Honour and Guilt. A Comparative Study on Regulations on Infanticide Between the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century

Infanticide has been judged by people in so many different ways: such differing concepts are reflected in Italian legislation. From medieval times up to the eighteenth century infanticide represented the betrayal of the ‘vocation of motherhood and of maternal instinct’. Extreme measures were adopted to sanction this offence, such as capital punishment in its most cruel and aggravated form. A new understanding of infanticide emerged with the Enlightenment principles: infanticide was considered not only to deserve a milder conviction compared to that of murder, but could also be liable to being recognized as a self-standing offence. After a cursory analysis of the legislation in force in the Italian territories during the Napoleonic, Austrian and Restoration regimes, the paper focuses on the ‘Italian’ codes. The 1889 Zanardelli code (art. 369) defined infanticide as a lesser form of murder. The apparent straightforwardness of the formulation did not prevent the proliferation of theories and interpretations, above all as regards to qualifying infanticide as a specific crime, or, instead, as a mitigated form of a crime, in view of an honour killing; the Corte di Cassazione gave the crime of infanticide a special qualification; the prevailing doctrine interpreted it as a hypothesis of murder characterised by mitigating and circumstantial evidence. The 1930 code modified the regulation on infanticide: the causa honoris explicitly became a constitutive element of the crime and was no longer merely a lessening circumstance of the species homicidii.