The Condemned, 1848

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It had been his longest and most enduring battle, a struggle for one of the most important causes there was: the abolition of the death penalty. In 1862, Victor Hugo would write in Les Misérables: “The scaffold is a vision. The scaffold is not a piece of carpentry; the scaffold is not a machine; the scaffold is not an inert bit of mechanism constructed of wood, iron and cords. It seems as though it were a being, possessed of I know not what sombre initiative; it devours, it eats flesh, it drinks blood; the scaffold is a sort of monster fabricated by the judge and the carpenter, a spectre which seems to live with a horrible vitality composed of all the death which it has inflicted.”

The seed of this emotion was planted in 1812, in the Spanish town of Burgos, Castile. How could the spectacle he was about to see be explained to a ten-year-old boy? Victor Hugo did not know where his mother was taking him; she had allowed an air of mystery to linger. They made their way to the main square, where the crowd was dense and agitated. They cut a path toward the scaffold that towered in the centre of the square. Victor’s blood ran cold. “This the justice of this country,” his mother explained, squeezing his hand. The condemned man would be paraded through the town in a wooden cart, exposed to the hateful gaze of the villagers, weighed down by his chains. His frightened expression was not lost on young Victor, who read terror and disarray in the man’s eyes. Beads of sweat ran down his pale forehead. He seemed to be muttering scattered verses of prayer. The crowd was galvanised by the spectacle to come. They jeered and hollered, launching insults and rotten tomatoes. They shook their fists. They rushed toward the cart to grab at the condemned man’s arms and feet, brandishing crosses and bibles. Victor hugged his mother. He did not wish to see any more. Surely this was the acme of human horror, and hatred in its purest form. Justice? Of what justice did they speak? He was witnessing a barbaric and inhuman act. The condemned man climbed onto the stage, held beneath the arms by two executioners wearing black hoods. They pulled off his chains and threw him roughly down onto the guillotine. The condemned man looked up at the blade that shone in the midday sun. Victor’s heart pounded in his chest. The priest uttered a few words, then turned to the executioners. The crowd was hushed in this solemn moment. The executioner released the rope, and a dull clack rang out. The blade fell through the prisoner’s neck, and his head rolled down over the boards of the gibbet.

The execution left a vivid impression upon Victor Hugo. He could still picture the crowd baying for blood, the executioners setting up the guillotine, and the terrified eyes of the victim. Today, on 15 September 1848, he rose to address France’s Constituent Assembly. He stood behind the pulpit, and met the glazed expressions of the legislators. Then he began speaking in his booming voice, full of emotion and anger. “I have examined the death penalty under each of its two aspects: as a direct action, and as an indirect one. What does it come down to? Nothing but something horrible and useless, nothing but a way of shedding blood that is called a crime when an individual commits it, but is (sadly) called "justice" when society brings it about. Make no mistake, you lawmakers and judges, in the eyes of God as in those of conscience, what is a crime when individuals do it is no less an offense when society commits the deed.”

Alan Alfredo Geday