virtue.
I do not pretend to diminish the just wrath these crimes deserve; but, in

# book_id: ab55b0ea559542f085841b0c39fb8b59
# book_title: Crimes and Punishments
# chapter_id: 36-chapter-xxxvi-crimes-of-difficult-proof
# chapter_title: Chapter XXXVI: Crimes of difficult proof
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pointing out their sources, I think myself justified in drawing one general
conclusion, and that is, that no punishment for a crime can be called
exactly just—that is, necessary—so long as the law has not adopted the
best possible means, in the circumstances of a country, to prevent the
crimes it punishes.

# book_id: ab55b0ea559542f085841b0c39fb8b59
# book_title: Crimes and Punishments
# chapter_id: 37-chapter-xxxvii
# chapter_title: Chapter XXXVII
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**OF A PARTICULAR KIND OF CRIME:**
The reader of this treatise will perceive that I have omitted all
reference to a certain class of crime, which has deluged Europe with
human blood; a crime which raised those fatal piles, where living human
bodies served as food for the flames, and where the blind multitude
sought a pleasant spectacle and a sweet harmony from the low dull groans,
emitted by wretched sufferers from volumes of black smoke, the smoke
of human limbs, while their bones and still palpitating entrails were
scorched and consumed by the flames. But reasonable men will see that
the place, the age, and the subject forbid me to inquire into the
nature of such a crime. It would be too long and remote from my subject
to show how a perfect uniformity of thought ought, contrary to the
practice of many countries, to be a necessity in a State; how opinions
that differ only by the most subtle and imperceptible degrees, and are
altogether beyond the reach of human intelligence, can yet convulse
society when one of them is not legally authorized in preference to the
others; and how the nature of opinions is such that, while some become
clearer through conflict and opposition, (those that are true
floating and surviving, but those that are false sinking to oblivion,)
others again, with no inherent self-support, require to be clothed with
authority and power. Too long would it be to prove that, however
hateful the government of force over human minds may seem, with no other
triumphs to boast of but dissimulation and debasement, and however
contrary it may seem to the spirit of gentleness and fraternity,
commanded alike by reason and the authority we most venerate, it is yet
necessary and indispensable. All this should be regarded as clearly proven
and consistent with the true interests of humanity, if there is anyone
who, with recognized authority, acts accordingly. I speak only of crimes
that arise from human nature and the social compact, not of
sins, whose temporal punishments even should be governed by other
principles than those of a narrow philosophy.

# book_id: ab55b0ea559542f085841b0c39fb8b59
# book_title: Crimes and Punishments
# chapter_id: 38-chapter-xxxviii-false-ideas-of-utility
# chapter_title: Chapter XXXVIII: False ideas of utility
# book_page: 90 / 103
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False ideas of utility held by legislators are one source of
errors and injustice. It is a false idea of utility that considers the
inconvenience of individuals more than the general inconvenience; that
tyrannizes over men's feelings instead of rousing them to action;
that says to Reason, "Be thou subject." It is a false idea of utility
that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling
drawback; that would deprive men of the use of fire because it burns
or of water because it drowns; and whose only remedy for evils is the
entire destruction of their causes. Of such a kind are laws prohibiting
the wearing of arms, for they only disarm those who are not inclined nor
resolved to commit crimes, while those who have the courage to violate
the most sacred laws of humanity, the most important in the legal code,
are unlikely to be induced to respect those lesser and purely
arbitrary laws, which are easier to break with impunity; and the
strict observance of which would imply the destruction of all personal
liberty (that liberty dearest to the enlightened legislator and to men
generally), subjecting the innocent to vexations which only the guilty
deserve. These laws, while they make the position of the
assailed even worse, improve that of their assailants; they increase rather than
diminish the number of homicides, owing to the greater confidence with
which an unarmed man may be attacked than an armed one. They are not so
much preventive of crimes as fearful of them, arising as they do from the
excitement roused by particular facts, not from any reasoned consideration
of the advantages or disadvantages of a general decree. Again, it is
a false idea of utility that would seek to impart to a multitude of
intelligent beings the same symmetry and order that brute and inanimate
matter admits of; which neglects present motives, the only constantly
powerful influences with the generality of men, to give force to remote
and future ones, the impression of which is very brief and feeble,
unless a force of imagination beyond what is usual makes up, by its
magnifying power, for the object's remoteness. Lastly, it is a false idea

