introduction of those directly responsible. Then there were motives as motivations, generally present in the mentalities, literature, and art of the day, which inspired people to action or reaction. In this case, the first type of motive, driving actual acts, was in the middle of a cluster of problems that face students of these crimes. More problematic than the second type, this was motive not as a reason to commit a specific crime, but as a means to an end that lay beyond the crime. Even more problematic is the fact that motives were often mixed. A murder for some other reason – anger, for example, or revenge – might be reinterpreted as longing for heaven when execution was imminent. Another claimed motive, eventually occurring, was having been incited by the devil.5 Such non-immanent ideas were common in that situation, often in a state of remorse. The confusion over motives is also illustrated by a case from Napoleonic France. A man murdered his wife in a fit of jealousy as she lay asleep. In the morning, he went to the prosecutor and said he deserved to die. Although he claimed to be mentally sound, he was found insane at his trial and confined to a hospital. There he eventually committed suicide, leaving a letter in which he said he would have preferred it if the executioner had given him his deserved death, but instead he had had to pay his debt to society by his own hand.6 Here, the criminal, if we listen to his words and actions, found himself guilty and sentenced himself to be executed, which was the result not of longing but justice. Thus, although he insisted that he should be executed, longing for death was not his reason for committing murder.It is therefore doubtful he should be included in a study of people who committed crimes in order to be executed. People have always had their reasons to seek execution. However, they can often be hard to discern, not least because it eventually was recognised that admitting them might deliver the perpetrator somewhere else than the scaffold. Such a motive may have been hidden or distorted in the course of coming down to us, whether at the hands of clerks of the court or writers of true crime stories, who may or may not find that mo5 See e g Byard and Maxwell Stewart 2018 p 1147, Krogh 2012 p 35, and Stuart 2023 p 7 sq. 6 Falret 1822 p 312 sqq. 21
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