Execution, Sovereignty and Sacrifice

Execution, Sovereignty and Sacrifice:
Balzac’s Un épisode sous la Terreur and El Verdugo
Francesco Manzini
Balzac famously proclaims his reactionary politics in the ‘Avant-propos
de La Comédie humaine’:
J’écris à la lueur de deux Vérités éternelles: la Religion, la
Monarchie, deux nécessités que les événements contemporains
proclament, et vers lesquelles tout écrivain de bon sens doit
essayer de ramener notre pays.1
Twice, in the ‘Avant-propos’, he takes the opportunity to trace these
politics back to the writings of Louis de Bonald (CH I 12–13). Surprisingly,
perhaps, he makes no mention of Joseph de Maistre, Bonald’s fellow
apostle of the Counter-Revolution. Maistre’s name does appear in the
main body of La Comédie humaine, but only twice and fleetingly: in
Illusions perdues (1837), Mme de Bargeton’s solitude is incongruously
enlivened by ‘les grands traités de M. de Bonald et ceux de M. de
Maistre, ces deux aigles penseurs’ (CH V 159); and in L’Initié (1848),
the final instalment of L’Envers de l’histoire contemporaine (1843–48),
Vanda de Mergi wonders whether Maistre’s theories of expiation might
not in fact hold the key to her mysterious illness (and therefore to the
novel’s plot).2 Even in Balzac’s extensive correspondence with the
reactionary Mme Hanska, we find Maistre invoked just the once: his is
a sufficiently unfamiliar presence in Balzac’s writings for this mention
1. Honoré de Balzac, La Comédie humaine, ed. by Pierre-Georges Castex, Bibliothèque
de la Pléiade, 12 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1976–81), I, 13, hereafter CH in the text.
2. See Francesco Manzini, ‘The Zero-Sum Game of Providential Pain: Balzac’s L’Envers
de l’histoire contemporaine’, in Pleasure and Pain in Nineteenth-Century French
Literature and Culture, ed. by David Evans and Kate Griffiths (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2008), pp. 73–85 for an account of the Maistrean logic generally at work in L’Envers.
IJFrS 13 (2013)
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to have been indexed recently as a reference to his younger brother
Xavier.3 Writing on 1 July 1843, Balzac notes that:
La France m’ennuie, je me suis pris d’une belle passion pour la
Russie, je suis amoureux du pouvoir absolu, je vais voir si c’est
aussi beau que je le crois. De Maistre est resté pendant longtemps
à S[ain]t-Pétersbourg, j’y resterai peut-être aussi.4
We might conclude from these three scattered allusions that Balzac was
aware of Maistre’s writings, that he was likely, as a man in love with
absolute power, to approve of their broad thrust, but that his interest
in them was probably superficial. Nevertheless, various modern critics
have postulated Balzac’s engagement, in Un épisode sous la Terreur
(1830), with Maistre’s infamous account of the figure of the executioner
in Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg (1821).
This engagement has been posited as a moving beyond Maistre’s
retrograde politics of throne and scaffold. Franc Schuerewegen observes
that ‘Un épisode sous la Terreur met en cause la fonction socialement
régulatrice que Joseph de Maistre attribue au personnage de l’exécuteur,
rendant problématique du même coup l’innocence de celui qui serait
seul, avec le soldat, à pouvoir tuer sans crime’.5 Lise Queffélec refers
back to Schuerewegen before analysing, in summary terms, the ‘allure
toute maistrienne’ of Balzac’s figure of the executioner.6 She suggests
that Maistre’s conception of this figure — as an (abject) embodiment
of the sovereignty also (gloriously) incarnated by the monarch — no
longer obtains in the world created anew by the Revolution:
3. Honoré de Balzac, Lettres à Mme Hanska, ed. by Roger Pierrot, 2 vols (Paris: Robert
Laffont, 1990), II, 1159.
4. Balzac, Lettres à Mme Hanska, I, 702.
5. Franc Schuerewegen, ‘Un épisode sous la Terreur: Une lecture expiatoire’, L’Année
balzacienne, 6 (1985), 247–63 (p. 247), hereafter ET in the text.
6. Lise Queffélec, ‘La Figure du bourreau dans l’œuvre de Balzac’, L’Année balzacienne,
11 (1990), 273–89 (p. 278), hereafter FB in the text.
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71
La figure double Roi et Bourreau apparaît [...] comme la figure
du Pouvoir dans l’ancienne France royale.
