To Hume the flaw in the “crime against self” argument seemed self-evident. “That suicide may often be consistent with interest and with our duty to ourselves, no one can question, who allows that age, sickness, or misfortune, may render life a burden, and make it worse even than annihilation.” In any case, he wondered, why was the rest of the world so wounded by suicide? “The life of a man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.”
Written at least twenty years before Hume’s death, “On Suicide” was not published until 1777, the year after he died. It was promptly suppressed and was later published from the apparently more tolerant grounds of Basel. But Hume’s “oyster” did not go down easily; he and his fellow eighteenth-century “apologists” for suicide, as their enemies referred to them, provoked a fresh torrent of rhetoric from antisuicide moralists. (One London minister, remarking that “On Suicide” had reportedly inspired a friend of Hume’s to shoot himself, suggested that Hume should have practiced what he preached.) From pulpits and printing presses across Europe they redoubled the volume of hellfire and brimstone against what they variously described as “a pusillanimous escape,” “that miserable insanity,” “the foul offspring of vile progenitors,” “The Certain Characteristic of a foolish, weak Mind,” “An Atrocious Offense Against God and Man,” “the offspring of hell,” “a crime of the deepest dye,” “the most sordid and unworthy selfishness,” and “the act of cowards, poltroons, and deserters.” As for the causes of this act, they compiled an impressive list of culprits: “gambling,” “government,” “vanity,” “modern philosophy,” “intemperate drinking,” “licentious novels,” “want of benevolence,” “want of ambition,” “Habits of Idleness,” “the examples of profligates,” “Indulgence of Criminal Love,” “a criminal love of the world,” “A Gloomy and Misguided Imagination,” “a weakness and timidity of mind,” “the difficulty of procuring a livelihood,” “the great number of authorized lotteries,” “a base, corrupt, loathsome sinful State of Mind,” “the fatal insanity of commercial speculation and the irrational desire of becoming wealthy on a sudden,” “the mistaken fashion in education which has latterly prevailed, [in which] the superficial shewy and frivolous accomplishments are almost universally preferred to solid science and modest virtue,” and above all, “want of submission to the Judge and Arbitrator of human affairs,” or as another preacher put it, “Godlessness.”
To stem what they believed to be a growing tide of self-destruction, they called for increased church attendance, fewer insanity verdicts in coroners’ courts, and stricter antisuicide penalties. “The carcass should have the Burial of an Ass, and the utmost Marks of Reproach cast upon it,” suggested one writer, “in order to deter others from giving way to, or falling into the like Snares and Wiles of the Devil.” Another proposed that these “sons of perdition” be hanged in chains head down and every minister required to preach against the crime once a year. Another suggested that the bodies of self-murderers be dissected publicly on stages in marketplaces and the skeletons handed over to surgeons to “contribute somewhat to the advancement of anatomical knowledge.” One minister favored a combination of all of the above. “It might not only be refused all rites of burial, but be exposed naked to public view, be dragged on an hurdle in the most ignominious posture, and undergo every disgraceful mark of shame, contempt and abhorrence,” he wrote. “The populace on these occasions might be harangued with energy on the foulness of the crime, and then the carcass delivered over (like that of the common murderer) for the purposes of public dissection; so that he, who had voluntarily withdrawn himself from being further useful to society in his life, might become so in his death.”
Buried in the bombast were important arguments—duty to the state, the virtue of suffering, responsibility to family—but their shrillness obscured their logic. “Many of those who have maintained the criminality of Suicide have indulged an intemperance of zeal, a bitterness of expression, which are ill suited both to the teacher and the investigator of moral science; and which tend to cast unfavourable suspicions, as well upon the Reasoning as upon the Reasoner,” observed Richard Hey, a graduate student at Cambridge, whose dissertation on suicide won a university prize in 1783. “It is time that we cease to injure our cause by an injudicious defence of it.” Hey noted that a softer touch was also more effective with would-be suicides. “There is a singular impropriety in using a severity of address to the persons whom we would retain from the commission of Suicide,” he wrote. “The state of mind in which this crime is usually committed, requires gentleness of treatment; as far as may be consistent with an open and full representation of the truth. Wherefore all unnecessary harshness is to be studiously avoided, as tending in a peculiar manner to defeat our principal purpose.” While Hey’s approach was sympathetic, his conclusion was familiar: “Suicide must stand universally condemned.”
