UC Irvine FlashPoints Title Capital Letters: Hugo, Baudelaire, Camus, and the Death Penalty Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0r30h8pt ISBN 9780810141537 Author Morisi, Eve Publication Date 2020 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Capital Letters The FlashPoints series is devoted to books that consider literature beyond strictly national and disciplinary frameworks, and that are distinguished both by their historical grounding and by their theoretical and conceptual strength. Our books engage theory without losing touch with history and work historically without falling into uncritical positivism. FlashPoints aims for a broad audience within the humanities and the social sciences concerned with moments of cultural emergence and transformation. In a Benjaminian mode, FlashPoints is interested in how liter- ature contributes to forming new constellations of culture and history and in how such formations function critically and politically in the present. Series titles are available online at http://escholarship.org/uc/flashpoints. series editors: Ali Behdad (Comparative Literature and English, UCLA), Edi- tor Emeritus; Judith Butler (Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley), Editor Emerita; Michelle Clayton (Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature, Brown University); Edward Dimendberg (Film and Media Studies, Visual Studies, and European Languages and Studies, UC Irvine), Founding Editor; Catherine Gallagher (English, UC Berkeley), Editor Emerita; Nouri Gana (Comparative Lit- erature and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA); Susan Gillman (Lit- erature, UC Santa Cruz), Coordinator; Jody Greene (Literature, UC Santa Cruz); Richard Terdiman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz), Founding Editor A complete list of titles begins on p. 267. Capital Letters Hugo, Baudelaire, Camus, and the Death Penalty Ève Morisi northwestern university press | evanston, illinois Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2020 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2020. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Morisi, Ève, author. Title: Capital letters : Hugo, Baudelaire, Camus, and the death penalty / Ève Morisi. Other titles: FlashPoints (Evanston, Ill.) Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2020. | Series: Flashpoints | Identifiers: LCCN 2019018289 | ISBN 9780810141513 (paper text : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810141520 (cloth text : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810141537 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Capital punishment in literature. | French literature—19th century— History and criticism. | French literature—20th century—History and criticism. | Hugo, Victor, 1802–1885—Criticism and interpretation. | Baudelaire, Charles, 1821–1867—Criticism and interpretation. | Camus, Albert, 1913–1960—Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC PQ295.C35 M67 2020 | DDC 840.9/3556—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019018289 To my mother Elle pouvait rester à la hauteur de n’importe quelle lumière. —Albert Camus, La Peste Contents Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations and Translations xiii Introduction: Three Writers and a Punishment 3 Part I. New Abolitionist Poetics: Hugo’s LE DERNIER JOUR D’UN CONDAMNÉ 15 Chapter 1. The Death Penalty, from Representation to Expression 21 Chapter 2. Pain and Punishment: The Guillotine’s Torture 45 Part II. Words That Kill in Baudelaire 67 Chapter 3. Prose Praising Sacrifice: Hugo, Maistre, and Beyond 73 Chapter 4. Poeticized Slaughter? Execution in Les Fleurs du mal 103 Part III. Camus’s Capital Fiction and Literary Responsibility 129 Chapter 5. Ad nauseam: Camus’s Narrative Roads to Abolitionism 135 Chapter 6. Poetic Accountability: Critical Language and Its Limits 165 Conclusion 207 Notes 215 Works Cited 239 Index 253 Acknowledgments Writing a book on a grim subject in a foreign language makes unorig- inal yet true statements all the more necessary: this monograph, which was several years in the making, could not have been completed without the help of colleagues, friends, and family members. Thanks are first due to Göran Blix and Bertrand Marchal, two super- visors who were academic models throughout my graduate years, and to two exceptional mentors, Suzanne Nash and Sarah Kay. Together, they shaped my work and experience as a doctoral student for the better. Until 2011, the Department of French and Italian at Princeton Uni- versity, Princeton’s University Center for Human Values and Graduate School, the Phi Beta Kappa Society, the Université Paris IV–Sorbonne, the Cité du Livre and Fonds Albert Camus in Aix-en-Provence, the Camus family, and Robert Badinter