Over 50 years ago, though I cannot help remarking that the years
seem impossible, Albert Camus remarked to my father — at the time
based in France as a State Department official and Partisan
Review correspondent — that he was at work on an essay on
capital punishment. “Vous êtes contre,” my father said,
anticipating the thinking of a writer whose mind he had studied for
years through his writings and for whose character he had some
feeling, though the two were never close friends. “Bien
entendu,” Camus replied in his reserved way.
Of course I am against, he said. Published at nearly the
same time as he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature,
Camus’s Réflexions sur la guillotine is perhaps the
most famous modern polemic against the death penalty. It marshals
most of the arguments that are lined up every time the topic comes
up; proponents and opponents of state-sanctioned execution of
criminals do little more, with varying degrees of eloquence,
rational coherence, and emotional appeal, than repeat the arguments
Camus made then and that he discussed with some of his friends and
acquaintances as he went to work in 1956 and ‘57 on his classic
piece.
Although, characteristically, Camus’s reflections were
profoundly informed by philosophical training that was deeply
seeped, as befit a man of the Mediterranean, in classical Greek
thought, it comes as no surprise that the decision to address the
subject was motivated by personal anguish. Camus was haunted all
his life, it comes up again in his late writings, by his own
father’s reaction to a public execution. Until after World War II,
French penal authorities had the option of dressing the guillotine,
the head-chopping machine invented during the French Revolution, as
a humane improvement (as indeed it was, though Camus pointed out in
his essay that it did not always work as advertised) over the
methods used in previous times, which were quite deliberately
designed to cause lasting horror in anyone who observed them.
Notwithstanding, Camus’s father, who was no opponent of the death
penalty, was sickened by what he saw and transmitted his aversion
to his son. Camus’s father was killed at the front in September
1914. The memories Camus had of his father were those of very early
childhood only, and he did not mind admitting that the shock caused
by that public execution in Algiers was one of the most
indelible.
In the mid-1950s, Camus was concerned that the execution
— within prison walls by now — of Algerian terrorists
(freedom-fighters by their own lights, or mujahideen, as
they referred to themselves) was politically counter-productive,
quite apart from indefensible on rational grounds. He did not deny
the morality of “an eye for an eye” justice, but he argued that it
never worked out that way. In the spiraling violence in his
country, every shooting of a French policeman, every
search-and-destroy mission against the commando responsible, every
bomb in a European café killing civilians, every retaliatory
dynamiting of a house in the casbah by white vigilantes,
contributed, as Camus well saw, to a situation increasingly
impermeable to any sort of discussion of compromise and reform
between the belligerent parties. He had been pleading for such
discussion since the late 1930s when in his earliest reporting (for
the communist paper Alger-Républicain) he said the unjust
colonial conditions in Algeria, based on self-serving lies
(officially Algeria was not a colony), created a ticking time
bomb.
Camus had zero sympathy for the Algerian national
movement’s terrorist squads — indeed despite his understanding of
his own country, which stood in such glaring contrast to the
armchair lesson-givers in Paris like Sartre who scarcely knew where
the place was, he could summon no sympathy for the Algerian
national movement as such. He viewed it, in a way that could not
help but sound like a right-wing caricature but that was eerily
prescient, variously as a communist and pan-Arabist conspiracy, and
he noted that an Arab Algeria made as much sense as a Berber or a
Maltese or a Jewish one. However, he clung to the hope that men of
good will would be heard above the din and a decent, essentially
federalist, solution might be found. He was sadly mistaken. His own
people nearly lynched him when he came home to argue for a “civil
truce” followed by negotiations.
In this context, Camus saw no useful purpose gained by
executing convicted bomb-throwers and non-uniformed combatants,
which under the laws of war was not illegal, though some of the
methods used by French authorities to win convictions probably
were. Repeatedly, and in complete discretion, he petitioned for
stays and orders of clemency, won a few, lost many. The minister of
justice who often refused them was a hungry young politician named
François Mitterrand, whose position he summed up tersely: “Our
policy is war.” As president of France several decades later,
Mitterrand encouraged his justice minister, the eminent jurist
Robert Badinter, to put through abolitionist legislation, which he
did.
