Does the history of French criminology still need to be written? Some recent works assume that it no longer does, but this certainly was not the case a short while ago. Since World War II, criminology has taken a back seat to the issues surrounding criminal law. In fact, at times it has been unclear whether or not criminology had its own history at all. Michel Foucault's famous Discipline and Punish dedicated only a few lines to the subject. Although important works on the history of penitentiary systems followed, Foucault's study did not give rise to new research on criminological science. Most likely, this was because criminology was considered a by-product of the penitentiary system.

Without drawing on any particular theory, I seek to locate the origins of French criminology within the history of the state and the individual by focusing on the impact of the revolutionary period, which has been taken into account in histories of the penal system but has been curiously neglected in the history of criminological knowledge. For it is only by resituating the criminological question in this period that one can try to understand the genesis of the contradictory anthropologies of criminal law and the human sciences, involving the competing postulates of free will and determinism.