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Title: The Death Penalty Author: Elisée Reclus Date: 1879 Language: en Topics: law, death penalty, the State, prison, justice Source: Translated from https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k819083.image Notes: Translation by João Black for the Anarchist Library. This is a lecture given by Reclus at a meeting of the Workers’ Association [Association Ouvrière] of Lausanne, 1879. It was later printed several times as a pamphlet.
GENTLEMEN,
I do not have the honor to be a Swiss citizen and I know only very
imperfectly the constitution of which some petitioners ask to suppress
an article; but this is a human question agitated in all civilized
countries. As a man and an international, I have the right to deal with
this question, and unfortunately I also have to deal with it as a
Frenchman, because my homeland is still a country of head-cutters, and
the guillotine, which was invented there, still works there.
Enemy of the death penalty, I must first try to know its origins. Is it
rightly that we make it derive from the right of personal defense? If it
were so, it would be difficult to fight it, because each of us certainly
has the right to defend ourselves and our loved ones, either against the
beast or against the fierce man who attacks us. But is it not obvious
that the right of personal defense cannot be delegated, because it
ceases immediately when the danger ceases? When we take the lives of our
fellow human beings into our own hands, it means that there is no social
recourse against them, it means that no one can help us; in the same way
when a man places himself apart from the others, above any contract, and
makes his power weigh on citizens changed into subjects, the latter have
the right to rise up and kill whoever oppresses them. Fortunately,
history gives us numerous examples of the claiming of this right.
The origin of the death penalty, as now applied by States, is certainly
revenge, revenge without measure, as terrible as hatred may inspire, or
revenge regulated by a kind of summary justice, in other words, the
penalty of retaliation: “Tooth for tooth, eye for eye, head for head”.
As soon as the family was formed, it took the place of the individual to
exercise revenge or vendetta. It demands the price of blood: each wound
is paid for by another wound, each death by another death, and this is
how hatreds and wars drag on. This was the state of a large part of
Europe in the Middle Ages, it was in the last century that of Albania,
the Caucasus and many other countries.
However, a little order has been introduced into the perpetual wars,
thanks to redemption. Individuals or families could usually redeem
themselves, and this kind of transaction was fixed by custom. So many
oxen, sheep or goats, so many ringing crowns or acres of land were fixed
for the redemption of blood. The condemned man could also redeem himself
by having himself adopted by another family, sometimes even by that
which he had offended; he could also become free by a brilliant action;
finally, he could fall too low for anyone to deign to punish him. It was
enough for him to hide behind a woman and henceforth he was free, too
vile to be killed, but more unhappy than if he had been covered with
wounds. He lived, but his life was worse than death.
The law of retaliation from family to family could not obviously be
maintained in large centralized states, monarchies, aristocracies or
republics. There it is society, represented by its government, king,
councils or magistracies, which is responsible for revenge or
condemnation [vindicte], as we say in the language of jurisprudence. But
history proves to us that by monopolizing the right to punish in the
name of all, the State, caste or king, was above all concerned with
avenging its particular injuries, and we know with what fury it pursued
its enemies and what refinements of cruelty it put into making them
suffer. There is no torture that imagination can invent and which has
not been thus applied to millions of men: here they were slowly burned,
elsewhere they were flayed or successively cut off the limbs, in
Nuremberg, they locked up the condemned man in the body of the iron
“Virgin”, reddened with fire; in France, they broke his limbs or dragged
him on four horses; in the East, they impale the unfortunate ones; in
Morocco, they are immured, leaving only the head outside the wall. And
why all this revenge? Is it to punish real crimes? No, the hatred of
kings and the ruling classes has always turned against men who claimed
freedom of thought and action. The death penalty has always been in the
service of tyranny. What did Calvin, master of power, do? He had Michael
Servetus burned, one of those men of scientific divination like there
are barely ten or twelve in the history of all mankind. What did Luther,
another founder of religion, do? He excited his friends the lords to run
after the peasants: “Kill them all, kill them, hell will take them back
sooner.” What did the triumphant Catholic Church do? It organized book
burnings. It kindled the stakes, held the noble people of Spain in
terror for three centuries. And recently when a free city, guilty of
having maintained its autonomy, was reconquered by its oppressors, did
we not see them killing by the thousands, men, women, children and using
the machine gun to grow bigger quickly the heaps of corpses? And those
who took part in the massacre, proud of their work, did they not come
cynically to brag about it? We could hear them right here.
(The speaker is alluding to the repression of the Paris Commune.)
