CRIMINOLOGY 1 



Ever since the famous reports of LA ROCHEFOUCAULD- 

 LIANCOURT to the National Assembly in 1790 and 1791, 

 France has been a center of lively interest in the subject 

 of criminalistics. His studies of mendicity, reforma- 

 tories, poor relief, and the Philadelphia prison system, 

 have been guide-posts for a century. But even before 

 that, VOLTAIRE had popularized the ideas of Beccaria. 

 The tradition was carried on in the nineteenth century 

 by great sociologists like QuETELET,who laid the founda- 

 tions of criminal statistics; by great publicists like 

 DE TOCQUEVILLE, who added a strand to the bonds 

 between France and America by his notable report on 

 the penitentiary system in the United States and its 

 application in France (1833); by great physiologists like 

 LAUVERGNE, who anticipated some of Lombroso's 

 theories; by great men of letters like LAMARTINE, who 

 thought it no condescension to offer to the cause of 

 neglected childhood some of his most masterly eloquence; 

 and by great medical men like MOREL and DESPINE, 

 who blazed new paths in criminal psychiatry. The 

 whole nineteenth century was a period of free trade 

 between these two republics in the field of charities and 

 correction. France borrowed ideas of prison adminis- 

 tration. America in return imported both ideas and men 

 for developing our system of caring for the blind, deaf- 

 mutes, feeble-minded, and insane. Recently France 



1 [Drafting Committee: C. A. ELLWOOD, University of Missouri; 

 MAURICE PARMELEE, College of the City of New York; A. J. TODD, 

 University of Minnesota. ED.] 



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