This doubtless explains the strange quality of submission that is so often observed in the condemned man at the moment of his execution. After all, those who have nothing to lose by it might make a last desperate effort, preferring to die by a stray bullet or to be guillotined in a violent struggle that would numb every sense: it would be a kind of freedom in dying. And yet, with very few exceptions, the condemned man walks quite docilely to his death in dismal impassivity. Which must be what our journalists mean when they tell us the con-demned man died courageously. What they really mean, of course, is that the condemned man made no trouble, no at-tempt to abandon his status as luggage, and that we are all grateful to him for his good behavior.
In so disgraceful a business the accused has shown a commendable sense of pro-priety in allowing the disgrace to be disposed of as soon as possible. But the compliments and character references are just another part of the general mystification that surrounds the death penalty. For the condemned man often behaves «properly» only to the degree that he is afraid, and deserves the eulogies of our press only if his fear or his despair are sufficiently great to sterilize him altogether. Let me not be misunderstood: some men—political prisoners or not—die heroically, and we must speak of them with the admiration and respect they deserve.
But the majority of those con-demned to death know no other silence than that of fear, no other impassivity than that of horror, and it seems to me that the silence of fear and horror deserves still more respect than the other. When the priest Bela Just offerd to write to the rela-tives of one young criminal only a few minutes before he was to be hung, and received these words in answer: «I don’t have the courage, not even for that,» one wonders how a priest, at such a confession of weakness, could keep from falling on his knees before what is most miserable and most sacred in man. As for those who do not talk, those who show us what they have gone through only by the puddle they leave in the place they are dragged from, who would dare say they died as cowards? And by what name shall we call those who have brought these men to their «cowardice»? After all, each murderer, at the moment of his crime, runs the risk of the most terrible death, while those who execute him risk nothing, except perhaps a promotion.
No—what the condemned man experiences at this moment is beyond all morality. Neither virtue, nor courage, nor in-telligence, not even innocence has a share in his condition at that moment. Society is reduced at one blow to that con-dition of primitive terror in which nothing can be judged and all equity, all dignity, have vanished. «The sense of his own innocence does not immunize the executed man against the cruelty of his death. . . . I have seen terrible criminals die courageously, and innocent men walk to the knife trembling in every limb.»17 When the same witness adds that, in his ex-perience, such failures of nerve are more frequent among intel-lectuals, he does not mean that this category of men has less courage than any other, but that they have more imagination.
Confronted with an inescapable death, a man, no matter what his convictions, is devastated throughout his entire system.18 The sense of powerlessness and solitude of the fettered pris-oner, confronted by the public coalition which has willed his death, is in itself an unimaginable punishment. In this regard, too, it would be far better if the execution were held in public: the actor that is in every man could then come to the aid of the stricken animal, could help him keep up a front, even in his own eyes. But the darkness and the secrecy of the cere-mony are without appeal: in such a disaster, courage, the soul’s consistency, faith itself—all are merely matters of chance. As a general rule, the man is destroyed by waiting for his execu-tion long before he is actually killed.
Two deaths are imposed, and the first is worse than the second, though the culprit has killed but once. Compared to this torture, the law of retali-ation seems like a civilized principle. For that law, at least, has never claimed that a man must be blinded in both eyes to pay for having blinded his brother in one.
This fundamental injustice, moreover, has its repercussions among the relatives of the man who is executed. The victim has his relatives too, whose sufferings are generally infinite and who, for the most part, wish to be revenged. They are revenged, in the manner I have described, but the relatives of the executed man thereby experience a misery that punishes them beyond the bounds of all justice. A mother’s or a father’s expectation during the endless months, the prison parlor, the awkward conversations which fill the brief minutes they are allowed to spend with the condemned man, the images of the execution itself—all are tortures that have not been in-flicted on the relatives of the victim.
Whatever the feelings of the latter, they cannot require their revenge to exceed the crime to such an extent, and torment those who violently share their own grief. «I have been reprieved, Father,» writes one man condemned to death, «and I still don’t really believe in my good luck. The reprieve was signed April 30, and they told me Wednesday, on my way back from the parlor. I sent them to tell Papa and Mama, who had not yet left the prison. You can imagine their happiness.»19 We can imagine their happiness only to the degree that we can imagine their unceasing misery until the moment of the reprieve, and the utter despair of those who receive another kind of news, the kind that unjustly punishes their innocence and their misery.
As for the law of retaliation, it must be admitted that even in its primitive form it is legitimate only between two indi-viduals of whom one is absolutely innocent and the other absolutely guilty. Certainly the victim is innocent. But can society, which is supposed to represent the victim, claim a comparable innocence? Is it not responsible, at least in part, for the crime which it represses with such severity? This theme has been frequently developed elsewhere, and I need not continue a line of argument which the most varied minds have elaborated since the eighteenth century. Its principal features can be summed up, in any case, by observing that every society has the criminals it deserves.
As far as France is concerned, however, it is impossible not to draw attention to circum-stances which might make our legislators more modest. An swering a questionnaire on capital punishment in Figaro in 1952, a colonel declared that the establishment of perpetual forced labor as the supreme penalty amounted to the same thing as the establishment of schools of crime. This superior officer seems to be unaware—and I am happy for his sake— that we already have our schools of crime, which differ in one particular from our reformatories—that fact that one can leave them at any hour of the day or night: they are our bars and our slums, the glories of our republic. And on this point, at least, it is impossible to express oneself with moderation.
According to statistics, there are 64,000 overcrowded liv-ing accommodations (three to five persons to a room) in the city of Paris alone. Now of course the man who murders children is a particularly unspeakable creature, scarcely worth working up much pity over. It is probable, too (I say probable), that none of my readers, placed in the same promiscu-ous living conditions, would go so far as to murder children: there is no question of reducing the guilt of such monsters. But would such monsters, in decent living conditions, have an occasion to go so far? The least one can say is that they are not the only guilty parties: it is difficult to account for the fact that the right to punish these criminals is given to the very men who prefer to subsidize sugar beets rather than new construction.20
But alcohol makes this scandal all the more striking. It is well known that the French nation has been systematically intoxicated by its parliamentary majority for generally dis-graceful reasons. Yet even with such knowledge in our grasp, the determined responsibility of alcohol for crimes of blood is still astounding. One lawyer (Guillon) has estimated that it is a factor in 60 per cent of all such cases. Dr. Lagriffe sets the rate somewhere between 41.7 and 72 per cent.
An investi-gation conducted in 1951 at the distribution center of the Fresnes prison, among inmates guilty of breaches of common law, revealed 29 per cent were chronic alcoholics and 24 per cent had alcoholic backgrounds. Finally, 95 per cent of all murderers of children have been alcoholics. These are all fine figures, but there is one we must consider which is still finer: that of the apéritif
