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The Last Day of a Condemned Man
The Last Day of a Condemned Man
The Last Day of a Condemned Man
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The Last Day of a Condemned Man

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"Before hearing my death sentence I was aware that my lungs breathed, that my heart beat, and that my body lived in the community of other men; now, I plainly saw that a barrier had sprung up between them and me. Nothing was the same as before." The imprisoned narrator of this profoundly moving novel awaits execution—and waits, and waits. Although his guilt is undeniable, his essential humanity emerges as he struggles with the certainty of impending death.
Victor Hugo's impassioned early work carries the same power and universality as Les Misérables. A vocal opponent to the barbarity of the guillotine, Hugo attempted to arouse compassion in the service of justice. This tale distills his beliefs and offers a highly significant contribution to the ongoing debate over the death penalty. A new Foreword by activist David Dow examines the message and relevance of Hugo's story to modern society.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMar 7, 2012
ISBN9780486120966
The Last Day of a Condemned Man
Author

Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo (1802-1885) is one of the most well-regarded French writers of the nineteenth century. He was a poet, novelist and dramatist, and he is best remembered in English as the author of Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) (1831) and Les Misérables (1862). Hugo was born in Besançon, and became a pivotal figure of the Romantic movement in France, involved in both literature and politics. He founded the literary magazine Conservateur Littéraire in 1819, aged just seventeen, and turned his hand to writing political verse and drama after the accession to the throne of Louis-Philippe in 1830. His literary output was curtailed following the death of his daughter in 1843, but he began a new novel as an outlet for his grief. Completed many years later, this novel became Hugo's most notable work, Les Misérables.

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  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Likely to have had an impact at the time, and written with the mandatory flair and self-pity. Yet not as gripping today as it was before.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This short psychologically powerful novel concerns the thoughts running through the mind of a man in prison and condemned to the guillotine in the early 19th century. It was first published anonymously in 1829, then reissued three years later with a preface by Hugo denouncing the death penalty, both as a matter of principle and as an example of a political abuse that no revolution had been able to abolish. It is not clear what crime the unnamed central character of the novel has committed; the implication is that he has killed someone (there is a reference by his lawyer to his belief the jury will acquit his client of premeditation), and he several times refers to the guilt he feels for the crime he admits to having committed, but we never learn the circumstances. In any case, it is irrelevant to the book's main point, which is the psychological changes he undergoes as the days and hours shrink down to the end. A terse but memorable read.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Hugo’s polemic against the death penalty is crafted as more of an emotional reaction than a political rant (though that appears in the preface). At first the condemned man believes that “death is infinitely to be preferred” to a life of hard labor; however, as his diary continues, we journey through his thoughts as execution day looms. Most disturbing is the festival atmosphere surrounding executions. When a woman remarks on the higher interest level in seeing a death row inmate versus a chain gang, out narrator posits “it is less diffuse, a concentrated and more aromatic liqueur.”It is also filled with Hugo’s beautiful prose: “For La Grève has already had enough. La Grève is mending her ways. The blood-swigging old crone behaved well in July. She now wants to live a better life, and to remain worthy of her recent good deed. Having lent her body to all the executions of the last three hundred years, she has now gone all coy. She is ashamed of her former calling. She wants to lose her bad name. she disowns the executioner. She is washing down her cobblestones.”
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Capital punishment has always been a difficult issue for me, and reading Hugo’s slim book from 1829 was timely given a measure to repeal it in California will be voted on this November.The question that those against capital punishment must answer, I think, is why an incorrigible mass-murderer should be allowed to go on living, even if locked up in prison. Hugo’s answer to this is that we should not commit a murder in response to murder, and we should leave punishment to God. Atheists may have a problem with that last part, but the first part seems to be at the heart of the matter.The question that those for the death penalty must answer is why do it, particularly when studies have shown it’s actually more expensive, does not serve as a deterrent to crime, and enforcement is not only racially biased, but sometimes wrong, As David Dow says in the forward to this book, it seems to come down to a need for retribution, and aside from the slippery slope that represents, vengeance is one of the more base parts of human nature. Hugo doesn’t try to touch on those things or present a balanced argument; he makes it clear he is against capital punishment, and his approach is to make the case for all, instead of picking a single case of injustice (though they exist), or to focus on instances where the method of execution fails, resulting in cruel, lingering, agony (though he does mention a few). He alludes to the condemned man in the novel having killed, and mentions the hideous crimes of past occupants of the prison cell he’s in, but he doesn’t go into specific details for why this particular man should be spared – presumably because there will always be another person who’s committed worse crimes, and is “more deserving” of death.Hugo’s approach is simple – to show the humanity of the killer. He does this by writing in first person, from the condemned man’s perspective, showing his experiences in prison leading all the way up to his actual execution in the Place de Grève. Behold this thinking, feeling fellow creature, he says. Remember he is a father, husband, and son. Forget for a moment what he has done – what are you about to do?In the form of another convict he meets, Hugo shows how a man may have come to be a killer – orphaned, with a rough childhood, and once out of prison for theft and honestly trying to turn over a new leaf, shunned and denied work. Doesn’t this touch your heart of hearts, he seems to say, and shouldn’t we follow our most enlightened spiritual leaders in exercising clemency, and not become killers ourseves? You can hear those for the death penalty howl – remember the victims, *their* humanity, how they suffered! – and just where is “The Last Day of the Murdered Man” anyway? And so it goes. This book is pretty simple, and I doubt it will change minds that are entrenched. It does reveal Hugo’s noble nature, which I admire, and it did make me think, and for that it was worth reading. Interestingly enough, after having used the guillotine for the last time in 1977(!), France ultimately did abolish the death penalty in 1981, nearly a century after Hugo’s death in 1885.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I have read this book in its French edition during September 2012. Whenever you read Victor Hugo, I think, you will be moved by how beautiful the writing style and lexicon is. Hugo is an amazing writer.

