Aristotle recognized the virtues of adversity. Translated and annotated, this warning was taken up by Horace: “Adversity has the gift of awakening talents that would have remained dormant in prosperity.” Centuries later, Arnold Toynbee echoed this sentiment in his monumental Study of History. Marking events like a novel, and in fact prompting Thucydides to write the first history of the West, wars and revolutions reflect violence, a human necessity that often has unforeseen effects, whether useful or pleasant. The Aeneid recounts one: the mythical founding of Rome. Another, not at all mythical, gives us a glimpse, through Ambroise Paré, of the dawn of modern surgery. And among countless technological advances, consider this one: given the urgency to decipher the Nazi Enigma code, the British developed the first analog computer. From there also, seemingly unusual, is the kinship outlined by René Girard between violence and the sacred; a strangeness that disappears when we remember sacrificial rituals. Like wars and revolutions, religions and their rituals repeat and reconnect: drinking the blood of Christ and eating his flesh in the communion of bread and wine; killing him over and over again, giving him the three nails and the crown of thorns, even though he died for us or perhaps because he died for us. There are also sacrifices whose violence, highly personal and intimate, leaves indelible expressions in poetry, music, and art. For a century and a half, Van Gogh’s ear has not been lost from view, sacrificed in vain by Rachel, bloody cartilage that has bequeathed to us, like a Christ in a movingly human dimension, the self-portrait of the earless man.
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A famous executioner of the revolution, a profession he inherited from his grandparents and passed on to his children, forming a parallel bloody dynasty that was ultimately more powerful than that of the Louis, which he brought to an end by guillotining the 16th, Chevalier Charles-Henri Sanson de Longval—I dare not cut his name—made his debut in the quartering of Damiens. As part of the rigorous torture that preceded the execution, the prisoner was burned; his right hand, the one that wielded the knife to attack the king, was burned with sulfur; and boiling oil, molten lead, and molten oil and sulfur were meticulously poured onto his nipples, arms, thighs, and calves, which had been clamped with pincers. After the torture, he was handed over to Sanson, who castrated him and then harnessed the horses that were supposed to carry out the task.
To the uproar of the crowd, the horses tore off his arms; however, after many efforts to free his legs, and despite the use of two other horses, they were unable to reduce his torso to a pile of wood. This was done with a knife. After he was effectively dismembered, he was declared dead. But that was not the end of the story: he was still alive. It was decided to gather up the pieces of flesh, bone, and coagulated blood that remained and take them to the stake, as the sentence demanded. What little remained of Robert-François Damiens, reduced to ashes, was scattered to the wind.
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For centuries, such a slow and cruel punishment had been criticized. Montaigne, for example, laments in the third book of the Essays that we injuriously dismember a living man. But it was only after the spectacle in the Place de Grève, which lasted several hours, that a change in executions was demanded, for their harshness and duration had weakened the strength of all those involved, the horses as much as the victim and the executioners. To alleviate the suffering of the condemned and make the process more efficient, the mechanics had to be more dynamic. The solution was not long in coming. Chance and necessity opportunely provided a useful and prophetic alternative: sharp and extremely fast, the guillotine not only alleviated the suffering of the condemned but also speeded up the executions, as if anticipating the urgency of bringing the death penalty into an industrial phase.
[Cover image: French Punishment (G. 48) (ca. 1824-1828), by Francisco de Goya]
