POPULATION AND TRADE IN FRANCE. BY FREDERICK MARSHALL. No. IV.-CRIME. THE statistics of crime in France date from 1825, when they were created by M. Guerry de Champneuf, then director of criminal affairs at the ministry of justice. Up to that period there were only incomplete returns of little utility. There are three classes of tribunals in France for the judgment of offences: assize courts, tribunals of correctional police, and tribunals of simple police. The cases brought before the two former tribunals are first submitted to the investigation of the public prosecutors and juges d'instruction, whose duty it is to decide whether they present sufficient importance and probability of culpability to require them to be sent for trial, and who, in that case, get up the evidence against the prisoners. Bail being virtually unknown in France, persons arrested on suspicion are detained in prison until the charge against them is decided; and as the "instruction" or preliminary examination of each case is gone into in great detail, and lasts sometimes a long time, the preventive imprisonment is necessarily equally long. The returns since 1826 establish, that while the number of prisoners brought before the assize courts for grave offences has materially diminished of late years, those tried by the tribunals of correctional and simple police have largely increased. The number of prisoners brought before the assize courts averaged 7400 per annum on the quarter of a century, included between 1826 and 1850; but from 1851 to 1855 the average fell to 7104, while in 1856 there were only 6124 prisoners for trial, and in 1857 only 5773. This diminution, if confirmed by the returns since 1857, is a very satisfactory feature in the present state of France, and it is the more striking when the simultaneous augmentation of population is brought into account. The 7400 culprits of 1826 represented .023 per cent. on the then population of 32 millions, while the 5773 prisoners of 1857 show only .016 per cent. on the 36 millions of people who then inhabited France. The diminution of the crimes brought before the assize courts, calculated per cent. on the population, amounts therefore to the large proportion of nearly one-third during the period in question. And while this remarkable diminution has occurred in the whole number of serious crimes committed, their nature and composition have undergone an equally remarkable change. Since 1826 the general proportion of crimes against persons has regularly increased, while that of crimes against property has simultaneously decreased. The following table of the number of cases tried per annum (which is naturally lower than the number of prisoners implicated) shows the exact variation which has occurred in the two categories of crime: In round numbers the proportion of crimes against persons has increased by one-third (25.6 to 34.1) in 32 years, whilst crimes against property have diminished by about one-seventh (74.4 to 65.9). It is, however, difficult to attribute this movement to any definite cause, for the augmentation of crimes against persons does not apply equally to all the various offences included under that general head; and certain classes of crime increase during one period to diminish again during another. For instance, from 1826 to 1850, wilful murders increased 22 per cent., and infanticides 49 per cent.; parricides doubled, and rape of girls under sixteen tripled; the increase of the latter crime being especially observable in the towns and manufacturing districts. But since 1851 all these crimes, excepting infanticide, have fallen again, the variation from 1851 to 1857 having been as shown in the following table: While, however, as is shown by this table, certain classes of offences have diminished since 1851, others have simultaneously increased; while murders, manslaughter, poisonings, and parricides, all of which had augmented from 1826 to 1850, fell from a general total of 534 in 1851 to 331 in 1857, and while accidental homicides, assaults, rape of women, and robberies largely diminished, infanticide, incendiarism, and fraudulent bankruptcy sensibly increased. Incendiarisms by the proprietors themselves, in the hope of gaining their insurance, rose from 14 per cent. of the whole number of incendiarisms in 1826 to 34 per cent. in 1850, while rape of children got up from 83 cases in 1826 to the above shown total of 617 in 1857. With the exception of the year 1854, serious robberies have regularly diminished, and it should be explained that their sudden augmentation in that year was caused by the famine and distress which then prevailed in France. This is proved by the remarkable circumstance that robberies of corn and flour, which were only 161 in 1851, rose to 502 in 1854. The geographical distribution of crime in France shows on an average about twice as many criminals (proportionately to the population) in the north as in the south. On the average of the twenty-five years between 1826 and 1850, the Department of the Seine had 1 assize court prisoner per annum for every 1335 inhabitants; Corsica, which comes next in the scale of criminality, had 1 to 1672; while in the Ain there was only 1 to 10,523 the average for all France being 1 to 4568. In 1857, after the general reduction of crime already indicated, there was 1 prisoner to 3225 inhabitants in the Seine, 1 to 2894 in Corsica, and only 1 to 15,493 in the Creuse: the average for the whole country being 1 to 6242. But while the assize cases are relatively so much more numerous in certain parts of France than in others, there is an equal local diversity in the composition of the crimes judged. Attacks against persons are always most numerous in the southern departments, which are mainly agricultural, while the cases presented by the northern districts, where manufactures are comparatively general, offer a great majority of robberies and other offences against property. The most striking example of this distinction occurs, strangely