provided various forms of support for which I am grateful. My appreciation also goes to my former peers at Princeton for their friendship during these formative years, and in particular to Katherine Brown, Sandra Field, Brian Jacobs, Yann Rob- ert, Milla Vidina, and Eliza Zingesser. I am deeply thankful to Susan Gillman, Gianna Mosser, and Richard Terdiman for showing interest in this project and for bearing with me with exemplary patience, helpfulness, and professionalism. A small number of people read this manuscript in its entirety. Eliza Zingesser went over the very first versions of these chapters and has been a most faithful partner in crime since 2006. With salutary honesty, ix x ❘  Acknowledgments David Carroll provided detailed feedback and identified key ways in which the book should be amended. Dick Terdiman also made instru- mental suggestions and provided encouragement as I attempted to edit the manuscript. At a critical time, Roger Pearson advised me with the thoughtfulness of a true gentleman. To these giving readers, who offered guidance when it was most needed, I owe a substantial debt. My appreciation also goes to the two anonymous reviewers ap- pointed by Northwestern University Press for their judicious and be- nevolent advice; to Haun Saussy, for his astute comments on the book proposal; and to Jean-Paul Avice, baudelairien hors pair, who always answered my questions with precision and generosity—as well as deli- cious lasagna. Both in the Department of French at the University of St Andrews and in the Department of European Languages and Studies at the Uni- versity of California, Irvine, I was fortunate to work alongside inspiring, intellectually challenging, and big-hearted colleagues—also true friends. I owe them my understanding of what the academic profession should be: Anke Biendarra, Suzanne Bolding, Daniel Brunstetter, Ellen Burt, David Carroll, Birte Christ, David Evans, Kai Evers, Herschel Farb- man, Franca Hamber, Gail Hart, Odile Heberlé, Élise Hugueny-Léger, Margaret-Ann Hutton, Élodie Laügt, Glenn Levine, Robin MacKenzie, Maryse Mijalski, Jane Newman, Carrie Noland, David Pan, Julia Prest, John Smith, and †Oliver Smith. More recently, my colleagues at St Hugh’s College and the French Sub-faculty at Oxford have offered a welcoming community in which to work. In and outside of this new home institution, special thanks are due to the whole team of modernists at Oxford and to my friends Ge- neviève Adams, Annette Becker, Brigitte Burel, Naomi Davidson, Margit Dirscherl, Jean Giraud, Sébastien Greppo, Mike Holland, Ann Jeffer- son, Antoine Jérusalem, Chantal Marazia, Maria Pavlova, Xavier Rous- seaux, Tom Sanders, Erin Saupe—without whose generous help the book cover that I had in mind would never have come to life—and Seth Whidden for their warmth and good humor over the past few years. I also thank the Paris Institute for Advanced Study for allowing me to work at the Hôtel de Lauzun for part of the summer of 2016, the Humanities Division of the University of Oxford for an award from the REF Strategic Research Assistance Fund that enabled me to benefit from editorial assistance to complete the monograph, Charlotte Wathey for her editorial work, and Simon Wedge and Paul Wakeling for the critical help they provided at the end of this journey. Acknowledgments ❘ xi Parts of this book have previously appeared in journals and edited volumes. I am grateful to the relevant publishers for permission to reuse this material. Chapter 1 appeared in Death Sentences: Literature and State Killing, edited with Birte Christ (Oxford: Legenda, 2019). Earlier versions of chapters 4 and 5 respectively appeared as “‘Poésie-bouche- rie’: Baudelaire’s Aesthetics and Ethics of Execution,” in Thinking Po- etry: Philosophical Approaches to Nineteenth-Century French Poetry, edited by Joseph Acquisto (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and “La Peine de mort dans les romans de Camus: Motif, mythe, éthique,” in Albert Camus contre la peine de mort (Paris: Gallimard, 2011). Parts of chapter 6 elaborate on ideas presented during conferences on Camus’s theater (Lourmarin, October 2012), on “Unity and Divi- sion” in Europe (UCI, March 2013), and in an essay I was invited to write for La Revue des Lettres Modernes. Série Albert Camus in 2014 (“Baudelaire et Camus: Penser la peine de mort”). Thanks are due to the relevant organizers and editors for giving me the opportunity to develop my thoughts on Camus and the death penalty. * * * Before I even knew of literary criticism, there are those who made me love school, and in particular languages and literature, who didn’t ob- ject to my urge to ask questions, and who provided moral and intellec- tual support: my elementary school teacher †Mademoiselle Papin, to whom I wish I could