BECCARIA, Cesare. Dei delitti e delle pene. [Livorno: Marco Coltellini.] 1764.
4to. Contemporary vellum, flat spine gilt-ruled in compartments, gilt lettering piece, floral patterned paper pastedowns; pp. 104, [2 (errata)], typographic ornaments to title, typographic headpiece; light wear to extremities, ink scribbling to front board; leaves a little toned as usual, a few small stains, else a very good copy; “W. Ashburner / Dedit mihi / v.cl. Ferd. Bosi IC 1925” in ink to title, early 20th-century ownership ink stamp “Walter Ashburner Firenze” to N4v and on the verso of final leaf (partly erased); 20th-century bookplate of Luigi Firpo to front pastedown (see below).
First edition of this foundational text of the Italian and European Enlightenments, and milestone of criminology, complete with the exceedingly rare errata leaf and a distinguished provenance.
The Milanese nobleman Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794) completed Dei delitti e delle pene (On Crimes and Punishments) between March 1763 and early 1764. Rejecting over a millennium of juridical tradition – “the dregs of the most barbarous centuries” – he called for a radical reconstruction of justice founded on universal rights and the pursuit of “the greatest happiness shared by the greatest number.” Advocating a rational and humane reform of criminal law, he argued that punishment should be proportionate to the harm done to society, and that prevention was more important than retribution. His impassioned denunciation of torture and the death penalty, fusing reason with deep human compassion, rested on “ideas now become so commonplace that it is difficult to appreciate their revolutionary impact at the time” (PMM 209).
The manuscript was sent to Giuseppe Aubert at the Coltellini Press in Livorno in April 1764, and by July the first copies were already circulating, prematurely and against Beccaria’s wishes to review the final product. Discovering numerous typographical errors, Aubert issued a single errata leaf correcting “the most important errors that had escaped due to the defects in the manuscript”; however, as most copies had already entered the book trade, only a few, now exceedingly rare, contain it. Beccaria’s bibliographer Luigi Firpo recorded just three examples: two in Italian public collections (Biblioteca Ambrosiana and Biblioteca Civica di Torino) and a third, the present copy, in his own possession.
The treatise’s success was immediate: six editions appeared within two years. Its influence spread rapidly across Europe and beyond, notably shaping penal reform in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, the first modern state to do away with torture and capital punishment in 1786. It also inspired British radicals such as Jeremy Bentham and resonated in the debates of William Blackstone and Edmund Burke. Through the English edition of Voltaire’s Commentaire to Beccaria, the Italian’s ideas reached America, where Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Rush embraced them, fuelling the movement to reform or abolish the death penalty between 1787 and 1816.
Provenance:
1. Walter Ashburner (1864-1936), renowned Boston-born book collector and co-founder of the British Institute in Florence, with his small and partly erased stamps; gifted to him by Ferdinando Bosi, the lawyer of writer Osbert Sitwell, in 1925 (presentation inscription on the title page).
2. Luigi Firpo (1915-1989), Italian MP, one of the foremost European historians of the early modern period and editor of the National Edition of Beccaria’s works, with his bookplate to the front pastedown.
Firpo (ed.), Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Cesare Beccaria, vol. I: Dei delitti e delle pene (1984); Melzi I, p. 281.
#2122236