University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Law and disorder: literary case studies of the great criminal in the shadow of the guillotine

(USC Thesis Other)

Law and disorder: literary case studies of the great criminal in the shadow of the guillotine

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content Law and Disorder: Literary Case Studies of the Great Criminal in the Shadow of the Guillotine A Dissertation Presented to the UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (French) By Katy D. Le Bris December 2015 Dissertation Committee: Peggy Kamuf, Director, Department of French and Italian and Comparative Literature Natania Meeker, Department of French and Italian and Comparative Literature Vincent Farenga, Department of Classics and Comparative Literature 2 Acknowledgements I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my advisor Peggy Kamuf whose passion for research and literature has inspired me to follow my own passion. I am indebted to her for the expertise and the sincere and valuable guidance she extended to me throughout this project. I am also indebted to the members of my department and committee, with special thanks to Natania Meeker. Her unwavering dedication, support, and encouragement over the years have made this journey possible. Finally, I am grateful to my dear friend Anne and all the precious friends who believed in me and never let me quit. 3 All respect for the law is a product of the social imagination, and the social imagination is what literature directly addresses. . . If the law were to be completely absorbed into the internal discipline of honest men, there would be no more law and we should all be living in the Garden of Eden. We are not there, but in the meantime law still depends upon the imagination, and the fostering and cherishing of the imagination by the arts is mainly what makes the profession honorable, perhaps even what makes it possible. Northrup Frye 4 Table of contents Acknowledgements............................................................................................................. 2 Table of contents................................................................................................................. 4 Chapter I: Introduction........................................................................................................ 5 Abstract........................................................................................................................... 5 Introduction..................................................................................................................... 6 Chapter II: Pierre-François Lacenaire, Murderer, Poet, and Lawyer ............................... 25 1. L’Affaire Lacenaire ................................................................................................. 26 2. The Shadow Courtroom............................................................................................ 37 3. Poetics of Recapitation: Literature and the Right to Outlive Death ......................... 58 Chapter III: Genet’s Tight-Rope Dancers: An Aestheticization of the Criminal ............. 82 1. Perilous People ......................................................................................................... 83 2. The Shadow of the Revolution ............................................................................... 105 3. The Power of Poetry, the Power of Crime.............................................................. 124 Chapter IV: Jacques Mesrine: Public Enemy, National Hero ........................................ 141 1. Mesrine: The Man of a Thousand Faces................................................................. 142 2. A Man in Revolt ..................................................................................................... 154 3. A Criminal in Search of an Author......................................................................... 176 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 192 Works Cited .................................................................................................................... 196 5 Chapter I: Introduction Abstract This project entitled “Law and Disorder: Literary Case Studies of the Great Criminal in the Shadow of the Guillotine” investigates the complex relationship between law and literature through an analysis of the representations of the great criminal in modern France. Crossing swords one more time with the law, great criminals, such as Pierre-François Lacenaire or Jacques Mesrine, embody disorder and, through their writings, enter into a complex conversation with legal texts, the press, and France’s most famous writers, from Hugo to Camus and Genet—canonical writers known for their philosophical reflection on the law and their stance against capital punishment. This study follows a case-based approach bridging two essential dates of French legal history (1791-1981), and reads the writings of real criminals against the literary production of canonical French writers focusing on great criminals. Through close readings of novels, plays, newspapers articles and criminals’ writings, one can trace links between criminal discourse and literary representation in order to examine the relationship between law and literature. Defining new perspectives in a field that needs to gain visibility, this project asks: how does French literature, in the shadow of the guillotine, compete with law’s power over life and death? What kind of discourse does literature forge through the figure of the great criminal? 6 Introduction Literature and the law have crossed swords many times. In antiquity, Plato already sought to banish poets from his ideal city (The Republic 398). Making a distinction between the narrative poet (who describes the hero) and the imitative poet (who pretends he is the hero), Plato proposes to evict the latter, whose words—like literature—are “stigmatized within the law with qualities of falsity, irrationality, seductiveness” (Yoshino 1838). Yet Plato observes that if an imitative poet came to the city, “we would fall on our knees before him as a man sacred, wonderful, and pleasing” (Qtd in Yoshino 1848). The imitative poet in Plato’s republic is simultaneously chastised by the law and honored by the city. As Yoshino concludes, “the force of the Platonic parable lies in the poignancy of casting out that which one most dearly loves, a banishment that demonstrates the intrication [sic] of the sacred and the sacrificial” (1841). This reading brings to mind another figure, that of the great criminal as Benjamin defines him: The great criminal, however repellent his ends may have been, has aroused the secret admiration of the public. This can result not from his deed but only from the violence to which it bears witness. In this case, therefore, the violence that present-day law is seeking in all areas of activity to deny the individual appears really threatening, and arouses even in defeat the sympathy of the masses against the law. By what function 7 violence can with reason seem so threatening to the law, and be so feared by it, must be especially evident where its application, even in the present legal system, is still permissible. (“The Critique of Violence” 239) The analogy between Plato’s poet as a figure of disorder and Benjamin’s great criminal has been a catalyst for this project’s reflection on the relationship between law and literature through an analysis of modern literary texts produced by, or focusing on, great criminals. * Post-revolutionary French literature has made the criminal and the law the center of its texts, and major novelists such as Hugo, Balzac, Zola, and Camus, as well as detective fiction writers, have since shown great interest in the dramatization of the law. John Wigmore’s ‘A List of One Hundred Legal Novels’ (1907), an essay gathering a hundred literary texts dramatizing legal topics, lists the notorious works of French writers such as Alexandre Dumas (Le Comte de Monte-Cristo), Honoré de Balzac (Le Père Goriot), and Victor Hugo (Les Misérables, Quatre-vingt-treize). To this list must be added the main French detective fiction writers: if Balzac can be seen as the precursor of the detective novel, Emile Gaboriau (1832-1873) is considered the pioneer of French detective fiction with L’Affaire Lerouge (1866), a genre that was further developed by Maurice Leblanc (Arsène Lupin) and Gaston Leroux (Rouletabille). Famous novels such as Balzac’s La Duchesse de Langeais, or Hugo’s Les Derniers jours d’un condamné 8 (1829) and Claude Gueux (1834) specifically focus on the figure of the criminal with the guillotine as a backdrop. 1 Hugo’s two novellas, written just a few years before Lacenaire’s memoirs—which are the focus of Chapter II—were among the first modern narratives that gave voice to a man waiting for his execution, and numerous memoirs, fictional or “real,” using a similar setting and topos, have been written since. 2 Moreover, the guillotine, a theater of death, gradually became the stage of new terrors and pleasures. Wald-Lasowski traces decapitation as a topos in nineteenth-century French literature and society in Guillotinez-moi and notes: “la terreur fait courir une chanson nouvelle, qui voit dans l’échafaud le théâtre de voluptés nouvelles,” as illustrated by this popular song that began to circulate in France during the Terror, “La Guillotine d’amour or Guillotine de Cythère:” Le désir ouvre la machine, Et l’exécuteur est l’amour. Prenant une attitude fière Se présente le patient; Plus il porte la tête altière, Plus il devient intéressant: L’étreinte augmente sa furie, Il s’agite, il brave son sort 1 Patrick Wald Lasowski’s Les Echafauds du romanesque provides an excellent analysis of the guillotine in French literature. Also see Jean-Pol Masson’s Le Droit dans la littérature, a very complete study of the emergence of detective and legal novels in French literature. 2 See for instance Vidocq, Genet, Knobelspiess or Mesrine. 