Misfits in Fin-de-Sicle France and Italy: Anatomies of Difference

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As the 19th century drew to a close, France and Italy experienced an explosion of crime, vagrancy, insanity, neurosis and sexual deviance. Misfits in Fin-de-Sicle France and Italy examines how the raft of self-appointed experts that subsequently emerged tried to explain this aberrant behavior and the many consequences this had. Susan A. Ashley considers why these different phenomena were understood to be interchangeable versions of the same inborn defects. The book looks at why specialists in newly-minted disciplines in medicine and the social sciences, such as criminology, neurology and sexology, all claimed that biological flaws some inherited and some arising from illness or trauma made it impossible for these misfits to adapt to modern life. Ashley then goes on to analyse the solutions these specialists proposed, often distinguishing between born deviants who belonged in asylums or prisons and accidental misfits who deserved solidarity and social support through changes to laws relating to issues like poverty and unemployment. The study draws on a comprehensive examination of contemporary texts and features the work of leading authorities like Cesare Lombroso, Jean-Martin Charcot, and Thodule Ribot, as well as investigators less known now but influential at the time. The comparative aspect also interestingly shows that experts collaborated closely across national and disciplinary borders, employed similar methods and arrived at common conclusions. This is a valuable study for all social and cultural historians of France and Italy and anyone interested in knowing more about the history of medicine in modern Europe.

Reviews

Ashleys study offers a detailed and nuanced account of diverse understandings of deviance. * American Historical Review *
Ideengeschichte (the history of ideas), when done well (unarguably the case here), provides a clear and sympathetic understanding of the diachronic development of an idea, fully exploring the intellectual and social matrix informing that development. Here, the author focuses on the view of misfits as understood by criminologists, psychiatrists, neurologists, sociologists, anthropologists, physiologists, forensic doctors, and jurists in fin-de-sicle France and Italy. In their writings and lectures (based on clinical observations, case studies, anthropometrics, and statistics), intellectuals strove to understand the causes and symptoms of their societys geniuses, lunatics, neurotics, vagabonds, criminals, and sexual deviants. Sharp disagreements ensued as the data, organized in ever more refined classificatory anatomies of difference, raised questions of causality (congenital/acquired, biological/social), occurrence (occasional/habitual), transmissibility, and degeneracy (individual/societal). But Ashley (Colorado College) also identifies the commonalities among the thinkers with respect to their empiricism, the privileging of heredity (whether Lamarckian or Darwinian), a focus on epilepsy (the quintessential degenerative disorder), accepting the inherence of energy in matter (nervous system), a disdain for the metaphysical suppositions and vocabulary of classical jurisprudence, and a conviction that their research was both timely and important for their colleagues in law, public policy, and government. Summing Up: Recommended. All academic levels/libraries. * CHOICE *
Susan A. Ashley refreshes this well-trodden ground with a broad scope and transnational and comparative approach ... Remarkably rich, dense and detailed. * French History *
[This book] will be useful to scholars of the social, cultural, and intellectual history of the fin de sicle Misfits helps us understand the anxieties about civilization, whom it was leaving behind, and whom it was harming. * H-France *
Ashleys style remains readable and clear ... The chapter on neurasthenia is one of the best in the book. * French Studies *
By focusing on how professionals in fin-du-siecle France and Italy interpreted vagrancy, crime, sexual perversion, madness, as well as genius and lunacy - all that inform the category of "misfits" - Susan Ashley illuminates how the assumptions, systems of thought, motives, and prejudices of criminologists, sociologists, and medical practitioners responded to the uncertainties of modernity. Gently contesting Michel Foucault's assault on disciplinary reason, Ashley provides a discerning blend of intellectual and cultural history. Her careful examination of the shift of analytical categories during this era naturally leads a reader to ponder current analyses of so-called "misfits" and how societies should respond. * K Steven Vincent, Professor, North Carolina State University, USA *
Misfits is the perfect title to Susan Ashleys fascinating book. It describes the fin-de-sicle anxieties of intellectual geniuses and aesthetes who worried about their sanity and loss of moral bearing, as well as to the broader array of degenerates, criminals and perverts, who threatened bourgeois self-confidence during the Belle poque. It also speaks to the failure of criminal anthropologists, psychiatrists, medical experts and social theorists to concur on the etiology of such a plague of misfits or its supposed effects upon society. Misfits is indispensable for scholars of nineteenth-century criminality, madness and sexuality. * Robin Walz, Professor of History, University of Alaska Southeast, USA *
Could democratic and scientific progress encourage the rise of social exclusion Examining French and Italian societies at the fin-de-sicle, as well as a century of historiographical debates, Susan Ashley provides very rich materials to understand how politics and culture build an underclass made of vagrants, criminals, lunatics, sexual deviants, and others. A relevant study of what deviance is. * Dominique Kalifa, Professor of Modern History, Universit Paris 1 Panthon - Sorbonne, France *

Author Bio

Susan A. Ashley is Professor of History at Colorado College, USA. She is the author of Making Liberalism Work: The Italian Experience, 1860-1914 (2003).