by Victor Serge
Dawn broke amid violent disorders, amid the cadenced cries of Murderers! Murderers! doubtless echoed—but with a profound feeling of being the righteous ones at last—by murderers standing in the darkness of their cells behind the bars of the Santé Prison. Pointless scuffles sent the police charging furiously into the crowd. At long intervals pistol shots rang out, spreading general panic and private joy. People ran off, shouting: “A cop got hit …” Slender young women—perhaps nothing more than overgrown girls, with scarves around their necks—eyed the soldiers, their hands resting heavy on their rifles near the arms depots: “Would you shoot at us?” Some of them answered calmly: “Of course!”; others murmured: “Never”; still others turned their dark faces away and grumbled: “What the Hell!” Dawn came up. We saw nothing, except for a whitish tinge which appeared indistinctly at the end of the boulevard above the waves of heads in the jagged foliage of the treetops. We did not hear the rumble of the car from which the condemned man emerged, half-naked, shivering, furious, desperate, alive, horribly alive in every ganglia of his brain, in every fiber of his nervous system. He shouted out his innocence, a macabre joke which no one understood among the guilty men lined up around the scaffold who represented the social mechanism behind Dr. Guillotin’s philanthropic machine. He appeared like a phantom among the concerns of pathetic, respectable people—appeared and disappeared, in a rapid movement of the seesaw plank, ending in the double fall: the still-thinking head with wide-open eyes falling into the basket, and the thick stream of warm blood falling onto the pavement of the boulevard, where someone had sprinkled a little sand as a precaution. None of us—the crowd—saw it with our own eyes; but at the exact moment we all had, more or less clearly, the same inner vision. I remember the pallor which suddenly spread over everybody’s face, the lips turning blue, the clamor which suddenly spread its huge dark wings over us and over the city, the fury in our chests—the collective feeling of the blade’s fall.
In Paris, every traveler approaching that end spends the last stage of his journey in the light-colored cells (the one I was in was painted iron-gray) of the Maximum Security section.
A sign over the door:
“Twenty-four-hour surveillance.”
Every five minutes the round “eye” cut into the Judas blinks its metal eyelid; a human eye glows within it, rests impassively for a moment on the condemned man. In the cell, nothing. The rough pottery bowl in which, in other cells, you can wash your face with cool water, is forbidden. The blunt iron penknife you used to be able to buy for three sous at the prison store is forbidden. Forbidden is the milk bottle which might be used to knock out a guard or, broken, provide a liberating piece of sharp glass to open your veins. The condemned man changes his clothes when he arrives there: the first stage in dressing the victim for the slaughter. I once caught a glimpse of a young comrade returning from court after being convicted. His hair had just been shaved off; his “civilian” clothes formed a dark pile on the tile floor. Fitted out in old denim worn through at the elbows and knees, his arms dangling, slow tears making perpendicular stripes down his lifeless face, he was staring stupidly at that patch of dark cloth at his feet …
Isolation is even more complete in Maximum Security. No more chance meetings during exercise period. The cell door is hardly ever open at the same moment as another. A guard unlocks it; the condemned man, wearing carpet slippers, finds a pair of wooden shoes (rarely his size) at his doorstep. Three paces away, the guard who is to accompany him is waiting. At the end of the corridor, the guard who watches the door leading to the exercise yards. Three pairs of eyes.
The electricity is always left on and burns dully in the middle of the ceiling and in the middle of the sleepless prisoner’s insomniac brain. His vague thoughts and nightmares flutter around the incandescent platinum wire until fatigue carries him off.
Almost no graffiti. A scratching, almost level with the floor, hidden, mysterious: Antoine, guillotined on … No date!
Death is perhaps the most natural of punishments; it is everywhere in nature. For the swimmer’s recklessness, the mountaineer’s false step, man’s duel against the tiger in the jungle, his longer duel against cold, hunger, the universe, she permits no other sanction than this—at once the first, and the ultimate one. The death penalty is perhaps the most human of punishments in two profound senses of the word. First, because men, for millennia—thus distinguishing themselves from the animals—have made daily use of it, clan against clan, tribe against tribe, city against city, state against state, society against society. The Thou shalt not kill of the Decalogue—in the laconic simplicity of its truncated text— is a vulgar lie. No one ever really thinks it. The moral law has always been: Thou shalt not kill thy brother in the tribe, the city, the nation or class, and it has always been completed by another imperative, no less categorical: Thou shalt kill the man of the other tribe, the other city, the other nation, the other class! It is also the most human because it cuts short all suffering. On this last point, modern civilization has arrived at a rather paradoxical refinement in cruelty. Just as it counts on fully exploiting the capacity of poor devils, goaded by hunger, to work, so it counts on the will of prisoners to live. Often, then, society, with calculating, hypocritical sentimentality, prefers life sentences—which death alone ends, as a rule, after long years of torture—to the death penalty. Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland lock up their “worst” criminals for life. France and Germany grant a pardon to certain condemned men by commuting their sentence to life imprisonment—worse, in reality, than death. A great French lawyer who had earned a reputation for chivalry during the Dreyfus Affair, once proposed abolishing the death sentence and replacing it with “six years of absolute solitary confinement,” six years’ dreadful seclusion, six years of marching through the darkness toward inevitable madness and death! The mailed fist smashing into a skull is no more cruel, in itself, than any act of war—and many acts of peace. It is less so, to judge by the quantity of suffering and death inflicted, than that of the shrewd businessman who, through a lucky speculation in coal, brings about a rise in price of three sous a hundredweight that will cause the deaths of a few hundred paupers’ children in the metropolis before the end of winter.