enough, in the very two departments which present the largest proportion of crime-Corsica and the Seine. On the average, from 1826 to 1850, 83 per cent. of the crimes committed in Paris (Seine) were robberies, forgeries, &c., while in Corsica, where the hot blood of the south and the effects of the vendetta bring out the knife, assassinations and attacks against persons constituted 87 per cent. of the cases tried; so that these two departments, the most criminal in France, present the exact inverse of each other in the composition of their offences. Divided according to their occupations, the prisoners tried at assizes from 1826 to 1850 give the following averages: The The results indicated by this table are curious and instructive. agricultural classes, which constitute 66 per cent. of the total population, produce only 37 per cent. of the whole number of criminals, while the manufacturing population, which amounts to only 17 per cent. of the whole, furnishes 32.4 per cent. of the offenders: these two facts strikingly confirm and explain the disproportion previously alluded to in the number of criminals found in the northern and southern departments. Domestic servants, whose total does not reach 3 per cent. of the people, supply 7.2 per cent. of the prisoners; while, worse than all, the liberal professions and public servants, whose total number, including their families, cannot be estimated at more than 700,000 at the very outside, or about 2 per cent. on the whole population, produce 5.8 per cent. of the criminals. It is therefore precisely the educated classes who present the worst results, the scale descending from them through domestic servants and manufacturing workmen to its minimum among the agricultural population. While this disproportion reveals itself on the whole, there is also a marked inequality between the various classes named in the composition of the crimes committed by each. Of the offences attributed to the liberal professions and public servants, 41.6 per cent. are against persons; but of the offences of domestic servants, 85.5 per cent. are against property, and only 14.5 per cent. against persons. These two classes present the extreme limit in each direction, and the divergence between these results indicates the differing nature of the temptations to crime which specially beset the two classes in question. Crimes against persons are proportionately most frequent in the spring and summer, while those against property rise in number under the pressure of the cold of autumn and winter. The exact comparison is as follows: The proportion of female criminals is diminishing: they averaged 20 per cent. of the whole number from 1826 to 1830, and only 16 per cent. from 1841 to 1850, rising again to 17 per cent. in 1857. In Corsica there are only 4 per cent. of women among the culprits, while in the Côtes du Nord the proportion gets up to 27 per cent. There are gene rally more female prisoners in the north than in the south, because the former is the principal field for offences against property, which are precisely those which women commit most easily. Of the crimes against persons committed by women, the most numerous, after infanticide and voluntary miscarriage, are poisoning, for which women amount to 48 per cent. of the accused, and parricide, for which they show 30 per cent. It is especially observable that the great mass of female crime is committed in-doors; indeed, of the total of domestic robberies, women commit the large proportion of 37 per cent. It is remarked, as might be expected, that the abandonment of virtue frequently precedes the perpetration of crime by women; one-fifth of the female prisoners, on an average, either have natural children or live in concubinage. Age exercises a marked effect in the nature of the offences committed. Up to sixteen years old the tendency is three times greater in favour of offences against property than against persons: the same disposition continues to exist in a decreasing degree down to forty, when crimes against persons take the lead, their majority increasing with age up to the proportion of 1 to 1 per prisoner above sixty. The motives of crime are sometimes difficult to ascertain, but as regards murders they are given exactly in the statistics of 1850, which assign the following proportions for each of the motives named: Murders from motives of cupidity have constantly increased during the last twenty years. The motives of robberies are, of course, always the same, but it is singular that people can be found to risk the galleys for such small sums as appear to be stolen. On the average from 1826 to 1850, the annual value of all the robberies brought before the assize courts was only 51,000l., which gives a mean of 121. 7s. per robbery; and as all the large robberies are included in this total, it is evident that the amounts ordinarily stolen are far under that average. It has been stated, that while the serious crimes brought before the assize courts have diminished of late years, the less important offences judged by the tribunals of correctional police have largely increased. The number of prisoners of this class has augmented from 178,021 in 1826 to 229,467 in 1857, which constitutes an increase of about onethird. The composition of the correctional police cases, on the average from 1826 to 1850, was as follows: Offences against special laws Breaches of the forest and game laws, and other 57.3 100 While, however, these averages show the general proportion in which the correctional police cases stand to each other, they do not indicate the movement of the various classes of offences. Almost all have increased in number, but mendicity was nine times as frequent from 1846 to 1850 as from 1826 to 1830, its annual average having risen in the interval from 966 cases to 8317; robberies more than doubled, and breaches of game and weapon laws rose from 5961 to 22,330, while offences against the forest laws somewhat diminished. Since 1853, however, mendicity |