Mais cette France royale n’est déjà plus, dans le texte balzacien,
qu’un objet irrémédiablement passé, et le statut du bourreau en
devient incertain [...] Le bourreau révolutionnaire est, en effet,
dans la perspective balzacienne, une figure paradoxale: en tuant
le Roi, il a annulé le Pouvoir qui le légitime. Sa nature, non
problématique sous l’Ancien Régime, est devenue problématique.
Avec la nature du bourreau, c’est la nature du Pouvoir politique
moderne qui est ici mise en question. (FB 278–79)
Schuerewegen and Queffélec therefore both agree that Balzac’s
executioner inaugurated modernity by calling into question his own
legitimacy and sovereignty.
By way of contrast, Michel Butor notes how both Balzac and
Baudelaire followed Maistre in conceiving of the executioner as ‘un
personnage, certes, tout à fait horrible, mais dont on ne peut pas se
passer comme une pièce essentielle de la société’.7 Butor therefore
appears to stress the continuing relevance of Maistre’s executioner as
the (mythical) embodiment of modern as well as archaic sovereignty.
Philippe Berthier, for his part, contextualizes Balzac’s presentation
of the executioner in Un épisode sous la Terreur by quoting a brief
unanalysed extract from Les Soirées (also cited by Queffélec) in his
‘Notice’: ‘[L]e bourreau, dit Joseph de Maistre, est “l’horreur et le lien
de l’association humaine. Ôtez du monde cet agent incompréhensible;
dans l’instant même l’ordre fait place au chaos, les trônes s’abîment et
la société disparaît”.’8
This article argues that Balzac’s long-standing love of absolute
power did indeed lead him to engage with Maistre’s ideas; that he did
so, whether directly or indirectly, in considerably more detail than
has hitherto been suggested; and that he sought in particular to follow
7. Michel Butor, Le Marchand et le génie: Improvisations sur Balzac I (Paris: Différence,
1998), p. 278.
8. Honoré de Balzac, Nouvelles, ed. by Philippe Berthier (Paris: Flammarion, 2005),
p. 43.
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Maistre by showing how execution relates to the notions of sacrifice and
sovereignty reconceptualized in Les Soirées and the Éclaircissement
sur les sacrifices (1821). Balzac’s executioner functions — first in Un
épisode sous la Terreur and then again in El Verdugo [The Executioner]
(1830) — as Maistre’s ‘pierre angulaire de la société’,9 the guarantor of
sovereignty, as well as of the abolished but still virtual throne towards
which France must be led by ‘tout écrivain de bon sens’. Although
Queffélec is surely right in asserting that Balzac questions the nature
of post-Revolutionary political power (FB 279), it is less clear that
Balzac’s Revolutionary executioner annulled the sovereignty of the
Ancien Régime. Rather he grounds and perpetuates this sovereignty in
his person. Hence the executioner’s function as one of the cornerstones
of La Comédie humaine. As Roland Chollet puts it, ‘avec El Verdugo
Balzac a écrit le nom du bourreau — en espagnol, il est vrai — au
sommaire de La Comédie humaine.’10
The story eventually entitled Un épisode sous la Terreur first
appeared in Le Cabinet de lecture on 29 January and 4 February 1830;
El Verdugo (written in 1829) in La Mode on 30 January 1830. Both were
by-products of the Mémoires de Sanson (1830), on which Balzac had
collaborated (the former served as the introduction to the Mémoires). A
third Balzac short story dealing indirectly with the Terror —Les Deux
Rêves, written in 1828 and later incorporated in Catherine de Médicis
expliquée (1842–44) and Sur Catherine de Médicis (1846) — appeared
in La Mode on 8 May 1830.11 Les Deux Rêves shows Catherine justifying
the Saint Bartholemew’s Day Massacre in recognizably Maistrean
terms, as a praiseworthy attempt to forestall even greater political
9. Joseph de Maistre, Œuvres, ed. by Pierre Glaudes (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2007), p. 651
[Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg], hereafter Œ in the text.
10.Roland Chollet, ‘Trophée de têtes chez Balzac’, L’Année balzacienne, 11 (1990),
257–72 (p. 269). Chollet discusses Balzac’s obsession with decapitation, encouraged
perhaps by the guillotining of his uncle Louis Balssa in 1819 (pp. 257–58). For a recent
excellent general study of the Romantic figure of the executioner, see Loïc P. Guyon,
Les Martyrs de la veuve (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010).
11.See Tim Farrant, Balzac’s Shorter Fictions: genesis and genre (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002), pp. 66–70 for an analysis of these three stories and their
publishing history.