# book_id: ab55b0ea559542f085841b0c39fb8b59
# book_title: Crimes and Punishments
# chapter_id: 38-chapter-xxxviii-false-ideas-of-utility
# chapter_title: Chapter XXXVIII: False ideas of utility
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of utility, which, sacrificing the thing to the name, distinguishes the
public good from that of every individual member of the public. There is
this difference between the state of society and the state of nature,
that in the latter a savage only commits injuries against others with a
view to benefit himself, while in the former state men are sometimes
moved by bad laws to injure others without any corresponding benefit
to themselves. The tyrant casts fear and dread into the minds of his
slaves, but they return by repercussion with all the greater force to
torment his own breast. The more confined fear is in its range, so much
the less dangerous is it to him who makes it the instrument of his
happiness; but the more public it is and the larger the number of people
It stirs them up, and the more likely it is that some rash,
desperate, or clever and bold man will try to use
others for his own purposes by raising hopes in them that are all the
more pleasant and seductive as the risk involved is spread over
a greater number, and as the value the wretched attach to their
existence diminishes in proportion to their misery. This is the reason
why offences ever give rise to fresh ones: hatred is a feeling far
more durable than love, inasmuch as it draws its force from the very
cause that weakens the latter, namely, from the continuance of the acts
that produce it.

# book_id: ab55b0ea559542f085841b0c39fb8b59
# book_title: Crimes and Punishments
# chapter_id: 39-chapter-xxxix-of-family-spirit
# chapter_title: Chapter XXXIX: Of family spirit
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Such fatal and legalised iniquities as have been referred to have been
approved of by even the wisest men and practised by even the freest
republics, because they have regarded society rather as an aggregate
of families than as one of individuals. Suppose there to be 100,000
individuals, or 20,000 families, of five persons each, including its
representative head: if the association is constituted by families, it
will consist of 20,000 men and 80,000 slaves; if it is an association
of individuals, it will consist of 100,000 citizens and not a single
slave. In the first case there will be a republic formed of 20,000
little sovereignties; in the second, the republican spirit will breathe
not only in the marketplaces and public meetings but also within
the domestic walls, wherein lies so great a part of human happiness or
misery. In the first case, too, since laws and customs are the result
of the habitual sentiments of the members of the republic—that is, of
the heads of families—the monarchical spirit will gradually introduce
itself, and its effects will be checked only by the conflicting interests
of individuals, not by a feeling that breathes liberty and equality.
Family spirit is a spirit of detail, confined to facts of trifling
importance. But the spirit that regulates communities is master of
general principles, overlooks the totality of facts, and combines them
into kinds and classes that are important to the welfare of the greater
number. In the community of families, sons remain in the power of the
head of the family for as long as he lives, and are obliged to look forward
to his death for an existence that depends on the laws alone. Accustomed
to submission and fear in the freshest and most vigorous time of life,
when their feelings are less tempered by that timidity which arises from
experience and which men call moderation, how shall they withstand those
obstacles to virtue that vice always places in their way, in that feeble
and failing period of life when despair of living to see the fruit of
their labours prevents them from making vigorous changes?
When the community is one of individuals, the subordination that prevails

# book_id: ab55b0ea559542f085841b0c39fb8b59
# book_title: Crimes and Punishments
# chapter_id: 39-chapter-xxxix-of-family-spirit
# chapter_title: Chapter XXXIX: Of family spirit
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in the family prevails by agreement, not by compulsion; and the sons, as
soon as their age releases them from their state of natural dependence,
arising from their feebleness and their need of education and protection,
become free members of the domestic commonwealth, subjecting themselves
to its head in order to share in its advantages, as free men do through
society at large. In the other condition, the sons—that is, the largest
and most useful part of a nation—are placed entirely at the mercy of
their fathers; but in this one there is no enjoined connection between
them, beyond that sacred and inviolable one of the natural ministration
of necessary aid, and that of gratitude for benefits received, which is
less often destroyed by the native wickedness of the human heart than by
a law-ordained and ill-conceived state of subjection.
Such contradictions between the laws of a family and the fundamental
laws of a State are a fertile source of other contradictions between
public and private morality, giving rise consequently to a perpetual
conflict in every individual mind. For while private morality inspires
fear and subjection, public morality teaches courage and freedom; while
the former inculcates the restriction of well-doing to a small number
of persons indiscriminately, the latter inculcates its extension to all
classes of men; and while the one enjoins the constant sacrifice of self
to a vain idol, called 'the good of the family' (which is frequently not
the good of any single member that composes it), the other teaches men to
benefit themselves, provided they break not the laws, and incites them,
by the reward of enthusiasm, which is the precursor of their action, to
sacrifice themselves to the good of their country. Such contradictions
make men scorn to follow virtue, which they find so complicated and
confused, and at such a distance from them as objects, both moral
and physical, derive from their obscurity. How often it happens that
a man, in reflecting on his past actions, is astonished to find
himself dishonest. The larger society grows, the smaller fraction of the
whole does each member of it become, and the more is the feeling of the

