But what does such a justification mean to the society we live in, a society which in its institutions and manners alike has become almost entirely secular? When an atheist—or skeptic—or agnostic judge imposes the death penalty on an unbelieving criminal, he is pronouncing a definitive punishment that cannot be revised. He sits upon God’s throne,27 but without possessing God’s powers and, moreover, without believing in them. He condemns to death, in fact, because his ancestors believed in eternal punishment.
Yet the society which he claims to represent pronounces, in reality, a purely eliminative measure, destroys the human community united against death, and sets itself up as an absolute value because it pretends to absolute power. Of course society traditionally assigns a priest to the condemned man, and the priest may legitimately hope that fear of punishment will help effect the condemned man’s conversion.
Yet who will accept this casuistry as the justification of a punishment so often inflicted and so often received in an entirely different spirit? It is one thing to believe and ‘therefore know not fear,’ and another to find one’s faith through fear. Conversion by fire or the knife will always be suspect, and one can well understand why the Church renounced a triumph by terror over infidel hearts.
In any case, a secularized society has nothing to gain from a con-version concerning which it professes complete disinterest: it enacts a consecrated punishment, and at the same time deprives that punishment of its justification and its utility alike. Delirious in its own behalf, society plucks the wicked from its bosom as if it were virtue personified. In the same way, an hon-orable man might kill his son who had strayed from the path of duty, saying, «Really, I didn’t know what else I could do!» Society thus usurps the right of selection, as if it were nature, and adds a terrible suffering to the eliminative process, as if it were a redeeming god.
To assert, in any case, that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely wicked is the same as saying that society is absolutely good, which no sensible person will believe today.
It will not be believed—in fact, it is easier to believe the contrary. Our society has become as diseased and criminal as it is only because it has set itself up as its own final justification, and has had no concern but its own preservation and success in history. Certainly it is a secularized society, yet during the nineteenth century it began to fashion a kind of ersatz religion by proposing itself as an object of adoration. The doctrines of evolution, and the theories of selection that accompanied such doctrines, have proposed the future of society as its final end. The political Utopias grafted onto these doctrines have proposed, at the end of time, a Golden Age that justifies in advance all inter-mediary enterprises.
Society has grown accustomed to legaliz-ing whatever can minister to its future, and consequently to usurping the supreme punishment in an absolute fashion: it has regarded as a crime and a sacrilege everything that con-tradicts its own intentions and temporal dogmas. In other words, the executioner, formerly a priest, has become a civil servant. The results surround us. Half-way through the cen-tury, our society, which has forfeited the logical right to pro-nounce the death penalty, must now abolish it for reasons of realism.
Confronted with crime, how does our civilization in fact define itself? The answer is easy: for 30 years crimes of state have vastly exceeded crimes of individuals. I shall not even mention wars—general or local—although blood is a kind of alcohol that eventually intoxicates like the strongest wine. I am referring here to the number of individuals killed directly by the State, a number that has grown to astronomic propor-tions and infinitely exceeds that of «private» murders.
There are fewer and fewer men condemned by common law, and more and more men executed for political reasons. The proof of this fact is that each of us, no matter how honorable he is, can now envisage the possibility of someday being put to death, whereas such an eventuality at the beginning of the century would have appeared farcical at best. Alphonse Karr’s famous remark, «Let my lords the assassins begin,» no longer has any meaning: those who spill the most blood are also those who believe they have right, logic, and history on their side.
It is not so much against the individual killer that our so-ciety must protect itself then, as against the State. Perhaps this equation will be reversed in another thirty years. But for the present, a legitimate defense must be made against the State, before all else. Justice and the most realistic sense of our time require that the law protect the individual against a State given over to the follies of sectarianism and pride. «Let the State begin by abolishing the death penalty» must be our rallying cry today.
Bloody laws, it has been said, make bloody deeds. But it is also possible for a society to suffer that state of ignominy in which public behavior, no matter how disorderly, comes no where near being so bloody as the laws. Half of Europe knows this state. We have known it in France and we risk knowing it again. The executed of the Occupation produced the executed of the Liberation whose friends still dream of re-venge.
Elsewhere, governments charged with too many crimes are preparing to drown their guilt in still greater massacres. We kill for a nation or for a deified social class. We kill for a future society, likewise deified. He who believes in omni-science can conceive of omnipotence. Temporal idols that demand absolute faith tirelessly mete out absolute punish-ments. And religions without transcendance murder those they condemn en masse and without hope.
How can European society in the twentieth century survive if it does not defend the individual by every means within its power against the oppression of the State? To forbid put-ting a man to death is one means of publicly proclaiming that society and the State are not absolute values, one means of demonstrating that nothing authorizes them to legislate defini-tively, to bring to pass the irreparable.
Without the death penalty, Gabriel Péri and Brasillach would perhaps be among us still; we could then judge them, according to our lights, and proudly speak out our judgment, instead of which they now judge us, and it is we who must remain silent. Without the death penalty, the corpse of Rajk would not still be poisoning Hungary, a less guilty Germany would be received with better grace by the nations of Europe, the Russian Revolution would not still be writhing in its shame, and the blood of Algeria would weigh less heavily upon us here in France.
Without the death penalty, Europe itself would not be in-fected by the corpses accumulated in its exhausted earth for the last twenty years. Upon our continent all values have been overturned by fear and hatred among individuals as among nations. The war of ideas is waged by rope and knife. It is no longer the natural human society that exercises its rights of repression, but a ruling ideology that demands its human sacrifices. «The lesson the scaffold always provides,»
Francart wrote, «is that human life ceases to be sacred when it is con-sidered useful to suppress it.» Apparently it has been con-sidered increasingly useful, the lesson has found apt pupils, and the contagion is spreading everywhere. And with it, the disorders of nihilism. A spectacular counter-blow is required: it must be proclaimed, in institutions and as a matter of prin-ciple, that the human person is above and beyond the State.
Every measure which will diminish the pressure of social forces on the individual will also aid in the decongestion of a Europe suffering from an afflux of blood, will permit us to think more clearly, and to make our way toward recovery. The disease of Europe is to believe in nothing and to claim to know everything. But Europe does not know everything, far from it, and to judge by the rebellion and the hope in which we find ourselves today, Europe does believe in some-thing: Europe believes that the supreme misery of man, at its mysterious limit, borders on his supreme greatness.
For the majority of Europeans faith is lost, and with it the justifi-cations faith conferred upon the order of punishment. But the majority of Europeans are also sickened by that idolatry of the State which has claimed to replace their lost faith. From now on, with divided goals, certain and uncertain, determined never to submit and never to oppress, we must recognize both our hope and our ignorance, renounce all absolute law, all irre-parable institutions.
We know enough to be able to say that this or that great criminal deserves a sentence of perpetual forced labor. But we do not know enough to say that he can be de-prived of his own future, which is to say, of our common opportunity for reparation. In tomorrow’s united Europe, on whose behalf I write, the solemn abolition of the death penalty must be the first article of that European
