Never Equal before Death: Three Experiences of Dying as Seen Through Eighteenth-Century French Executions

Abstract

Criminal justice and public executions have been an important subject of research for historians over the last 50 years, as the history of mentalities met historical anthropology and the figures proposed by social history were joined to the concepts of ceremony, rituals and rites of passage. The important studies of Richard Evans and Richard van Dülmen for Germany, and Pieter Spierenburg for the Netherlands, have paved the way for a comprehensive analysis of the phenomenon of capital punishment, its rituals, their audiences and most of the actors concerned with its staging.¹ Usually, when the abolition of the death penalty is not the focus, studies are elaborated with the development of the modern state, the civilising process and the refinement of sensibilities in mind. Numerous studies have radicalised the views of Max Weber and Norbert Elias, presenting the development of an industrial and rational civilisation as an almost continuous progress of the pressure maintained by a moral and religious civilising project.2 Between prohibition and transgression, between the city and the countryside, a few minor exceptions were part of a relatively linear history. We might then ask to what extent it is possible to write a history of capital punishment without considering its future abolition or the numerous forms of opposition to it. Is it possible to investigate the capacity to act of the criminals put to death by justice? Is it pertinent to study their experience as the starting point of a new cultural history of criminal justice?