EXECUTION, SOVEREIGNTY AND SACRIFICE
73
bloodshed. Balzac’s Catherine follows Maistre’s line — for example
as set out in his posthumous Lettres à un gentilhomme sur l’Inquisition
espagnole (1822) — by arguing that Protestantism produced a spirit
of heretical dissension leading to civil war and the disintegration of
sovereignty.12 Catherine justifies herself by appearing to a lawyer in
a dream; this lawyer, portrayed as her political successor, eventually
stands revealed as none other than Robespierre, hailed by Catherine
as ‘un des maçons de l’édifice social commencé par les apôtres’ (CH
XI 453). This assertion appears absurd until one remembers that, as
the architect of the Terror, Robespierre had decided to make the
executioner the cornerstone of his new society. It is further glossed by
an exchange between Beaumarchais (but of course) and Robespierre.
The former asks the very Maistrean question ‘et comment sauvera-t-on
les monarchies qui croulent?’, to which he is given the very Maistrean
answer: ‘Dieu est là’ (CH XI 454). Put another way, le bourreau est là:
so long as this cornerstone is left in place, the edifice of sovereignty will
not crumble. Thus Balzac uses Les Deux Rêves to stress the continuity
between archaic and modern power — as opposed to the discontinuity
identified by Schuerewegen and Queffélec — by revealing Robespierre
as an exponent of the sovereignty incarnated (rather splendidly in
Balzac’s account) by Catherine.
Balzac presents the Terror not just as a symbol of the failure
of la Saint-Barthélémy to constrain dissension and so prevent the
political violence of the Revolution, but also as its analogue: an act of
political violence quite conceivably justified by the timeless imperative
to impose the absolute power of sovereign unitary government. As
Pierre-Georges Castex puts it, ‘en créant le Comité de salut public,
en organisant la Terreur, [Robespierre] aussi, pense Balzac, a voulu
sauver l’unité nationale’ (CH I li). Les Deux Rêves therefore implicitly
asks whether sovereignty passed from Louis XVI to the nation or to
some sort of Rousseauvian general will, as problematically represented
12.Maistre actually praises the Inquisition for preventing the Spanish equivalent of ‘le
massacre de la Saint-Barthélémy’. Joseph de Maistre, Lettres à un gentilhomme sur
l’Inquisition espagnole (Cadillac: Saint-Rémi, 2011), p. 90.
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by the Committee of Public Safety (this is a question that Balzac
eventually answers in El Verdugo). More generally, Les Deux Rêves
asks, after Maistre, whether sovereignty and its blood sacrifices serve as
the necessary conditions of political order, figured as the highest form
of political liberty (CH XI 453). Put another way, does sovereignty
regulate and limit (political) violence by exercising its prerogative to
punish, or itself generate such violence by imposing punishment as a
function of its fixation with the category of sacrifice?
Maistre viewed the Terror as at once a religious sacrifice and a
senseless destruction, a holocaust and a shoah. To this extent, it operated
simultaneously as part of God’s obscure Providential order (for example
in the way that it closed its own circuit by leading the Terrorists to
their self-execution) and as a satanic manifestation of disorder. Maistre
responded to the enormity of the Terror’s violence by insisting on the
need for a return to sovereignty and sacrifice. Since the Second World
War, this view has proved unfashionable: the response to the enormity
of the Holocaust or Shoah has been more to insist on the need for a move
beyond sovereignty and sacrifice. The Catholic philosopher Jacques
Maritain was the first to call for an end to sovereignty as a category:
Ma thèse est que la philosophie politique doit se délivrer du mot
et du concept de Souveraineté […] parce que, pris dans son sens
authentique et dans la perspective du domaine scientifique propre
auquel il appartient (celui de la philosophie politique), ce concept
est intrinsèquement illusoire et ne peut que nous égarer si nous
continuons à l’employer.13
From a rather different perspective, Michel Foucault launched a similar
appeal a couple of decades later:
13.Jacques Maritain, L’Homme et l’État (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2009 [1951; 1953]),
p. 48. Maritain earlier notes that ‘la Révolution française a conservé ce concept de
l’État considéré comme un tout en lui-même, mais elle l’a fait passer du Roi à la
Nation, identifiée à tort avec le corps politique’ (p. 34).
EXECUTION, SOVEREIGNTY AND SACRIFICE
75
Le souverain, la loi, l’interdiction, tout cela a constitué un système
de représentation du pouvoir qui a été ensuite transmis par les
théories du droit: la théorie politique est restée obsédée par le
personnage du souverain. Toutes [les grandes théories juridiques
et philosophiques] posent encore le problème de la souveraineté.