9 Le plus doux moment de sa vie Est le plus voisin de la mort. O Vénus dont mon cœur fidèle Adore et suit les douces lois, Donne-moi, pour prix de mon zèle, Une Guillotine à mon choix : Et par l’effet de ta puissance, Après un trépas fortuné, Ah ! Rends-moi toujours l’existence, Pour être encore guillotiné. (Qtd in Guillotinez-moi 39) This song, which Wald-Lasowski summarizes as “Sexe-couperet. Vénus-guillotine” (40), associates the blade, sex, and passion. It epitomizes the sexual desire triggered by the deadly object and encapsulates the criminal’s attraction for the machine. The nineteenth century is a time when the nation (and Europe at large) fantasizes about the guillotine. Hugo for instance reports an anecdote in “Visite à la Conciergerie – Choses vues” in which the famous executioner Sanson is asked to show the guillotine to an English family visiting Paris (Ecrits 58). One of their three daughters asks the executioner many details about it, but is only satisfied after he ties her up on the guillotine, places her head in the lunette and shuts down its upper part. “Plus tard en contant la chose, Sanson disait: j’ai vu le moment où elle allait me dire ‘il y a encore quelque chose, laissez tomber le couteau’” (60). 10 Literature itself fantasizes about the guillotine, as illustrated by the profusion of stories associating capital punishment and desire. “La littérature du XIXème siècle rêve la guillotine” (Guillotinez-moi 10) and this phantasm can be found in numerous literary works. For example, in Villiers de L’Isle d’Adam’s unusual short story, “Les Phantasmes de Monsieur Redoux” (1883), the main protagonist, a Parisian bourgeois, purposely gets himself locked in at night in the Tussaud museum of London in order to “try” the guillotine. 3 The short story places decapitation at the heart of a complex network of phantasms: the near-death experience, the repetition of the king’s execution, but also, as Freud has suggested, castration. Freud states in the opening lines of his essay, “Medusa’s Head,” “to decapitate=to castrate,” and claims that the terror linked to the decapitated head originates in the castration complex and is specifically linked to “the sight of something” (264). More important, he maintains that “the sight of the medusa’s head makes the spectator stiff with terror . . . becoming stiff means an erection” (265). He therefore associates the guillotine (decapitation) and desire (erection), a recurrent motif in the French nineteenth-century imaginary that is haunted by this tension between terror and pleasure: “l’ambivalence d’un désir qui est à la fois terreur et plaisir, qui amène le sujet à jouer à faire peur” (Clair 83). This obsession is epitomized by Notre Dame de la Guillotine (1893) by Gustave Le Rouge, in which the main character, Georgius, “le grand 3 Another short story by Villiers de l’Isle d’Adam related to the fantasy of the guillotine is “L’Etonnant couple Moutonnet,” a story in which the husband tries to get his wife executed but fails. Years later, desire and passion are still animating this strange couple and the reader finds out that the wife knew about her husband’s deadly plan all along, but it is precisely this fantasy of the guillotine that rekindled their passion. For a detailed list of literary works pertaining to the guillotine and the fantasies it triggered, see Wald Lasowski, Les Echafauds du romanesque. 11 Répresseur,” vividly expresses his fantasies about the guillotine in terms of fear and sexual desire: Elle [la guillotine] se dressait en son imagination comme une idole embrumée de mystère, animée d’une vie particulière faite des terreurs et vengeances des hommes, comme une attirante et traitresse femelle dont les jambes rigides, dont le sexe fallacieux et vide incitaient l’humanité aux coïts monstrueux du cou et de la lunette. (108) His vision of the guillotine recalls the terror of the Medusa in Freud’s reading of the myth: “she displays the terrifying genitals of the Mother” (265). Georgius vividly describes decapitation as a monstrous and fascinating sexual act with the guillotine—a fascination that permeates literature from the nineteenth century onward. Having cast its shadow upon literature since the Revolution, the guillotine—also called “le glaive de la loi” (law’s sword) in French—therefore constitutes the backdrop of this dissertation. Crossing swords one more time with the law, great criminals, such as Pierre-François Lacenaire, Jacques Mesrine, or the characters of Genet’s novels, embody disorder and, through their writings, enter into a complex conversation with legal texts, the press, and France’s most famous writers, from Hugo to Camus and Genet—canonical authors known for their philosophical reflection on the law and their stance against capital punishment. Choosing great criminals such as Lacenaire or Mesrine, as opposed to faits divers, implies choosing the most visible—an essential criterion in this discussion of the role of literature around the death penalty with the spectacular and theatrical 12 guillotine as a backdrop. 4 Placing Genet, a petty criminal but renowned novelist, in the center of this project offers a contrasting perspective on the writings of Lacenaire and Mesrine whose criminal imagination outclassed their limited literary talent. * Tout condamné à mort aura la tête tranchée. This breviloquent sentence, a sentence both in the semiotic and the legal sense, from Article 3 of the French Penal Code of 1791, ruled in French law until the abolition of the death penalty in 1981. French legal culture since the Revolution has been part of a complex narrative and the two centuries between 1791 and 1981 were marked by constant debate about capital punishment in the legal, political, scientific, philosophical, and literary spheres. The first abolitionist discourse appeared as early as 1791 when this law entered the Penal Code and when Robespierre gave his famous ‘Discours sur la peine de mort.’ It was followed by numerous abolitionist interventions, from Victor Hugo’s Han d’Islande (1823, his first abolitionist text published when he was twenty-one years old) to French criminal lawyer Robert Badinter’s L’Exécution (1973).This study therefore bridges two essential dates of French legal history: 1791-1981, the legal life of the guillotine. The guillotine, the bloody symbol of the French revolution, had an ironic destiny. Regarded as a more humane method of execution, it was designed to be efficient, painless, 4 Walker in particular has provided an excellent analysis of the faits divers and their significance in the representations of criminals. 13 and democratic. Yet it soon became a spectacle, attracting large crowds to witness public executions on the scaffold. An incarnation of the Terror but also a symbol of the most absolute form of egalitarism, Louisette started presiding over the macabre theater of the law more than two hundred years ago, and, as Daniel Arasse has demonstrated, gradually entered the public imaginary as an object of fascination. 5 As Arendt has emphasized, 1789 marked a dramatic historical and cultural break in France. She claims: “the modern concept of revolution, inextricably bound up with the notion that the course of history suddenly begins anew, that an entirely new story, a story never known or told before, is about to unfold” (28). In France, the Revolution and the Terror undoubtedly changed the course of history, and the period directly following the French revolution of 1789 was marked by a complete transformation of society, but also of the law, with the institution of the Penal Code in 1791, the Civil Code (also called the Napoleonic Code) in 1804, the Code of Civil Procedure in 1806, the Commercial Code in 1807, and the code of Criminal Instruction in 1808. 6 The Revolution also left a controversial legal heritage, with the execution of King Louis XVI as the “original” crime that forged new law and marked the beginning of the modern era—a fact Arendt recalls when she states: “whatever brotherhood human beings may be capable of has grown out of fratricide, whatever political organization men may have achieved has its origin in crime” (20). In France, the revolution of 1789 and the 5 Louisette is another name for the guillotine, after the name of its original creator Antoine Louis, sometimes mistaken as a reference to Louis XVI. The guillotine was finally named after the French doctor, Joseph Ignace Guillotin, whose version of the device was adopted. 6 Based on Roman law and the inquisitorial system, French law is to be distinguished from the other main legal structures used for instance in the US – the Common law system, which is adversarial and relies on precedents. 14 subsequent political upheavals triggered an immense interest in the law and the death penalty, which both became the locus of countless narratives, and the beheading of the king by the guillotine catalyzed “l’instant révolutionnaire” defined by Derrida as a strong moment of founding violence defined as following: la violence n’est pas extérieure à l’ordre du droit. Elle menace le droit à l’intérieur du droit . . . ce que redoute l’Etat, . . . le droit dans sa plus grande force ce n’est pas le crime ou le brigandage, même à grande échelle . . . l’Etat a peur de la violence fondatrice, c’est-à-dire capable de justifier, de légitimer . . . ou de transformer des relations de droit . . . . et donc de se présenter comme ayant un droit au droit. (Force de loi 87) In light of this dissertation’s corpus, one can propose that the law fears – and yet desires – the great criminal as the epitome of the Terror, a repetition (or a difference in repetition) of the “instant révolutionnaire,” who has the power to challenge the law. The great criminal, seductive yet castigated, is a tragic figure that fascinates and horrifies the popular imaginary, as he opens up a space of disorder within the law with by means of the very violence that also founds the law. His disorder, like Benjamin’s violence, is thus law-making and law-preserving. The iconic multi-layered figure of the great criminal is at the center of this project, which argues that the great criminal, in his various spectacular and literary dimensions, like Plato’s imitative poet who pretends he is the hero, is a catalyst for the most intense relationship between law and disorder. While popular imagination envisions the great criminal as a figure of lawlessness, an outlaw, 15 one can advance that the great criminal is a figure of “lawful(l)ness” that is both within the law and exceeds the law. Disorder is his ethical and aesthetic method and crime is the operating mode he advocates. * In 1816, Jakob Grimm, a German philologist, jurist and mythologist equally celebrated for his work as a legal and a literary scholar, made the far-reaching claim that “law and literature arose from