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Updated: June 5, 2025
On May 18th, M. de Lor proved equally as successful with the apparatus erected at his own house. These philosophers soon excited those of other parts of Europe to repeat the experiment; among whom none signalized themselves more than Father Beccaria, of Turin, to whose observations science is much indebted. Even the cold regions of Russia were penetrated by the ardor for discovery.
The poet Alfieri, that Tyrtæus of Italian liberty, produced there his revolutionary dramas, and there sowed his maxims against the two-fold tyranny of popes and kings in every theatre in Italy. Milan, beneath the Austrian flag, had within its walls a republic of poets and philosophers. Beccaria wrote there more daringly than Montesquieu.
For Beccaria, for Carrara, for their predecessors, this idea is no more nor less than that mentioned in books 47 and 48 of the Digest: "The criminal is liable to punishment to the extent that he is morally guilty of the crime he has committed." The entire classic school is, therefore, nothing but a series of reforms.
This race of ancient rulers still gives birth to kings Lagrange, Volta, Rasori, Canova, Rossini, Bartolini, Galvani, Vigano, Beccaria, Cicognara, Corvetto. These Italians are masters of the scientific peaks on which they stand, or of the arts to which they devote themselves.
The philosophers of our century prove, and demonstrate that the capital penalty is as barbarous as the rack was before Beccaria; still, because the bible says: tooth for tooth, and death for death; the criminal, and, too often, the innocent, are not yet spared from the bloody law.
But in 1764 appeared the admirable book of the Milanese Marquis Beccaria, and about thirteen years later the Englishman John Howard published his first book on the State of the Prisons. Beccaria shared the ideas of the Philosophers on most subjects. Where he differed from them, it was as Rousseau differed, in the direction of socialism.
"Ten years before the Revolution," says Roederer, "the criminal courts of France were no longer like before.... Their attitude had changed.. . All the young magistrates, and this I can bear witness to, for I was one myself, pronounced judgments more in accordance with the principles of Beccaria, than according to law."
This story, with Manzoni's "Colonna Infame" and Cantu's "Vita di Beccaria," led me to take up the history of criminal law, and especially the development of torture in procedure and punishment. Much time during two or three years was given to this subject, and a winter at Stuttgart in 1877-1878 was entirely devoted to it.
It induced the philosophical BECCARIA to assert that every individual had an equal degree of genius for poetry and eloquence; it runs through the philosophy of the elegant Dugald Stewart; and REYNOLDS, the pupil of Johnson in literature, adopting the paradox, constructed his automatic system on this principle of equal aptitude.
"The torture of a criminal during his trial is a cruelty consecrated by custom in almost every nation," says Beccaria. Indeed it seems to have been legal in his day all over the Continent, although restricted in Prussia and obsolete in practice in Holland. Beccaria opposed torture entirely, on broad grounds.
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