All the Living and the Dead: A Personal Investigation Into the Death Trade

by Hayley Campbell

Paul Friedland writes in his book Seeing Justice Done: The Age of Spectacular Capital Punishment in France that this image we have of an executioner as an agent of the law, someone whose job it is to carry out a sentence handed down from above, is a relatively modern idea purposely put in place by Enlightenment reformers who were trying to construct a different kind of penal system – one that was rational and bureaucratic, one that dispersed responsibility, and therefore blame, among many cogs in a vast system. Prior to this, in France at least, the executioner was considered an extraordinary being, an outcast, a universally reviled person ‘whose touch was so profane that he could not come into contact with other people or objects without profoundly altering them’.