Victor Hugo witnessed the workings of the guillotine at first hand. More than once, in fact, he found himself among crowds of curious, expectant, agitated, hate-filled people awaiting a show of death. Much disgusted and angered by the twisted joy that people seemed to take in it—by the distinct ugliness of the spectacle—he decided to write a book against the death penalty. Apparently, it was the day after Hugo had strolled past an executioner casually preparing the guillotine for its next victim at the Place de l'Hotel de Ville, that he began writing The Last Day of a Condemned Man. He quickly finished it and saw it published in 1829, although he did not put his name on it. He waited three years to do so; in 1832, he finalized the short novel and added a substantial preface explaining his aims, the context, and so forth. Thus he completed and owned a work that Dostoevsky would later consider "absolutely the most real and truthful of everything that Hugo wrote." And, as I will explain later, Dostoevsky was in a position to know—not merely by virtue of being a great writer and absolute master of psychological realism.

In the preface to The Last Day of a Condemned Man, Hugo summarizes the aim of the novel: to provide a generalized, yet accurate and compelling account of a man condemned to death. In the preface, Hugo furthermore provides some arguments against the death penalty, and recounts—to the reader's as much as to his own horror—some stories about barbarically botched executions. The novel itself is supposed to add fictional force to Hugo's arguments, and it does. The reader gets a detailed account of the thoughts and feelings of a (nameless) man who is waiting to be executed by guillotine. He reflects on the external stimuli—the prison, the courtyard, the priest—as well as on the changes, fears, and vain hopes that he finds within himself. We gain an intimate picture of the man condemned to death—for what, we do not know for sure, but apparently for murder. We also develop a certain amount of sympathy—not so much for the man himself (although his three year-old daughter's failure to recognize him is poignant), but for the terrible condition in which he finds himself, and in which, so Hugo would put it, no one ought to find himself. The main force of the novel comes, of course, with the final scene, when the inevitable occurs (the finality of the death penalty is precisely what makes it so horrible), and the man in whose life and thought we have partaken for some time now finds himself among masses of people screaming for his death.

Hugo’s concerns are later echoed in Camus’s 1957 extended essay, Reflections on the Guillotine, where he takes a strong stand against capital punishment. Camus’s father apparently witnessed an execution by guillotine, and, while initially supporting it as a form of punishment, changed his mind after having seen the deed performed (which left him in shock, as Camus recounts). While Hugo’s account is fictional (though realistic), Camus provides arguments and statistics against the effectiveness of capital punishment.

To the Western, liberal reader today, Hugo (and Camus) may seem to be preaching to the choir; few of us need to be convinced that the guillotine specifically or the death penalty generally is barbaric and ineffectual (although in some worrying pockets of populist thought, one can find appeals to reinstatement of the death penalty). Having said that, there is much to say for the conviction with which Hugo writes, his wholehearted commitment to the end of a savage practice, and for his support of the socially downtrodden (after all—then as now—it was not generally the rich who received the harshest punishments). In his preface, Hugo writes that "it has always been for those who are truly strong, truly great, to show concern for the poor and weak." In this way at least, Hugo shows himself as a great man; and Camus, likewise. At the time of writing, of course, these perspectives were much needed. Perhaps fiction gets one closer to the people than ethical-philosophical arguments. There is a reason why Camus did not limit himself to essays, but tried to get his ideas across through fiction.

