Les martyrs de la Veuve : Romantisme et peine de mort 1820-1848

Between 1820 and 1848 French literature was permeated with the theme of the death penalty. Condemned characters, guillotines and execution scenes suddenly invaded novels, plays and poetry. This phenomenon was linked in the first instance with the historical context, contemporaries of the Restoration having had their memory and imagination filled with the images of the beheaded figures of the Revolution and the period that followed. Among these, one in particular captured their attention: Louis XVI. This obsession is indicative of an authentic psychological trauma that was both collective and intimate, the revolutionary regicide having been generally perceived as the worst of all imaginable crimes, that of parricide. It is naturally to art and more specifically to literature, then conceived as "the expression of society", that the task fell to rid society of this guilty conscience.

However the emergence of this theme in literature during the 1820's would not have been possible if it had not in the meantime corresponded to the rise of Romanticism. The literary topos of the death penalty indeed offered Romantic authors a challenge to meet, an artistic cause to defend, and brought about the invention of new means of expression suited to render all the violence and all the horror of the executions, an approach that itself implies an aesthetic liberation and a thematic and formal renewal.

Finally the death penalty offered romantic artists a historical cause to fight for, that of the abolition of a punishment they found barbaric and which completely contradicted their ideal of social progress. The omnipresence of this theme in romantic literature is also inseparable from the resurgence of the debate on the question of the abolition of the death penalty that grew from 1820 on, thereby adding to the discussion all of the emotional and suggestive power of artistic representation.