While preachers reiterated familiar theological objections, the reasoning of antisuicide philosophers became increasingly secular. They focused their arguments on an idea first raised by Aquinas that suicide goes against human nature. In 1690, John Locke published his Second Treatise on Government, a manifesto based on the assumptions that life is an “inalienable right” and “life-preservation” a primary law of nature. To the pro-suicide Rationalists the option of suicide was a mark of man’s freedom. To Locke freedom was based on self-preservation, which ruled out suicide: “Freedom, then, is not . . . for everyone to do . . . as he pleases. . . . Freedom . . . is so . . . closely joined with a man’s preservation, that he cannot part with it. . . . Nobody can give more power than he has himself, and he that cannot take away his own life cannot give another power over it.” Immanuel Kant took the argument one step further. Kant, who believed that Hume’s skepticism signaled the end of philosophy, proposed an absolute moral code in which “duty” occupied a central position. Man’s first duty was self-preservation; suicide was therefore a vice. “The rule of morality does not admit of it under any condition because it degrades human nature below the level of animal nature and so destroys it.” Although his argument was largely secular, Kant’s “categorical imperative,” which declared that individual behavior ought to serve as an example for all mankind, prohibited suicide no less rigidly than did religion.
In Reflections on Suicide, published in 1813, Madame de Staël maintained that there could be no blanket judgment. “The causes of misery, and its intensity, vary equally with circumstances and individuals,” she observed. “We might as well attempt to count the waves of the sea, as to analyze the combinations of destiny and character.” Her main quarrel was with the idea that suffering was an excuse for killing oneself: “The greatest faculties of the soul are developed only by suffering.” But for the majority of suicides her attitude was one of sympathy: “We ought not to be offended with those who are so wretched as to be unable to support the burden of existence, nor should we applaud those who sink under its weight, since, to sustain it, would be a greater proof of their moral strength.” This was a factor that writers on both sides of the debate had largely overlooked: would-be suicides were unhappy and in pain. The discussion of suicide could not be limited to a moral debate of right or wrong, cowardice or bravery, sin or honor; the suffering that may lead to the act must be acknowledged. Indeed, at one point in her essay de Staël seemed to be overwhelmed by feeling. “Oh!” she wrote. “What despair is required for such an act! May pity, the most profound pity, be granted to him who is guilty of it!”
While opposing suicide on moral grounds, many writers argued against the antisuicide laws. The Italian jurist Cesare Beccaria pointed out that in economic terms the state was more wronged by the emigrant than by the suicide since the former took his property with him, whereas the latter left his behind. Confiscations inflicted injustice on a man’s family, and punishment of the corpse, he observed, was as futile as beating a statue. Only God, he concluded, could punish a suicide. Under attack by the eighteenth-century Rationalists, ant
isuicide laws gradually fell into disuse. In Geneva, indignities to the corpse were abolished in 1770 after the body of an “innocent” man was dragged through the streets. In southern France, armed citizens stormed a prison to seize the body of a suicide and prevent its being hauled through the town. The following year, in the same district, a crowd gathered to halt the execution of a sentence against a suicide’s corpse; police called to the scene made numerous arrests. In 1770, degradation of the corpse was also officially abolished in France; legal action was to be taken only against the suicide’s name. In 1790 the French National Assembly, on the motion of Dr. Joseph Guillotin, who would become famous for championing a swift mode of execution, repealed all sanctions against suicide. In the new penal code of 1791, it was not even mentioned. Suicide was legal.