But if the State is fierce when it comes to avenging an attack on its
power, it brings less passion in the condemnation [vindicte] of private
crimes, which little by little made it ashamed to apply the death
penalty. Gone are the days when the executioner, dressed in red, showed
his person behind the king: he is no longer the second personage of the
State, he is no longer the “living miracle” as he was called by Joseph
de Maistre; he has become the shame of society and does not even allow
himself to be known by his name. Men have been seen blowing off their
right hands so as not to be forced to serve as executioners. In many
countries where the death penalty still exists, people are beheaded,
hanged and garroted only inside prisons. Finally, in several countries,
the death penalty has been abolished; for more than a hundred years the
blood of the decapitated no longer fouls the soil of Tuscany, and
Switzerland is one of the nations which have had the honor of burning
the scaffold. And now it would be ashamed to restore it! Switzerland has
really little concern for her glory. Before it adopts the restoration of
the death penalty, let it at least be proven that the countries where
there are fewer crimes are those where the penalty is the most terrible!
However, it is precisely the opposite that happens: because blood calls
for blood, it is around the scaffolds and in the prisons that murderers
and thieves are formed. Our courts are schools of crime. What more vile
beings than all those whom public condemnation uses for repression:
informers and jailers, executioners and policemen!
So the death penalty is unnecessary. But is it fair?
No, it’s not fair. When an individual avenges himself in isolation, he
can consider his adversary responsible, but society, taken as a whole,
must understand the bond of solidarity which binds it to all its
members, virtuous or criminal, and recognize that in each crime it also
has its share. Did society take care of the criminal’s childhood? Did it
give him a complete education? Did it make the paths of life easier for
him? Has it always given him good examples? Has it ensured that he has
every chance of remaining honest, or of becoming so again after a first
fall? And if society has not done so, can the criminal not accuse it of
injustice?
The economist Stuart Mill, this honest scholar whom it is good to set as
an example to all his colleagues, compares all members of society to
runners to whom some Caesar would set the same goal. One of the
competitors is young, agile, fresh, another is already old: some are
sick, lame, legless. Would it be fair to condemn the latter: some to
misery, others to slavery or death, while the former would be crowned
victorious? And do we do anything else in society? Some have chances of
happiness, education and strength: they are declared virtuous; the
others are condemned by the environment to remain wallowing in misery or
in vice: is it on them that social condemnation must fall?
But there is yet another cause which forbids bourgeois society from
pronouncing the death penalty. It is that she [bourgeois society]
herself kills and kills by the millions. If there is a fact proven by
the study of hygiene, it is that the average life could be doubled.
Misery shortens the life of the poor. One profession kills in the space
of a few years, another in a few months. If all had the enjoyments of
life, they would live like peers in England, they would grow older than
sixty; but practically condemned either to forced labor or―which is
worse―to lack of work, they die before their time, and during their
short life, disease has tortured them. The calculation is easy to do. It
is at least 8 to 10 million men that society exterminates each year, in
Europe alone, not by killing them with gunshots, but by forcing them to
die by removing their couvert at the banquet of life. Ten years ago, an
English worker, Duggan, committed suicide with all his family. An
infamous newspaper, always busy extolling the merits of kings and the
powerful, had the impudence to congratulate itself on this workman’s
suicide. “What a good riddance,” they exclaimed, “workers for whom there
is no place, by killing themselves, relieve us of the disagreeable task
of killing them with our hands.” This is the cynical confession of what
all worshipers of the God Capital think!
What, then, is the remedy for all these mass murders, together with the
murders which are committed in isolation? You know in advance what a
socialist proposes. It is a complete social change, it is collectivism,
the appropriation of land and instruments by all those who work. It is
thus that the chasm of hatred can be filled between men, that misery and
the pursuit of fortune, that great adviser of crimes, will cease to
excite citizens against each other, and that social punishment can
finally rest. To the right of force, which prevails in wild nature, it
is time to make justice succeed, which is the ideal of any man worthy of
the name.
But in the transformed society, there may still be crimes.
Physiologically the type of the criminal may present itself again. What
will we do then? Will we kill the criminal? Certainly not. The one in
whom the crime comes from madness, we will treat him, as we treat the
mad or the other sick, by guarding against their violence. As for men
who have become criminals through fiery temperament or ardor of blood,
it would now be possible to offer them rehabilitation through heroism.
We have seen it a hundred times: galley slaves throw themselves into the
flames or into the waters to save the unfortunate and thus feel reborn
in the esteem of other men. The convicts whom the commune of Cartagena
freed and whom France made slaves again, were sublime in their heroism
during their short freedom of a few months. Obey, said Christianity, and
the people degraded themselves. Get rich, say the bourgeois to their
sons, and they seek to get rich in every way, either by violating the
law or, with more skill, by circumventing the law. Become heroes, say
the revolutionary socialists, and even brigands will be able to recover
through heroism.
Elisée Reclus.
(Lecture given at a meeting convened by the “Workers’ Association” of
Lausanne.)