# book_id: ab55b0ea559542f085841b0c39fb8b59
# book_title: Crimes and Punishments
# chapter_id: 39-chapter-xxxix-of-family-spirit
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commonwealth diminished, unless care be taken by the laws to reinforce
it. Societies, like human bodies, have their circumscribed limits,
extension beyond which inevitably involves a disturbance of their
economy. The size of a State ought apparently to vary inversely with the
sensibility of its component parts; otherwise, if both increase together,
good laws will find, in the very benefit they have effected, an obstacle
to the prevention of crimes. Too large a republic can only save itself
from despotism by a process of subdivision, and a union of the parts into
so many federative republics. But how could this be achieved, except by a despotic
dictator with the courage of Sylla and as much genius for construction
as he had for destruction? If such a man be ambitious, the glory of all
the ages awaits him; and if he be a philosopher, the blessings of his
fellow citizens will console him for the loss of his authority, even
should he not become indifferent to their ingratitude. In proportion as
the feelings which unite us to our own nation are weakened, do those for
the objects immediately around us gain in strength; and it is for this
reason that under the severest despotism the strongest friendships are to
be found, and that the family virtues, ever of an exalted character, are
either the most common or the only ones. It is evident, therefore, how
limited have been the views of the great majority of legislators.

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There was a time when nearly all penalties were pecuniary. Men's crimes
were the prince's patrimony; attempts against the public safety were
an object of gain, and he whose function it was to defend it found his
interest in seeing it assailed. The object of punishment was then a
suit between the treasury, which exacted the penalty, and the criminal:
it was a civil matter, a private rather than a public dispute, which
conferred on the treasury rights other than those conferred on it by
the demands of public defence, while it inflicted on the offender
grievances other than those he had incurred through the necessity of example.
The judge was therefore an advocate for the treasury rather than an
impartial investigator of the truth, an agent for the Chancellor of
the Exchequer rather than the protector and minister of the laws. But
as in this system to confess a fault was the same thing as to confess
oneself a debtor to the treasury, that being the object of the criminal
procedure in those days, so the confession of a crime, and a confession
so managed as to favour and not to harm fiscal interests, became and
still remains (effects always outlasting their causes so long) the
central point of all criminal procedure. Without such a confession, a
criminal convicted by indubitable proofs will incur a penalty less than
the one legally attached to his crime; and without it he will escape
torture for other crimes of the same kind that he may have committed.
By the same token, however, the judge becomes master of the criminal's
person, to lacerate him methodically and with formality, in order to extract from
him, as from so much livestock, all the profit he can. Once the fact of the
crime is proved, confession provides convincing proof; and to make this
proof still less open to doubt, it is forcibly extracted through the agonies and
despair of physical pain; while at the same time a confession that is
extrajudicial—that is, offered calmly and indifferently, and without
the overwhelming fears of a trial by torture—is held insufficient for a
verdict of guilt. Inquiries and proofs that shed light on the fact
but weaken the claims of the treasury are excluded; nor is it out

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of consideration for his wretchedness and weakness that a criminal is
sometimes spared from torture, but out of regard for the claims that
this entity, now mythical and inconceivable, might lose. The judge
becomes the enemy of the accused, who stands in chains before him, the
prey of misery, of torments, and of the most terrible future; he does not
seek to find the truth of a fact, but to find the crime in the prisoner,
trying to entrap him, and thinking it to the loss of his own credit if
he fails to do so, and to the detriment of that infallibility which men
pretend to possess about everything. The evidence that justifies a man's
imprisonment rests with the judge; in order that a man may prove himself
innocent, he must first be declared guilty: that is called an _offensive
prosecution_; and such are criminal proceedings in nearly every part of
enlightened Europe in the eighteenth century. The real prosecution, the
_informative_ one—that is, the indifferent inquiry into a fact, such
as reason enjoins, such as military codes employ, and such as is used
even by Asiatic despotism in trivial and unimportant cases—is of very
scant use in the tribunals of Europe. What a complex maze of strange
absurdities, doubtless incredible to a more fortunate posterity! Only the
philosophers of that time will read in the nature of man the possible
actuality of such a system as now exists.

