On the day of his engagement party in 1815, Gérard de Villefort, the young deputy crown prosecutor of Marseille, is called to examine a sailor arrested on an anonymous denunciation: Edmond Dantès. Villefort quickly realizes that the young man is innocent and knows nothing about politics. Then he reads the letter Dantès was carrying from the island of Elba, without knowing its contents, and sees the addressee: Monsieur Noirtier, rue Coq-Héron, Paris. Noirtier is Villefort’s father, a convinced Bonapartist. If the letter came to light, the career of the royalist son would be over. Villefort burns it in front of Dantès, promises him he will soon be released, and has him locked up without trial in the Château d’If, where he will spend fourteen years. He then hurries to Paris to warn Louis XVIII of Napoleon’s return and wins the king’s favor. Years later, the novel reveals another of his secrets: he had an affair with Madame Danglars, and when she gave birth in secret to a boy in a house at Auteuil, Villefort buried the newborn alive in the garden. The child survived, rescued by a Corsican who had sworn vengeance on Villefort, and grew up to be the criminal Benedetto.
// The theoryHow a conscience is switched off
Albert Bandura started from a question: how can people who have moral standards, and who would feel guilty about hurting someone, end up doing terrible things without feeling bad about it? His answer, developed in Social Foundations of Thought and Action (1986) and in a famous 1999 article, is that moral self-regulation can be selectively switched off. He identified eight mechanisms, grouped in four places. On the conduct: moral justification (the act serves a higher purpose), euphemistic labeling and advantageous comparison. On responsibility: displacement (someone else ordered it) and diffusion (everyone did it). On the consequences: minimizing, ignoring or distorting the harm. On the victim: dehumanization and attribution of blame. Bandura insisted that these mechanisms are not the privilege of monsters. They are used by ordinary people, and above all by people inside institutions that give them a respectable language for doing harm.
The law as an anaesthetic
Villefort’s position gives him the most powerful disengagement tool of all: the institution of justice itself. Moral justification: he serves the king and public order, and a Bonapartist plot is a threat to the state. Euphemistic language: Dantès is not buried alive, he is “held for the investigation”. Displacement of responsibility: the denunciation came from others, the decision is formally the system’s. Distortion of consequences: Villefort never visits the Château d’If, never asks what became of the prisoner, never has to see what he did. When Dantès’s old employer, Monsieur Morrel, pleads for him during the Hundred Days, Villefort, sensing the political wind, writes a petition so exaggerated that, after the second restoration, it makes Dantès look even more dangerous. Each step can be described as procedure. None of them feels, to him, like the destruction of a man.
// The subjectThe prosecutor and his secrets
Villefort is a man of severe principles in public. He is feared in the courts as an implacable prosecutor and admired for his austerity. In private he lives surrounded by crimes he has hidden: the letter he burned, the child he buried, and, without knowing it, the poisonings committed by his second wife in his own house. His reaction to each discovery repeats the same pattern: protect his name first. The novel brings everything to the surface in a single chapter. At the trial of Benedetto, the accused, asked who his father is, names the crown prosecutor himself. Villefort, who has just learned that his wife is a poisoner and has told her to kill herself to avoid the scaffold, rushes home to find her dead, together with their son Édouard. He loses his mind.
Gérard de Villefort
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// The crackA theory of mechanisms, not of origins
Moral disengagement explains very well how Villefort lives with what he does, and much less why he begins. His first decision comes from fear and ambition: a political career that depends on hiding his father’s loyalties. The mechanisms come after, to make the decision bearable. The theory also has trouble with the burial of the child, which seems driven by panic as much as by justification; Villefort believed the baby was dead, according to his own account, and acted to hide a scandal. Bandura’s model works best for repeated, organized harm, and less well for the single act of a man in a hurry.
There is also a question the novel raises and the theory can only point to: the institution that made it possible. Villefort could bury Dantès because the justice system of the Restoration allowed a prosecutor to imprison a man without trial on political grounds, and because nobody checked. Villefort knew Dantès was innocent and chose to destroy him. What Bandura adds is that the most dangerous disengagement is the one that comes with an official form: the one that lets a respectable man do harm while believing he is doing his duty.
Wrongful imprisonment and the people who allow it
Studies of wrongful convictions and political imprisonment keep finding prosecutors, judges and officials who knew, or could have known, that the accused was innocent, and who went ahead because their careers, their institutions or their political masters demanded it. Bandura’s mechanisms appear in their own explanations: the higher purpose of public order, the responsibility of the system, the reluctance to look at the consequences. Dumas’s novel is a revenge fantasy, but it rests on a real fear: that the law can be used to make a person disappear, and that the person who does it can go home and sleep.
Three key ideas
- Bandura’s moral disengagement (1986, 1999) describes eight mechanisms—justification, euphemism, displacement and diffusion of responsibility, distortion of consequences, dehumanization and blaming the victim—that let ordinary people do harm without self-censure.
- Gérard de Villefort knows Dantès is innocent, burns the letter addressed to his Bonapartist father and has him locked in the Château d’If without trial. Years later it is revealed that he buried alive the son he had with Madame Danglars. At Benedetto’s trial everything comes out, and he goes mad.
- The crack: the theory explains how he lives with his crimes, not why he starts, and it fits the burial less well. Even so, Villefort chose to destroy an innocent man with the law as his tool.
Sources · further reading
- Bandura, A. (1986). Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory. Prentice-Hall.
- Bandura, A. (1999). “Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities”. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 193-209.
- Bandura, A. (2016). Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm and Live with Themselves. Worth Publishers.
- Dumas, A. (1844-1846). Le Comte de Monte-Cristo.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Gérard de Villefort?
Gérard de Villefort (“Procurador del rey”) is a villain from The Count of Monte Cristo, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. He read the letter, understood that the young man knew nothing, and burned it in the fireplace in front of him.
Why does Gérard de Villefort (Crown prosecutor) become a villain?
Gérard de Villefort and moral disengagement: in The Count of Monte Cristo, the deputy crown prosecutor knows that Edmond Dantès is innocent and sends him to the Château d’If so that nobody reads the letter that compromised his father. Albert Bandura explained how ordinary people switch off their conscience to do harm. Villefort switches it off with the penal code in his hand.
Which criminological theory explains Gérard de Villefort?
Gérard de Villefort's case is analysed through Moral disengagement. Albert Bandura’s theory of moral disengagement (1986, 1999) describes the mechanisms by which anyone deactivates the self-censure that would stop them doing harm: justifying the act by a higher purpose, displacing responsibility, minimizing the consequences, blaming the victim. Gérard de Villefort, prosecutor in Marseille and later crown prosecutor in Paris, is a man of the law who uses them all. He imprisons an innocent man to protect his career, buries his own newborn son alive to protect his reputation, and for twenty-five years considers himself an exemplary magistrate.
