We deny that the sight of punishment produces the desired effect. Far from edifying the people, it demoralizes them, it destroys their every feeling, and therefore their every virtue. There are many proofs, but our argument would be overcrowded if we were to cite them. We will mention merely one fact among a thousand, because it is the latest. It occurred ten days previous to the time we are writing. It was March 5th, the last day of the carnival. At Saint-Pol, immediately after the execution of an incendiary named Louis Camus, a group of masked men came and danced around the still reeking scaffold. So, make examples! The Mardi-Gras will laugh in your face!

If, in spite of experience, you still hold to your usual theory of example, then bring back the sixteenth century, be really formidable; bring back the various modes of punishment, bring back Farinacci, bring back the cross-examining juries; bring back the gallows, the wheel, the funeral-pile, the strappado (rack), the cutting-machine, the quartering, the ditch in which people were buried alive, the vat in which they were boiled alive; bring back to every street in Paris, as though it were an open shop among others, the hideous butcher’s stall of the hangman, constantly covered with quivering flesh. Bring back Montfaucon, with its sixteen pillars of stone, its rough sessions, its caves of bones, its motes, its hooks, its chains, its carcasses, its tower of plaster dotted with ravens, its branching gallows, and the odor of dead bodies that the north-east wind wafts in large gusts across the entire Faubourg du Temple. Bring back in its permanence and power this gigantic penthouse of the Paris hangman. Yes! Here is an example indeed. Here is capital punishment that is understood. Here is a system of punishment of some importance. There is something horrible in it, and terrible too.

Or, do as is done in England. In England, which is a commercial country, a smuggler is arrested on the coast of Dover; he is arrested as an example, and as an examples he is left hanging to the gallows; but as the bad air spoils the body, the latter is carefully wrapped in linen which is coated with tar, that it may not have to be renewed very often. O land of economy! To tar those who are hanged!

But, nevertheless, this is somewhat logical. It is the most humane way of understanding the theory of example.

But do you really, seriously believe that you make an example when you wretchedly slaughter a poor man in the most deserted spot of the outside boulevards? On the Grève, in broad daylight, it may pass; but on the square at Saint-Jacques! At eight o’clock in the morning! Who is passing there? Who ever goes by there? Who knows that you are killing a man? For whom is it an example? For the trees of the boulevard apparently.

Do you not see that your public executions are done stealthily? Do you not see that you hide yourselves? That you are afraid and ashamed of your deed? That you stammer absurdly over your discite justitiam moniti? That at heart you are troubled, abashed, restless, less sure of being right, won over by the general doubt, that you are cutting off heads mechanically, without knowing very well what you are doing? Do you not feel in your innermost heart that you have at least lost the moral and social idea of the mission of blood which your predecessors, the old lawmakers, carried out with a quiet conscience? At night, do you not turn your head over on your pillow oftener than they? Others before you have advocated capital punishment; but they believed they were in the right, that it was just and good. Jouvenel des Ursins thought himself a judge; Élie de Thorrette thought himself a judge; Laubardemont, La Reynie, and Laffemas considered themselves judges; you, in your innermost soul, are not sure that you are not assassins!

You leave the Grève for Saint-Jacques, the crowd for solitude, daylight for twilight. You do not carry on openly what you do. You hide, I tell you!

Every reason for capital punishment, then, is overthrown. Every syllogism of the platform is set at naught, all the shavings of a requisition are swept away and reduced to ashes. The slightest touch of logic destroys all poor reasoning.

Let the people of the king no longer come and ask heads from us as jurymen, from us as men, calling on us, in a soft voice, in the name of the society to be protected, the public prosecution to be assured, the examples to be made.

It is all mere rhetoric, bombast, nothing! A prick of a pin on these hyperboles, and you bring down the swelling. Beneath this soft-sounding talk, you find only hardness of heart, cruelty, barbarity, the desire to show one’s zeal, the necessity of gaining one’s salary. Keep silent, mandarins! Beneath the judge’s velvet paw are felt the nails of the hangman.

It is hard to think in cold blood of what a criminal public prosecutor is. He is a man who makes his living by sending others to the scaffold. He is the official purveyor of places like La Grève. He is a gentleman who has some pretension to style and learning; who is a good speaker, or thinks he is; who can recite a Latin verse when necessary, or two, before carrying out a death-sentence; who strives after effect; who interests his amour-propre, O misery! where are involved the lives of others; who has his own models, his desperate types to copy, his classics, his Bellart, his Marchangy, as one poet has Racine or another Boileau. In an argument, he takes the side of the guillotine; this is his role, his province. His requisitory is his literary work; he embellishes it with metaphors, he perfumes it with quotations, it must be beautiful for the audience, and pleasing to the ladies. He has his baggage of commonplaces still new for the province, his fine points of elocution, his expressions, his literary style.

He hates the proper word almost as much as do our tragic poets of Delille’s school.