Early nineteenth century views on suicide or self-harm were but a continuation of concepts created in previous centuries. The Enlightenment debate on suicide reflected a clash between religious views and the new liberalism, and this, to a certain extent, repeated itself after the 1800s. A good illustration is the work of Madame de Staël who, after writing an apology of suicide in 1796, published a rejoinder in 1812. This much neglected tract is entitled Reflexions sur le Suicide: In my work on the Influence of Passions I defended the act of Suicide, but I repent now of having penned those thoughtless words. I was then a proud and vivacious young woman: but what is the use of living but having the hope of improving oneself? Another representative of the liberal view was Cesare Beccaria who in his Dei delitti e delle pene wrote: ‘Suicide is a crime that cannot be punished for when punishment is meted out it either falls upon the innocent or upon a corpse. In the latter case it will have no effect upon the living, in the former it is tyrannical and unfair as political rights dictate that punishment must be personal.’

After the 1820s, the moral debate became ‘medicalized’, i.e. it was shaped by changes in the notion of mental disease and in psychological theory. As Lanteri-Laura and del Pistoia have observed: ‘at the end of the eighteenth century [suicide] ceased to be condemned on the basis of religiously inspired tradition: the secularisation of the law no longer made it permissible to punish it as a revolt against God.