Ce dont nous avons besoin, c’est d’une philosophie politique
qui ne soit pas construite autour du problème de la souveraineté,
donc de la loi, donc de l’interdiction; il faut couper la tête du roi
et on ne l’a pas encore fait dans la théorie politique.14
More recently, Jean-Luc Nancy has similarly called for an end to —
or a beyond of — sacrifice.15 Giorgio Agamben, for his part, has used
his investigations of the figure of the homo sacer — also analysed by
Maistre (Œ 816) — again to return to the vexed question of sacrifice
by relating it precisely to the paradox of sovereignty posited by Carl
Schmitt whereby ‘the sovereign is, at the same time, outside and inside
the juridical order.’16 For Agamben, it is the homo sacer — he who
cannot be sacrificed and yet may be killed — rather than the executioner
who stands at the opposite pole to that occupied by the sovereign. Put
another way, ‘The sovereign sphere is the sphere in which it is permitted
to kill without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice,
and sacred life — that is, life that may be killed but not sacrificed — is
the life that has been captured in this sphere’ (HS 83). These debates
rest on the assumption that modern power (as posited by Schuerewegen
and Queffélec) inherits its structures from the archaic power of throne
and scaffold (as theorized by Maistre).
Contemporary theoretical discourses of sovereignty and sacrifice
often refer back to earlier sociological discourses: to the Collège de
Sociologie and Acéphale groupings animated by Georges Bataille,
14.Michel Foucault, ‘Entretien avec Michel Foucault’ [1977], in Dits et Écrits, ed. by
Daniel Defert and François Ewald, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), II, 140–60 (p. 150).
15.Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘L’Insacrifiable’, in Une pensée finie (Paris: Galilée, 1990), pp. 65–
106.
16.Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. by Daniel
Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998 [1995]), p. 15, hereafter
HS in the text.
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Roger Caillois and others; then further back to Henri Hubert and Marcel
Mauss, to Émile Durkheim, and finally to Auguste Comte, whom
Durkheim credits with inspiring him to seek rational explanations for
the irrational forces that ground society. As Owen Bradley has pointed
out, Comte himself looked back further still to the example provided by
Maistre, praised by Comte, in his Système de politique positive (1851),
for inventing what Bradley refers to as ‘the historical study of symbolic
practices’.17
In Comte’s analysis, the Revolution’s attempt at renewal could
only produce first chaos and then a botched reimposition of order:
Dans une telle situation philosophique et politique, le besoin
d’ordre, devenu prépondérant, dut déterminer une longue réaction
rétrograde, qui, commencée par le déisme légal de Robespierre,
se développa surtout d’après le système de conquêtes de
Bonaparte, et se prolongea faiblement, malgré la paix, sous ses
chétifs successeurs. Elle n’a laissé d’autre résultat durable que la
démonstration historique et dogmatique de l’école de De Maistre
sur l’inanité sociale de la métaphysique moderne.18
Maistre’s reactionary dogmas demonstrated the social inanity of postRevolutionary France by presenting his startled readers, past and present,
with what looks surprisingly like a sociological theory of sacrifice.19 In
many ways, he appears to have been the first person to see the need for
such a theory, although, as Bradley points out, his avowedly theological
17.Owen Bradley, A Modern Maistre: The Social and Political Thought of Joseph de
Maistre (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), p. 83, hereafter AMM in
the text. See also Carolina Armenteros, The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre
and his Heirs, 1794–1854 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), pp. 229–32.
18.See Auguste Comte, Système de politique positive ou traité de sociologie, instituant la
religion de l’humanité, 4 vols (Paris: Mathias, 1851–54), I, 67.
19.See Armenteros, The French Idea of History, pp. 156–82, Douglas Hedley, ‘Enigmatic
Images of an Invisible World: Sacrifice, Suffering and Theodicy in Joseph de Maistre’,
in Joseph de Maistre and the Legacy of Enlightenment, ed. by Carolina Armenteros
and Richard A. Lebrun (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2011), pp. 125–46 and Douglas
Hedley, Sacrifice Imagined: Violence, Atonement and the Sacred (London: Continuum,
2011), pp. 137–60 for recent analyses of Maistre’s theorizations of sacrifice.
EXECUTION, SOVEREIGNTY AND SACRIFICE
77
outlook prevented him from attempting to found a science of the sacred
(AMM 57). From Comte’s perspective, and using the terminology he
coined, Maistre therefore represented the very best of the old ‘théolâtrie’
while anticipating the ‘sociolâtrie’ of the coming age.20
As noted by Berthier, Maistre argues that without sacrifice and
its public performance through ritualized and divinely sanctioned
executions, sovereignty is abrogated and society collapses into
barbarism and chaos:
Toute grandeur, toute puissance, toute subordination repose sur
l’exécuteur: il est l’horreur et le lien de l’association humaine.
