The Unruly Emotions of the Execution Crowd and its Critics in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century France

Abstract

From the 1860s to the 1910s, a host of commentators sounded off on the degraded spectacle of the public execution in France. They had little to say about the violence of capital punishment as such. The problem that haunted them was the crowd that gathered around the guillotine. In these years the execution crowd was a mystery and an obsession, the object of literary surveillance, parliamentary inquiry, scientific study, and journalistic examination. These commentators saw a crowd without dignity, a crowd full of unhealthy emotions, a crowd of morbid curiosity and misplaced revelry. Who was this crowd? What emotions did its participants feel at the spectacle of punishment? And what can this story tell us about the public execution – or, more generally, the public – in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France? The outcry over the execution crowd reveals more about the commentators than about the crowd. The guiding emotions of these commentators had little to do with empathy, civilization or distaste for violent punishment; they had everything to do with disgust for the crowd on the streets and fears of the public in a new age of mass culture.