The Steal (6 page)

The earliest mentions of a stealing disease occur shortly after Leigh Perrot’s trial in the now-discredited science of phrenology, which held that you could understand a person’s character by measuring his or her skull. In 1801, German phrenology’s founder, Franz Joseph Gall, and his colleague, Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, were kicked out of Austria for their theories, which were considered anticlerical. The two men began a multiyear lecture tour across Europe. They wound up in Paris, where they were mostly celebrated. Along the way, they studied the brains of murderers and robbers as well as those of ordinary people. Gall suggested that people steal because of the size of the “organ of the propensity to covet,” and ultimately concluded that they also did so out of a “propensity to acquire.” Unlike the propensity to murder, which was on top of the head, the one to steal was on the side.

The first parts of Gall and Spurzheim’s major work,
The Physiognomical System,
were published in France in 1810. The volumes include a study of not only plebian thieves but also numerous members of the gentry and royalty who stole. Gall preserves some of their subjects’ anonymity, like the man who became a Capuchin monk to escape the possible fatal consequences of his crimes (which continued after he joined the monastery) and “the Countess M***.” But he named other petty thieves of note, such as Henry IV of France, the wife of the famous German physician and chemist Hieronymus David Gaubius, and Victor Amadeus II, king of Sardinia, who from 1720 to 1730 “pilfered everywhere objects of little importance.” (It is not clear what Gall based these diagnoses on, although Victor Amadeus was known for his penchant for conquering other nation-states.) But Gall revived Defoe and Fielding’s view, ventured a century earlier, that society punishes poor thieves more harshly than rich ones. “Petty larcenies are overlooked by the world when they are committed by the rich and polished members of society.”

In an era that betrayed the French Revolution’s promise, this charge packed more force. If Gall seems almost gleeful outing members of royalty in the shadow of the French Revolution, the alienists—the next generation of scientists, working mostly in France in the 1820s—turned the study of the passions in a less overtly political direction. Though the alienists were interested in pyromania, nymphomania, and trichotillomania (hair-pulling), none of these manias presented as dramatic a legal and moral challenge as kleptomania.

Other roots of the idea of stealing as a disease appear in Philippe Pinel’s 1806
Treatise on Insanity
. Pinel, Napoleon’s personal physician, the founder of modern psychology, unchained inmates, originated a more systematic method of diagnosing mental illness, and taught these methods to other physicians at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. In 1816, André Matthey, a Swiss protégé of Pinel, coined the word “klopemania,” borrowing from the Greek words
kleptein
(stealing) and
mania
(insanity). He called this type of shoplifting
penchant au vol
and
vol sans necessité
—“desire for theft” and “theft without need,” and listed several people “of character” who had committed it. Matthey believed that klopemaniacs’ desire to steal was “permanent but is hardly accompanied by mental alienation. Reason is conserved and resists this secret impulse, but the penchant to steal subjugates the will.” These theories resulted in courtroom acquittals.

If early medical ideas about klopemania betray the romantic movement’s influence on the connection between insanity and crime, Théodore Géricault was one painter who turned to realism to depict mental illness. In 1820, Géricault visited England, where capital punishment for shoplifting was being abolished. Two years later, upon returning to Paris, at age thirty-three, he began to paint portraits of the insane at the request of a friend, a young doctor at the Salpêtrière Hospital. This series of ten portraits, of which only five survive, are melancholy, somber—less case studies than ordinary people.
The Kleptomaniac of Ghent
is neither a madman nor a prosperous burgher. His shabby attire fades beneath his cold, pinched gaze. His indifference to the painter—to anyone who would judge him—implies that he is in the grip of irrational forces of some kind, that the Industrial Revolution as well as an inner revolution have taken their toll. Shame is not a factor; no social reproof can stop him. Nothing in his face reveals remorse.

Another medical advance occurred in 1838, when Pinel’s protégés, Jean-Étienne-Dominique Esquirol and C.C.H. Marc, the physician of King Louis-Philippe of France, began work on the disease. Marc renamed it kleptomania and formulated ideas about how conscious those who did it were of their action. He was also the first to use the phrase “the instinctive, irresistible propensity to steal.” Esquirol distinguished between those afflicted with this propensity and the criminals who impersonated them. He also discriminated between mental deficiency and insanity, and speculated that a reasonable person could commit an unreasonable act—like kleptomania. His book,
Mental Maladies: A Treatise on Insanity
, linked insanity of all forms, including kleptomania, to melancholy (later known as depression) and showed how it could manifest itself in one particular type of unreasonable act, like shoplifting. He and Marc describe one shoplifter confessing she would have stolen even if the store had been a church. Esquirol also was among the first scientists to notice that kleptomania, which he believed to be the consequence of “moral insanity”—a respectable woman (or man) risking her social status by stealing—is accompanied by dread.

The political writer Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s 1840 book,
What Is Property?
, indirectly proposed a philosophical corollary to artistic and medical summations of why middle-class people were stealing. Despite his famous epigram “Property is theft,” Proudhon does not advocate the crime. Eight years before
The Communist Manifesto
was published, though, Proudhon does list the outrages “the inalienable right of property” perpetuates—“the reign of libidinous pleasure,” a “hypocritical bourgeois morality,” and rents for the ruling class—and argues that the unequal distribution of property is society’s leading problem.
What Is Property?
not only shocked and angered many Frenchmen but also angered the July Monarchy, which banned the book.

