‘Nothing Spreads Like Fear’: From the Government of the Plague to the Crime of Contagion”

This chapter explores the historical role of fear, specifically, fear of contagion, as a driving force in shaping legal systems from the medieval period to twentieth-century Italy. Positioned within the broader framework of dark emotions in legal history, have served epistemological, semiotic, and normative functions in legal responses to public health crises. Starting from the Black Death, the issue traces how jurists and institutions responded to epidemics with exceptional legal instruments, often under pressure from mass panic and religious interpretations of disease as divine punishment. Early public health mechanisms, such as quarantine laws and sanitary magistracies, reflected an effort to regulate not only disease but fear itself, translating emotional urgency into legal order. The analysis continues through the modern age, focusing on the moralization of venereal diseases like syphilis, and the resulting juridical challenges. Here, fear became a semiotic force, framing illness as moral deviance and justifying interventions that blurred the line between private conduct and public threat. Legal debates around sexual transmission and family integrity marked a shift toward individual liability for contagion, culminating in the Zanardelli Code of 1889. The final part addresses the Fascist codification of the crime of contagion in 1930, which redefined the offense as a crime not against persons but against the health and purity of the national stirpe. In this biopolitical turn, fear was institutionalized as a tool for population control and ideological consolidation. The criminalization of contagion reflected not only a response to disease but a transformation of legal science’s role: from protecting bodies to preserving the imagined body politic.