• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1275 0

delinquente, the French criminologist Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904) had published his La Criminalité comparée (Comparative Criminology). Tarde had read Lombroso’s work in the original Italian and sought to challenge the assumptions that he was making. Criminals, he argued, were not just ‘born’; nor could they be regarded as a purely biological throw-back to a primitive form of existence. Heredity and social environment also contributed to the making of the criminal. If the criminal displayed what might be termed ‘regressive’ patterns of behaviour, it was because the circumstances of birth and upbringing had upset the normal balance of inherited characteristics relating to the past history of the species. Tarde also insisted that whilst the human race had advanced intellectually and technologically, its moral development lagged far behind. Atavistic impulses had adapted themselves to changing conditions and to technological progress. Tarde had worked as a judge’s assistant and as an examining magistrate at Sarlat, in the Périgord, since 1867. His Comparative Criminology was written out of twenty years of practical experience of criminal investigation and it also had a practical objective. Tarde was concerned to ensure that the administration of justice did not consist merely in the application of summary sentences but that each case would be judged with reference to all the particularities of character and circumstance that attended it.

Echoes of this criminological debate are sensed in a number of ways in La Bête humaine. Most obvious is the suggestion, introduced early in the novel, that Jacques’s urge to kill is an atavistic impulse whose origins are lost in the remote past. ‘Was this the swollen legacy of a grudge that had passed from man to man since the first infidelity in the dark recesses of some primeval cave?’ Jacques asks himself (II). The question is never resolved. It returns insistently throughout the novel, tormenting Jacques’s conscience and calling for the reader’s attention. Yet however remote its possible origins, Jacques’s urge to kill is also perceived as the legacy of a more recent past, an unwanted bequest from the family of drunkards and delinquents into which he has been born and whose tainted blood he has inherited. Jacques gloomily reflects on the generations of Macquarts and Lantiers that have preceded him. ‘It couldn’t really be called a normal family. So many of them had some flaw, and he often thought he must have inherited this family flaw himself’ (II). It is this hereditary ‘flaw’ (the French ‘fêlure’ literally means ‘crack’) that allows resentments and obsessions which no longer find room in the conscious memory to seep through the walls of social conditioning into a supposedly more civilized modern world. The notion of heredity acting as a mediating agent for primitive impulse or as a catalyst for some latent genetic disorder is close to the thinking of Tarde.

Some of the physical features which Lombroso had identified as distinguishing marks of the criminal also find their way into Zola’s description of characters in the novel. Roubaud is given a low forehead and short, hairy fingers; Jacques’s otherwise handsome appearance is marred by a pronounced lower jaw. This should not be taken to imply that the novel simply endorses Lombroso’s ideas and reduces the physical appearance of characters to a series of ready-made hallmarks of criminal types. Zola does not allow these supposedly ‘criminal’ features to go unchallenged. When Cabuche stands before the judge at the final trial, accused, according to the examining magistrate’s interpretation of events, not only of murder but of an act of necrophilia, Zola provides him, in a manner that verges on caricature, with the ‘enormous fists and carnivorous jaws’ appropriate to the crime committed. The well-dressed ladies crowding the reserved balcony of the courtroom eager to catch a glimpse of this monster of sexual depravity need no further convincing. Zola ensures, however, that the reader of the novel knows that Cabuche is perfectly innocent. More