    This book is about how a prisoner is living his last day before he is executed at the blade of a guillotine. When this book came out, this topic was a taboo, it wasn't approved to be criticizing the death penalty through decapitation. Nowadays, it is forbidden, of course, and activists are trying to render illegal the death penalty by hanging or by administering chemicals. SO, at the time, during the end of the 19th century, Hugo published this book anonymously, nobody knew who wrote it. It was an eye-opener to the people, and as I progress in this review, you will know why it was influential.

    Hugo was always an advocate for the people, especially the poor. He believes that no matter what crime(s) you may have committed, the guillotine is too cruel and unjust and should be banned. This is basically what this book tries to tell us.




    The book starts with a satirical dialogue between members of the bourgeoisie Française where they're ridiculing the book 'le Dernier Jour D'un Condamné' , attacking the poor, the prisoners and the writer of such a book that they wouldn't call literature. that was quite a clever way of introducing what Hugo is fighting against: the bourgeoisie, the class struggles, the snob society of the rich, the preconceived ideas, the merciless priests and politicians of his time, the absurdity of some so-called poets, and on.

    He proceeds then to offer us in a diary-like account of an anonymous prisoner, on death penalty, telling us about his verdict, the prison, his execution, and about all the feelings and thoughts going through his mind. He wrote it all on his last day, thus the title of the book. We know few things about him: he killed someone, he is a husband and father of a little girl, he is a rich man, and he is living in utter fear. We do not know anything about the murder, Hugo is highlighting the fact that it doesn't matter, and regardless of what the crime was, the man is suffering because of his imprisonment and awaiting death.
    There are many emotional instances in the book, especially the part about his daughter, about being in a cell where previously decapitated criminals lived until their own last days, about how merciless people are, how they would gather and celebrate an execution. This book is very personal to Hugo. He remembers having passed through a street one day, seeing people gathering in crowds since early morning, running around, singing and yelling, leaving their jobs, bringing their family and kids, all to witness joyfully an execution! He felt miserable about it, and he had to write this book as a protest against human cruelty and exaltation at the sight of a guillotine. There are some horrific details, like when the people would shout in disappointment if the guillotine's blade wasn't oiled or shaved properly as to decapitate the head at the first trial. That was one of many passages in this book that sent an icy shiver down my spine!
    The condemned man is anonymous because Hugo wanted us to relate to this unknown person, to put ourselves in his shoes, and see what it feels like to live in a constant nightmare.

    I will end my review by raising a few questions:
    - Do you think that criminals should be punished?
    - Do you think the death penalty is too harsh?
    - Many people, including myself, believe the guillotine was one of the most barbaric form of torture. Don't you think that the death penalty through painless merciful ways is a necessity?
    (I think that although the criminal would be in a horrendous psychological turmoil, and although sometimes an innocent man is convicted - this has to do with the laws of convict, not with death penalty per se - , but if you kill, you should pay for it, and you do not deserve to live in a 5 stars prison cell - like there are in some developed countries - while the person you've denied the right to live to your victim. So, I believe that a merciful death penalty, like injecting certain chemicals to stop the heart painlessly, is the best justice we can offer both the victim and the criminal, that is as far as I could sympathize with a murderer. Do not torture the murderers, but let them pay for their crime.)
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Hugo’s polemic against the death penalty is crafted as more of an emotional reaction than a political rant (though that appears in the preface). At first the condemned man believes that “death is infinitely to be preferred” to a life of hard labor; however, as his diary continues, we journey through his thoughts as execution day looms. Most disturbing is the festival atmosphere surrounding executions. When a woman remarks on the higher interest level in seeing a death row inmate versus a chain gang, out narrator posits “it is less diffuse, a concentrated and more aromatic liqueur.”It is also filled with Hugo’s beautiful prose: “For La Grève has already had enough. La Grève is mending her ways. The blood-swigging old crone behaved well in July. She now wants to live a better life, and to remain worthy of her recent good deed. Having lent her body to all the executions of the last three hundred years, she has now gone all coy. She is ashamed of her former calling. She wants to lose her bad name. she disowns the executioner. She is washing down her cobblestones.”