Ôtez du monde cet agent incompréhensible; dans l’instant même
l’ordre fait place au chaos; les trônes s’abîment et la société
disparaît. Dieu qui est l’auteur de la souveraineté, l’est donc aussi
du châtiment: il a jeté notre terre sur ces deux pôles; car Jéhovah
est le maître des deux pôles, et sur eux il fait tourner le monde [1
Samuel 2: 8]. (Π471)
For Maistre, sovereignty is defined and legitimated by its prerogative to
punish — ‘cette divine et terrible prérogative des souverains: la punition
des coupables’ (Œ 470) — figured as a proto-Schmittian power of final
decision.21 By the exercise of this prerogative, sovereignty maintains
its glory. It must, however, remain untainted by the physical act of
execution and the purging transference of guilt that this entails. Hence
the need for the terrible figure of the executioner, for, as Bradley puts it,
the culprit victim’s ‘impurity is transferred to the executioner, and, by
that fact, the king’s “body” — his sovereign dominion over his realm
— is restored to purity’ (AMM 66). Thus, for Maistre, the sovereign
20.Despite plainly modelling these two terms on ‘idolâtrie’, Comte does not use them
pejoratively. If we were to extend the logic of his analysis, we might say that Bataille
and Caillois, in their pre-war writings, continued to represent the old ‘sociolâtrie’ even
as they began to anticipate contemporary theoriolatry.
21.See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty,
ed. and trans. by George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005),
pp. 5–15 and HS 15–19. Schmitt notes that ‘De Maistre spoke with particular fondness
of sovereignty, which essentially meant decision’ (p. 55).
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can never himself be the executioner or share in the latter’s abjection.
Rather, the sovereign and the executioner both stand outside society.
Together they embody sovereignty, but they do so by presenting the
two faces of sovereign power. They are bound together, but must have
no contact. This relationship is symbolized, in Les Soirées, by the gold
coins (bearing the King’s effigy) that are tossed to the Executioner and
picked up by his blood-stained hand after each performance of his rite:
‘[le bourreau] tend sa main souillée de sang, et la justice y jette de loin
quelques pièces d’or qu’il emporte à travers une double haie d’hommes
écartés par l’horreur’ (Œ 470).22 This symbolic exchange between
sovereign and executioner condemns the latter to his isolation:
[le bourreau] est créé, comme un monde [...] Est-ce un homme? Oui.
Dieu le reçoit dans ses temples et lui permet de prier. Il n’est pas
criminel: cependant aucune langue ne consent à dire, par exemple,
qu’il est vertueux, qu’il est honnête homme, qu’il est estimable,
etc. Nul éloge moral ne peut lui convenir; car tous supposent des
rapports avec les hommes et il n’en a point... (Œ 470–71)
The executioner’s only (symbolic) relationship is with the sovereign,
likewise a limit figure isolated from the community.23
Caillois refers explicitly to this passage in his ‘Sociologie du
bourreau’, a lecture delivered to the Collège de sociologie in 1939, in
congruous celebration of Mardi Gras:
Joseph de Maistre, au terme du portrait impressionnant qu’il fait
du bourreau, de la terreur qu’il inspire, de son isolement parmi ses
semblables, signale justement que ce comble vivant de l’abjection
22.See also AMM 63–71 for an analysis of this passage. Schuerewegen insists on the
centrality of exchange in Un épisode sous la Terreur, including the exchange of a gold
coin, bearing the king’s effigy, for the hosts that will be used to celebrate a mass for
the dead monarch (ET 251–52). This mass will have the effect of reconstituting Louis
XVI’s mystical body (p. 256).
23.Queffélec notes that the executioner and the king form a couple, and that the former is the
object of ‘une exclusion sociale’ born of the terror and horror he inspires (FB, p. 276).