the same bed” (153). This compelling idea that soon began to haunt literary scholars and jurists—as it does this project—suggests kinship and desire. Similarly, Derrida asks: “Et si la loi, sans être elle-même transie de littérature, partageait ses conditions de possibilité avec la chose littéraire?” (La Faculté de juger 109), pointing to the common character of law and literature. In the early twentieth century, the works of American jurist John Wigmore and Justice Benjamin Cardozo prefigured and influenced what has now become the groundbreaking scholarly field of law and literature. This interdisciplinary field later gained substantial ground among legal and literary scholars in 1970s with the publication of the seminal The Legal Imagination (1973) by American law professor and literary critic James Boyd White who is often seen as the founder of the modern law and literature discipline. His book examines legal texts in the light of literary analysis. In a similar vein, Richard Weisberg, a leading scholar in law and literature, published 16 Poethics, and Other Strategies of Law and Literature (1992) in which he develops the concept of law as literature and suggests using literary critical methods to interpret legal texts. John Wigmore’s ‘A List of One Hundred Legal Novels’ (1907), an essay gathering a hundred literary texts dramatizing legal topics, suggests that lawyers could learn from literature and acknowledged the transformative power of the literary text. Among these texts are listed the notorious works of French writers such as Alexandre Dumas (Le Comte de Monte-Cristo), Honoré de Balzac (Le Père Goriot), Victor Hugo (Les Misérables, Quatre-vingt-treize), Albert Camus (La Chute, L’Homme révolté). Few French scholars specialize in this interdisciplinary study of law and literature, however there have been some key works produced. The question of the imaginary of the guillotine is brought into view in Patrick Wald-Lasowski’s Les Echafauds du Romanesque (1991) and Guillotinez-moi (2007). Antoine Garapon and Denis Salas, who published a recent analysis of law and literature in France, Imaginer la loi. Le droit dans la littérature (2008), raised some significant questions and posed fiction as an ethical and aesthetic nexus between law and literature. François Ost’s ground-breaking work, Raconter la loi: aux sources de l’imaginaire juridique (2004), also influenced by American scholarship, defines three significant directions: the law of literature (“le droit de la littérature”) that engages with the law putting literature on trial; law as literature, following the traditional American approach; and law in literature which is the direction he prefers (1). As Yoshino underlines, law has an incentive to distance itself from literature. Yet as a textual practice, “law has difficulty distinguishing itself from literature more broadly construed. Law and literature is a fraught enterprise because law must struggle with the 17 seeming necessity and impossibility of banishing the literary from its confines” (1839). Reading the Platonic banishment of the poet from the city as an ancient analogue for the banishment of literature from the sphere of law, Yoshino also remarks that the “law and literature” discourse is “anemic but will not die:” while literature is marked by qualities stigmatized within the law, literature has “one, more expansive incarnation, a generalized form of which law is a part . . . law is a machine of words” (1838). In this dissertation, law and literature “comparaissent, paraissent ensemble, se voient convoqués l’un devant l’autre” (“Préjugés, Devant la loi,” in La Faculté de juger 109). Examining literature as law, this project explores the relationship(s) between law and literature through the figure of the criminal-writer as a figure of authority in the different public spheres he establishes in the literary text, which, in turn, acquires its own authority—an analysis that brings together Leclerc’s reflection on the question of authority and Habermas’s definition of the public sphere. Habermas defines the public sphere as: a sphere between civil society and the state, in which critical public discussion of matters of general interest was institutionally guaranteed . . . . The emergent bourgeoisie gradually replaced a public sphere in which the ruler’s power was merely represented before the people with a sphere in which state authority was publicly monitored through informed and critical discourse by the people . . . . The process in which the state- governed public sphere was appropriated by the public of private people making use of their reason and was established as a sphere of criticism of 18 public authority was one of functionally converting the public sphere in the world of letters already equipped with institutions of the public and with forums for discussion. (51) The public sphere for Habermas is therefore where individuals can gather to discuss and challenge public authority, and thereby establish their own authority through discourse— a conclusion that Leclerc analyzes from a different, but complementary, perspective, when he examines the history of authority and authorship. As Leclerc states in his Histoire de l’autorité, , “celui qui parle n’est plus en position d’assujetti: il est un homme libre” (6). Leclerc distances his reflection from the purely institutional conception of authority, focuses on auctoritas, the discursive authority of the writer, and claims: L’autorité, c’est la position sociale, symbolique, institutionnelle légitimant la prétention de proférer la vérité. . . . L’Auteur, entendu au sens de l’énonciateur autorisé du discours, de détenteur de autorité énonciative, ce peut être Dieu, la collectivité, les Anciens. Ce n’est que dans la modernité textuelle qu’il a pris la figure plus profane du scripteur de l’œuvre littéraire, de l’écrivain. (16) Looking at three different spheres—the bourgeois society for Lacenaire, the circus for Genet, and pop culture for Mesrine—this dissertation explores the question of authority and authorship to reflect on the power of literature and criminal writers. 19 Considering writing as a revolutionary gesture, Maurice Blanchot writes: “il y a au coeur de tout écrivain un démon qui le pousse à frapper de mort toutes les formes littéraires, à prendre conscience de sa dignité d’écrivain” (La Part du feu 97). In his reflection on literature, revolution, and terror, Blanchot identifies Sade as “l’écrivain par excellence” who, writing in prison throughout the French revolution, produced radical texts full of violence and crime, unrestrained by law: Il écrit une œuvre immense, et cette œuvre n’existe pour personne. Inconnu, mais ce qu’il représente a pour tous une signification immédiate. Rien de plus qu’un écrivain, et il figure la vie élevée jusqu’à la passion, la passion devenue cruauté et folie. Du sentiment le plus singulier, le plus caché et le plus privé de sens commun, il fait une affirmation universelle, la réalité d’une parole publique qui, livrée à l’histoire, devient une explication légitime de la condition de l’homme dans son ensemble. Enfin, il est la négation même : son œuvre n’est que le travail de la négation, son expérience le mouvement d’une négation acharnée, poussée au sang, qui nie les autres, nie Dieu, nie la nature et, dans ce cercle sans cesse parcouru, jouit d’elle‐même comme de l’absolue souveraineté. (311) Sade brings together the writer and the criminal in the shadow of the revolution, embodies the terrorist, and establishes his own law through literature. In this perspective, one can gradually expand the analogy between Plato’s poet as a figure of disorder and Benjamin’s great criminal—glorified and punished—in order to excavate a vision of the 20 great criminal in literature as the revolutionary figure that can allow for the possibility of literature as law—a vision captured by Blanchot, when he claims that true writers must come to believe they are the revolution: “tout écrivain qui, par le fait même d’écrire, n’est pas conduit à penser: je suis la révolution, seule la liberté me fait écrire, en réalité n’écrit pas” (324). * While the law has a long history of putting literature on trial, can literature put the law on trial? And what would it mean for both the law and literature to answer yes to this question? 7 The literary allows one to suspend referential certainty but can only do so under the protection of the law, which thereby guarantees literature a certain kind of freedom. While is the law so attached to protecting fiction? 8 These are questions this dissertation seeks to answer using Derrida’s The Death Penalty (2014) and “Préjugés: Devant la loi” in La faculté de juger (1985), in which he addresses the question of how law and literature relate, and provides reflections that have been central to political, legal, and literary theory. Moreover, Derrida’s The Death Penalty provides a framework for this project in that it poses the centrality of the question of the death penalty within its 7 A question Hillis Miller asks about literature’s power to lay down the law, in ‘Laying Down the Law in Literature,’ 1491. 8 Some notorious literary works brought to trial: Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (trial in 1857); Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (two trials: 1857 and 1864). See Yvan Leclerc, Crimes écrits. La littérature en procès au XIXe siècle. 