An act is only as good as the end pursued and the result obtained. Masked or thinly veiled, from time immemorial, they have needed to use the death penalty against us—the working people. We, too, need it, to put an end to all this! Murder will close the circle of murder; for a war can only be ended by a victory; for only the victors can be liberators—having liberated themselves. In the class war, which is like the other kind but stripped of hypocrisy, the greatest humanity must be combined with the most decisive use of force. The class that wants to build a new world, forever cleansed of killing machines, must learn how to kill in battle so as not to be killed. But it must learn as well—along with all those who turn resolutely toward the future—to abolish a past which has put such arms into its hands, to abolish the refined, useless, senseless, gratuitous cruelty of death inflicted by an “act of justice” on guilty men who are sometimes brutes, usually unlucky wretches, sometimes rebels (that is to say, the most ardent of men), and always the inevitable products of the normal workings of society, always victims paying a ransom for others …
Nothing, in an opulent and solid society, justifies that abominable thing: the solemn execution, on a set day, at a fixed hour, after complicated formalities, of a miserable wretch who has been kept for sixty or a hundred days in an iron-gray cell in the Maximum Security section, alone with the guillotine blade, that cold line on the back of the neck. You can understand Danton calling for the September massacres.
You can understand the Russian Revolution, encircled like the French Revolution in the past, slaughtering several hundred or several thousand bourgeois on the day when Lenin fell bloody at its feet. You can understand the Third French Republic coldly shooting down thirty thousand defeated Communards; their magnificent blood has not been lost—all debts
will be paid. That is the price at which we learn the laws of class war. They hold the secret of a different victory: But your death, Antoine-with-no-name of the Fifth Division, guillotined on an unknown date, seems to me to be something monstrously and ferociously useless.
Totally useless, surrounded by complicated ceremonies, the application of “capital” punishment to the worst victims on the losing side of the social struggle raises the whole system of penitentiary repression to the height of ancestral savagery. The guillotine (elsewhere, the ax, the noose, the garrote, the electric chair—different equipment) adds a symbol of steely clarity to prison. Jail is a machine for grinding up lives slowly. The blade’s lightning efficiency grinds better. Modern jails are perfect. Any scaffold, even the most primitive, is perfect. The very permanence of jails and scaffolds testifies to their necessity, and at the same time, to their eternal impotence. They will last as long as the class war in which only one victory can be definitive: that of the destroyers of jails and scaffolds. Your death at an unknown date, Antoine-with-no-name, only shows that you have been treated with all the rigor of the class war—you, who probably never devoted a moment’s thought to it.
Once, while returning from a visit with my lawyer, I happened to meet a comrade who was being kept in that deathly part of the prison. M*** was a tall, thin fellow with a long, drab face, a narrow, receding forehead, and flat temples. There was barely a spark of life left in his dull eyes, which were as lusterless as slack water; his face prefigured the guillotine grimace. He was too simpleminded to fool himself. His face barely responded to my greeting: His pupils widened, his eyelids arched; but he raised his long, pale, sharp right hand to the level of his neck and imitated the fall of the knife.
He lived with that anticipation. He greeted its image in a comrade’s face. When he walked, the shadow of two uprights crossed by a slanting blade fell before him. His anticipation was not deceived.
When I think of the men I have known well who were devoured by that expectation, the memory of meeting this one, the weakest among them and the most ravaged, rises up to greet me silently with that grave, almost ritual gesture. That gesture: the same one which, years before, during a dawn of execution which became a dawn of rioting, I saw traced by that skinny kid, surrounded by a circle of women in the misty halo of a street lamp …
They were five or six in the Maximum Security cells—men of savage strength whose hard, mocking expressions were familiar to me—alone with certain or probable death. They were living as one lives—but better, with more intelligence and will. One of them, with the face of a serious schoolboy and the nature of an impulsive child, divided his hours between calming studies, the orderly daydreams he mistook for thoughts, gymnastic exercises, ablutions—and the long, long walks of the caged man turning, taciturn, around his cage in the dizzying apprehension of losing his head at the end of the road. Nevertheless, the stubborn, unreasonable hope of living still grew within him with such youthful ardor that it was physically impossible for him to think of dying. At the moment when death appeared certain to him, he turned crimson and all the blood rushed to his brain, bathing it in the horrible intoxication of an ultimate act of will. From that first plunge of the guillotine blade right up to the real one, he maintained his self-control, repressing his terror. A fine-looking man, whom I had known less than a year earlier at the height of mature self-awareness, appeared before me on the way out of his death cell. He looked twenty years older, his face deeply lined, feverish, his velvet-brown eyes concealing wild panic under a façade of strained self-control. Innocent, his neck was to feel no other knife blow than that of a death sentence dragging on and on until the day of his “pardon.” Defendants in the same trial, we were given the surprise of a chance meeting during a transfer. And I saw how those who felt they were on the road to the guillotine already bore its distinctive mark in their eyes, on their brow, in the fold of their lips, in the jerky movements of their bony, whitened, nervous hands …
The iron-gray walls of the Maximum Security section are the most silent of all; but since the prison was built, so many tortured souls have bruised their pitiful wings against the sterility and indifference, brightness and hardness of these walls that the mere thought of it makes you feel their torture going on and on, while one by one their names are lost, without meaning, in the crowd. The same suffering writhes endlessly within these same walls, perpetual from year to year, whatever the names and numbers of its momentary bearers. They relay each other, passing on from hand to hand—not the torch of antiquity—but their severed heads with blinking eyes.
