À l’aube du XX^e siècle, le professeur Alexandre Lacassagne, médecin légiste et aliéniste lyonnais, célèbre fondateur des sciences criminologiques, a recueilli les récits autobiographiques de dix criminels jugés et reconnus coupables, incarcérés en l’attente de leur sentence… Près de cent ans plus tard, ces textes ont été publiés et commentés par l’historien Philippe Artières (Fayard, 2000). Nous proposons ici une lecture rétrospective de ces écrits à la lumière de la psychopathologie contemporaine. Après une contextualisation et une brève analyse critique du procédé, nous avons tenté de révéler, entre les éléments de style et les formulations plus explicites, les intentions ou les motivations des auteurs au moment de leurs crimes, leur rapport au sentiment de culpabilité ainsi que quelques hypothèses sur leur état psychique ou leurs traits de personnalité. Finalement nos observations confirment la complexité de chaque situation avec une graduation possible entre les facteurs environnementaux et les prédispositions ou dynamiques plus personnelles. Ceci va donc bien dans le sens de l’hypothèse défendue par Lacassagne d’une causalité que l’on dirait aujourd’hui biopsychosociale du crime.

Professor Alexander Laccassagne is a French forensic pathologist, founder of criminology in the early twentieth century. He collected the autobiographical accounts of ten criminals, tried and convicted, imprisoned pending sentencing in Lyon. Almost a hundred years later, these texts were published and analyzed by the historian Philippe Artières (Fayard, 2000). We offer a retrospective reading of these writings under a view of contemporary psychopathology. This article begins with a historical contextualization and a brief critical analysis of lacassagne's working method and ambitions. In particular, we noted the limitations of the exercise and the various biases regarding the recruitment of authors and the inevitable desirability of agreeing or pleasing in order to obtain favors. Then we tried to reveal the intentions or motivations of the authors, at the time of their crimes, from the elements of style or more explicit words. We also note their relationship to feelings of guilt as well as some hypotheses about their psychic state or personality traits. If no major disorder is identified, it appears for the majority an alteration of the development of the personality. From an environmental point of view, the question of failed model and weakly structuring father appears in the foreground. On a more personal level, impulsivity, functioning in action, lack of empathy, are very majority evoking psychopathic traits. In addition, the narcissistic dimension predominates with often the rise of an injury taking the form of a feeling of humiliation with the need for revenge or leak forward. Finally, the causality of the crime is very complex with a possible graduation according to the case between personal or innate factors and environmental factors [history of the subject and social environment]. So this can confirm the biopsychosocial hypothesis of Lacassagne.