All this does, Camus said, is push the extremists to the
fore. He was right: when the French withdrew after seven ghastly
years of fighting, the most radical nationalists easily took over,
then fell out among themselves, leading to more fighting followed
by the almost inevitable military dictatorship.
Wartime is not peacetime and a society in which the rule
of law and due process are observed is not the same as one torn by
a violent insurgency by have-nots (including have-not any political
or civil rights) against haves (though often very poor haves, as
Camus well knew.) But it is difficult not to see in the painstaking
efforts of our states to apply the ultimate sanction of justice the
pertinence of the issues Albert Camus raised many decades
ago.
Executions on the same day this past week illustrate
Camus’s description of capital punishment as “the longest
pre-meditated murder” in a way he never would have imagined. Troy
Davis, executed by the state of Georgia for a crime committed over
20 years ago, maintained his innocence to the very end, as did
Lawrence Russell Brewer’s execution (by the same method of lethal
injection, said to be painless) by Texas was almost expeditious by
comparison, as the crime for which he, too, rejected responsibility
to the end occurred only 13 years ago.
In referring to state-sanctioned “murder” Camus did not
mean to bring a kind of moral relativism into the discussion. On
the contrary, the classic moralist that he was would have insisted
that killing is killing, and killing when the killed has no
defenses is murder. He would not, he did not, say the state was not
justified in doing this on moral grounds; he never went in for the
false sentimentality of root social causes and the
non-responsibility of the criminal. Beyond such practical issues as
whether or not the death penalty has a deterrent effect (an
unending debate, Camus thought, with some statistical evidence in
support, that it has none), the question is whether a civilized
community, through its state, defends itself effectively by
choosing revenge in its most final and irrevocable form.
Recalling his conversations with Camus, my father said,
“His morality was absolute. He was a man of the Mediterranean and
as such, you know, austere, almost puritanical. He was a kind man,
but strict, severe.”
I assumed they had discussed the Rosenberg’s. “Yes, of
course, that was one of the cases that provoked his reflection. You
know, he was an anti-communist and he was quite able to accept they
had a fair trial. He knew how much damage the atomic espionage
rings caused us, and collaterally France and even — to the degree
he saw the Soviet hand in the Algerian affair — his
home.”
“But he was against.”
“Well, again, he asked what good does it do? Why can’t we,
leaders of the Free World and defenders of civilization, defend
ourselves without this form of punishment? “Voyez,
Kaplan,” he said, “les effets que
les cocos vont en tirer.” See the propaganda
value of this affair to the communists, he meant. And he was right
about that.
My father usually agreed with Camus, while reproaching him
very gently for some of his literary efforts and while objecting to
his cold war positions, which could on occasion be convoluted.
Neither man would have found any compassionate or moral grounds for
staying the sentences against the convicted killers in Georgia and
Texas, though in the case of the former I think both would have
worried about the questions about the evidence that repeatedly were
raised. The author of The Stranger and The
Misunderstanding certainly would have understood the horror of
a casually racist killing and would have noted the historical
significance of the firm stance taken by a Southern state in
responding to it, just as he would have agonized about the lack of
a murder weapon in the Georgia case and the ambiguous
witnesses.
The stances of the families of the victims in both cases
are completely understandable, one can even say admirable and
poignant. There remains this: are we like the Taliban, who give to
the families of victims the final say on whether murderers should
be killed, and the choice of weapons with which to carry out the
sentence?
My father and Albert Camus were believers in progress. But
neither one thought progress is achieved by social engineering or
replacing by means of violent revolution an unfair system with a
theoretically more just one. Their stance was, remains, a difficult
one, perhaps impossible, but courageous. The terrible question of
capital punishment in our country, model of freedom under law in a
flawed and, as Governor Perry says, broken world, reminds us that
humility and skepticism remain necessary counterweights to our
upbeat optimism for the future.