EXECUTION, SOVEREIGNTY AND SACRIFICE
79
est, en même temps, la condition et le soutien de toute grandeur,
de tout pouvoir, de toute subordination. ‘C’est l’horreur et le lien
de l’association humaine’, conclut-il. On ne pouvait manifester
par une formule plus heureuse à quel point l’exécuteur constitue
le pendant solidaire et antithétique de l’horreur et du lien de cette
même association, du souverain dont la face majestueuse suppose
l’envers d’opprobre qu’assume son terrible vis-à-vis.24
Caillois goes on to analyse the execution of Louis XVI from this neoMaistrean perspective:
On comprend, dans ces conditions, que l’exécution capitale du
roi remplisse le peuple d’étonnement et d’effroi et apparaisse
comme le point culminant des révolutions. Elle réunit les deux
pôles de la société, pour faire sacrifier l’un par l’autre et pour
assurer comme une victoire momentanée des forces de désordre
et de changement sur celles d’ordre et de stabilité. Ce triomphe ne
dure d’ailleurs que l’instant où retombe la hache, car l’acte n’est
pas moins sacrifice que sacrilège. Il attente à une majesté, mais
pour en fonder une autre. Du sang du souverain naît la divinité de
la nation. (CS 415)
Caillois is of course more willing than Maistre — and Balzac — to
conceive of sovereignty passing to the nation (in the manner later
set out by Maritain). He nevertheless preserves many of the features
of Maistre’s analysis, extrapolating in particular the significance of
Maistre’s two poles — sovereignty and punishment — coming together
to effect the sacrilegious sacrifice of the sovereign by the executioner.25
More generally, Caillois explores the way in which the Paris
executioner, popularly known as ‘Monsieur de Paris’, might himself
24.Le Collège de Sociologie, ed. by Denis Hollier (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), pp. 414–15,
hereafter CS in the text.
25.Agamben follows Michael Walzer in arguing that ‘the enormity of the rupture marked
by Louis XVI’s decapitation on January 21, 1793, consisted not in the fact that a
monarch was killed but in the fact that he was submitted to a trial and executed after
having been condemned to capital punishment’ (HS 102–03).
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constitute a form of royalty (CS 403–05): ‘Le caractère héréditaire de
l’emploi, scandaleux pourtant dans une démocratie, ne suscite aucun
commentaire. [...] On signale, sans souligner son caractère exceptionnel,
la prérogative — typique du pouvoir souverain — qui permet au
bourreau de désigner son successeur’ (CS 403–04). As Flaubert puts it
in the Dictionnaire des idées reçues:
BOURREAU Toujours de père en fils.26
Caillois’s executioner came from the collateral Deibler line; Balzac’s
from the House of Sanson, which, by 1830, had produced five generations
of public executioners and so functioned, reasonably transparently, as
an inverted royal family. It is the sovereignty embodied by this dynasty
that Balzac explores first in Un épisode sous la Terreur and then in El
Verdugo.
Un épisode sous la Terreur opens with a mysterious, initially
liminal and then spectral figure who stalks an old lady through the
snowbound streets of Paris two days after the execution of Louis XVI
(Balzac stresses that the King had died forgiving and thereby redeeming
the nation: the sacrilege of his execution had therefore served also as a
redemptive sacrifice). The old lady turns out to be one of two disoriented
nuns, visiting a baker to purchase wafers that, once consecrated as
hosts, will serve to reify the sacrificed body of both Jesus and Louis.
The mysterious figure, referred to by the narrator as ‘l’inconnu’, gives
off an unsettling aura. There is a sense in which he might be an agent
of the Terror: a secret policeman of the type that Balzac was among the
first to describe in literature. But when he eventually finds the hiding
place of the two nuns, and the priest they are ineffectually helping to
conceal, it turns out that he simply wishes to attend a funeral mass in
remembrance of the King. ‘L’inconnu’ goes on to offer his protection
to the priest and the nuns, remarking mysteriously: ‘Sachez que […]
26.Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard et Pécuchet, ed. by Claudine Gothot-Mersch (Paris:
Gallimard, 1999), p. 494.
EXECUTION, SOVEREIGNTY AND SACRIFICE
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vous pouvez m’employer sans crainte, et que moi seul, peut-être, suis
au-dessus de la Loi, puisqu’il n’y a plus de Roi...’ (CH VIII 442). This
claim only makes sense once ‘l’inconnu’ is finally revealed as Sanson,
the King’s executioner in both senses of the phrase.
Suzanne Bérard footnotes this quotation, rather missing its point:
‘Formule plus romanesque qu’exacte: l’exécuteur des hautes œuvres,
à aucune époque et moins encore sous la Révolution, n’était au-dessus
de la loi’ (CH VIII 1434). For his part, Schuerewegen points out that
‘ce passage rappelle assez explicitement le discours du bourreau dans
L’Âne mort et la femme guillotinée de J. Janin [1829]: “J’avais de mon
côté mon bon droit [...]. Sous ce droit la royauté a courbé la tête [...],
j’ai été plus fort que les lois dont je suis la suprême sanction”’ (ET 248).
