In 1815 Danglars is the accountant of the Pharaon, the merchant ship on which Edmond Dantès is about to be made captain. He envies the promotion, and at a tavern he devises the plan that will destroy Dantès: an anonymous letter, written with his left hand so the writing cannot be recognized, denouncing the young sailor as a Bonapartist agent. Fernand posts it. Twenty-five years later Danglars is a baron and one of the most powerful bankers in Paris, married to Hermine, the widow of an aristocrat, who speculates on her own account with information from her lover at the ministry. When the Count of Monte Cristo arrives in the city, he opens an unlimited credit with Danglars and begins to ruin him through his own greed. A false message sent through the government telegraph, announcing unrest in Spain, makes Danglars sell his Spanish bonds at a loss; other bets fail. On the verge of bankruptcy, he flees to Rome with five million francs that he was holding for the hospitals of Paris. On the road he is captured by the bandit Luigi Vampa, who, on Monte Cristo’s orders, keeps him fed at a hundred thousand francs a meal until his fortune is almost gone. He is released alive, with his hair turned white.
// The theoryWhen money is the only institution
In Crime and the American Dream (1994), Steven Messner and Richard Rosenfeld took Merton’s idea further. Merton had blamed the gap between goals and means; they blamed the institutional balance of power. In any society, the economy coexists with institutions that pursue other values—the family values care, education values learning, politics values the common good—and that limit the reach of the market. When the economy dominates, those institutions are devalued (what does not pay is not worth much), they accommodate to the economy (family and school organize themselves around work and money), and economic norms penetrate them (people are judged by what they earn). The result is a culture in which the end, wealth, justifies almost any means, and in which the institutions that should restrain people have lost their power to do so. The theory was built to explain the high crime rates of the United States, but its logic applies wherever money becomes the only measure of worth.
Steven F. Messner and Richard Rosenfeld, Crime and the American Dream (1994)
The anomic pressures inherent in the American Dream are nourished and sustained by an institutional balance of power dominated by the economy.
“Enrichissez-vous”
The France of the July Monarchy, the period in which most of the novel takes place, is often summed up by a phrase attributed to the minister François Guizot: enrichissez-vous, “get rich”. Dumas’s Paris is a society in which bankers have replaced the old nobility, titles can be bought and marriages are financial alliances. Danglars is its perfect product. His family is a business: his marriage to Hermine is an arrangement, his wife speculates with her lover’s information, and he tries to marry his daughter Eugénie to whichever suitor brings the most money. Politics is a source of inside information and contracts. His honor is his credit rating. When everything is measured in money, the only crime Danglars recognizes is losing it. His fraud with the hospitals’ money does not trouble him; it is simply the last resource available.
// The subjectEnvy with a ledger
Danglars is the coldest of Dantès’s enemies. Fernand acts out of love and jealousy, Caderousse out of drunkenness and cowardice, Villefort out of fear for his career. Danglars acts out of envy, and he plans. The letter is his idea, the left hand is his precaution, and the calculation that Fernand, the jealous lover, should be the one to post it is his insurance. That pattern runs through his whole life: he lets others take the risks and keeps the profits. Monte Cristo’s revenge on him is designed accordingly. It does not take his life; it takes his money, piece by piece, through the same mechanisms he lived by—credit, speculation, the price of things—until the banker who measured everything in francs has to pay a fortune for bread. When Monte Cristo finally reveals himself, Danglars is the only enemy he spares.
Danglars
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// The crackA theory of societies, applied to a man
Institutional anomie is a macro-level theory: it explains why some societies have higher crime rates than others, not why a particular man writes an anonymous letter. Danglars’s first crime predates his wealth and has nothing to do with the market; it is envy of a younger man’s promotion, which other theories, such as relative deprivation, explain better. The theory explains the world in which he thrived and the absence of brakes on his later frauds, not the origin of his character. It also runs the risk of making the system responsible for everything. Most bankers in July Monarchy Paris did not steal from hospitals.
There is also an irony in the novel that the theory helps to see. Monte Cristo defeats Danglars by turning the economic system against him: he uses the telegraph, the stock market and credit to ruin him. The avenger does not appeal to any institution other than money, because in Danglars’s world there is none strong enough. Danglars chose to destroy an innocent man out of envy and to steal money meant for the sick. What Messner and Rosenfeld add is that his success was not an accident: it was what a society that worships wealth produces at the top.
Financial crime and the culture that feeds it
Every great financial scandal reopens the question that institutional anomie poses: what happens to restraint in a culture where profit is the measure of everything. Investigations into fraud in banks and markets keep finding the same ingredients that Dumas put into Danglars: inside information, speculation with other people’s money, the use of family and political connections as business tools, and a confidence that respectability will cover any shortfall. The theory’s practical lesson is about balance: strong families, schools, regulators and political institutions that value something other than money are not luxuries, but the brakes that a market society needs.
Three key ideas
- Institutional anomie theory (Messner and Rosenfeld, 1994) holds that crime grows when the economy dominates family, education and politics, devaluing them until money becomes the only measure of worth.
- Danglars devises the anonymous letter against Dantès out of envy, becomes a Parisian banker and baron, is ruined by Monte Cristo through a false telegraph and failed speculation, and flees with five million francs belonging to the hospitals. Vampa’s bandits charge him a hundred thousand francs a meal.
- The crack: it is a theory of societies, and Danglars’s first crime is envy, not the market. Even so, he chose to destroy an innocent man and to rob the sick.
Sources · further reading
- Messner, S. F. and Rosenfeld, R. (1994). Crime and the American Dream. Wadsworth.
- Messner, S. F. and Rosenfeld, R. (1997). “Political Restraint of the Market and Levels of Criminal Homicide: A Cross-National Application of Institutional-Anomie Theory”. Social Forces, 75(4), 1393-1416.
- Sutherland, E. H. (1949). White Collar Crime. Dryden Press.
- Dumas, A. (1844-1846). Le Comte de Monte-Cristo.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Danglars?
Danglars (“Barón Danglars”) is a villain from The Count of Monte Cristo, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. At the end of the novel he was paying a hundred thousand francs for a chicken in a Roman bandits’ cave.
Why does Danglars become a villain?
Danglars and institutional anomie: in The Count of Monte Cristo, the envious accountant who devised the letter against Dantès becomes one of the great bankers of Paris, speculates on inside information and flees with the money of the city’s hospitals. Messner and Rosenfeld explained what happens when the economy rules over every other institution.
Which criminological theory explains Danglars?
Danglars's case is analysed through Institutional anomie. Steven Messner and Richard Rosenfeld’s institutional anomie theory (1994) holds that crime grows when the economy dominates the other institutions—family, education, politics—until money becomes the only measure of a person’s worth. Danglars, accountant on a merchant ship in 1815 and banking baron in the Paris of the 1830s, embodies that society. His first crime is envy turned into an anonymous letter; the later ones, speculation, fraud and theft, are those of a man for whom no value exists beyond the balance.