21 reflection on the power of literature to challenge the law. The primary corpus of this dissertation examines different manifestations of the “poetico-literary quasi redemption” Derrida poses as a link between literature and the death penalty (33), through Lacenaire’s poetics of recapitation, Genet’s aestheticization of the great criminal, and Mesrine’s theatrical rebellion and quest for justice. This project does not focus on the great criminal as a legal entity, but on his place in “the imaginative universe of the law—the human narrative we call law” (Miller 1491). This human drama constitutes the core of this dissertation and therefore puts into conversation the writings of celebrated authors and those of famous criminals, each chapter being a literary case study. In order to avoid a “structural” approach to crime, this study, however, does not analyze the evolution of crime quantitatively or qualitatively in French literature or society, and does not re-open criminal cases. Both projects have been undertaken by other scholars, such as Anne-Emmanuelle Demartini in L’Affaire Lacenaire (2001) or Philip Smith in Punishment and Culture (2008). Yet, without neglecting these two areas, this project offers a genealogy of the figure of the great criminal, pairing real criminals with literary characters and analyzing the reconfiguration of the great criminal through different vectors (ethical discourse, aesthetics, pop culture). This interdisciplinary engagement between law and literature links the reality of crime with literary texts in their most spectacular dimension through three core chapters, focusing on Pierre-François Lacenaire and Victor Hugo, Jean Genet, and finally Jacques Mesrine and Albert Camus respectively. Chapter II “Pierre-François Lacenaire, Murderer, Poet, Lawyer” traces the guillotine as a topos in the great criminal’s memoirs and poems. This chapter first 22 investigates the common characteristics of his autobiographical project and Victor Hugo’s famous Last Days of a Condemned Man (1832) and Claude Gueux (1834), two novellas that focus on a criminal awaiting execution with the guillotine as a backdrop. This reading of Lacenaire with Hugo proposes that Lacenaire’s and Hugo’s writings create a “shadow courtroom” in which literature produces an ethical discourse against the death penalty. One can advance that literature reclaims law’s authority and defies the guillotine by establishing a separate system of judgment based on knowledge of the human character, thereby creating an alternative public sphere. This chapter ultimately conceptualizes the great criminal’s power of subversion through an analysis of Lacenaire’s “poetics of recapitation” in which the guillotine becomes a source of creation that effectively gives life to the criminal it executes: Lacenaire is given life as an author and as a literary character in his own text, and becomes a literary character in the proliferation of narratives that follow his execution. Pairing real criminals with fictional ones is the fundamental structure of this dissertation but also the core of Jean Genet’s novels in which he glorifies notorious criminals such as Maurice Pilorge and Eugene Weidmann (both guillotined in 1939) while recalling his own criminal life. Binding together law and literature, Genet was a controversial poet and novelist, a delinquent, and a political activist, made famous for his glorious celebration of homosexual desire and transvestites. Chapter III, entitled “Genet’s Tight-Rope Dancers: An Aestheticization of the Criminal,” builds on the concepts of alternate public sphere and “shadow courtroom” defined in Chapter II in order to open up the reflection on the ethical power of literature to the question of aesthetics, for Genet’s alternate public sphere is the circus. Reading Genet’s lesser-known poetic text, The Tight- 23 Rope Dancer, in which the narrator praises and admonishes a funambulist, one can draw an analogy between the funambulist and the criminal, suggesting that, in Genet’s vision, criminals and artists are united in defiance of society—symbolized by gravity in the case of the tight-rope dancer. Carrying this interpretation over to Genet’s most celebrated works (Our Lady of the Flowers, The Miracle of the Rose and The Man Condemned to Death), his criminals can be analyzed as tight-rope artists flirting with law and death in a beautiful erotic dance (the funambulist’s metal wire becomes an image of the blade of the guillotine). Hence one can suggest that, by bringing together the artist and the criminal at the intersection of law, aesthetics, and desire, Genet endows the literary with the power to play with (and against) the rules and logic of the law and the society it governs. Chapter IV “Jacques Mesrine: Public Enemy, National Hero” builds on the concept of aestheticization and emphasizes Mesrine as a theatrical character whose life and death (which occurred when he was shot on the street by the police just two years before the death penalty was abolished) were major événements médiatiques. A criminal in search of an author in the tradition of Pirandello’s Six Characters In Search of an Author and a man in revolt recalling Camus’s L’Homme révolté, Mesrine, through his own writings, provides critical directions about law’s violence and literature’s power and limits. Replacing Mesrine in a larger literary and philosophical tradition that examines and questions the law, its premises, and its applications, one can advance that Mesrine undermines the “legitimacy” of the law, and actually embodies the disorder engendered by “the law’s own ordering efforts” (Sarat 2)—a disorder the law denies, like the violence of its origins. By forcing the public to face law’s violence, Mesrine promotes righteous rebellion and crime. A tragic character trapped in law’s script, Mesrine emerges 24 as a character in the theater of the law condemned to play a script in which he has no voice. Seeking authorship in his own texts, he writes stories directly inspired from popular literature and clichés, and only manages to ensconce himself deeper into characters in different literary genres—a destiny that can be read as literature’s autonomous discourse on its own possibilities and limits. 25 Chapter II: Pierre-François Lacenaire, Murderer, Poet, and Lawyer LACENAIRE, Pierre-François (Lyon, 1803 – Paris, 1836) CRIMES: Fraud; Theft; Desertion; Murder. CONVICTIONS: Bicêtre, 12 months (1829); La Force, 13 months (1833); La Conciergerie, condemned to death (1835). 26 1. L’Affaire Lacenaire French criminal Pierre-Francois Lacenaire (1803-1836) had a life punctuated by a succession of thefts, frauds, and murders, while he also made numerous attempts at becoming a writer. As one of France’s most notorious criminals in the nineteenth century and a man of literary ambitions who wrote poems and memoirs that are still discussed today, Lacenaire remains an enigmatic and fascinating figure of French criminal and literary history. Little did he know that his memoirs and poems, hastily written in prison, would transform him into a celebrity and feed the legend that had started developing before his execution. Shortly after his arrest, Lacenaire became an unprecedented object of discourse as his name, picture, and story were widely circulated in the local and national newspapers. La Gazette des tribunaux, a newspaper specialized in reporting on famous cases, expanded his notoriety throughout the country. Lacenaire also owed part of his celebrity to Le Petit journal, one of France’s main newspapers, which discussed his case in great detail for months before and after his execution. In addition, numerous regional newspapers such as La Gazette du Midi or Le Petit Rouen reported on his case and projected him to the front stage. 9 His contemporary, Jacques Arago, a journalist and a writer, declared in his Lacenaire après sa condamnation: ses conversations intimes, ses poésies, sa correspondance, un drame en trois actes, a book published in 1836, 9 For an extended list of the newspapers discussing Lacenaire around 1836, see Anne- Emmnauelle Demartini, L’Affaire Lacenaire 259-322. 27 combining the journalist’s narrative of Lacenaire’s life and some of Lacenaire’s writings: “si Lacenaire n’avait été qu’un Trumeau, un Cartouche . . . nous n’aurions jamais rien publié sur Lacenaire. [Il] nous a ouvert son âme toute entière” (1). 10 The public’s interest in the life and death of the criminal may indeed have made it possible for Lacenaire to finally gain notoriety as a writer. His popular Mémoires, révélations et poésies de Lacenaire écrits par lui-même à la Conciergerie, which serves as the main focus of this chapter, was published in 1836, just four months after his death, with a final section that was later identified as apocryphal. These memoirs, written as a kind of palimpsest of Hugo’s Le Dernier jour d’un condamné (1829), largely contributed to the murderer’s celebrity. “Le poète assassin” as he called himself (60) quickly became Lacenaire’s nom de guerre in the French imaginary, but his writings were more than the reminiscences of the Romantic dandy that some of his critics have described. 11 Lacenaire’s poems and memoirs—mixing facts and fiction—built a case against society and challenged the guillotine that took his life in 1836. * Like hundreds of prisoners since the Revolution, Lacenaire was confined in a small cell in La Conciergerie, the “antechamber of the guillotine,” awaiting his execution. Unlike most prisoners, Lacenaire was given a table, ink and paper. Nowadays, La 10 The edition of the memoirs used in this chapter is the 2002 Editions du Boucher. The poems are quoted from Victor Cochinat’s edition of Lacenaire’s writings. 11 Nineteenth-century critics such Jacques Arago and Victor Cochinat in their semi- fictional biographies of Lacenaire have evoked the figures of the romantic and the dandy; modern critics such as Emmanuelle Demartini and Lisa Downing associate Lacenaire with the same figures. 28 Conciergerie, located west of Ile de la Cité in Paris, has become a museum and many cells have been reconstituted, allowing the visitor to imagine a criminal writing at his table. 12 Figure 1: http://beauxmondesdesigns.blogspot.com/2010/01/little-american-visit-to-opera-house-la.html This exhibition recalls that wealthy aristocrats imprisoned there during the nineteenth century could be provided with ink and paper to write. But Lacenaire was neither rich nor 12 For a description of the museum, see http://conciergerie.monuments-nationaux.fr 29 an aristocrat—despite his father’s delusions of grandeur and imbuement with the aristocracy. Yet he was granted several privileges, as suggested by his only complaint: Quoique je n’aie à reprocher aucun acte d’injustice, d’arbitraire ou de dureté à M. le directeur de X... je ne puis m’empêcher de me plaindre qu’il se soit permis de me tutoyer. Une semblable familiarité est inconvenante vis-à-vis de tout le monde, et je devais, plus qu’un autre, en être à l’abri par ma position, mon éducation et toute ma manière d’être. Ce ne sont pas de semblables procédés qui démontrent la supériorité et établissent le mieux la ligne qui sépare les rangs et les positions. (140) Arguably, his living conditions in prison were probably not as comfortable as the rumors have suggested, but Lacenaire’s sense of exceptionality is apparent throughout the memoirs and nowhere in this text does he question his entitlement to receive a certain number of privileges. 