Larra’s Phantasmagoria: The Spectacle of Execution in Early Parliamentary Spain

Abstract

In his 1835 article “Un reo de muerte,” Mariano José de Larra decries both the death penalty and a “free” society that would gather to watch the spectacle. This article examines the cultural and legal underpinnings of Larra’s critique, focusing on references to the phantasmagoria, whose deathly displays advanced a model of spectatorship important to understanding the transition from the Enlightenment to new political and representational realities in Spain. Larra’s frustration reflects ill-fated reforms such as the Código Penal de 1822, rooted in the work of Beccaria and Bentham, which would have limited capital punishment but which ultimately gave way to crowded public executions. Larra uses the press, where executions were publicized, to condemn a spectacle that hid moral and political dangers behind the conventions of popular entertainment. Thus what was in earlier articles a more disengaged irony towards the público and its viewing tendencies becomes in “Un reo de muerte” the basis of an awakening in which public executions represent the persistence of tyranny in Spain and the phantasmagoria represents spectatorship in its most sinister and critical guise.