Phrenology: a science of skulls and crimes, and its social impact in 19th century France

International audienceAlthough phrenology (a specific science of skull) is dismissed as a false theory since many years, it in fact constituted an important early science of the criminal, and the ideas that phrenologists generated in the fields today called "criminology", "penitentiary science" and "penology" influenced those fields long after the phrenological map of the brain had been forgotten. Dr Gall and his followers produced an attempt to make one of the most radical reorientations in ideas about crime and punishment ever proposed in the Western world. This conference will explain the main lines of its history in France to underlined its chief importance in the field criminological thought