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The Last Day of a Condemned Man - Victor Hugo

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 2009, is an unabridged republication of the work published by Thomas Crowell and Company, New York, in 1896. A new Foreword by David Dow has been prepared for this edition.

Copyright

Foreword copyright © 2009 by David Dow All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Gataloging-in-Publication Data

Hugo, Victor, 1802—1885.

[Dernier jour d’un condamné. English]

The last day of a condemned man / Victor Hugo ; translated from the French

by Arabella Ward.

p. cm.

Originally published: New York : Thomas Crowell & Co., 1896.

9780486120966

I. Ward, Arabella. II. Title.

PQ2285.D413 2009

843’.7—dc22

2008053681

Manufactured in the United States of America

Dover Publications, Inc., 31 East 2nd Street, Mineola, N.Y. 11501

Table of Contents

Title Page

Bibliographical Note

Copyright Page

Foreword

Preface

THE LAST DAY OF A CONDEMNED MAN - A COMEDY

Chapter I - Bicêtre

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XIX

Chapter XX

Chapter XXI

Chapter XXII - In the Conciergerie

Chapter XXIII

Chapter XXIV

Chapter XXV

Chapter XXVI

Chapter XXVII

Chapter XXVIII

Chapter XXIX

Chapter XXX

Chapter XXXI

Chapter XXXII

Chapter XXXIII

Chapter XXXIV

Chapter XXXV

Chapter XXXVI

Chapter XXXVII

Chapter XXXVIII

Chapter XXXIX

Chapter XL

Chapter XLI

Chapter XLII

Chapter XLIII

Chapter XLIV

Chapter XLV

Chapter XLVI

Chapter XLVII - My Story

Chapter XLVIII - A Room in the Hotel de Ville

Chapter XLIX

Four o’clock

Note on The Last Day of a Condemned Man

Foreword

We do not know his name or exactly what he did. We know little about his present, less about his past, and nothing of his childhood. We do not know the name of his victim, or even with certainty that there was a victim. A book about the death penalty that does not tell us the details of the death of the victim is a rare (perhaps unprecedented) volume, yet that is the book Victor Hugo has written. We know nothing that Hugo believes to be unessential to our judgment, yet we nevertheless know everything Hugo thinks we need to know to conclude that capital punishment is an abomination.

Hugo was forthright about his intention in writing The Last Day of a Condemned Man. He abhorred capital punishment. He said the idea for writing the book came to him at the site of an execution: in the public square, as an execution was taking place, a scene Hugo says he walked upon casually.¹ Hugo wanted to see the death penalty abolished. He did not live to see that happen, but he played a role in its demise. His instrument was this novella.

To make his radical case, Hugo adopted a radical approach. Visit any abolitionist website in the U.S. or peruse any abolitionist tract and you will learn excruciating details of travesties of justice, for the American approach is to focus on particulars. I do not mean this observation as a criticism. On the contrary, the American abolitionist strategy is sensible, because it is undoubtedly true that the death penalty favors white skin over skin of color and dramatically favors wealthy defendants over poor ones. It is true that defense lawyers in capital cases are often abysmally bad. It is true that racism pervades the criminal justice system, and inserts itself most insidiously in the death penalty domain. It is true that a significant percentage, perhaps as much as a quarter, of the death row population comprises men with serious mental illness; and a handful, perhaps 3 percent, perhaps a bit more, committed no crime at all. Attention to the particulars is a sound tactic—I have used it often myself—because people who care about equality and fairness may have their support of capital punishment eroded upon learning of the inequality and inequity that characterize our death penalty regime.

In the United States, therefore, in literature as well as political discourse, discussions of the death penalty almost invariably pivot on the facts of the specific crime or the particular criminal. Briefs written by prosecutors to justify imposing a death sentence, and opinions written by judges upholding the punishment, recite in punctilious and gory detail the facts of the brutal murder (and what murder is not?)—facts that typically have nothing whatsoever to do with the legal issue before the courts. Yet our moral sense is quieted, or, if not entirely quieted, at least numbed, by these recitations. We can ignore the brutality of an execution and evade the lawlessness that is attendant to it by averting our eyes and closing our rational minds and focusing all our attention on the horrible facts of the crime.

