“France
shares with England and Spain the honor of being one of the last countries this
side of the iron curtain to keep capital punishment in its arsenal of
repression. The survival of such a primitive rite has been made possible among
us only by the thoughtlessness or ignorance of the public, which reacts only
with the ceremonial phrases that have been drilled into it. When the
imagination sleeps, words are emptied of their meaning: a deaf population
absent-mindedly registers the condemnation of a man. But if people are shown
the machine, made to touch the wood and steel and to hear the sound of a head falling,
then public imagination, suddenly awakened, will repudiate both the vocabulary
and the penalty.” — Albert Camus, “Reflections on the
Guillotine,” in Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays, translated from the
French by Justin O’Brien (1961)
Today
marks the 225th anniversary of the day that the proposed
machinery of death that Albert Camus
assailed with his typical moral astringency achieved irresistible momentum. The
Nobel laureate wrote this extended essay in 1957, when the urge to have the
French state punish opponents with the ultimate penalty remained strong (and would
receive additional impetus with the terror launched the following year in the
Algerian War of Independence). It would take nearly another quarter-century
after the essay’s publication, though, before France banned the guillotine and,
with it, capital punishment.
The guillotine
has come to symbolize not just the Reign of Terror, but also the French
Revolution as a whole. But it might be better seen as a product of the
Enlightenment—and specifically, the very influential 1764 meditation by the
Italian Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments.
In pre-revolutionary France, aristocrats enjoyed privileges even in the face of death. While the rest
of the population (the poor especially) were subject to cruel, unorganized, and
arbitrary death sentences (torture on the wheel, death at the stake, and,
especially, hanging), the nobility could have the less prolonged and/or
ignominious method of beheading.
In
contrast, Beccaria held that a sentence must be "proportionate to the
offense and determined by the law," and it should not be unnecessary or
cruel. The most prominent leaders of the French Revolution seized on his belief
in rational punishment meted out equally, but forgot another rather crucial
element in his thinking: rejection of the death penalty.
Enter
doctor and politician Joseph Ignace Guillotin. Now, he didn’t design or even construct the deadly instrument
named for him (those honors went to, respectively, another surgeon, Antoine
Louis, and piano maker Tobias Schmidt). But he was the one who, after the
revolution’s outbreak in the second half of 1789, proposed the notion of doing
away with unequal methods of death: Why not behead all criminals judged
by the state to deserve death? At the same time, why not make the
administration of death reliable for a change, through a machine with a blade that
could unerringly split the neck? "With this machine," he explained, not
without a little sly humor, "I'll take off your head in the blink of an
eye and you don't suffer."
Many
delegates in the National Assembly on that December 1789 day chuckled, unaware that within a very short time, either they or someone they knew would be subject
to this awful apparatus that would at various times be nicknamed La Veuve (The Widow), Le Glaive de la Liberte (The Sword of
Freedom), Le Rasoir National (The
National Razor), or Sainte Guillotine.
A
month later, on January 21, 1790, Dr. Guillotin was able to promulgate his proposal
more aggressively because of a national controversy. The brothers Agasse,
convicted of falsifying bills of exchange in London, had been sentenced to
hang. Protests erupted over a form of punishment that not only left the “criminal”
dead but stigmatized his surviving family members.
Guillotin
persuaded the rest of the assembly on the day of the Agasses’ deaths that their
offenses were personal, without application to the rest of the family. In the
process, delegates looked with renewed interest on his idea for a machine that would
spare survivors collateral cruelty.
By
1792, France’s revolutionary government voted to institute this new method of
capital punishment, and its first use came in April of that year.
Over
the next two years, as the death toll from the new instrument reached the tens
of thousands, Dr. Guillotin became squeamish about this machine named after
him. In the 19th century, his descendants petitioned the French
government unsuccessfully to have it renamed.
In
1981, France eliminated capital punishment at the same time that it banned its
longstanding particular form of it. Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right
party National Front, has called for its reinstatement following the massacre
of editors of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, but that prospect still
appears a long way off.
In
contrast, over the past 125 years, the United States has continued to labor
under the same delusion that spawned the guillotine: that swifter, more certain
forms of capital punishment will make application of the ultimate penalty
itself more humane. First, the electric chair was invented for that purpose,
then lethal injection.
U.S.
death penalty advocates—and the judges who continue to uphold the practices--have
still not figured out what Camus did, with his typically acute insight: “No
government is innocent enough or wise enough or just enough to lay down to so
absolute a power as death.”
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