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THE PREVENTION OF CRIMES—OF KNOWLEDGE—MAGISTRATES—REWARDS—EDUCATION.
It is better to prevent crimes than to punish them. This is the chief
aim of every good system of legislation, which is the art of leading men
to the greatest possible happiness or the least possible misery,
according to a calculation of all the goods and evils of life. But the
means hitherto employed for this end are for the most part false and
contrary to the end proposed. It is impossible to reduce the turbulent
activity of men to a geometrical harmony without any irregularity
or confusion. As the constant and most simple laws of nature do not
prevent aberrations in the movements of the planets, so, in the infinite
and contradictory attractions of pleasure and pain, disturbances and
disorder cannot be prevented by human laws. Yet this is the chimera
that narrow-minded men pursue when they have power in their hands. To
prohibit a number of indifferent acts is not to prevent the crimes that
may arise from them, but to create new ones from them; it is to
give capricious definitions of virtue and vice which are proclaimed as
eternal and immutable in their nature. To what should we be reduced if
Did everything that might tempt us to a crime have to be forbidden? It
would be necessary to deprive a man of the use of his senses. For one
motive that drives men to commit a real crime there are a thousand that
drive them to commit those indifferent acts which bad laws call
crimes; and if the likelihood of crimes is proportioned to
the number of motives to commit them, an increase in the scope of crimes
is an increase in the likelihood of their commission. The majority
of laws are nothing but privileges, or a tribute paid by all to the
convenience of a few.
Would you prevent crimes? Then make the laws clear and simple,
bring the whole force of a nation to bear on their defence, and suffer no
part of it to be busied in overthrowing them. Make the laws favour not
so much classes of men as men themselves. Cause men to fear the laws and
the laws alone. The fear of the law is salutary, but the fear of one man by another is fatal and fertile in
crime. Men as slaves are more sensual,

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more immoral, more cruel than free men; and, while the latter give their
minds to the sciences or to the interests of their country, setting
great objects before them as their model, the former, contented with the
passing day, seek in the excitement of libertinage a distraction from
the nothingness of their existence, and, accustomed to an uncertainty
of result in everything, they look on the result of their crimes
as uncertain too, and so decide in favour of the passion that tempts
them. If uncertainty of the laws affects a nation, rendered indolent
by its climate, its indolence and stupidity is thereby maintained and
increased; if it affects a nation, which though fond of pleasure is
also full of energy, it wastes that energy in a number of petty cabals
and intrigues, which spread distrust in every heart, and make treachery
and dissimulation the foundation of prudence; if, again, it affects a
courageous and brave nation, the uncertainty is ultimately destroyed,
after many oscillations from liberty to servitude, and from servitude
back again to liberty.
Would you prevent crimes, then see that enlightenment accompanies
liberty. The evils that flow from knowledge are in inverse ratio to its
diffusion; the benefits are directly proportioned to it. A bold impostor, who
is never a commonplace man, is adored by an ignorant people and despised
by an enlightened one. Knowledge, by facilitating comparisons between
objects and multiplying men's points of view, brings many different
notions into contrast, causing them to modify one another, all the
more easily as the same views and the same difficulties are observed
in others. In the face of a widely diffused national enlightenment, the
calumnies of ignorance are silent, and authority, disarmed of pretexts
for its manifestation, trembles; while the rigorous force of the laws
remains unshaken, since no one of education has any dislike for the clear and
useful public compacts which secure the common safety, when he compares
the trifling and useless liberty sacrificed by himself with the sum-total
of all the liberties sacrificed by others, who without the laws might

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have been hostile to himself. Whoever has a sensitive soul, when he
contemplates a code of well-made laws, and finds that he has only lost
the pernicious liberty of injuring others will feel himself constrained
to bless the throne and the monarch who sits on it.
It is not true that the sciences have always been injurious to mankind;
when they were, it was an inevitable evil. The multiplication of
the human race over the face of the earth introduced war, the ruder
arts, and the first laws—mere temporary agreements that perished with
the necessity that gave rise to them. This was mankind's primitive
philosophy, the few elements of which were just, because the indolence
and slight wisdom of their framers preserved them from error. But with
the multiplication of men there went ever a multiplication of their
wants. Stronger and more lasting impressions were therefore needed
in order to turn them back from repeated lapses to that primitive state
of disunion which each return to it rendered worse. Those primitive
delusions, therefore, which peopled the earth with false divinities and
created an invisible universe that governed our own, conferred a great
benefit—I mean a great political benefit—on humanity. Those men were
benefactors of their kind, who dared to deceive them and drag them,
docile and ignorant, to worship at the altars. By presenting to them
objects that lay beyond the scope of sense and fled from their grasp
the nearer they seemed to approach them—never despised, because never
well understood—they concentrated their divided passions on a single
object of supreme interest to them. These were the first steps of all
the nations that formed themselves out of savage tribes; this was the
epoch when larger communities were formed, and such was their necessary
and perhaps their only bond. I say nothing of that chosen people of God,
for whom the most extraordinary miracles and the most signal favours were
a substitute for human policy. But as it is the quality of error to fall
into infinite subdivisions, so the sciences that grew out of it made
of mankind a blind fanatical multitude, which, shut up within a close

