It will be objected that we are discussing only a few exceptional creatures who make a living out of such degradation. There might be fewer protests if it were known that there are hundreds of men who offer their services as executioner without pay. Men of my generation, who have survived the history of our times, will not be surprised to learn this.
They know that behind the most familiar, the most peaceful face lies the instinct to torture and to kill. The punishment which claims to intimidate an unknown murderer unquestionably provides a number of known monsters with their vocation as killers. Since we are not above justifying our cruellest laws by considerations of probability, let us not hesi-tate to admit that out of these hundreds of men whose services are refused, one, at least, has satisfied in some other way the bloody impulses which the guillotine awakened within him.
If we are to maintain the death penalty, let us at least be spared the hypocrisy of justification by example. Let us call by its right name this penalty about which all publicity is suppressed, this intimidation which does not operate upon honest men to the degree that they are honest, which fascinates those who have ceased to be honest, and which degrades and disorders those who lend their hands to it. It is a punish-ment, certainly, a dreadful physical and moral torture, but one offering no certain example save that of demoralization.
It forbids, but it prevents nothing—when it does not in fact arouse the will to murder itself. It is as if it were not, ex-cept for the man who suffers it—in his soul for months or years, and in his body during the desperate and violent mo-ment when he is cut in two without being altogether deprived of life. Let us call it by a name which, lacking all patents of nobility, at least provides that of truth—let us recognize it for what it ultimately is: a revenge.
Punishment, penalizing rather than preventing, is a form of revenge: society’s semiarithmetical answer to violation of its primordial law. This answer is as old as man himself, and usually goes by the name of retaliation. He who hurts me must be hurt; who blinds me in one eye must himself lose an eye; who takes a life must die. It is a feeling, and a particularly violent one, which is involved here, not a prin-ciple. Retaliation belongs to the order of nature, of instinct, not to the order of law. The law by definition cannot abide by the same rules as nature.
If murder is part of man’s nature, the law is not made to imitate or reproduce such nature. We have all known the impulse to retaliate, often to our shame, and we know its power: the power of the primeval forests. In this regard, we live—as Frenchmen who grow justifiably indignant at seeing the oil king of Saudi Arabia preach inter-national democracy while entrusting his butcher with the task of cutting off a thief’s hand—in a kind of middle ages our-selves, without even the consolations of faith. Yet if we still define our justice according to the calculations of a crude arith-metic,14 can we at least affirm that this arithmetic is correct, and that even such elementary justice, limited as it is to a form of legal revenge, is safeguarded by the death penalty?
Theanswer must again be: No. We scarcely need to point out how inapplicable the law of retaliation has become in our society: it is as excessive to punish the pyromaniac by setting his house on fire as it is insufficient to punish the thief by deducting from his bank account a sum equivalent to the amount he has stolen. Let us admit instead that it is just and even necessary to compensate the murder of the victim by the death of the murderer. But capital punishment is not merely death.
It is as different, in its essence, from the suppression of life as a concentration camp from a prison. It is undeniably a murder which arithmeti-cally cancels out the murder already committed; but it also adds a regularization of death, a public premeditation of which its future victims are informed, an organization which in itself is a source of moral suffering more terrible than death. There is thus no real compensation, no equivalence.
Many systems of law regard a premeditated crime as more serious than a crime of pure violence. But what is capital punishment if not the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal act, no matter how calculated, can be compared? If there were to be a real equivalence, the death penalty would have to be pronounced upon a criminal who had fore-warned his victim of the very moment he would put him to a horrible death, and who, from that time on, had kept him confined at his own discretion for a period of months. It is not in private life that one meets such monsters.
Here again, when our official jurists speak of death without suffering, they do not know what they are talking about, and furthermore they betray a remarkable lack of imagination. The devastating, degrading fear imposed on the condemned man for months or even years15 is a punishment more terrible than death itself, and one that has not been imposed on his victim. A murdered man is generally rushed to his death, even at the height of his terror of the mortal violence being done to him, without knowing what is happening: the period of his horror is only that of his life itself, and his hope of escaping what-ever madness has pounced upon him probably never de-serts him.
For the man condemned to death, on the other hand, the horror of his situation is served up to him at every moment for months on end. Torture by hope alternates only with the pangs of animal despair. His lawyer and his con-fessor, out of simple humanity, and his guards, to keep him docile, unanimously assure him that he will be reprieved. He believes them with all his heart, yet he cannot believe them at all. He hopes by day, despairs by night.16 And as the weeks pass his hope and despair increase proportionately, until they become equally insupportable.
According to all accounts, the color of his skin changes: fear acts like an acid. «It’s nothing to know you’re going to die,» one such man in the Fresnes prison said, «but not to know if you’re going to live is the real torture.» At the moment of his execution Cartouche remarked, «Bah! a nasty quarter of an hour and it’s all over.» But it takes months, not minutes.
The condemned man knows long in advance that he is going to be killed and that all that can save him is a reprieve which operates, so far as he is concerned, like the will of heaven itself. In any case he cannot intervene, plead for himself: he is no longer a man, but a thing waiting to be manipulated by the execu-tioners. He is kept in a state of absolute necessity, the condi-tion of inert matter, yet within him is the consciousness that is his principal enemy.
When the officials whose trade is to kill such a man refer to him as «luggage,» they know what they are saying: to be unable to react to the hand that moves you, holds you, or lets you drop—is that not the condition of some package, some thing, or better still, some trapped animal? Yet an animal in a trap can starve itself to death; the man con-
demned to death cannot. He is provided with a special diet (at Fresnes, diet No. 4 with extras of milk, wine, sugar, preserves, and butter); he is encouraged to eat well—if neces-sary he is forced to eat.
The animal must be in good condition for the kill. The thing—the animal—has a right only to those corrupted privileges known as caprices. «You’d be surprised how sensitive they are!» declared one sergeant at Fresnes with-out a trace of irony. Sensitive? Unquestionably—how else recover the freedom and dignity of will that man cannot live without?
Sensitive or not, from the moment the death sen-tence is pronounced, the condemned man becomes part of an imperturbable mechanism. He spends several weeks within the cogs and gears of a machine that controls his every gesture, ultimately delivering him to the hands that will lay him out on the last device of all. The luggage is no longer subjected to the operations of chance, the hazards that dominate the existence of a living being, but to mechanical laws that permit him to foresee in the minutest perspective the day of his decapitation.
His condition as an object comes to an end on this day. During the three-quarters of an hour that separates him from his extinction, the certainty of his futile death overcomes everything: the fettered, utterly submissive creature experiences a hell that makes a mockery of the one with which he is threatened. For all their hemlock, the Greeks were humane: they provided their criminals a relative liberty at least, the possibility of postponing or advancing the hour of their own death; and of choosing between suicide and execution.
For reasons of security, we carry out our justice by ourselves.