Clearly, Balzac does not view Sanson as superior to Louis. However, he
does appear to agree with Jules Janin’s ‘bourreau’ that the executioner
possesses ‘une légitimité inviolable’:
Une légitimité inouïe qui depuis le chancelier Maupeou n’a pas
reculé d’un pas. Révolution, anarchie, Empire, Restauration, rien
n’y fait; mon droit est toujours resté à sa place, sans faire un pas
ni en avant ni en arrière.27
Sanson alone, of the sovereign odd couple, is still alive; he alone
embodies a sovereignty that in Balzac’s version, following Maistre,
cannot pass to the people (as in Caillois’s version). The purpose of
Sanson’s commemorative mass, repeated annually, is also now made
clear; he consumes the body and blood of Christ to wash himself of
the sin of regicide, commonly figured as a form of both parricide and
deicide in counter-revolutionary propaganda; to wash himself of the
sin that attaches itself to him because he has both sacrilegiously and
sacrificially executed the King on the illegitimate authority of the
Convention and the legitimate authority provided by his own abject
27.Jules Janin, L’Âne mort et la femme guillotinée, ed. by Joseph-Marc Bailbé, Nouvelle
Bibliothèque romantique (Paris: Flammarion, 1973), p. 140.
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share in the sovereignty that he and the King together incarnate.28
Schuerewegen argues that ‘bien qu’il ait dû trancher la tête du corps
royal, le bourreau balzacien ne tranche pas aussi facilement la question
de la légitimité de son acte’ (ET 248). But in fact, Balzac’s Sanson is
infallible in matters of sovereignty, just as Maistre argued in Du pape
(1819) that the pope is infallible in matters of doctrine.
There are two versions of the revelation of Sanson’s identity.
The original leads smoothly into the main body of Sanson’s ghosted
memoirs: many years later, the priest is called to administer the last rites
to a stranger who turns out, naturally, to be ‘l’inconnu’. It is only upon
leaving Sanson’s house that the priest discovers the man’s true identity.
The story then ends with the people of Paris spontaneously gathering
to follow Sanson’s simple coffin to the cemetery. This ending is highly
unsatisfactory, and appears designed to flatter the memory of Sanson and
thus his heir, the sixth and last Sanson to hold office, who had collaborated
with the writing of the memoirs. Earlier in the story, however, Balzac
had made it clear that Sanson, and everything that pertains to Sanson, is
forever shunned: he may be the bond of society, but he is also its horror. In
1842, Balzac therefore produced a new ending: the priest emerges from
his priest-hole on hearing that the Terrorists have fallen, just in time to see
Sanson impassively accompanying the last of them to the guillotine. The
priest recognizes the executioner as his ‘inconnu’ and promptly has a fit.
In the midst of his ravings, he exclaims: ‘le couteau d’acier a eu du cœur
quand toute la France en manquait!...’ (CH VIII 450).
Balzac likes referring to important figures as ‘l’inconnu’ and
concluding his stories by pulling out their true identities like so many
rabbits from a hat. But here Sanson is triply unknown: unknown by the
priest until the very end of the story; unknown because no-one wants to
know him; unknown because, as one half of the sovereign odd couple,
he is in any case unknowable. He has stopped being a man and become
an impassive and inexorable sacrificer: a blade of steel, but with a heart.
28.Caillois notes that the executioner ‘peut communier, mais il doit recevoir l’hostie les
mains gantées, ce qui est interdit à tous les autres fidèles’ (CS 410).
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83
El Verdugo is based on a medieval Flemish tale recounted in the
main body of the Mémoires de Sanson. Balzac transposes the action to the
Spain of 1809 — a country without a legitimate sovereign after Ferdinand
VII’s forced abdication of 1808. The story starts with the massacre of a
French battalion in support of Ferdinand and on the orders of the Marquis
de Léganès, presented by Balzac as sovereign in his extensive domains
(CH X 1134), belonging as he does to a ‘race presque royale’ (CH X
1140): he is certainly more legitimately sovereign than King Joseph
Bonaparte. One officer escapes and brings back with him a larger French
force under the command of a general, who orders the execution of the
entire Léganès household as his price for sparing the rest of the Spanish
population. The Marquis requests that his eldest son also be spared and
that the rest of his family not be hanged but rather beheaded by the local
executioner. On the face of it, the Marquis is being a snob to the very end,
trying to preserve his precious bloodline and his social superiority —
certainly this is how the general interprets his request. But the Marquis
is in fact trying to preserve Spanish sovereignty by ensuring the survival
of his son, Juanito — whom he refers to as the Marquis once his own
death is certain — and, more obscurely, by arranging for the participation
of the legitimate executioner. Laughing, the French general responds by
offering to spare whichever child of the Marquis agrees to behead the rest
of the members of the family. Sovereignty will, pace Maistre, need to be
concentrated in a single person: the eldest son will, in a single instant,
become both the new marquis and the new executioner, at once glorious
and abject.