13 From this perspective, he attributes his exceptional treatment to the superiority and quality of his education: “Que de personnes depuis le jour de ma condamnation, m’ont témoigner ou fait témoigner de l’intérêt et ont demandé à me voir, et pourtant je suis un assassin ! Si j’eusse été un vulgaire assassin, sans talents, sans éducation, tout ce monde-là se serait-il dérangé ?” (111). Lacenaire had indeed achieved a high level of education and had solid knowledge of history, law, and literature. One may advance however that the public’s interest in his life (and death) may have been largely responsible for his prerogatives. Not only was he allowed to write, but he also had 13 On Lacenaire’s living conditions in prison, see Demartini 47. 30 access to newspapers, entertained visitors, received good food, and was not constrained by a straightjacket, unlike most prisoners during the days or weeks preceding their execution. Lacenaire mentions several visitors in his memoirs: Arago, a journalist who published a semi-fictional biography of the criminal in 1836; M. Allard, the chief of Police; a few scientists, specifically Pierre-Marie Dumoutier, a phrenologist who made Lacenaire’s death-mask; and Reffay de Lusignan, Lacenaire’s old Jesuit professor from the school he attended in Alix when he was fourteen. Within the walls of one of Paris’s most infamous prisons and imbued with a sense of exceptionality, Lacenaire wrote relentlessly: “Ecrivons maintenant, écrivons sans relâche . . . ma plume ne s’arrêtera pas dans ma main, elle n’en ira que d’un pas plus ferme et plus agile (92). He knew his days were numbered—executions usually took place six to eight weeks after the sentence had been pronounced and his appeal only provided him with a short respite. * “L’affaire Lacenaire,” as it was commonly referred to in the press during the 1830s, was reopened several times throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Demartini’s biographical work constitutes an excellent resource and lists all the different references to Lacenaire in the press. She traces them in La Gazette des tribunaux, journal de jurisprudence et de débats judiciaires (the most famous judicial newspaper of the nineteenth century), but also through other important French newspapers, such as Le Constitutionnel and Le Petit journal. Her archival work reveals the extraordinary coverage of Lacenaire’s case in the press, before and after his death (260). The articles 31 published on January 10 th , 1836, the day after Lacenaire’s execution, epitomize the tensions and contradictions in the narratives that surrounded the criminal. The number of people attending, the general atmosphere, and more important, Lacenaire’s attitude in the face of death, were reported in contradictory terms, producing two completely different narratives. La Gazette des tribunaux emphasizes Lacenaire’s lack of courage: A neuf heures moins un quart, le funèbre cortège est arrivé au pied de l’échafaud, qui avait été dressé à une heure après minuit, à la lueur des torches. Lacenaire descend brusquement de la voiture; la pâleur de son visage est effrayante; son regard est vague et incertain; il balbutie et semble chercher des paroles que sa langue se refuse à articuler . . . . Pendant cet horrible moment, Lacenaire est au pied de l’escalier…M. L’Abbé Montes cherche à détourner son attention de l’effroyable spectacle qu’il a devant les yeux... Ah bah !... répond Lacenaire, d’une voix altérée… En vain cherche-t-il encore à faire croire à une assurance qu’il n’a plus. M. Allard est-il là ? dit-il d’une voix de plus en plus éteinte . . . . Il avait annoncé qu’il parlerait au peuple ; mais il n’en a plus la force ; ses genoux fléchissent ; sa figure est décomposée ; il monte les degrés, soutenu par les aides de l’exécuteur, et le coup fatal a bientôt mis fin à ses angoisses et à sa vie. (qtd in L’Affaire Lacenaire 263) But Le Constitutionnel publishes a different version and emphasizes Lacenaire’s bravery: 32 La voiture s’étant arrêtée au pied de l’échafaud, où le cercle formé par la garde municipale venait de s’ouvrir, Lacenaire descendit le premier, alla se placer à la gauche, à côté de son confesseur, qui ne cessait de lui adresser des exhortations. Lacenaire avait les mains liées derrière le dos ; ses cheveux et son col de chemise étaient coupés ras ; il portait une redingote bleue, placée en manteau sur ses épaules, la même qu’il avait à l’audience au moment de la condamnation, peut-être aussi le jour de l’assassinat. Du reste, ses traits étaient sereins, et la stoïque impassibilité avec laquelle il suivait tous les mouvements, soit de l’exécuteur et de ses valets, soit de son complice, aurait pu faire croire qu’il s’agissait pour lui de la chose au monde la plus insignifiante. C’était le tour de Lacenaire, qui, d’un œil tranquille, avait vu tomber le couteau et se relever sanglant. Il monte, d’un air dégagé, les degrés de l’échafaud. Comme Avril, il promène pendant quelques secondes des yeux assurés sur la foule, et paraît un instant se recueillir comme pour la haranguer . . . cependant les exécuteurs l’ayant étendu sur la bascule, il conserve toute sa connaissance, et les yeux fixés sur le bac béant qui renferme la tête de son co-accusé, il attend le coup qui va à son tour le frapper . . . Mais, par une inexplicable cause, le couteau ne se détache point . . . vingt secondes se passent dans cet horrible supplice, et Lacenaire faisant un effort désespéré, tourne la tête et relève vers la hache, qui s’abat enfin, des yeux dont nous n’essaierons pas de peindre l’effroyable regard ! (qtd in L’Affaire Lacenaire 264) 33 These two very different narratives formed a rhetorical duet that was soon joined by several other newspapers taking either side. It is not until 1863 that it will be officially established that La Gazette had reported a lie initiated by the authorities (Demartini 186). After his death, the media’s interest in Lacenaire inevitably faded but he soon became l’enfant terrible of French literature, as many writers took hold of his story. In 1852, French writer Théophile Gautier dedicated a poem to Lacenaire, drawing an inglorious portrait of the one he called “real murderer and false poet.” 14 Victor Cochinat, a journalist and a former lawyer, published a new edition of Lacenaire’s memoirs in 1864 (Lacenaire, ses crimes, son procès et sa mort, d'après des documents authentiques et inédits, suivis de ses poésies et chansons), which, not unlike Lacenaire’s text, mixes fiction and facts. Two modern editions of the memoirs were published later, one in 1968 (edited by Monique Du Bailly) and one in 1991 (edited by Jacques Simonelli). Simonelli suggests that Stendhal created his character Valbayre after Lacenaire in Lamiel, an unfinished novel, and that the latter also inspired Balzac and a section of Lautréamont’s Chants de Maldoror (11). The literary perspective is but one incursion of the public’s interest into Lacenaire’s case. Historians did not let Lacenaire fall into oblivion. To the modern reader nowadays, L’Affaire Lacenaire principally refers to French historian Anne-Emmanuelle Demartini’s skillful study of the criminal in which she delineates the different representations of Lacenaire as a monster in the 1830s, exploring the imagination of a nation in a very specific historical moment. She argues that the constant reconfiguration 14 http://www.toutelapoesie.com/poemes/GAUTIER/1.HTM 34 of the figure of the monster reflects the political, social, cultural and ideological stakes of post-revolutionary France. She examines for instance the figure of the beast, that of the bourgeois, and that of the romantic dandy and puts these different facettes in conversation with the medical, political and cultural discourses of the 1830s. Many have since asked why this criminal could exert so much fascination upon the public’s imagination and trigger such a proliferation of discourses. Lisa Downing, a specialist in French discourses of sexuality and French criminal culture, discusses “l’affaire Lacenaire” in her recent book The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality, and the Modern Killer (2013). She accurately relates the murderer’s notoriety to his status: Lacenaire’s actual crimes were neither particularly numerous nor impressive. He was convicted of a double murder and a bungled attempted third killing . . . . If the case of Lacenaire excited a disproportionate wealth of reactions and opinions from a variety of ideological and political factions, this is perhaps due to his status as an educated, creative and bourgeois killer. (36) A man of literary ambitions, educated and trained as a lawyer, Lacenaire makes a most unusual suspect and becomes an object of fascination. Like Demartini, Downing studies Lacenaire’s case in relation to the larger questions that agitated the French society of the 1830s, such as the rise of the individual, Romanticism or the growing obsession of science with crime (37). Examining the reasons behind his enduring notoriety, Downing 35 and Demartini have efficiently demonstrated that the various representations of Lacenaire, in the press and in literature, reflect the questions and issues of specific historical, political and cultural moments and systems of thoughts. However, while I will not take issue with these claims, I hold that these assessments fall short of meeting the challenge of fully apprehending Lacenaire. In my view, Lacenaire, as a figure of the great criminal and as a locus of fantasy, actually exceeds these frames. In a kind of palimpsest of Hugo’s writings, Lacenaire’s memoirs, which are the main focus of this chapter, constitute a milestone in the representation of the great criminal. They forge a new post-revolutionary literary tradition—that of a condemned man writing in the shadow of the guillotine. Investigating the common characteristics of his autobiographical project and Victor Hugo’s famous Last Days of a Condemned Man (1832) and Claude Gueux (1834), two novellas that focus on a criminal awaiting execution with the guillotine as a backdrop, I propose that Lacenaire’s writings create a “shadow courtroom” in which he establishes his authority over legal discourse. Literature can thereby produce an ethical discourse against the death penalty and generate a subversive discourse against the law and its founding violence. Within the frame of a reflection on law and literature, and more specifically on literature as force competing against law’s power over life and death, I ultimately advance that literature reclaims law’s authority and defies the guillotine by establishing ‘a separate system of judgment based on knowledge of the human character, and thereby creating an alternative public sphere” (Struve 28). “I laughed whole-heartedly, for I was coming back from the guillotine . . . alive.” Such is one of the remarkable comments found in Lacenaire’s shadow courtroom (155), 36 and one of many paradoxical images of the guillotine as a source of life. Tracing the guillotine as a topos in his writings, the second half of this chapter outlines Lacenaire’s power of subversion, which I conceptualized as a “poetics of recapitation.” Following this thread in the memoirs but also in his poems, I demonstrate how he paradoxically introduces the guillotine as a source of creation that effectively gives life to the criminal it executes. 