“Now I am captive. My body is fettered in a cell, my brain imprisoned in a fixed idea, and dreadful, bloody, and merciless it is! I now have but one thought, a lone conviction and a single certainty: that I am condemned to death! ‘Condemned to death’ howled the crowd; and as I was being led away the entire room rushed after me with the roar of a building collapsing while I walked as if drunk and drugged. I had suffered a sea change. 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.”
When a man dies not by nature or accident but by decree, knowing and waiting for that moment, what becomes of that man? What becomes of society?
The fear is overwhelming. It grips the reader as the fateful day approaches. Written expertly in the first person, giving an urgency to the prose, it is simple and eloquent. I found myself empathizing with the unknown man. And how could I not? I was completely absorbed in his harsh reality, my heart racing, head pounding. It’s an instinctive reaction — survival. The inhumanity of society is abhorrent if it punishes in this way and Hugo makes you feel disgusted and appalled at what is about to happen. And to a guilty man! We do not know what crime has been committed but it is clear that he is not innocent. Hugo does not distract the reader with the crime. It is irrelevant. This is a story of punishment. The issue is the death sentence alone.
“The Last Day of a Condemned Man” is a miniature distillation of Hugo’s beliefs and his imagination. The French author was only 27 when he wrote it, and he was sickened by his country’s continuing love affair with the guillotine, the engine of death. He saw the death penalty as not only cruel and gruesome but stupid; he rages at the lack of reason behind it. Hugo gives convincing arguments as to why the death penalty is not only crude and inhumane but also ludicrous and farcical. Who is truly being punished? It’s a sociological and ethical tour de force. Originally published in 1829, this novella was deeply shocking to the French at that time and its effect has not diminished.
‘Either the man you punish has no family, no relatives, no ties that bind him in this world. In which case he has received no schooling, no education, no attention has been paid to his heart or his mind; therefore by what right do you kill this hapless orphan? You punish him because he has been dragged up, untrained and unsupported! His destiny is the culprit, and not he. You punish an innocent man! Or else the man has a family — in which case, do you believe that to slit his throat wounds him alone? ... once again, you punish innocents.’
