This post explores the trial of Auguste Mariottini, which took place at the Old Bailey in London in 1897. His case suggests that physical trauma, in this case a head injury, was accepted in the courtroom as a cause of madness and jealousy was not.
Mariottini was found insane because the witness accounts of the physical trauma that he was exposed to and his son’s testimony immediately draws the courtrooms attention to a ‘gas explosion in the café… where he received great injuries to his face and head’ and therefore the perceived cause of the defendant’s insanity is revealed.[i] Physical injuries, especially to the head were believed to be a cause of madness in the Victorian era and Mariottini was reported to have a changed character ‘after he was released from hospital, becoming violent, jealous and irrational’.[ii] This suggests that the injuries he sustained induced insanity. Mariottini’s son testified that his father was ‘suffering from insane delusions’ after the accident, which showed the jury that his actions adhered to the McNaughten Rules (the legal test for madness, established in 1843).[iii] The physical injuries that Mariottini sustained suggests that head injuries were also believed to cause insanity.
The trial also sheds light on the nineteenth-century understandings of jealousy. Mariottini committed his crime under while under the delusion that his wife was unfaithful due to ‘her familiarity with the customers and staff’ in their café.[iv] But his suspicion and jealousy appear to have been overlooked in the courtroom, and instead the focus was on the explosion. This could have been because, as historians have shown, ‘crimes of passion were associated with European crime’ and British courts were not keen to allow jealousy to be seen as a cause of insanity.[v] Only five Englishmen were declared insane due to jealousy between 1867 and 1892 and the rest were executed. Therefore, the trial is important when investigating the causes of male madness because it provides further evidence to suggests that jealousy was not always considered to be a legitimate cause of madness, and in this case was spoken about as an after-effect of his head injury. Mariottini’s son testified that after the accident his father’s ‘manner was greatly changed, and he suspected my mother of misconducting herself with the customers’[vi]. There was the idea that jealousy would most often occur alongside other types of insanity such as delusional insanity, which Mariottini was suffering with and ‘some alienists believed that jealousy was a symptom rather than a cause’.[vii]
[i] Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 8.0, 03 December 2021), September 1897, trial of AUGUSTE MARIOTTINI (49) (t18970914-561).
[ii] Mariottini’s trial.
[iii] Mariottini’s trial.
[iv] Mariottini’s trial.
[v] Martin J. Wiener (1999) ‘The sad story of George hall: Adultery, murder and the politics of mercy in mid‐Victorian England’, Social History, 24:2, 174-195, 184.
[vi] Mariottini’s trial.
[vii] Jade Shepherd, ‘I am not very well I feel nearly mad when I think of you’: Jealousy, Murder and Broadmoor in Late Victorian Britain, Social History of Medicine, volume 30, issue 2, 2017
Mad or Bad? Criminal Lunacy in Britain, 1800-1900 