“Tomorrow.”
All I saw through the Judas were two rounded eyes under arched eyebrows. The sharp voice whispered but one word:
“Tomorrow.”
Tomorrow, what? The four iron-gray walls answer me with their heavy silence. The pages of the old Bible lying open on my table seem to fade, fade … What is it that suddenly changes the hue of the walls? As if the sun—but there is no sun—were setting … Where does this sudden cold come from—and this feeling of tension in the neck? I am not condemned to die … “Tomorrow.”
The three sharp whispered syllables will pass from cell to cell. Or the arc of raised eyebrows will pass on their meaning. Or a strange tapping will be heard in the wall. Or the guards will hurry as they make their rounds. Noises, signs, glances, a feeling. All these warnings will cease at the doorstep of one locked cell, but the man within will understand; and if he nonetheless falls asleep tonight, it’s because he has known too far in advance, for too many long hours. His troubled sleep, broken by starts, will become calm sixty minutes before dawn, only to be interrupted forty minutes later. The administration estimates twenty minutes as the time necessary to carry out the death ceremony.
Condemned men receive a kind of special treatment. To prevent them from sinking into madness or committing suicide in spite of every precaution, guards or Sûreté agents keep them company. They play cards together. They never speak of that. But it is all they think about. And the condemned man learns from his partner’s distraction, from a slight unusual pallor, from the tremor of a hand which accidentally touches his, that it’s tomorrow.
A sharp whistle, coming from the outside, sometimes warns him.
One of them asked his guard one evening:
“It’s tomorrow, right?”
The guard, flabbergasted, tried to deny it.
“Don’t be afraid,” calmly replied the head destined to fall less than ten hours later. “I know. And they can all go to hell! Understand?”
Tomorrow.
Tonight the whole prison is listening anxiously. Hundreds of chests are holding in their breath. Brains grow feverish in a communion—perhaps only the contagion of a disease—of the fever of one crazed brain— soon to be a bit of gray stuff, bloodless, rotting slowly—living only in anticipation of death.
Long before the time comes, bare feet make their way toward the locked cell doors in the darkness or pale nocturnal light. Through the cracks in closed Judases the eyes of many brothers in suffering will try to glimpse the man leaving on his ultimate voyage.
Some will perceive—for the space of an instant—a confused image which will remain stamped on their memories forever:
Indistinct silhouettes: shadows, képis. Him: a gray profile, deep sockets. In shirtsleeves. Held by the elbow, dragged along, almost carried, fainting perhaps, bewildered. Him.
Then the bars of the window will turn dark against the pale sky and the numbness of chilling dejection.
TWELVE
The Souricière and the Conciergerie
I WAS INTERROGATED DURING FOUR OR FIVE HALF-HOUR SESSIONS, OVER A period of twelve months, before being sent into criminal court under various indictments, adding up more or less to a ticket on a convict ship headed for Guiana. Prisoners with plenty of money go to their pretrial examinations in a taxi, accompanied by plainclothes policemen. Photographers from the big papers try to catch them on the courthouse steps. They wear ties an
d detachable collars. They are called “gentlemen.” Penniless prisoners are dragged suddenly out of their cells in ragged clothing and bustled into the filthy compartments of the Black Maria. These are known as “guys” or “mugs.”
After being locked up for months, the trip in the Black Maria and the duel of interrogation—where a man at bay confronts a crafty hunter lying in wait on the opposite side of a desk, ready to catch his victim off guard, aiming a sudden, unexpected question like a rifle shot—constitute real events …
The noise of the car rolling over cobblestones or asphalt. Street noises—the quiet streets around the Santé Prison, whose calm is disturbed only occasionally by an odd passing car, then the bustle of the main boulevard with its countless human and mechanical voices. The feeling of passing, stiff in a vertical coffin, through a street where you often walked with a free and lively step. Peering avidly through the air filter, yearning desperately at the fleeting sight of a female passerby—heart clenched, fists clenched. The moving screen of a trolley car.
