Baron Scarpia: The police chief who tortured a man to possess his lover

Act Two of Tosca (Giacomo Puccini, 1900, with a libretto by Illica and Giacosa after Victorien Sardou’s play). Rome, June 1800. Baron Scarpia, chief of police of a regime that persecutes republicans, is at supper in his rooms in the Palazzo Farnese while, elsewhere in the building, the celebrated singer Floria Tosca performs a cantata celebrating Napoleon’s supposed defeat. Scarpia sends her a note asking her to come up. Meanwhile her lover, the painter Mario Cavaradossi, is brought in under arrest, suspected of hiding the fugitive Angelotti. When Tosca arrives, Cavaradossi is taken into the adjoining room, and Scarpia explains to her that she can spare her lover unbearable pain: she need only say where Angelotti is. The screams from the next room break her, and she tells. Hours earlier, in the church, Scarpia had used a fan bearing the Attavanti arms to stir her jealousy and make her lead his agents, unknowingly, to the painter. Then he proposes a deal: if she gives herself to him, Cavaradossi will face a mock execution and they will be able to flee together. Tosca agrees. While Scarpia signs the safe-conduct, she takes a knife from the table and kills him. At dawn, at the Castel Sant’Angelo, she discovers that the execution was real: Scarpia had deceived her in that too. Tosca throws herself from the battlements.

// The theoryThe psychopath with an office

In The Mask of Sanity (1941), Hervey Cleckley described the psychopath as an apparently normal, intelligent and charming person, incapable of feeling guilt, empathy or true love. Robert Hare turned that description into an assessment tool, the PCL-R, with two broad factors: interpersonal and affective traits (superficial charm, grandiosity, pathological lying, manipulation, lack of remorse and empathy) and the antisocial lifestyle. With Paul Babiak, Hare also studied psychopaths who end up not in prison but in companies and institutions, where their traits can be mistaken for leadership.

// The subjectA devout man at the Te Deum

Puccini closes the first act with one of the most famous scenes in opera: Scarpia plans aloud how to possess Tosca and send Cavaradossi to the gallows, while behind him the church intones a Te Deum. The juxtaposition says it all: the man who represents order, religion and the authority of the state is the most depraved in the work. Scarpia does not hide his cruelty behind the uniform; he exercises it thanks to it. His power guarantees him impunity, and his charm, that of a cultured and well-mannered aristocrat, opens every door.

The rest of the second act is a catalogue of the traits Hare grouped in his first factor. When news arrives that the battle at Marengo has turned against the Austrians, Cavaradossi rejoices that Scarpia’s reign of terror is numbered, and Scarpia sends him to his death without a flicker. Alone with Tosca, he puts a price on the painter’s life. She offers money; he answers that he does not want her money, he wants her. When his agent Spoletta returns to announce that Angelotti has killed himself and that all is ready for the execution, Scarpia waits for Tosca to give in and only then gives the order: a mock execution, like the one they staged for a certain Count Palmieri. Spoletta understands what his chief means. Tosca does not. The lie is told in front of the victim, in a code shared only by the chief and his subordinate, which is why the deception of the third act is no last-minute twist: Scarpia had prepared it out loud. Charm, manipulation, lying, absence of remorse and a state apparatus to carry it all out.

// The crackThe problem is not only the man

Psychopathy explains Scarpia as an individual, but risks hiding the essential point: Cavaradossi’s torture is not a private act, but a practice of the state. Scarpia has agents, a torturer and an executioner at his service, and a regime that charges him with persecuting dissidents. A psychopath without that apparatus would have been a criminal; with it, he is an official.

Moreover, a diagnosis of psychopathy can become a comfortable way of thinking about evil: if the torturer is a monster with a different brain, the rest of us are safe. Research on state torture shows the opposite: most torturers are not psychopaths, but ordinary people trained and protected by an institution.