ABSTRACT
The positivist doctrines of the Italian school of criminal anthropology landed on stony soil in France. Lombroso's notion of the “born criminal” violated not only the country's liberal legal traditions inherited from the Revolution but also the Catholic doctrines of free will and redemption. The opponents of Lombrosianism in France appealed to the authority of science to refute the doctrines of the Italian school. The secular thinkers of the French school of criminal anthropology sought to combat Lombrosianism by developing in place of the born criminal a Neo-Lamarckian concept of hereditary degeneration which, nonetheless, preserved some element of free will. The prominent jurist Raymond Saleilles provided a Catholic response which also appealed to science in refuting the ideas of Italian positivism. Saleilles developed his version of individualization of punishment, which meant a new system of “punishment (…)to be determined not by the material gravity of the crime (…)but by the nature of the individual”. Saleilles tried to bridge the gap between free will and determinism by claiming that if the criminal act was not free, the personality of the criminal was. His notion of individualization of punishment originated in a unique French historical context. This included the practices of the nation's judicial system, the political situation in Third Republic France, and the challenges which positivism posed to Catholic doctrines.