Occasionally, a death sentence is set aside by judicial review. When that occurs, it is again, ironically perhaps, typically the result of unique facts of the case: the police or prosecutors hid a crucial piece of evidence; or all people of color were stricken by prosecutors from the jury; or the accused wrongdoer is mentally retarded, or otherwise not fully morally culpable. For expedience’s sake, perhaps, Hugo, abolitionist that he was, may have supported his latter focus on facts, for the result of this attention is that a human life is spared. But then again, if he were to remain true to his conviction that capital punishment is wrong, he might have deemed these facts irrelevant as well, for even they divert our attention from the crux of the matter, which is, quite simply, whether the death penalty is ever morally sound. Speaking of his book, Hugo said: I have tried to omit any thing of a special, individual, contingent, relative, or modifiable nature.² Morality is found in generalizations, and individual cases are the enemy of generalizations. Hugo aimed for universality, for a broad moral claim, and he hit the target in its bull’s eye.

Originally published in French in 1829 under the title Le dernier jour d‘un condamné, Hugo in this short novel strips away all the exterior, contingent, and variable facts—that is to say, all the facts that differ from one crime to another; from one perpetrator to another; from one victim to another; from one courtroom to another, indeed, from one society to another—and he leaves us with naked psychology, the interior of the human mind, the common core of all humanity. His protagonist is a man sentenced to death in France. We know little else. He has a daughter who believes he is already dead. He will face the guillotine, but, as was customary in France in the nineteenth century—and as remains the practice in China and other nations still today—the condemned does not know precisely when he will be executed until the moment is upon him. He expects his stay in prison to last around six weeks, give or take. (Hugo’s protagonist is executed at 4 o’clock. He learns the fateful hour has arrived at 3.) He dies amidst a horrible crowd ... , a crowd which longs and waits and laughs.

This scene of a public execution will be unfamiliar to contemporary readers. In the U.S., prison authorities carry out executions in relative secret, often in the middle of the night. Members of the media are present; typically, so are family members of the murderer and his victim. But the procedure takes place behind prison walls, with little fanfare and little public interest. It has not always been this way. The last public execution in America did not occur until 1936, when Rainey Bethea was hanged in front of more than 20,000 onlookers in Owensboro, Kentucky. And of course, lynchings, which some scholars regard as thematically connected to the current regime of capital punishment, were not uncommon as long as two decades later, especially in South, and these horrific scenes likewise unfolded in full view of large and boisterous crowds.

In France, executions never moved indoors, as it were; they took place in public, up until the end. There is a certain logic to having heads roll in the streets. If one objective of inflicting this ultimate sanction is to deter other crimes, it seems preferable for the citizenry to know the punishment exists, and to witness its infliction. North Korea uses public executions to intimidate its citizens to this very day. In parts of the Muslim world, public stonings have a carnival atmosphere. But seeing the state kill makes it more difficult to evade the moral question of whether the state ought to kill, and so at last, in 1981, not quite a century after Hugo’s death in 1885, France abolished the death penalty, becoming the last nation in western Europe to do so.

Like Hamida Djandoubi, who became the final victim of the French guillotine when he was beheaded in 1977 in Marseille, the character in Hugo’s novel also faces execution by guillotine, a tool conceived by Joseph-Ignace Guillotin in 1789 and used for the first time three years later. Decapitation, which had previously been reserved for executing members of the royalty, became France’s sole method of execution, replacing hanging, burning, and other methods, on the theory that a speedy cutting off of the head was less cruel than the alternatives for causing death. This same rationale led U.S. jurisdictions two hundred years later, in the early 1980s, to embrace lethal injection as a method of killing. Conceived of by A. Jay Chapman, a medical examiner in Oklahoma, lethal injection was used for the first time when the State of Texas executed Charlie Brooks in 1982. (Texas has since carried out more than 400 executions by lethal injection, a number which accounts for more than one-third of all executions in the U.S.) Of the thirty-six states that execute criminals, all except Nebraska kill inmates with a three-drug combination that initially puts them to sleep, then paralyzes them, and finally induces cardiac arrest. (Nebraska continued to electrocute inmates until the method was declared cruel and unusual by the Nebraska Supreme Court in 2008.) The history of capital punishment, therefore and paradoxically, reveals the state’s very unease with the punishment, for the history of capital punishment has been a steady if quixotic quest to identify a mode of bringing about death that is supposedly more humane than its predecessor—until at last the legislature concludes that the taking of human life is inherently cruel, regardless of the method by which the sanction is carried out. Our system of crime and punishment has progressed, so to speak, from stark brutality, to more nuanced bruality, to the recognition that all intentional homicide is brutal, to abolition.

Hugo’s protagonist says that the public see nothing but the execution, and doubtless think that for the condemned there is nothing anterior or subsequent! Hugo is no theologian. We therefore cannot learn from him whether there is indeed anything subsequent. His interest is in the anterior (and,

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