The Archiv of Criminal Anthropology : a journal fit for a nascent scientific field

International audienceSince the Second World War, criminology in France has been confined to the status of an off-shoot of Criminal Law and, indeed, it long seemed to lack a history of its own given its precarious standing in the present and future1. It is striking in this respect that Michael Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, first published in French in 1975, devotes no more than a few lines explicitly to the subject of criminology. Foucault’s work would inspire a whole generation of researchers interested in the history of the prison, but its impact on criminology in his home country was negligible. This may have something to do with the fact that Foucault represented criminology as a minor science, a mere auxiliary to the study of law. In his work, criminology’s practitioners can be observed spouting meaningless, ideologically-infused “chatter” while hanging onto the coat-tails of the more prestigious juristes. He does not to stop there, however. In his account, criminology is portrayed above all as a symptom of the new “economy of power”, aimed not just at applying the criminal law, but also “rehabilitating” the offender. With little need for exaggeration, Foucault casts French criminologists in the less than flattering role of unreflexive agents of state ideology, content to give their “scientific” seal of approval to the penal policies of the day2: hardly a worthy subject for historical study. The Archives d’Anthropologie Criminelle was the first French-language academic journal devoted to “criminology”, understood in its broadest sense as “the science of crime and the criminal”. This journal is an essential source for understanding the state of knowledge on the study of crime and of criminals during its significant period of publication (1886-1914), and each of these issues is freely accessible in full on Criminocorpus with annotation on the context of its production