Suicide by Proxy became a major societal problem after 1650. Suicidal people committed capital
crimes with the explicit goal of earning their executions as a short-cut to their salvation.
Desiring to die repentantly at the hands of divinely-instituted government perpetrators hoped
to escape eternal damnation that befell direct suicides. Kathy Stuart shows how this crime
emerged as an unintended consequence of aggressive social disciplining campaigns by
confessional states. Paradoxically suicide by proxy exposed the limits of early modern state
power as governments struggled unsuccessfully to suppress the tactic. Some perpetrators
committed arson or blasphemy or confessed to long-past crimes usually infanticide or
bestiality. Most frequently however they murdered young children believing that their
innocent victims would also enter paradise. The crime had cross-confessional appeal as
illustrated in case studies of Lutheran Hamburg and Catholic Vienna.
