Cesare Beccaria: Life and Ideas in On Crimes and Punishments

Cesare Beccaria was born in Milan on 15 March 1738, the son of Marquis Giovanni Saverio and Maria Visconti di Saliceto; his full name at birth was Cesare Beccaria Bonesana, Marquis of Gualdrasco and Villareggio, though he is known by the shorter Beccaria. Between 1763 and early 1764 he took part in the Academy of Fists, the Milanese circle led by the brothers Pietro and Alessandro Verri, and it was there that he drafted On Crimes and Punishments. He died in Milan on 28 November 1794.

On Crimes and Punishments: publication and circulation

The manuscript reached the printer Giuseppe Aubert, in Livorno, on 12 April 1764; the first copies began circulating in July of that same year. Beccaria published it anonymously, because its criticism of the legal system then in force risked drawing retaliation from those in power. Within two years the book went through six editions, all printed in Tuscany but carrying false places of publication — Monaco, Lausanne, Harlem — to further shield the author.

The book is not an abstract treatise: it is organized into short numbered chapters, each devoted to one aspect of the penal system. Chapter VI, Proportion between Crimes and Punishments, argues that the obstacles keeping people from crime must be stronger the more an action goes against the public good: punishment, in other words, should be matched to the harm done to the community, not left to a judge’s discretion.

Practical example: in a classroom, what actually discourages misbehavior isn’t the threat of a harsh punishment rarely enforced, but the certainty that every infraction gets noticed and dealt with, even with a mild consequence — the same principle chapter XXVII applies to the penal system.

The ideas of On Crimes and Punishments: proportion, purpose, certainty

Chapter XII, Purpose of Punishments, sets the point that separates the book from earlier criminal law: the purpose of punishment “is nothing other than to prevent the offender from doing further harm to fellow citizens and to deter others from doing the same.” It is a preventive function, aimed at the future, not a retributive one aimed at avenging what has already happened — a distinction that comes up often in literature and history-of-ideas exams.

Chapter XXVII, Of the Mildness of Punishments, adds a second principle, one students often mix up with the opposite idea: “one of the greatest checks on crime is not the cruelty of punishments, but their inevitability.” A certain punishment, even a moderate one, weighs more heavily on the decision to commit a crime than the threat of an atrocious penalty that is hard to enforce, because “even minor harms, when certain, always frighten the human mind.”

In chapter XVI, Of Torture, Beccaria starts from a procedural principle: “a man cannot be called guilty before the judge’s sentence, nor can society withdraw its public protection from him.” From there follows his condemnation of judicial torture, which he writes “confuses all relations” between accuser and accused, forcing the latter to prove innocence through pain before any judgment has even been reached.

Cesare Beccaria and the death penalty

Chapter XXVIII, Of the Death Penalty, opens with a question: “What right do men claim for themselves to slaughter their fellow men?” Beccaria argues that it is not the intensity of a punishment that has the greatest effect on the mind of someone who might commit a crime, but its duration over time: for this reason he points to life imprisonment, with “the long and painful example of a man deprived of freedom,” as a stronger deterrent against crime than capital punishment.

The topic also resurfaces in the book’s circulation across Europe. The French translation, published in 1766 with a commentary by Voltaire, made it known among French intellectuals; the English translation followed in 1767. Wikipedia reports that the reforms Beccaria advocated led to the abolition of the death penalty in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, the first state in the world to take that step, without giving a precise year for it.

Cesare Beccaria’s legacy

In 1767 the judicial reform pursued by Catherine II of Russia drew on Beccaria for its criminal-law part, even though the empress initially knew little about him: she believed he lived in Florence and thought he was an abbot, while still admiring his book a great deal, according to Treccani.

Beccaria was also the maternal grandfather of Alessandro Manzoni, the author of The Betrothed: a family tie, not a shared subject, since the two works stand far apart in period and topic. Centuries earlier, another Italian political thinker, Machiavelli, in The Prince, had turned an unsparing, for its time, analysis onto the ruler’s power; Beccaria applies that same direct scrutiny to the system of punishment.

Outside Italy, the influence shows up best in its readers. Among those who read the book are John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, central figures in the American Revolution and in drafting the United States’ founding legal texts.