bsmall2Oct 10, 2024
> When the imagination sleeps, words are emptied of their meaning: a deaf population absent-mindedly registers the condemnation of a man. But if people are shown the machine, made to touch the wood and steel and to hear the sound of a head falling, then public imagination, suddenly awakened, will repudiate both the vocabulary and the penalty.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/albert-camus-reflections-on-the-guillotine
#AlbertCamus #DeathPenalty #ReflectionsOnTheGuilloutine
Reflections on the Guillotine

Albert Camus Reflections on the Guillotine 1957

The Anarchist Library
Show threadbs2Oct 10, 2024
🧵
> It was unusual for drums to emerge in the center of town, but the Place Clugny was the site of the Negro Market, and sometime theater of popular entertainments for the blacks. Here too a guillotine had once been erected, when the French Jacobin Commissioner Sonthonax had ruled the region. But after a single beheading, the blacks who witnessed it had torn down the machine, all in one spurt of spontaneous rage—too appalled by its mechanical cruelty to let it stand. #HaitiTrilogy 🧵
@bsmall2
Show threadbs2
> “Or I might find myself hanged for an émigrée.” Isabelle’s ironic smile flashed, then faded. “I suppose I must congratulate myself that the guillotine was not successful here—owing to the tender sensibilities of our blacks.” She laid her hand across the hollow of her throat.
#HaitiTrilogy #MadisonSmarttBell #Guilloutine
@bsmall2
Oct 10, 2024 at 11:08amWeb
Show threadbsmall2Oct 10, 2024
@bsmall2
Mentions of the Guillotine in Madison Smart Bell's Haiti Trilogy reminded me of a line from Paul Goodman. Somewhere he says that a person with the sensitiveness of Albert Camus can see the killing machine, the guillotine, and have visceral reaction that it is "not us"....
#PaulGoodman #GoodmanOnCamus #GoodmanOnDeathPenalty