Suicide in Eighteenth-Century France

Eighteenth-century France witnessed not only a lively debate about the etiology and legitimacy of suicide, documented in published sources, but also hundreds of suicides, documented in police records. These reports provide information about many variables: sex, age, address, status, and motives. Some dossiers include explanatory messages from Parisians who killed themselves or exculpatory statements by others who tried and failed to do so. All include depositions of friends, neighbors, and relatives, who attempted to make sense of the lives and deaths of individuals with familiar physical, financial, romantic, and/or mental issues. After a last spate of prosecutions in the early 1770s, magistrates accepted the assumption that suicide demonstrated insanity, well before legislators decriminalized the offense. Before and during the French Revolution, contemporaries invested some cases with political significance, but most Parisians continued to discuss the subject in conventional ways.