Agenda UV

The López Piñero Institute for the History of Medicine and science (joint centre of the University of Valencia and CSIC), located in the Palau de Cerveró, presents the seminar Which History of early French Criminology? 1885-1939, which will take place on Monday, March 10, at 17 h. in the conference room of the institute. The seminar, to be held entirely in English, is part of the lecture series Les proves del crim (Criminal Evidences), and it will be taught by Marc Renneville, researcher at the CNRS (A. Koyré Centre, París). The history of criminology in France has not been established as a defined study area. In fact, the very existence of criminology as a scientific discipline is a subject of discussion in France. First, it has been criticized by Michel Foucault as useless knowledge, and then sociologists refused to recognize it as a scientific discipline. For its part, jurists included criminology in the history of their discipline, thus making it dependent on the evolution of legal doctrines. And it was after 1980 when a historical perspective in the wake of the social history and the history of ideas came to light. Early works on the birth of criminology were developed in France. This birth was thus understood with the publication of Archives de l’anthropologie criminelle, reviewed by Alexandre Lacassagne (medical examiner) and Gabriel Tarde (jurist). Other researchers proposed to begin the history of criminology much earlier, in the French Revolution. The aim of the seminar will be to review the historiographical context and provide some details about important moments in the history of scientific discourses on crime and criminals in France, recalling the importance of the place that the legal medicine occupied in this history, both by its theories and by its practice of judicial expertise. Marc Renneville is a researcher at the CNRS (Centro A. Koyré, París). He has taught Contemporary History and Computing at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes. Then, he led the research department of the École Nationale d’Administration Pénitentiaire in Agen and participated in the creation of the centre of historic resources on the crimes and penalties. Since 2012, he is Research Director at CNRS and leads since 2013 the Huma-Num TGIR. He is the author of Le langage des crânes, une histoire de la phrénologie (París, 2000), a study that won the award for the best work by the Société française d’histoire de la médeciner. He also published Crime et folie, Deux siècles d’enquêtes médicales et judiciaires (Crime and Madness, Two Centuries of medical and legal investigations)(París, 2003) and republished by Gabriel Tarde, La criminalidad comparada (Comparative criminality)(París, 2004). He is the creator and scientific director of the Criminocorpus web platform. History of justice, crimes and penalties (http: // criminocorpus.org).