In England, although there was no change in the law through the eighteenth century, coroners’ juries made increasing use of the insanity loophole to spare the suicide’s corpse and his innocent family. Between 1770 and 1778, coroners in the county of Kent investigated 580 possible suicides and returned only 15 verdicts of felo de se. Such leniency dismayed legal purists. “The excuse of not being in his senses ought not to be strained to that length, to which our coroner’s juries are apt to carry it,” grumbled the celebrated jurist William Blackstone, “viz. that the very act of suicide is evidence of insanity; as if every man, who acted contrary to reason, had no reason at all: for the same argument would prove every other criminal non-compos, as well as the self-murderer.” Lunacy, however, remained largely an upper-class prerogative; the verdict of felo de se was apt to be applied only to lower-class suicides. “A penniless poor dog, who has not left enough money to defray the funeral charges, may perhaps be excluded the churchyard,” observed The Connoisseur, a satirical magazine, “but self-murder by pistol genteelly mounted, or the Paris-hilted sword, qualifies the polite owner for a sudden death, and entitles him to the pompous burial and a monument setting forth his virtues in Westminster-Abbey.”
England’s stubborn refusal to relax its official position on suicide may have been partly the result of its reputation. During the eighteenth century it became generally accepted—by everyone but the English—that as a people they were particularly prone to self-destruction. “We do not find in history that the Romans ever killed themselves without a cause; but the English are apt to commit suicide most unaccountably; they destroy themselves even in the bosom of happiness,” wrote Montesquieu in The Spirit of Laws in 1748. “This action among the Romans was the effect of education, being connected with their principles and customs; among the English it is the consequence of a distemper.” Other reasons put forth for “the English malady” ranged from religious decay, rationalism, licentiousness, and lack of exercise to the people’s fondness for butcher’s meat, rich foods, sea coal, gambling, and tea. The most frequently cited culprit was the weather. An anonymous eighteenth-century French novel begins, “In the gloomy Month of November, when the people of England hang and drown themselves . . .” In 1805, in a letter to a friend, Thomas Jefferson reflected that his country’s clear skies would offer protection against any predilection for hanging that Americans might have inherited from their ancestors. In a satirical essay Boswell suggested that freezing might be a useful suicide prevention device. As November approached, “the English, instead of hanging or drowning themselves, will certainly prefer having themselves frozen up . . . and when it is fine weather, up they will spring like swallows to the enjoyment of happiness.”
Some Englishmen were unamused. “Self-murder! Name it not; our island’s shame; / That makes her the reproach of neighb’ring states,” lamented Robert Blair in his poem “The Grave.” “O Britain, infamous for suicide! / An island in thy manners!” cried Edward Young in “Night Thoughts.” “It is a melancholy consideration, that there is no country in Europe, or perhaps in the habitable world, where the horrid crime of self-murder is so common as it is in England,” thundered John Wesley, founder of Methodism, proposing that the tide of English suicide would turn if self-murderers were hanged upside down in chains. Others questioned whether England’s notoriety was deserved. An entry on suicide in the 1797 Encyclopaedia Britannica attributed it to rigorous newspaper reporting of suicide—a point Voltaire had made when he remarked that if Paris newspapers kept statistics as accurately as England’s, France’s reputation for suicide would rival its neighbor’s. In an 1804 travel book Thomas Holcroft wrote, “I doubt if as many suicides be committed through all Great Britain in a year as in Paris alone in a month.”
The intercontinental competition raged throughout the eighteenth century. Although the numbers were debatable, the nature of suicide had unquestionably altered. A century that began with the suicides of Richard and Bridget Smith would conclude with the deaths of two French soldiers, twenty and twenty-four, who shot themselves out of ennui on Christmas Day, 1773. “No urgent motive has prompted us to intercept our career of life except the disgust of existing here a moment under the idea, that we must at one time or other cease to be,” they explained in their note. “We leave our parts to be performed by those, who are silly enough to wish to act them a few hours longer.” Accounts of such blasé suicides filled newspapers and drawing room conversations: the Englishman who hanged himself “in order to avoid the trouble of pulling off and on his clothes”; the Frenchman who, when asked to dine by a friend, replied, “With the greatest pleasure—yet, now I think of it, I am particularly engaged to shoot myself.” Suicide had become decadent, trivial; one could not take it too seriously. “There are little domestic news,” complained Horace Walpole, whose correspondence was spiced with world-weary references to self-destruction, in a letter to Richard Bentley. “If you insist upon some, why, I believe I could persuade somebody or other to hang themselves; but that is scarce an article uncommon enough to send cross the sea.”