The difficulty of Juanito having to behead his own mother is
resolved when she thoughtfully throws herself off a cliff. He decapitates
all the other members of his family, including his father. Juanito is now
not only an executioner but also a parricide, and thus doubly abject; but
this double abjection, paradoxically, makes him doubly glorious: his is an
‘admirable forfait’ (CH X 1143). We are briefly shown the new Marquis,
a number of years later and now himself the father of a son, awaiting the
birth of another before he can allow himself to die. The Marquis has,
understandably, become an isolated, spectral figure — a broken man,
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perhaps, but also a sovereign and executioner, doubly condemned to
be unknowable. He is, however, honoured throughout Spain and bears
the title, officially bestowed ‘comme titre de noblesse’ by the restored
Ferdinand VII, of ‘El Verdugo, le Bourreau’ (CH X 1142–43).
Returning to the main scene of the story, the French general
and his officers continue drinking indoors while El Verdugo performs
his duty. They cannot even be bothered to watch. The general thinks
that the spectacle will intimidate the Spanish and therefore that he
understands the effect that it will produce, but in this he is quite wrong,
as demonstrated by the esteem in which El Verdugo is subsequently
held. The general’s problem is that he does not possess a science of
the sacred. He is sociologically inane. He has not considered that the
villagers had negotiated their own safety in return for surrendering the
sovereign family to its fate, and that the sovereign family had accepted
this fate; one hundred representatives of this population assemble
silently to witness the executions, which, transparently to them,
constitute a sacrificial rite, the shedding of the best of their blood. This
spectacle will have the effect not just of horrifying the villagers but also
of binding them both to each other and to their new sovereign; it will
produce the affective effervescence described by Durkheim:
Il y a des périodes historiques où, sous l’influence de quelque
grand ébranlement collectif, les interactions sociales deviennent
beaucoup plus fréquentes et plus actives. [...] Il en résulte
une effervescence générale, caractéristique des époques
révolutionnaires ou créatrices. [...] C’est là ce qui explique
[...] tant de scènes, ou sublimes ou sauvages, de la Révolution
française. Sous l’influence de l’exaltation générale, on voit le
bourgeois le plus médiocre ou le plus inoffensif se transformer
soit en héros soit en bourreau.29
Here the decapitation of the old Marquis functions as the coronation of
the new, at the altar that is the place of execution. The Spanish community
29.Émile Durkheim, Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (Paris: CNRS, 2007),
pp. 318–19.
EXECUTION, SOVEREIGNTY AND SACRIFICE
85
is united by an affectivity that the French General fails either to anticipate
or understand. For execution functions as a sacrificial rite that binds
the community even as it unbinds the patient — a rite first explained
sociologically by Maistre. If anything, the General appears to think that he
is inverting and parodying the archaic ritual of sacrifice (whereby the father
sacrifices the son), thus making it null; but in fact this sacrifice is doubly
powerful, for the new Marquis, the eldest son ordained by Providence to
perpetuate sovereignty, is ideally placed to embody temporal sovereignty
in its totality. His status as both legitimate heir and executioner is further
enhanced by his Christian near self-sacrifice, the analogue of Sanson’s
near self-sacrifice in 1793. As one half of sovereignty sacrifices its other
half, so sovereignty sacrifices itself, thereby paradoxically guaranteeing
its survival and producing a surfeit of glory that mirrors the surfeit of
abjection it has been forced to endure. Sovereignty is a hydra, or, as
Foucault puts it, ‘il faut couper la tête du roi et on ne l’a pas encore fait
dans la théorie politique’. The new Marquis, even more than Sanson, is
what Maistre famously refers to as an ‘heautontimorumenos [sic]’ or
‘bourreau de lui-même’ (Œ 539), not in the manner of the self-executing
Terrorists, but rather in the manner of Christ. He is ‘le couteau’, in the
manner of Sanson, but also la plaie: as a Romantic hero, he is therefore
also already in part Baudelaire’s Héautontimorouménos:
Je suis la plaie et le couteau!
Je suis le soufflet et la joue!
Je suis les membres et la roue,
Et la victime et le bourreau!30
Or, as Catherine de Médicis puts it in Les Deux Rêves, ‘Quelque jour
des écrivains à paradoxes se demanderont si les peuples n’ont pas
quelquefois prodigué le nom de bourreaux à des victimes’ (CH XI 453).
Oriel and University Colleges, Oxford
30.Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Claude Pichois, Bibliothèque de la
Pléiade, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1975–76), I, 78.