Reflections on the Guillotine, Albert Camus
Shortly before World War I, a murderer whose crime was particularly shocking (he had killed a family of farmers, chil-dren and all) was condemned to death in Algiers. He was an agricultural worker who had slaughtered in a bloody delirium, and had rendered his offense still more serious by robbing his victims. The case was widely publicized, and it was generally agreed that decapitation was altogether too mild a punish-ment for such a monster.
I have been told this was the opin-ion of my father, who was particularly outraged by the mur-der of the children. One of the few things I know about him is that this was the first time in his life he wanted to attend an execution. He got up while it was still dark, for the place where the guillotine was set up was at the other end of the city, and once there, found himself among a great crowd of spectators.
He never told what he saw that morning. My mother could only report that he rushed wildly into the house, refused to speak, threw himself on the bed, and suddenly began to vomit. He had just discovered the reality concealed beneath the great formulas that ordinarily serve to mask it. Instead of thinking of the murdered children, he could recall only the trembling body he had seen thrown on a board to have its head chopped off.
This ritual act must indeed be horrible if it can subvert the indignation of a simple, upright man; if the punishment which he regarded as deserved a hundred times over had no other effect on him than to turn his stomach.
When the su-preme act of justice merely nauseates the honest citizen it is supposed to protect, it seems difficult to maintain that this act is intended—as its proper functioning should intend it to confer a greater degree of peace and order upon the city. Justice of this kind is obviously no less shocking than the crime itself, and the new «official» murder, far from offering redress for the offense committed against society, adds instead a second defilement to the first.
This is so apparent that no one dares speak openly of the ritual act itself. The officials and the journalists whose responsibility it is to speak of it, as if conscious of the simultaneously provocative and shame-ful aspects of such justice, have devised a kind of ceremonial language for dealing with it, a language reduced to the most stereotyped formulas. Over breakfast we may read, on some back page of our newspaper, that the condemned man «paid his debt to society,» that he «expiated his crime,» or that «at five o’clock this morning justice was done.» Officials deal with this man as «the accused,» «the patient,» or merely refer to him as the C.A.M. (Condamné à mort).
Capital punishment, one might say, is written about only in whispers. In a highly organized society such as ours we acknowledge a disease is serious by the fact that we do not dare speak of it openly. In middle-class families, it was long the rule to say that the oldest daughter had a «weak chest,» or that Papa suffered from a «growth»: to have tuberculosis or cancer was regarded as something of a disgrace. This is even more certainly true in the case of capital punishment: everyone does his best to speak of it only in euphemisms.
The death penalty is to the body politic what cancer is to the individual body, with per-haps the single difference that no one has ever spoken of the necessity of cancer. Yet we do not usually hesitate to describe the death penalty as a regrettable necessity, justifying the fact that we are killing someone because it is «necessary,» and then not speaking of what we are doing because it is «re-grettable.»
My intention, on the contrary, is to speak of it crudely. Not out of a taste for scandal, and not, I think, because I am morbidly inclined. As a writer I have always abhorred a cer-tain eagerness to please, and as a man I believe that the repulsive aspects of our condition, if they are inevitable, must be confronted in silence. But since silence, or the casuistry of speech, is now contributing to the support of an abuse that must be reformed, or of a misery that can be relieved, there is no other solution than to speak out, to expose the obscenity hiding beneath our cloak of words.
France shares with Spain and England the splendid distinction of being among the last countries on this side of the iron curtain to retain the death penalty in its arsenal of repression. This primitive rite sur-vives in our country only because an ignorant and uncon-cerned public opinion has no other way to express itself than by using the same ceremonial phrases with which it has been indoctrinated: when the imagination is not functioning, words lack the resonance of their meanings and a deaf public scarcely registers a man’s condemnation to death. But expose the machinery, make people touch the wood and the iron, let them hear the thud of heads falling, and a suddenly aroused public imagination will repudiate both vocabulary and punish-ment alike.
When the Nazis staged public executions of hostages in Poland, they first gagged their prisoners with rags soaked in plaster so they could not cry out some final word of liberty or rebellion. It may seem an effrontery to compare the fate of these innocent victims with that of our condemned crimi-nals, but apart from the fact that it is not only criminals who are guillotined in France, the method is the same: we gag our guilty with a stuffing of words, though we cannot justly affirm the legitimacy of their punishment unless we have first considered its reality. Instead of saying, as we always have, that the death penalty is first of all a necessity, and afterwards that it is advisable not to talk about it, we should first speak of what the death penalty really is, and only then decide if, being what it is, it is necessary.
Speaking for myself, I believe the death penalty is not only useless but profoundly harmful, and I must record this con-viction here before proceeding to the subject itself. It would not be honest to allow it to appear as if I had arrived at this conclusion solely as a result of the weeks of inquiry and investigation I have just devoted to the question.
But it would be equally dishonest to attribute my conviction to sentimen-tality alone. I stand as far as possible from that position of spineless pity in which our humanitarians take such pride, in which values and responsibilities change places, all crimes be-come equal, and innocence ultimately forfeits all rights.
I do not believe, contrary to many of my illustrious contempo-raries, that man is by nature a social animal; the opposite, I think, is probably nearer the truth. I believe only that man cannot now live outside a society whose laws are necessaryto his physical survival, which is a very different thing. I be-lieve that responsibility must be established according to a reasonable and effective scale of values by society itself.
But the law finds its final justification in the benefit it provides, or does not provide, the society of a given place and time. For years I have not been able to regard the death penalty as anything but a punishment intolerable to the imagination: a public sin of sloth which my reason utterly condemns. I was nevertheless prepared to believe that my imagination in-fluenced my judgment. But during these weeks of research, I have found nothing which has modified my reasoning, nothing which has not, in all honesty, reinforced my original conviction.
On the contrary. I have found new arguments to add to those I already possessed; today I share Arthur Koestler’s conclusion without qualification: capital punishment is a dis-grace to our society which its partisans cannot reasonably justify.
It is well known that the major argument of those who support capital punishment is its value as an example. We do not chop off heads merely to punish their former owners, but to intimidate, by a terrifying example, those who might be tempted to imitate their actions. Society does not take revenge—society merely protects itself. We brandish the newly severed head so that the next prospective murderer may therein read his future and renounce his intentions. All of which would indeed be an impressive argument if one were not obliged to remark:
(1) That society itself does not believe in the value of this much advertised example.
(2) That it has not been ascertained whether capital punishment ever made a single determined murderer renounce his intentions, while it is certain that its effect has been one of fascination upon thou-sands of criminals.
(3) That the death penalty constitutes, from other points of view, a loathsome example of which the consequences are unforeseeable.
First of all, then, society does not believe its own words. If it did, we would be shown the heads. Executions would be given the same promotional campaign ordinarily reserved for government loans or a new brand of apéritif. Yet it is well known on the contrary, that in France executions no longer take place in public—they are perpetrated in prison yards before an audience limited to specialists. It is less well known why this should be so, and since when it has been so. The last public execution took place in 1939—the guillotining of Weidmann, a murderer several times over whose exploits had brought him much notoriety.
On the morning of his execu-tion, a huge
