They were less depressed in the Middle Ages

John Bossy

• Marx on Suicide edited by Eric Plaut and Kevin Anderson, translated by Gabrielle Edgcomb
  Northwestern, 152 pp, £11.20, May 1999, ISBN 0 8101 1632 4
• Suicide in the Middle Ages, Vol I: The Violent Against Themselves by Alexander Murray
  Oxford, 510 pp, £30.00, January 1999, ISBN 0 19 820539 2
• A History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture by Georges Minois, translated by Lydia Cochrane
  Johns Hopkins, 420 pp, £30.00, December 1998, ISBN 0 8015 5919 7

In 1846 Karl Marx published a version of a chapter about suicide which had recently appeared in a book by one Jacques Peuchet entitled Mémoires tirées des archives de la police. Peuchet had been an encyclopedist and statistician of some distinction, and is said to have invented the term ‘bureaucracy’. He had survived the Revolution, and under the restored Bourbons had become archivist of the police records of Paris and hence a benefactor of Richard Cobb and readers of his Death in Paris (1978). The records of suicide caught Peuchet’s eye, and he had a line on it. The line was to defend suicides against the customary condemnation by claiming, like Thomas Hood in ‘The Bridge of Sighs’, that their despair was the effect of a general lack of Christian charity in the field of social relationships. He illustrated this by invoking the oppressive use of parental or paternal authority, particularly against girls, which had perhaps been encouraged by the Code Napoléon. They were victims, not of Society with a capital S but of a shortage of society, or sociability.