[Georges Minois, History of Suicide.

Voluntary Death in Western Culture,

translated by Lydia G. Cochrane, Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1999; i-x, 387 pp.]

The history of suicide has come of age. After a century of sociological inquiry, historians over the last
decade have now embraced this all-too-human act and have produced remarkable results. Ten years ago
Michael MacDonald and Terence Murphy set new standards for the social and cultural study of suicide by
first compiling the most thorough statistical account of self-willed death in England between 1500 and
1800 (a time when England gained the reputation as the land of rampant self-killing); but then secondly
they cast doubt upon all such efforts to measure and explain the "suicide rate." In the process, they
provided a wonderful essay on the changing religious and philosophical meaning of death and a
stimulating enquiry into the power of the popular press to secularize and standardize the experience of
self-murder. Others have picked up this high standard and have now produced ambitious books on
suicide in the Middle Ages, in early modern Sweden, and in early modern Germany, to name just three
prominent and recent works.

Georges Minois, well known for his many studies of Brittany and of such topics as old age and religion
under the old regime, has now written a cultural history of suicide (originally published in French in 1995).
He concentrates on the early modern period from the sixteenth century through the eighteenth. The
smooth translation by Lydia G. Cochrane is another of her excellent contributions, through which readers
in English have gained acquaintance with many of the best French and Italian historians. Although Minois
looks across the Channel frequently (adopting many of MacDonald and Murphy's conclusions), and
occasionally glances at German conditions when they have been described by other scholars, it is fair to
say that Minois spends most of his attention and all of his originality on cultural conditions in France. He
begins with a brief survey of attitudes toward suicide in antiquity and the Middle Ages, a survey in which
he reinforces the broad generalization that pagan antiquity was theoretically tolerant of suicide at least
among the social élites, while early and medieval Christianity condemned all forms of self killing. This
Christian consensus began to come apart in the late Renaissance, at least in France and England, where
Montaigne and Shakespeare symbolize for Minois the refreshing tendency to question why life should be
given an absolute value. The period 1580-1620 marks for Minois the first crisis of the European
conscience (adapting the phrase of Paul Hazard), a time when the old verities at last came under
scrutiny. This did not mean, however, that intellectuals and skeptics now took their lives more often than
before. Minois repeatedly suggests that the very act of questioning the meaning of life became for some a
means of answering the question. The mid-seventeenth century marked a counter-attack by the forces of
royal and religious authority, condemning suicide with renewed harshness and underlining the severe
penalties (secular and religious) attached to those convicted of this crime. But the tide of doubt could not
be stemmed so easily, and Minois analyzes carefully a large number of poets, dramatists, and thinkers
who continued to argue for the heroic nature of self-sacrifice when the conditions of life became
unendurable. In this way they formed a "second crisis of the European conscience," 1680-1720, when
suicide became intellectually fashionable and philosophically problematic again. By the mid-eighteenth
century most French and English opinion makers were agreed that harsh penalties against suicide were
superstitious and ineffective. Minois makes an effective point when he shows that these penalties had
always been most rigorously applied to suicides among the common people while aristocrats and
gentlemen had usually managed to mask their self-willed deaths with cover-ups and euphemisms. By the
eighteenth century commoners were conspiring with their clergy and with the local magistrates to achieve
the same advantages long enjoyed by their betters.

After the French Revolution, as sociologists and psychologists took over the study of suicide, political
thinkers and philosophers fell largely silent before the problem. And so, according to Minois, we are the
apparent heirs to a renewed taboo, in which suicide is hardly mentioned among us above a whisper and
in which the meaning of life and death can no longer be discussed in such stark terms. With the rise of the
moral question of euthanasia, however, Minois urges us to return to the bracing age of inquiry when
suicide and its attendant meanings could be openly discussed. His is a stimulating and learned view, well
informed by wide reading especially among the intellectuals and poets of the seventeenth century.

As a cultural study, this book is unquestionably valuable. Its chief weaknesses stem from a loose and
sometimes careless use of statistics. Minois knows well that it is useless to try to compute a suicide rate
for classical antiquity or indeed for any age before the nineteenth century, but he often indulges himself in
false certainties, as when he assures us that the ancient pagans did not commit suicide any more often
than other people since then. In his treatment of early modern Europe too, he sometimes forgets that we
cannot compute anything like a real suicide rate and must rely instead upon reported suicides, which is
quite another matter. It is true that he has good company in this failing, for until the study by MacDonald
and Murphy most historians have accepted a vulgar Durkheimianism that has ignored the overwhelming
obstacles that stand between us and a true suicide rate. But since 1990 we should know better or at least
be better ready to defend our views. And yet Minois's book is so heavily cultural in its focus, with excellent
attention to many little-studied theologians and jurists, that its occasional statistical overconfidence does
not much mar a most useful survey.

Michael MacDonald and Terence Murphy, Sleepless Souls. Suicide in Early Modern England, 1500-1800
(Oxford University Press, 1990).

Alexander Murray, Suicide in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Arne Jansson, From
Swords to Sorrow: Homicide and Suicide in Early Modern Stockholm (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell
International, 1998); Vera Lind, Selbstmord in der Frühen Neuzeit: Diskurs, Lebenswelt und kultureller
Wandel am Beispiel der Herogtümer Schleswig und Holstein (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
1999).

Cochrane has now translated at least 28 works by scholars such as Manlio Bellomo, Alain Boureau,
Roger Chartier, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Jacques Le Goff, Giovanni Levi, Robert Muchembled, Ottavia
Niccoli, and Paolo Rossi. Hers is a major service that usually goes too little noticed.

H. C. Erik Midelfort
University of Virginia