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labyrinth, collides together in such confusion, that some sensitive and
philosophical minds have regretted to this day the ancient savage state.
That is the first epoch in which the sciences or rather opinions are
injurious.
The second epoch of history consists in the hard and terrible transition
from errors to truth, from the darkness of ignorance to the light. The
great clash between the errors that serve a few men of
power and the truths that serve the weak and the many, and
the contact and fermentation of the passions aroused at such a period,
are a source of infinite evils to unhappy humanity. Whoever ponders
the different histories of the world, which after certain intervals
of time are so much alike in their principal episodes, will therein
frequently observe the sacrifice of a whole generation to the welfare
of succeeding ones, in the painful but necessary transition from the
darkness of ignorance to the light of philosophy, and from despotism to
freedom, which result from the sacrifice. But when truth, whose progress
at first is slow and afterwards rapid (after men's minds have calmed down
and the fire is quenched that purged a nation of the evils it suffered),
sits as the companion of kings on the throne, and is reverenced and
worshipped in the parliaments of free governments, who will ever dare
assert that the light which enlightens the people is more injurious than
darkness, and that acknowledging the true and simple relations of things
is pernicious to mankind?
If blind ignorance is less pernicious than confused half-knowledge,
since the latter adds to the evils of ignorance those of error, which
is unavoidable in a narrow view of the limits of truth, the most
precious gift that a sovereign can make to himself or to his people
is an enlightened man as the trustee and guardian of the sacred laws.
Accustomed to see the truth and not to fear it; independent for the most
part of the demands of reputation, which are never completely satisfied
and put most men's virtue to a trial; used to consider humanity from
higher points of view; such a man regards his own nation as a family of
men and of brothers, and the distance between the nobles and the people

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seems to him so much the less as he has before his mind the larger total
of the whole human species. Philosophers acquire wants and interests
unknown to most men, but above all, of not
betraying in public the principles they have taught in obscurity, and they
gain the habit of loving the truth for its own sake. A selection of
such men makes the happiness of a people, but a happiness which is only
transitory, unless good laws so increase their number as to lessen the
probability, always considerable, of an unfortunate choice.
Another way of preventing crimes is to interest the magistrates who carry
out the laws in seeking rather to preserve than to corrupt them. The
greater the number of men who compose the magistracy, the less danger
will there be of their exercising any undue power over the laws; for
venality is more difficult among men who are under the close observation
of one another, and their inducement to increase their individual
authority diminishes in proportion to the smallness of the share of it
that can fall to each of them, especially when they compare it with
the risk of the attempt. If the sovereign accustoms his subjects, by
formalities and pomp, by severe edicts, and by refusal to hear the
grievances, whether just or unjust, of the man who thinks himself
oppressed, to fear the magistrates rather than the laws, it will be more
to the profit of the magistrates than to the gain of private and public
security.
Another way to prevent crimes is to reward virtue. On this point I notice
a general silence in the laws of all nations to this day. If prizes
offered by academies to the discoverers of useful truths have caused the
multiplication of knowledge and of good books, why should not virtuous
actions also be multiplied, by prizes distributed from the munificence of
the sovereign? The money of honour ever remains unexhausted and fruitful
in the hands of the legislator who wisely distributes it.
Lastly, the surest but most difficult means of preventing crimes is
to improve education—a subject too vast for present discussion, and
lying beyond the limits of my treatise; a subject, I will also say,

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too intimately connected with the nature of government for it ever to
be anything but a barren field, only cultivated here and there by a few
philosophers, down to the remotest ages of public prosperity. A great
man, who enlightens the humanity that persecutes him, has shown in detail
the chief educational maxims of real utility to mankind; namely, that it
consists less in a barren multiplicity of subjects than in their careful
selection; in substituting originals for copies in the moral as in the
physical phenomena presented by chance or intention to the fresh minds of
youth; in inclining them to virtue by the easy path of feeling; and in
deterring them from evil by the sure path of necessity and disadvantage,
not by the uncertain method of command, which never secures more than a
simulated and transitory obedience.

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From all that has gone before, a general theorem may be deduced, of great
utility, though little conformable to custom, that common lawgiver of
nations. The theorem is this: 'In order that every punishment may not
be an act of violence, committed by one man or by many against a single
individual, it ought above all to be public, speedy, necessary,
the least possible in the given circumstances, proportioned to its crime,
dictated by the laws.'