Cesare Beccaria

Life and ideas

Cesare Beccaria was a young Milanese nobleman who, with the encouragement of a small circle of reformers around the brothers Verri, wrote a short book, On Crimes and Punishments (1764). It was published anonymously and was an immediate success across Europe. He argued that only laws made by the legislature may fix punishments; that trials must be public, quick and fair; that torture to obtain confessions is both cruel and unreliable; that punishments should be proportionate to the crime and aim to prevent crime, not to take revenge; and that the certainty of punishment deters better than its severity. He also opposed the death penalty as neither necessary nor useful. Rulers such as Catherine the Great and Leopold of Tuscany took up his ideas, and he is regarded as a founder of modern criminal law.