The officials con-nected with the event and the government itself, contrary to every hope, regarded this excellent publicity in a very dim light, declaring that the press had only appealed to the most sadistic impulses of its readers. It was therefore decided that the public would no longer be permitted to witness executions, an arrangement which, shortly afterwards, made the work of the Occupation authorities considerably easier.
Logic, in this case, was not on the side of the lawmakers. Logically, in fact, they should have voted a medal to the editor of Paris-Soir and encouraged his staff to do still better next time. If punishment is to be exemplary, then the number of newspaper photographs must be multiplied, the instrument in question must be set up on a platform in the Place de la Concorde at two in the afternoon, the entire population of the city must be invited, and the ceremony must be televised for those unable to attend. Either do this, or stop talking about the value of an example. How can a furtive murder committed by night in a prison yard serve as an example?
At best it can periodically admonish the citizenry that they will die if they commit murder; a fate which can also be assured them if they do not. For punishment to be truly exemplary, it must be terrifying. Tuaut de la Bouverie, representative of the people in 1791 and a partisan of public execution, spoke more logically when he declared to the National Assembly: «There must be terrible spectacles in order to control the people.»
Today there is no spectacle at all—only a penalty known to everyone by hearsay and, at long intervals, the announce-ment of an execution couched in soothing formulas. How shall a future criminal, in the very act of committing his crime, keep in mind a threat which has been made increas-ingly abstract by every possible effort? And if it is really desirable that the incipient murderer preserve a vision of his ultimate fate that might counterbalance and ultimately reverse his criminal intent, then why do we not burn the reality of that fate into his sensibility by every means of language and image within our power?
Instead of vaguely evoking a debt that someone has paid to society this morning, would it not be more politic—if we are interested in setting an example—to profit by this ex-cellent opportunity to remind each taxpayer in detail just what sort of punishment he can expect? Instead of saying, «If you kill someone you will pay for it on the scaffold,» would it not be more politic—if we are interested in setting an example to say instead: «If you kill someone, you will be thrown into prison for months or even years, torn between an impossible despair and a constantly renewed fear, until one morning we will sneak into your cell, having taken off our shoes in order to surprise you in your sleep, which has at last overcome you after the night’s anguish. We will throw ourselves upon you, tie your wrists behind your back, and with a pair of scissors cut away your shirt collar and your hair, if it should be in the way. Because we are perfectionists we will lash your arms together with a strap so that your body will be arched to offer unhampered access to the back of your neck.
Then we will carry you, one man holding you up under each arm, your feet dragging behind you, down the long corridors, until, under the night sky, one of the execu-tioners will at last take hold of the back of your trousers and throw you down on a board, another will make sure your head is in the lunette, and a third one will drop, from a height of two meters twenty centimeters, a blade weighing sixty kilo-grams that will slice through your neck like a razor.» ¹
1 Notes for this essay are given on pages 54-55.
For the example to be even better, for the terror it breeds to become in each of us a force blind enough and powerful enough to balance, at the right moment, our irresistible desire to kill, we must go still further. Instead of bragging, with our characteristic pretentious ignorance, that we have invented a swift and humane2 means of killing those condemned to death, we should publish in millions of copies, read out in every school and college, the eyewitness accounts and medical reports that describe the state of the body after execution. We should particularly recommend the printing and circulation of a recent communication made to the Academy of Medicine by Doctors Piedelièvre and Fournier.
These courageous physicians, having examined, in the interests of science, the bodies of the condemned after execution, have considered it their duty to sum up their terrible observations thus: «If we may be permitted to present our opinion on this subject, such spectacles are horribly painful. The blood rushes from the vessels according to the rhythm of the severed carotids, then coagulates. The muscles contract and their fibrillation is stupefying. The intestine undulates and the heart produces a series of irregular, incomplete, and convulsive movements.
The mouth tightens, at certain moments, into a dreadful grimace. It is true that the eyes of a decapitated head are immobile, the pupils dilated; fortunately, they cannot see, and if they exhibit no signs of disturbance, none of the character-istic opalescence of a cadaver, they at least have no capacity for movement: their transparency is that of life, but their fixity is mortal. All this may last minutes, even hours, in a healthy subject: death is not immediate. . . . Thus each vital element survives decapitation to some extent. There remains, for the physician, the impression of a hideous experiment, a murderous vivisection followed by a premature burial.»³
I doubt that many readers can read this dreadful report without blanching. We can, in fact, count on its power as an example, its capacity to intimidate. What is to prevent us from adding to it the reports of witnesses that further authen-ticate the observations of medical men. If the severed head of Charlotte Corday is supposed to have blushed under the exe-cutioner’s hand, we shall hardly be surprised after examining the accounts of more recent observers.
Here is how one assist-ant executioner, hardly likely to cultivate the sentimental or romantic aspects of his trade, describes what he has been obliged to see: «There was one wild man, suffering from a real fit of delirium tremens, whom we had to throw under the knife. The head died right away. But the body literally sprang into the basket, where it lay struggling against the cords that bound it. Twenty minutes later, in the cemetery, it was still shuddering.» 4
The present chaplain of La Santé, the reverend father Devoyod, who does not appear to be opposed to the death penalty, tells, nevertheless, the following remarkable story in his book Les Délinquants5 (which renews the famous episode of a man named Languille whose severed head an-swered to its name6):»The morning of the execution, the condemned man was in a very bad humor, and refused to receive the succor of religion. Knowing the depths of his heart and his true regard for his wife, whose sentiments were genuinely Christian, we said to him, ‘For the love of this woman, commune with yourself a moment before you die.’
And the condemned man consented, communing at length before the crucifix, and afterwards scarcely seemed to notice our presence. When he was executed, we were not far from him; his head fell onto the trough in front of the guillotine, and the body was immediately put into the basket. But con-trary to custom, the basket was closed before the head could be put in. The assistant carrying the head had to wait a mo-ment until the basket was opened again.
And during that brief space of time, we were able to see the two eyes of the con-demned man fixed on us in a gaze of supplication, as if to ask our forgiveness. Instinctively we traced a sign of the cross in order to bless the head, and then the eyelids blinked, the look in the eyes became gentle again, and then the gaze, which had remained expressive, was gone. . . .» The reader will accept or reject the explanation proposed by the priest according to his faith. But at least those eyes that «remained expres-sive» need no interpretation.
I could cite many other eyewitness accounts as hallucina-tory as these. But as for myself, I hardly need or know how to go further. After all, I make no claim that the death pen-alty is exemplary: indeed, this torture affects me only as what it is—a crude surgery practiced in conditions that deprive it of any edifying character whatsoever. Society, on the other hand, and the State (which has seen other tortures) can easily bear such details; and since they favor preaching ex-amples, they might as well make them universally known so that a perpetually terrorized populace can become Franciscan to a man.
For who is it we think we are frightening by this
