French Senator and former French Minister of Justice Robert Badinter spoke in Gaston Hall on Wednesday to honor 19th-century writer Victor Hugo’s commitment in fighting the death penalty.
Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Ruth Bader Ginsburg introduced Badinter. She listed many of the senator’s accomplishments, such as his position as president of the Constitutional Council of the French Republic and his work in human rights advocacy.
“While Hugo is renowned for his literary genius, the French writer also had a lifelong opposition to the death penalty,” Badinter said. He began by noting that Hugo was a man who, unlike many other people, became less conservative with age. Despite all the changes in his life, he remained staunchly adverse to the death penalty.
Badinter noted that Hugo saw the practice of execution in the light of a class struggle. Badinter quoted Hugo, “`I have tirelessly fought to stop the assault of those above on those below.” The writer’s opinions were not just based on ideals – as Hugo had witnessed several executions in his life. One that stayed with him in particular, according to Badinter, was that of an 18-year-old girl who had stolen a single handkerchief.
Hugo’s approach to fighting the death penalty was different from both those who preceded him and his contemporaries, in Badinter’s view.
Hugo went beyond the use of intellectual discussion to make his point. “He decided that he would put the reader in the condition of a man who was sentenced to death and is waiting for his execution,” Badinter said. An example of this is Hugo’s novel The Last Day of the Condemned.
Hugo felt sympathy for those who committed crimes because he believed that crimes were a result of miserable conditions, Badinter said. He also noted that Hugo’s son, Charles, shared his father’s convictions. After writing an article about an execution by guillotine that was not effective in one drop of the blade, Charles was brought to court on charges of not respecting the law. Badinter added that Charles brought his father with him to plead on his behalf. Though not acquitted, Charles Hugo’s jail time was significantly reduced.
The senator said that the guillotine in Hugo’s novels took on a life of its own. It became “an evil, monstrous beast,” taking on a representation of the death penalty itself. Literature, however, was not Hugo’s only means of expression. Whenever he found out that an execution was to take place or if someone ever requested his help, Hugo immediately took action by giving speeches and writing letters. Badinter said Hugo came to the aid of American abolitionist John Brown when he was sentenced to death.
What made Hugo’s efforts so remarkable, according to Badinter, is the continuity of his struggle. His work was constant and always done with passion. Badinter said that Hugo never had doubts about his position, even when the person sentenced had committed atrocious crimes. “`For me, the assassin is no longer an assassin, the arsonist no longer an arsonist, and the thief no longer a thief. He is a quivering human being who is about to die,'” Badinter said while quoting Hugo’s work.
Later in Hugo’s life, he became a senator, always sitting as far to the left as possible, Badinter said. His final political move was presenting a proposal for abolishing the death penalty in which he wrote, “happy is he of whom it one day may be said in leaving this world he took with him the death penalty.”
Though Hugo was alive when executions were banned in cases of political crime in France, it would be years after his death that the practice was entirely abolished in his country. In fact, Senator Badinter was deeply involved in the anti-death penalty movement that finally made Hugo’s hope a reality.
The event, “Victor Hugo and the Death Penalty,” was sponsored by Georgetown’s BMW Center for German and European Studies, the Department of French, the Alliance Francaise of Washington, D.C., and the Cultural Services of the Embassy of France. The lecture marked the bicentennial of Hugo’s birth.