This nonchalance surrounding the subject of suicide would become even more flagrant in the Romantic Age. If eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers made the act philosophically defensible, the Romantics of the early nineteenth century made it positively seductive. The Romantic movement began as a reaction to the rationalism of the Age of Reason. If a man’s life was indeed of no more importance to the universe than that of an oyster, to the Romantics a man’s death was everything, a transcendent reunion with nature and with God. “How wonderful is death,” wrote Shelley. “A quiet of the heart,” Byron called it. Keats longed to “cease upon the midnight with no pain.” Taking the Renaissance combination of creativity and melancholy one step further, the Romantics coupled genius and premature death. The poetic sensibility was too good for this world; best to burn brightly and die young, like a shooting star. Some did. Keats died in 1821 at twenty-five, Shelley a year later at twenty-nine, and Byron two years after that, at thirty-six.
If dying young was glamorous, suicide was the ultimate thrill. The act showed an enviable, even heroic refusal to accept the banality of the world. In their preoccupation with suicide the Romantics had two early models. Thomas Chatterton, the precocious son of a schoolmaster, had begun publishing his brilliant poems at age sixteen. At nineteen, penniless, starving, and unappreciated, he swallowed arsenic in his lodging house garret. The details of Chatterton’s suicide in 1770 were hardly romantic. What was distilled from them, however—a combination of genius and early death—was irresistible to the Romantics. “The marvelous Boy, the sleepless Soul that perished in his pride,” as Wordsworth called him in his “Monody on the Death of Chatterton,” became the model of the doomed poet for several generations of Romantic poets and would-be poets.
Four years after the death of Chatterton, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther offered a second lethal symbol in the lovesick young hero who shoots himself. As a young man Goethe himself had longed for a glorious death. He had admired Emperor Otto’s suicide by stabbing and decided that he would kill himself like Otto or not kill himself at all. “By this conviction, I saved myself from the purpose, or indeed, more properly
speaking, from the whim, of suicide,” he later wrote. “Among a considerable collection of arms, I possessed a costly, well-ground dagger. This I laid down nightly by my side; and, before extinguishing the light, I tried whether I could succeed in sending the sharp point an inch or two deep into my heart. But as I truly never could succeed, I at last took to laughing at myself, threw away all these hypochondriacal crotchets, and determined to live.” Writing Werther, it has been suggested, kept Goethe from becoming Werther.
Like Goethe, most of the Romantic writers confined their intoxication with death to literature. Those who followed their own prescription hardly “cease[d] upon the midnight with no pain.” Poor, lonely, rejected, and nearing fifty, the poet Thomas Beddoes took curare in Basel. German playwright Heinrich von Kleist, who had proposed suicide pacts to friends for a decade, finally found an accomplice in an incurably ill young woman. After shooting her, Kleist killed himself. Gérard de Nerval, tormented by insanity, used a frayed apron string to hang himself from a lamppost in Paris at age forty-six. More often, like Goethe, the Romantics merely toyed with suicide. The young Chateaubriand brought a shotgun to a lonely forest on his father’s estate with the stated intention of killing himself, but his suicide was interrupted by the unexpected arrival of a gamekeeper. He died of old age at seventy-nine. The twenty-year-old de Musset, shown a beautiful view, cried, “Ah! It would be a beautiful place to kill oneself in!” Although de Musset asserts that twice he laid the point of a dagger against his heart, he never drew blood and eventually died at forty-six of a heart attack.
These celebrated writers stopped short of the act itself, but many young men who lacked the talent to express the Romantic ideal in prose expressed it with their death. Life imitated art: Werther, of course, was said to have inspired suicides all over Europe for decades, and numerous deaths were blamed on Byron’s Manfred, Chateaubriand’s René, and Lamartine’s Raphael. Alfred-Victor de Vigny’s play Chatterton was said to have doubled the annual rate of suicide in France between 1830 and 1840, when young men “practised it as one of the most elegant of sports,” according to one historian. Suicide clubs flourished. In his letters, Flaubert, writing nostalgically of the friends with whom he’d spent his youth, captured the essential spirit of the Romantic flirtation with suicide: “We swung between madness and suicide; some of them killed themselves . . . another strangled himself with his tie, several died in debauchery in order to escape boredom; it was beautiful!”
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