37 2. The Shadow Courtroom In The Shadow Courtroom: Literature, Law and Narrative Authority in Victorian England (2000), Laura Struve examines courtroom scenes in nineteenth-century novels and advances that Victorian authors used the courtroom and its methods as “a foil to illustrate literature’s superiority over the law” (iii). While I do not seek emphasize the supremacy of one over the other, I use her concept of “shadow courtroom” to foreground the question of narrative authority as the crux of my reflection in this chapter. In my view, Lacenaire's writings reveal the competition for narrative authority that opposes—yet unites—the legal and the literary discourses. Equally important, using Struve’s definition of the shadow courtroom as “another kind of courtroom where readers independently evaluate the evidence and arrive at a judgment” (iii), I study Lacenaire’s shadow courtroom as an alternative public sphere in which literature is empowered to challenge, and potentially subvert, the law. Lacenaire’s shadow courtroom is, first of all, defined by its extensive use of the legal discourse and procedures. Lacenaire “poète et assassin” initially wanted to be a lawyer. He knows the convolutions of the law as he himself boldly claims: “j’avais volé le code à la main” (87). The opening lines of his memoirs read: “je me décide, moi, bien vivant, sain de corps et d’esprit, à faire de ma propre main mon autopsie et la dissection de mon cerveau” (4), with the legal phrase “sain de corps et d’esprit” evoking a legal 38 testimony. Like a judge, he critically examines the facts, decides “mon jugement ne me satisfit pas” (87), and reopens the case. 15 He uses the language and strategies of a lawyer to call himself to the bar as a witness and composes an ingenious defense speech, which he proudly calls “un plaidoyer aussi concis qu’élégant” (5). Then he proceeds with the accusation. Using perfect legalese, he accuses the press of stealing his texts while he is prison: “C’est donc une violation de ma propriété; car mes écrits m’appartiennent, je ne suis pas encore mort, même civilement, puisque mon pourvoi suspend tout l’effet du jugement” (85). Following the chronology of the events that marked his life, Lacenaire justifies his actions by blaming nature and society: “Il semble que la nature se soit fait un jeu cruel de rassembler en moi tous les dons les plus précieux pour me faire parvenir à ce que le monde appelle le comble de l’infamie et du malheur” (17). Consequently, Lacenaire positions himself as an anti-hero fighting against the injustice of the society that condemns him. More important, while his “power” is only imaginary, he does gain narrative authority by establishing himself as the subject of his own discourse, a discourse that will have much impact on the public: 16 15 This comment made by Lacenaire refers to one of his previous trials, when he was charged with theft and condemned to a few months in prison. 16 Lacenaire occupies a large part of the social and cultural imagination despite his mediocre talents and has been used as a case study in criminal culture. François Foucart, a jurist and psychologist, attempts to dismantle the aura of prestige and fascination conferred upon Lacenaire in his Lacenaire, l’assassin démythifié. He seeks to understand how Lacenaire, whose crimes and writings were not exceptional, still acquired such fame. Foucart remarks that Lacenaire was the first criminal who used public opinion and speculates about the fact that the dandy-assassin became a figure of the romantic. Lacenaire knew how to speak and write well, and he could seduce the journalists and the intellectuals who turned him into a figure of rebellion, echoing their own problems within a society that did not accept them. 39 Tant de prétendus observateurs ont eu la fatuité de me juger ; on m’a peint sous des formes si bizarres, si éloignées de la vérité, que lorsque je l’aurais rétablie, lorsque j’aurais présenté non seulement les faits de mon existence, mais encore mes opinions, ma manière de sentir et de juger, le public s’apercevra combien il a été pris pour dupe par ces gens qui ont parlé de moi sans m’avoir jamais vu ni connu. (6-7) From the Foucauldian perspective, it can be argued that Lacenaire’s writings make it possible for literature to become a counterpoint to law’s discourse by challenging and reclaiming some of its narrative authority. Of his crimes, Lacenaire has indeed much to say, and he makes a great display of his bravado throughout the memoirs in which he progressively establishes himself as a debonair criminal waging a personal war on society. Lacenaire claims: “Croyez-vous que c’était l’appât de l’or que je devais trouver chez Chardon qui m’avait poussé? Oh non! C’était une sanglante justification de ma vie, une sanglante protestation contre cette société qui m’avait repoussé” (130). 17 He proceeds to acknowledge his crimes, which he describes with a profusion of details. His discursive strategy goes as far as to deny the accuracy of the reports published in the press. Lacenaire warns: Le public s’apercevra combien il a été pris pour dupe par ces gens qui ont parlé de moi sans m’avoir jamais ni vu ni connu, et par ceux-mêmes qui, 17 He is referring to the double murder of Chardon and the latter’s mother, also known as the murder of the Passage du Cheval-Rouge. Lacenaire and his accomplice Avril killed Chardon with an ax and suffocated his mother in her bed. 40 s’en étant approchés en dernier lieu, ont rendu de mes diverses conversations des comptes peu exacts, mais appropriés à leur système, pour les faire coïncider avec leurs opinions personnelles. (7) Retaillez vos plumes maintenant, moralistes, observateurs, qui avez voulu me juger sans me connaître, sans ma participation. Pensiez-vous donc que je me dévoilerais ainsi avant le temps, que je vous donnerais mon dernier mot? Discutez à cette heure, pour expliquer si le matérialisme est chez moi effet ou cause du crime; rapportez mes conversations, rapprochez-les et créez-vous un homme qui se rapporte à vos systèmes, ce ne sera jamais moi. (98) As Demartini states in her biography of Lacenaire, “il définit son projet autobiographique: opposer au crâne-objet des phrénologues, la vie-texte d’un sujet” (334). Gradually Lacenaire establishes himself as the subject of a discourse in which he embodies different persona: he is the accused, the judge, the attorney, and the witness all at once. “Le discours autobiographique obéit au modèle judiciaire” (Demartini 325). Through the literary space of the memoirs, he builds a shadow courtroom that establishes a separate system of judgment based on knowledge of the human character” (Struve 28). He displaces the law’s definition, boundaries and application, and opens up an alternative public sphere that critiques and challenges the legal system. Lacenaire has much to reveal and proclaims the authenticity of his story: “si tu t’attendais à trouver dans ce livre des scènes de roman, tu te tromperais; ma vie, quoique bien pleine, est vide de ces épisodes que l’on retrouve assez du reste sous la plume de nos 41 auteurs” (5). However the reader soon realizes, from the tone and content of the memoirs, that Lacenaire’s claim to authenticity must be weighed against his obvious theatricality and his fictionalized—sometimes even quixotic—narrative. Although he claims that there is no room for the romanesque in his memoirs, his style is inspired by different French literary works. In this perspective, it is particularly important to analyze his rhetoric of the confession. Opening his memoirs with a preface that immediately evokes Rousseau’s introduction to the Confessions (1782), Lacenaire recalls the story of his life, from the innocence of his early childhood and his victimization at home, to his years at school, his different failures, and his crimes. Comparing Rousseau’s preface to a few excerpts of the Mémoires can illustrate the Rousseauian style and spirit of Lacenaire’s autobiographic enterprise. Rousseau writes: Je forme une entreprise qui n'eut jamais d'exemple et dont l'exécution n'aura point d'imitateur. Je veux montrer à mes semblables un homme dans toute la vérité de la nature; et cet homme, ce sera moi. Moi seul. [a] Je sens mon coeur, et je connais les hommes. . . . Que la trompette du jugement dernier sonne quand elle voudra ; je viendrai, ce livre à la main, me présenter devant le souverain juge. Je dirai hautement : Voilà ce que j'ai fait, ce que j'ai pensé, ce que je fus. [b] J'ai dit le bien et le mal avec la même franchise . . . . Je me suis montré tel que je fus ; méprisable et vil quand je l'ai été, bon, généreux, sublime, quand je l'ai été . . . . Rassemblez autour de moi l'innombrable foule de mes semblables ; qu'ils écoutent mes confessions, qu'ils gémissent de mes indignités, qu'ils rougissent de mes 42 misères. Que chacun d'eux découvre à son tour son coeur au pied de ton trône avec la même sincérité ; et [c] puis qu'un seul te dise, s'il l'ose : Je fus meilleur que cet homme-là. (8, my emphasis) Similarly Lacenaire declares, on knowing one’s heart better than anyone else [a]: “voulez-vous que je vous dise une chose, moi qui connais à fond le cœur de l’homme, à vous qui pensez le connaître” (94). On being sincere, revealing his most intimate thoughts, and revealing all good and bad events truthfully—a rhetorical strategy he uses throughout the memoirs [b], he claims: Je vais donc t’initier dans tous les secrets, non seulement de ma vie, mais encore de mes sensations et de mes pensées les plus intimes . . . . Je ne te promets qu’une chose, moi, c’est de te faire lire dans mon cœur aussi bien que moi-même et de t’en faire compter tous les battements, toutes les pulsations. Tu peux donc, les yeux fermés, t’abandonner à ma sincérité, quoique je n’aie pas prêté serment. (5) Finally, on challenging the readers to find him guilty [c], he says: Aussi, en finissant, je porte le défi à qui que ce soit de prouver que j’ai menti dans la plus légère circonstance. (7) Qu’il y en ait donc un seul qui se lève et qui dise : j’ai vu trembler cet homme. (97) 43 Although Lacenaire claims Emile is the only book by Rousseau that he ever read with pleasure or interest (24), the Confessions are obviously a subtext for his memoirs. 