The question of how to deal with criminals is very much alive and pertinent today. It will probably always be a pressing question for societies; given how unlikely it is that criminality will disappear from the human race. Should we focus on punishing or on rehabilitating criminals? Although we no longer have the death penalty (I speak of the Netherlands here), this question is far from settled. Are we taking revenge when we imprison, or are we simply taking malfunctioning and dangerous members and removing/quarantining them from society? Is punishment—can it ever be—an example to others? We know that punishment is a very limited deterrent, if it has any effect at all. Is there not a better way? Hugo offers his view of the better way, as a final note to Claude Gueux—a short story written in 1834, which is included in my edition of The Last Day. Here, he writes: "This head, the man of the people's head, cultivate it, till it, water it, give it virtue, make use of it; then you will have no need to cut it off." Education, education—it takes time, effort, and patience. It is perhaps no wonder that people are tempted to punish sooner than try to rehabilitate. It has to be said, though, that here in the Netherlands there have recently been a couple of serious lapses when it comes to 'rehabilitating' criminals; freedoms have been given to those who—in retrospect—really ought never to have been given them. Or so it seems, at least, in these few but particularly vivid and tragic cases. Camus’s suggestion for an alternative to capital punishment in Reflections on the Guillotine is to improve living conditions. This, to me, seems at least as important as education. We know that the probability of crime increases with squalid living conditions. Desperate people sometimes do desperate things. But again, to improve society—especially the conditions of those worse off—is a more difficult and unwelcome task for governments, it seems, than to simply punish those who transgress the law.

It is unsurprising that Dostoevsky was deeply affected by The Last Day of a Condemned Man, for he experienced a last day at first hand. Condemned to death by firing squad for revolutionary activities, Dostoevsky was lined up with several others to be shot. For three minutes, he knew—as far as he could know—that he would be killed. It was only at the very last moment that the execution was halted, that his life was spared. The clearest and most touching fictional representation of his mock execution can be found in The Idiot, where Prince Myshkin describes the experiences of an acquaintance (which are really that of the author). "Take a soldier, put him right in front of a cannon during a battle, and shoot at him, and he'll still keep hoping, but read the same soldier a sentence for certain, and he'll lose his mind or start weeping." (Pevear and Volokhonsky translation.) It is the certainty, the backing of the state/authority, the irreversibility and lack of any hope for reprieve that makes capital punishment so dreadful. "Who ever said human nature could bear it without going mad?" Myshkin/Dostoevsky turns to Christ in those last minutes, although the terrifying thing is that He cannot do anything here. Hugo also turns to God as the proper 'punisher'—rather than us human being among ourselves. Yet the problem is that in this life we cannot turn to another source for either our punishment or salvation. It has to come from us, out of us, somehow. Dostoevsky knows this better than Hugo. Those last minutes before the firing squad, the scaffold, the guillotine—nothing can save us there. And no one should be put in that position.

There is an alternative to turning to God. Boethius embraced philosophy, instead. While imprisoned and awaiting his execution (on charges of wishing to overthrow the Ostrogothic King Theodoric the Great) in Pavia in the year 524, he wrote The Consolation of Philosophy. In a fascinating mix of Greek philosophy, stoicism, Christian thought, and Neoplatonism, Boethius reflects on human nature, virtue, justice, determinism and free will, why evil (people) often seem to triumph over good (people), and so on. "The now that passes produces time, the now that remains produces eternity." (David Slavitt translation.) In the end, what he leaves is a beautiful, poetic, and meditative work—yet whether he actually came to terms with the irrevocability of the (imposed) end of his life, we do not know. I'm inclined to think, with Hugo and Dostoevsky, that he couldn't have. But perhaps writing helped him—as it did Dostoevsky, although Fyodor never quite came to terms with had happened to him on that day. Perhaps, as Wittgenstein put it, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." (Translation Ramsey and Ogden.) At the same time, there may be something in trying-to-speak-of-it. Especially if through the attempt one leaves to others what one cannot carry beyond one's life: art and thought, developed as thoroughly as one could.

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If you want to read Victor Hugo’s The Last Day of a Condemned Man, I recommend this edition translated by Moncrieff.

For Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy, I recommend this beautiful paperback edition published by Harvard University Press (Slavitt’s translation is my favorite so far).

(Note: if you buy any book(s) using the above link, or any book from The Book Depository via this link, I will receive a small commission. It won’t cost you anything extra, and you’ll help me maintain this blog.)