The construction of Parisian department stores with glittering displays did much to turn kleptomania into a female disease. These stores seemed to persuade middle-class and wealthy women to shoplift and reinforced the idea that the crime
was
shopping’s dark side. To lure female customers, stores installed mirrors and adorned enormous display windows with Chinese and Japanese objects and fashions or reproductions of stage sets from popular ballets, operas, or variety shows. Women who a decade earlier would never have left home spent hours in these temples of commerce. But if the dazzle of the modern department store helped to gender kleptomania, so did fashion. As the crinoline became chic, the “kick,” “a short overskirt covering an ordinary dress skirt and stitched so that the lining and the skirt made a bag around the body from the waist to the heels,” replaced the pocket as a receptacle. Kleptomaniacs tucked handkerchiefs, gloves, lace, candies, scarves, needles, combs, and other trinkets and accessories inside.

The French psychiatrist Ernest-Charles Lasègue, who identified other modern conditions like anorexia and
folie à deux
, was the first to scientifically link kleptomania—now understood to be a women’s disease—to the rise of the department store. Lasègue’s colleague M. Letulle introduced several phrases charting the cultural anxiety about middle-class and wealthy kleptomaniacs—one was “honest thief.” Another was “the madwoman in the store” whom modernity, by multiplying temptation, was “forcing” to shoplift.

In the crowded, late-nineteenth-century world of French novels with female kleptomaniacs as heroines, one stands out: Madame de Boves in Émile Zola’s 1883 novel
The Ladies’ Paradise
. Consumerism crushes beautiful, impoverished, forty-year-old Madame de Boves, whereas her counterpoint, Denise, resisting both material and carnal temptation, marries the store owner. Set in the eponymous Parisian department store,
The Ladies’ Paradise
depicts de Boves’s shoplifting as though her life depended on it. Gone is the Rousseauian/Proudhonian protest of shopping’s new ideology and the redistribution of the wealth. De Boves shoplifts to compensate for her husband’s affair as her daughter watches, horrified. When the detective searches de Boves in the back room of the store, he finds

The detective forces de Boves to sign a confession. “Women were capable of anything when they get carried away by their passion for clothes,” he muses. Yet, like Moll Flanders, de Boves is not unsympathetic. Nor are the real-life female kleptomaniacs whom French newspapers and case studies often described more as children or overexcitable women than hardened criminals. When a kleptomaniac told one forensic investigator that she preferred shoplifting to “the father of her children,” the crime was trivialized into the petulant protest of a little girl and glamorized as the longing of an amorous woman, at least in France.

In Victorian England, the more women kleptomania afflicted, the more physicians regarded the disease with disbelief. But this kleptomania seemed to reveal anxiety about the genetic feebleness of monarchs as much as women. Here is an excerpt from the winner of a contest, titled “Prize Essay on Kleptomania, with a View to Determine Whether Kleptomaniacs Should Be Held Disqualified for Employments of Trust and Authority under the Crown,” written by one Henry Allen.

Somehow, though the monstrous kleptomaniac minister of state was as noticeable as the hunchback of Notre Dame, he was never unmasked. The “prize essay” turned out to be a political treatise rather than a medical one, concluding, “Only in a country of hereditary legislators could it be needful to inquire whether a kleptomaniac is fit for public offices of trust and authority yet as statistics attest, our hereditary legislators are particularly subject to mental derangement.”

In 1880, even the eminent British doctor and advocate for mental health, John Charles Bucknill, criticized the ease with which judges—and the public at large—allowed kleptomaniacs to dupe them: “In the slang of the day, a burglar has become a kleptomaniac and a prison a kleptomaniac hospital.” As Bucknill knew, the number of middle-class British women pleading the “irresistible impulse” defense for shoplifting had spiked so sharply that laws punishing the crime had to be tightened.

In its condemnation of kleptomania as a euphemism for the shoplifting of the well-to-do, America followed England. More attention was paid to the crime and how to stop it than to the disease and how to cure it. Founded in 1850 as a private security company, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency established a division to catch shoplifters after the Civil War and most of the major department stores took advantage of it. Pinkerton detectives pursued shoplifters, while socialists, transcendentalists, and humorists lampooned kleptomaniacs as proof of democracy’s failure. In his 1888 essay “A New Crime,” Mark Twain writes, “In these days, too, if a person of good family and high social standing steals anything, they call it KLEPTOMANIA, and send him to the lunatic asylum.” Twain was not the only Gilded Age American to lampoon the disease. A lifelong advocate for free speech, suffragism, and a classless society, the anarchist Emma Goldman derided kleptomania. In a speech she gave in 1896 in Pittsburgh, she denounced it as yet another strategy the wealthy enacted to steal from the poor:

Ida B. Wells, civil rights activist and journalist, was critical of how differently the law punished African Americans and whites for petty theft. The majority of African Americans being lynched were not rapists, but those accused of small offenses such as shoplifting, she complained. And: “Negroes are sent to the workhouse, jail, or penitentiary for stealing five cents of bread whereas white men are rewarded for stealing thousands.” Wells also told how, in Philadelphia, a white kleptomaniac accused a young black man of raping her to cover up her shoplifting.