18 Under Lacenaire’s rhetoric of the confession lies a tension between facts and fiction, a tension that exists in the legal discourse as well. The confession is a genre at the intersection of the law, the religious and narrative. It can therefore be argued that Lacenaire’s method does not really differ from the reconstitution of life- and crime- narratives presented in court by attorneys. 19 While Lacenaire constantly reaffirms the thruthfulness of his story: “Aussi, en finissant, je porte le défi à qui que ce soit de prouver que j’ai menti dans la plus légère circonstance” (7), this rhetorical gesture cannot fool the reader into believing everything Lacenaire describes. Still he presents himself as an “insider” with the advantage of being able to reveal what is hidden below the surface, or what the press or the phrenologists cannot guess. Inside his cell, inside his head, Lacenaire scrupulously emphasizes his interiority, his thoughts, and his emotions: J’avais un cœur délicat et sensible. Porté à la reconnaissance et aux plus tendres affections, j’aurais voulu voir tout le monde heureux autour de moi. Rien ne me paraissait si doux et si digne d’envie que d’être aimé. La vue du chagrin d’autrui m’arrachait des larmes. Je me souviens, à l’âge de 7 ans, d’avoir pleuré en lisant la fable des deux Pigeons. (18) 18 See Demartini 332, for an analysis of the reception of Lacenaire’s writings by the public within the framework of the Rousseauian autobiography. 19 On the transformations of narratives in court, see John Conley, and William O'Barr, Just Words: Law, Language, and Power 1-14. 44 Thus setting the tone of his memoirs, Lacenaire produces a controversial autobiographical text, a narrative that, like its author, refuses to be ended (or guillotined) and gradually takes up a life of its own. These tensions point to a competition for narrative authority between the legal and the literary discourses, and Lacenaire’s literary enterprise suggests that fiction does not necessarily lie with literature but with the law. The fictionalized part of his narrative in the memoirs only proves that he can skillfully lie by using the language of the law—an example of Foucault’s argument that power produces resistance to itself (Discipline and Punish 194). * Throughout his memoirs, Lacenaire repeatedly expresses an anxiety regarding his loss of self once his body is in the hands of the phrenologists—experts who claimed they could determine someone’s character from the shape and irregularities of the skull. He reflects upon the skulls and the death-masks (plaster heads and busts) that were, at that time, routinely appropriated by phrenologists and became the objects of voluminous studies and abundant discourses—discourses that Lacenaire intends to direct when his own head is involved and states: Je vois d’ici une nuée de phrénologues, crânologues, physiologistes, anatomistes, que sais-je? Tous oiseaux de proie vivant de cadavres, se ruer 45 sur le mien sans lui laisser le temps de refroidir. . . . Je ne m’appartiens plus en ce moment; que sera-ce après ma mort? (3) After calling himself as a witness for the defense and making his own case, Lacenaire, attorney, poet, and murderer, seeks to establish his narrative authority over the court’s experts—in this case, the phrenologists represented by Dumoutier, a physicist who founded the Société de Phrénologie in Paris in 1836, and Bonnelier who published the Autopsie physiologique de Lacenaire. 20 Lacenaire founds his narrative authority by debunking their work and mocking their “science.” The Revolution brought the head into focus, as French historian Daniel Arasse has shown in The Guillotine and the Terror. The guillotine turned into a portrait machine and the “portrait de guillotine” became a genre (134). Death-masks were another manifestation of the public’s interest in the decapitated, an interest that has not completely faded in French society: in December 2013, the French newspaper Le Monde triggered the public’s attention by presenting the re-creation of the French revolutionary Robespierre’s face, a reconstruction made using the plaster head Madame Tussaud had moulded after Robespierre’s execution on the guillotine in 1794. A facial reconstruction specialist, Phillippe Froesh, and a forensic specialist, Philippe Charlier, had modeled his 20 Sometimes referred to as Dumoustier or Dumousier in Lacenaire’s text, Pierre-Marie Alexandre Dumoutier was a phrenologist, the founder of the Société de Phrénologie in Paris and a member of the Société d’Anatomie. While Dumoutier made the plaster head, it is his colleague Hippolyte Bonnelier who analyzed it in Autopsie physiologique de Lacenaire. 46 head, revealing a face marked by the pox and numerous scars. 21 Tussaud’s talent as a sculptor had allowed her to escape the scaffold during the French revolution as she was employed to make the death-masks of some of the victims of the guillotine, including those of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. 22 However, not all the condemned were “fortunate” enough to have their heads sculpted by the notorious Tussaud. Dumoutier made two copies of Lacenaire’s head, one before and one after his execution. Figure 2: http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/hommedia.ashx?id=93878&size=Large 21 http://bigbrowser.blog.lemonde.fr/2013/12/17/recapite-le-visage-de-robespierre- reconstitue/ 22 See for instance: http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/death-mask-of-jean- paul-marat-cast-by-madame-tussaud-news-photo/73184347 47 Figure 3: https://i.vimeocdn.com/portrait/2158285_300x300.jpg Both masks, along with Lacenaire’s skull, brain, and hand, were appropriated by phrenologists and became the objects of numerous studies. While the first plaster-head is currently unavailable to the public, the post-mortem mask is still exhibited in the Science Museum of London. 23 Show me your head and I will tell you who you are: such was the improbable claim of phrenology in the nineteenth century, a time marked by the rapid development of positivistic criminology, made famous by Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso. 23 http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/broughttolife/objects/display.aspx?id=92707 Paul Gachet (1828-1909), a specialist in psychiatry and a patron of the arts, originally collected this plaster head that became part of a larger collection dedicated to phrenology. Most of his collection is owned by the Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle and presents 33 skulls, 376 busts et 107 brain plasters. See Erwin Ackerknecht, “P. M. A. Dumoutier et la collection phrénologique du Musée de l'Homme” 289-308. 48 As Foucault has recalled, the emergence of new scientific disciplines led to the increasing medicalization of the criminals and their systematic classification. 24 It is therefore not surprising that phrenologists found Lacenaire a highly interesting subject. While Bonnelier claims in the Autopsie physiologique de la mort de Lacenaire that, “la tête de Lacenaire dit sa vie: elle est l’avant-propos de ses Mémoires” (15), Dumoutier (as reported by Bonnelier in his Autopsie) describes Lacenaire as follows: Un homme portant les organes que je viens de reconnaitre faisait peu de cas de la vie. – Bien que sensuel, il pouvait supporter la frugalité. Très affectueux, il aurait aimé ses enfants, sa famille. – l’idée de la destruction lui paraissait simple, elle lui était familière. – il était peu courageux, mais sa fermeté, sa constance, y pouvaient suppléer. – essentiellement discret, il avait plus de réserve que de prudence. – il était fourbe. – il était avide d’acquérir plutôt pour satisfaire à ses besoins accidentels que pour conserver. (13) Bonnelier claimed he did not read Lacenaire’s memoirs before writing his report, yet his conclusions largely overlapped with the comments found in the press. Whether Dumoutier read Lacenaire’s memoirs is impossible to determine but it can be advanced that some of his findings may have been influenced by the press that described Lacenaire in similar terms. Conversely the press itself had access to Dumoutier’s first reports 24 On the body being reduced to parts and the disappearance of dignitas, see Jean Clair, and Robert Badinter, Crime et châtiment 31. Reclaiming his dignitas is also part of Lacenaire’s poetics of recapitation. 49 (written before Lacenaire’s death) and may have recycled some of his analyses. The profusion and circularity of discourses around Lacenaire reveals that the criminal had indeed reasons to worry about his loss of self. It also points to the competition of narratives surrounding “l’affaire Lacenaire.” Lacenaire, in his shadow courtroom, mocks the court’s experts and reveals their incompetence and the unreliability of their conclusions. While he never attacks head-on the premises of phrenology as a science, he proceeds to debunk its practice by revealing some of its previous errors and mocking its legitimacy: “les phrénologues comme les autres sont sujets à des bévues et des confusions” (3). He recalls Lemoine’s and Gilart’s cases and the phrenologists’ accidental swapping of the reports. Lacenaire ridicules the scientists who inadvertently claimed that Lemoine was a poet instead of Gilart. 