By studying the ritual dimension of capital execution in France, which is supposed to contribute to the edification of the whole of society, Anne Carol makes the archives bleed. She shows that justice has long been a theatre of terror.
Even though most of us have an idea of what the guillotine looks like, it is worth recalling how it works. The principle is simple: the blade weighted with a weight (the “sheep”) must fall from a sufficient height onto the neck of a condemned person. (…) When the blade falls, he must be lying on his stomach, with his neck directly above the cleaver, well exposed and immobilized. (…) Along the scale is a wicker basket to collect the body, and in front of the telescope, a container receives the severed head. (p. 56-57)
It is difficult to believe today that justice has long chosen to eliminate the body, the soul, and the crimes of those condemned to death: simply in a basket. Anne Carol reminds us of this with great detail and analysis, in At the foot of the scaffold. In 2003, in The Capital Experience. A Death on Show XVIe–XXe centuriesshe described execution as an “eliminating punishment” and explained that it was a social act of “definitive exclusion from society of individuals recognized as incorrigible and dangerous.”
The Theatre of the Killing
In At the foot of the scaffold, capital execution is considered in its ritual dimension, which contributes to the moral edification of the whole of society, by psychological repercussions. But it is also, or even above all, in its properly pragmatic dimension: Anne Carol breaks down its uses, meticulously follows its course, alongside its actors, to approach its sensitive reality, in such a way as to make its duration, its tempo, its critical moments perceived. She thus restores the complexity of the movements, the manipulations, the tensions and the physical trials that the execution involves, assesses the bodily and emotional implications for the protagonists. None of the moments that the condemned man goes through is spared the reader, the objective being to share the “paroxysmal human experience” that the execution constitutes.
Among the many works addressing the subject in its institutional and ethical dimensions – and having chosen the same methodological bias, the direct testimony of administrative and police witnesses – let us cite, for the autonymic finesse of its title, The Lives of Infamous Men (1977) by Michel Foucault, a short compendium of human “infamies” that the administration comes to note, approve and oust with the back of a police report, as if blame and indictment were equivalent to a way out of the crisis.
Unlike Michel Foucault, Anne Carol could not have written as the epigraph of her book “This is not a history book”. The two works share the same formal characteristics: they are about presenting and commenting on a trying administrative source, composed of a series of reports produced by the prosecutors in charge of the execution, kept in the National Archives.
It is an anthology of existences. Lives of a few lines or a few pages, countless misfortunes and adventures, gathered in a handful of words.
Anne Carol makes the archives bleed by extracting a vile material: the description of these executions which reek of panic or revolt of the condemned, their forced resignation or their moral annihilation in the face of the iniquity of a practice which one finds hard to believe could have continued in France until the 1970s.
Among the witnesses at least of the execution, the executioner, the prosecutor and his clerk, who reads the sentence before the guillotine, a minister of religion (since 1397, the condemned were previously deprived of it to aggravate their punishment), the lawyer from the 1880s. The evolution of the presence of all these actors and the modalities of this presence are carefully analyzed by Anne Carol, through the written testimonies of the interested parties or close collaborators, which show that the execution is always trying for all of her direct assistants.
In order for the punishment to be administered where its edifying power can appear to be at its greatest, the execution often takes place on the main square of a town or village (Place de la Grève, now Place de l’Hôtel de Ville in Paris until 1932, when people began to prefer the outskirts): the crowd is part of the arrangement. But
Sometimes it is not the condemned man who attracts a large audience, but an external event: in Paris, during the Universal Exhibition of 1889, the Cook travel agency includes the double execution of Allorto and Sellier in its tour. (p. 51)
Justice is a theatre and for a long time its audience is deliberately an actor.
The grain of sand and the machine
For a long time, religious logic (repentance before the fatal blow) and judicial logic (execution as a social sanction) were closely intertwined: it was important that the condemned person feel emotions (confession of the crime and guilt, expression of regret, hope of redemption) and that he externalize them. In this sense, he serves the society to which he exposes the staging of his death. For the ritual to gain in effectiveness, the condemned person “can cry, but not excessively; he can tremble, but not to the point of being paralyzed; he is expected to manage to control himself at least » (p. 97).
In other words, society imposes on him a “way of being condemned to death” just before the fatal act that is eminently despotic and alienating: there are ideal execution scenarios that, if they do not go well, “over-condemn” the condemned. Thus, an essential criterion for the success of an execution is resignation to this order (confession, recognition of guilt, request for forgiveness). The society that executes its criminals demands that its condemned consent to their own punishment and show it. Foucault expressed it in these terms: “Establish torture as a moment of truth.”
Gradually, religion, which strongly influenced the model of “successful execution”, lost ground in French society and its help was increasingly actively refused by the condemned.
With the refusal of religious help is expressed the claim to be one’s own recourse, one’s own end, one’s own support; an intimate variation of the claim to be one’s own master, in a way. (p. 211)
Also, political resistances are more and more frequent under the Third Republic, to the extent that execution is assimilated to a form of archaic and arbitrary power: its aim being to bring into play, as Michel Foucault reminds us, to its most extreme point, “the asymmetry between the subject who dared to violate the law, and the all-powerful sovereign who asserts his strength.”
Thus, the anarchist François Koënigstein, known as Ravachol, guillotined in 1892, according to the condemnation book which recorded his execution,
showed violence, saying he had no regrets for his actions, insulting the bourgeoisie, magistrates and the prison chaplain, and on the short walk from the prison gate to the site of the scaffold, chanting filthy words at the top of his lungs. Shouting at the supreme moment: “Long live anarchy!”
The anarchist moment left a lasting mark on the history of the guillotine. Resistance to the well-oiled ritual grew more and more numerous; the machine was breaking down.
A counterculture of the scaffold is being built, which circulates within society and defines new standards of behavior. Insensitivity, irony, audacity (interpreted as “cynicism” and “boastfulness”), concern to assert one’s freedom to think and act – however minimal – replace emotion, repentance, resignation, piety and submission. (p. 222)
On the eve of the Second World War, a decree of June 24, 1939 put an end to public executions. The distance from the crowd weakened the power of the emotional sharing that the execution constituted. The guillotine moved closer to the prison, the preparation ritual lost its solemnity and the work of killing became modernized, “standardized”. By the end of the XIXe century, a successful execution is a quick execution (p. 231). In The Guillotine in Secret. Public Executions in FranceEmmanuel Taieb describes the reasons for the progressive decline of the spectacle of death. By becoming “furtive and secret”, according to the words of Victor Hugo in his speech of September 15, 1848, it becomes more and more suspect.
The last person to be sentenced to have their head cut off was Hamida Djandoubi, on September 10, 1977, in Marseille. The testimony of the court-appointed judge who recorded this moment—which she did not yet know was historic—is partly quoted at the end of Anne Carol’s book. It is punctuated by descriptive sequences in which the rites of execution, emptied of meaning, create a grotesqueness and a disarray that signal the incongruity of the punishment.