17 January 1973

Abstract

I WANTED TO EXPLAIN to you the kind of detachment of the criminal from the system of private obligations or disputes in which he was caught up in Medieval practices, and his emergence as a social enemy, as an individual opposed to the whole of society as such. We can symbolize this transformation with a text that was quite important institutionally and politically. It is a discourse delivered to the Constituent Assembly in October 1789, at the time of the reform of penal organization in France, or more precisely, of a modification of the procedure of criminal investigation, in which the rapporteur of the project, Beaumetz,¹ describes what, according to him, is the mechanism and justification of criminal procedure in the Ancien Régime. In doing this he merely re-transcribes the practices of penal law in the Ancien Régime into the new vocabulary, which is, schematically, that of Beccaria, and, on the basis of that re-transcription in terms of public enemy, proposes a number of modifications to criminal procedure: “A crime is committed: the whole of society is injured in one of its members; hatred of the crime or private interest leads to a denunciation or motivates a complaint; the public prosecutor is informed by the injured party or roused by the general clamor, the crime is established, clues are gathered; its traces are confirmed. Public order must be avenged.”²

The appearance of the criminal as social enemy. Historical survey of first manifestations. (I) Economic analysis of delinquency in the eighteenth century by the physiocrats. Le Trosne, Mémoire sur les vagabonds (1764): More than a psychological propensity like idleness or a social phenomenon like begging, vagabondage is the matrix of crime and a scourge of the economy; it produces scarcity of labor, raises wages, and lowers production. ∽ The laws inadequate; the measures recommended by Le Trosne: 1. enslavement; 2. outlawing; 3. peasant self-defense; 4. mass conscription. ∽ Similarities of vagabonds and nobility. (II) The criminal-social enemy as literary theme. Gil Blas and the beginning of the eighteenth century: the continuum and omnipresence of delinquency. Novels of terror at the end of the eighteenth century: localized and extra-social delinquency. Emergence of the dualities crime-innocence, evil-good.