204 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



to megalomania, in their intermittent geniality, and especially in 

 their great impulsiveness. There was also latent in Luccheni an in- 

 direct disposition to suicide, which I have found in other political 

 criminals, like Oliva, Nobiling, and Passananti,* who, having con- 

 ceived a dislike for the king, made an attempt on his life; and espe- 

 cially in Henry, who rejected the defense of his advocate and his 

 mother based on the insanity of his father, remarking that it was 

 the advocate's business to defend, his to die; and in that Roumanian 

 who was photographed in a portrait that I have reproduced, in the 

 act of committing suicide. f Luccheni, too, believed he would be 

 condemned to death, and was much disappointed when he learned 

 that there was no such penalty in the canton where he committed the 

 crime. 



It may have been morbid vanity that prompted the exclamation 

 he was heard to make, '' I wanted to kill some great person, so as to 

 get my name in the papers " (Gautier). 



But while an organic, individual cause was good for a third in 

 Luccheni's crime, he was much more influenced by the atmosphere 

 in which he lived. An illegitimate child, left in one of those nurs- 

 eries which are real nests of crime and graver disorders, then con- 

 signed to a very poor and not always moral family of mendicant 

 habits, having learned nothing except to beg and wander, he found 

 such modes of subsistence as he could (notice the uncertainty and 

 plurality of his occupations, indicating lack of assiduity — servant, 

 soldier, marble polisher, and in the beginning peasant) ; he found, we 

 might say, as the most constant condition the infelicity which radi- 

 ated around him from every quarter, and, reflecting the worst, urged 

 him to this way of suicide. We should recollect, too, what Frattini 

 said: " "Was it hunger brought me to this? " and the anarchist whom 

 Hamon speaks of: " When I began to question the unfortunates of the 

 hospital, it had a frightful efi^ect on me; I comprehended the need of 

 solidarity and became an anarchist " ; and as another one said to the 

 same Hamon : " I became an anarchist when I saw my comrades 

 begging for work with their faces bathed in tears, and was indig- 

 nant over it." Caserio wept when he thought of the lot of his Lom- 

 bard companions in misery. These criminals by passion, by altru- 

 ism, are, as Burdeau wrote, veritable philanthropic assassins. They 

 kill recklessly for the love of men. 



Epilepsy and hysteria in Luccheni are explained by his abrupt 

 passage from one condition to the other, and by the conversion of 

 factional passion in him into a criminal act. But there are epileptics 

 and criminals everywhere; yet persons thus disordered in "N^orway 

 and Sweden are not transformed into anarchists; nor in Switzerland 



* See my Delitto politico, 1890. f Ibid. 



