Of Crimes and Punishments, Cesare Beccaria, Robert Badinter, Maurice Chevallier

In the summer of 1764, in Livorno, Italy, a twenty-six-year-old man anonymously published a short essay dealing with "the cruelty of punishments and the irregularity of criminal procedures." Marquis Cesare Beccaria, the author of the essay, would not remain unknown for long. His text was an immediate success, made its way onto the French scene, was translated, and spread throughout Europe. Voltaire, Diderot, and d'Alembert acclaimed it... Beccaria laid the foundations of modern penal thought. Beccaria, a spiritual brother of the Encyclopedists, wanted to establish the principles of a new criminal justice system "on reason and humanity." He developed an original philosophy that viewed punishment as a guarantee of the law and not an outlawing. Advocating secularized justice and concerned with defending social utility, Beccaria denounced the death penalty and its harmful effects. All punishment must be related to freedom and not power, to social necessity and not to the arbitrary will of the sovereign or the judge. Beccaria, celebrated by the Enlightenment, was a fundamental reference for the Revolution, and to this day the principles of his thought have had an international influence.