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.