On Hiding the Guillotine

It’s hard to know what to make of this book, but it is undoubtedly interesting and will be of use to both activists in favor of prison abolition and theorists of state power.

Part of the problem is that the book is very French. Of course, French historical writing is immensely important and French historians have a lot to offer, but the style is notably different than that of Anglo-American historians. While Anglo-American historians generally present their arguments upfront and then dive into a variety of cases to corroborate their arguments, French historical writing tends to be a bit more subtle. They tend to be quite argumentative, but the arguments are implicit and there is more opportunity for readers to draw their conclusion. Trained in the Anglo-American tradition, I really prefer the former, but I understand why others like the latter.

This book is a study of how public executions “disappeared” in France. The last public execution took place in June 1939, after which President Edouard Daladier issued a decree banning public executions. Taïeb’s question is effectively: Why?

This study is largely an examination of newspaper articles that cover executions (virtually all of which were public) and they attitudes they had towards the death penalty. In the period covered (1870-1939), French authorities issued 566 death sentences, although their willingness to do so (as well as the public’s reception of them) changed over time. For instance, on the high end, there were 25 executions in 1873 and 22 or 23 in 1922, and 20 in 1923. On the low end, the French state executed zero people in 1902, 1904, and 1906-08.

Prior historians have had a wide variety of views on why public executions came to an end in France and other countries. For instance, Pieter Spierenburg argues for the case of the Netherlands that upper-classes and legislative officials came to see public executions as intolerable. While they were necessary to show the power of the state in earlier periods, the stabilization of the Netherlands (paired with widespread acceptance of its legitimacy) meant that it was no longer necessary to make examples of criminals. Michel Foucault, on the other hand, argues in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison that authorities worried about popular unrest by people who saw the state as garnering too much power.

Taïeb’s own argument—from what I can gather—is that the abolition of public executions occurred for two reasons. First, sensibilities among the French people shifted, and many came to believe that it was impossible for “civilized” people to participate in the spectacle of execution (many also argued that the nature of execution itself was barbaric, but 21st century critics of this view point to the United States as a “civilized” nation as an example of a “civilized” place that still largely accepts execution). Second, the removal of executions from the public sphere was part of a privatization process that consumed 20th century French society more broadly—essentially, the private sphere became increasingly prominent.

That said, Taïeb emphasizes that “public” executions did not come to a complete end. Although residents could no longer watch beheadings on the street, they could listen to descriptions on the radio, read about them in the newspaper, and, starting in the 1950s, straight-up watch executions on TV. The only type of execution that was not permitted to be aired on primetime television was beheading.

This is an interesting read, but I would have liked Taïeb do more to foreground debates about the abolition of public execution. The book leans heavily into theoretical debates over state sovereignty, the public/private sphere, and theatricality. This is all important, but I’m not sure that these aspects are the most important story here.