25 He humorously asks: “qui pourra m’assurer qu’on ne découvrira pas en moi de la chimie culinaire et du pudding à la chipolata?” (4). This humor, in the face of death, establishes his superiority and gives his self-portrait more authority by denying phrenology any credibility. He further discredits the phrenologists by rejecting the conclusions they drew while examining him in prison. He declares: “les phrénologues qui ont avancé que j’étais né avec la protubérance de la fermeté, se sont grossièrement trompés. J’avais le caractère le plus faible, le plus inconstant” (65). This argument against phrenology—if the modern reader needed any—is probably the most convincing evidence of its questionable authority as a science in the light of the tumult of Lacenaire’s fitful life. 25 Both of them were charged in 1833 for theft and the murder of Mrs Idatte, a housekeeper for the Depuytrens. Lemoine was sentenced to death but Gilart was found innocent and released. See Jean Madival’s Archives Parlementaires de 1787 à 1860, 587. 50 If the re-creation of the person as an object through the examination of the head was the main enterprise of phrenology, the reconstitution of the self through the dissection of the mind is the main enterprise of Lacenaire’s autobiography, an enterprise that ultimately allows him to debunk phrenology and reclaim his head and his narrative authority. This narrative authority in the shadow courtroom allows the readers to form their own judgment in an alternative public sphere, and establishes a subversive space in literature. * La Chronique de Paris in 1836 declares : “un héros de la cour d’assises, c’est l’échafaud qui l’a grandi, c’est notre législation qui a attaché à cet homme moins d’horreur que d’étonnement : c’est la peine de mort qui est la poésie du crime. Abattez l’échafaud” (Qtd in Demartini 273). In the memoirs, Lacenaire's “grandeur” (as well as his delusions of grandeur) leads him to imagine himself seizing power and passing new laws—a gesture made possible by the status the guillotine conferred upon him. Lacenaire first presents himself as a systematic man. The evidence for such a claim lies in his explanation of his system of thought—an attempt to rethink and reorganize all laws: “Je voulais me créer un système basé sur des faits, un système qui fût mien et non le résultat des vingt mille théories que j’aurais trouvées dans leurs livres. J’ai toujours été un homme très systématique” (47). Arguably, his system, as several critics have pointed out, is weak and often the result of an intellectual patchwork of philosophies and theories (Demartini 68-93). Nonetheless, the significance of his gesture must be 51 emphasized as he poses himself as an imaginary figure of authority, develops his own system, reorganizes society according to his own rules, and establishes crime and violence as a new economy: J’étais comme on voit, toujours resté dans mes principes, dans mon système. J’avais méprisé les hommes jusqu’alors, mais sans les pouvoir détester, ils ne m’avaient pas encore fait de mal . . . . La haine succéda au mépris, haine profonde et rongeuse, dans laquelle je finis par envelopper tout le genre humain. Dès lors je ne combattis plus pour mon intérêt personnel, mais pour la vengeance; il est vrai que c’est toujours un intérêt personnel, puisque c’est un plaisir, mais enfin je ne songeai plus à mon bien-être, et certes j’en donnai déjà une belle preuve en me jetant moi-même en prison. (87) The guillotine—the backdrop of his text—gives life to Lacenaire as the subject of his own discourse. While his “power” is only imaginary, his literary gesture is strong enough to motivate the authorities to debunk his authority by reporting a lie in the press and emphasizing his cowardice in the face of death. As Demartini argues, the government, by presenting Lacenaire as a coward, sought to debunk the fascination he exerted on the public that saw him as a hero (186). As his ultimate discourse challenges society’s laws and its main agent, the guillotine, the memoirs become a fictional courtroom in which 52 Lacenaire presents a new defense and successively manifests a desire to subvert the law by usurping its authority. 26 Then Lacenaire slowly proceeds to turn the law against itself and accuses the society that condemns him, blaming it for its unnecessary violence and cruelty: “un être inoffensif . . . il faut encore que vous le fassiez souffrir pour votre nourriture, souffrir pour votre divertissement” (96). 27 He emphasizes the cruelty of the death penalty, comparing it to a sadistic form of entertainment. The guillotine, the bloody symbol of the French revolution, was initially designed to provide a more reliable, swift and humane method of execution. Yet it soon became a spectacle itself, attracting large crowds to witness public executions on the scaffold. An incarnation of the Terror but also a symbol of the most absolute form of egalitarism, Louisette (another name for the guillotine) started presiding over the macabre theater of the law over two hundred years ago, and gradually entered the public’s imagination as an object of fascination. 28 Gradually, Lacenaire “decapitates” the guillotine by building charges against the death penalty. He specifically highlights the guillotine’s inefficiency as a deterrent, pointing out the fact that death by the guillotine produces a fascinating example that others might want to follow: “l’homme est imitateur . . . l’assassinat n’est jamais plus fréquent que lorsqu’on vient de condamner un homme pour assassinat” (93). The guillotine therefore emerges as a useless instrument. 26 The first part of his memoirs was written when he was waiting for the decision of his appeal. Lacenaire’s writings become more accusatory in the second half, after his appeal was rejected. 27 Lacenaire is talking here about the animals killed by hunters and suggests he is himself a figure of the hunted animal. 28 See for instance Daniel Arasse’s analysis of the infamous prestige of the guillotine since the Revolution, 24. 53 When it was instituted, the guillotine was regarded as a more humane method of execution, and was meant to inflict “a painless death.” It could therefore be argued that it emerged as the instrument of its own subversion: the guillotine would be what allowed society to envision the end of the death penalty because of the very reason it was instituted (no more pain or cruelty), and may have contained the seeds of its own demise. 29 Indeed the first abolitionist campaign started in France as soon as the guillotine itself was instituted, with the first bill and official debate against the death penalty being supported by Robespierre in 1791. Victor Hugo stands out as the figurehead of abolitionism in France with his notorious writings against the death penalty. As early as 1823, Hugo, who was then twenty-one years old, denounces the public’s fascination for the cruelty of the guillotine: “il y a au fond des hommes un sentiment étrange qui les pousse, ainsi qu’à des plaisirs, au spectacle des supplices” (Ecrits sur la peine de mort 7). If Montesquieu, Beccaria and Bentham had already demonstrated the cruelty, uselessness and horror of the death penalty, Hugo’s powerful and emotional writing presents the death penalty as a social crime: “quand on a tué celui qui tua, qu’a-t-on fait? On n’a pas châtié, on n’a pas effrayé, on n’a pas corrigé, on n’a pas amélioré, non. On a mis le crime social en regard du crime individuel” (67). 30 Lacenaire makes a similar accusation: 29 The guillotine remained the only means of executions in France until the abolition of the death penalty in 1981. 30 Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) was a British philosopher, jurist, and social reformer. See his Rationale of Punishment, specifically chapters XI “Capital Punishment” and XII “Capital Punishment Examined.” Montesquieu (1689-1755) was a French lawyer, man of letters, and political philosopher. See his De L’esprit des lois. Cesare Beccaria (1738- 1794) was Italian criminologist, jurist, philosopher and politician. See On Crimes and Punishments. 54 Vous en voulez au meurtrier, et chaque jour vous foulez aux pieds, vous broyez sous vos dents, sans remords, le cadavre de vos victimes; chaque jour vous marchez sur des douleurs saignantes, sans daigner vous retourner. Non, je ne viens pas prêcher le meurtre, mais je viens protester contre l’ordre atroce que vous avez établi pour vous dans la nature, parce que je savais que je devais la signer et la sceller avec le mien. Je viens prêcher au riche la religion de la crainte, puisque la religion de l’amour n’a aucun pouvoir sur son cœur. (97) Interestingly, Bonnelier, who wrote Lacenaire’s Autopsie, echoes Lacenaire’s accusations and uses his phrenological report to develop an abolitionist stance by castigating the society that is responsible for criminals and fails to educate them. Indeed, his report, read en séance publique in front of the Société Phrénologique on January 15 th , 1836, dedicates as much space to Bonnelier’s philosophical and political reflections on capital punishment as it does to his scientific findings on Lacenaire’s personality. Bonnelier accuses society of its political and social flaws; he presents a defense of literature (which, he argues, cannot be responsible for criminality) and develops an argument that reveals the uselessness and injustice of the death penalty. Bonnelier declares: Les scélérats se poseraient moins en instruments du châtiment social, si les corps politiques qui dirigent la société s’employaient mieux à reformer par l’action persuasive du bien-être, de la haute moralité, de la bienveillance 55 pour tous et dans toutes choses, les erreurs incessamment développées par la souffrance, l’incertitude et la déception. (53) These mémoires d’outre-tombe allow Lacenaire to reexamine his trial, pass a new judgment, and imagine a new outcome. In his shadow courtroom, his writings also grant literature, as a form of discourse, the power to challenge the dominant discourse of the law and take a strong ethical stand against the death penalty. While it is not in Lacenaire’s power to revoke his death sentence, he uses the autobiographical texts written in prison to open up a subversive space within his cell, within the law. Although he is physically bound by his prison walls, his words can infiltrate and infect the law; and this discursive enterprise interjects itself between the moment of the law’s decision and the instant of its execution. Lacenaire senses this distinct possibility of subversion when he states: “il faudrait que le meurtrier arrêté à six heures du matin, fut jugé à huit, et qu’au moment où l’orateur du jury dit, la main sur son gilet: ‘Sur toutes les questions, oui, l’accusé est coupable’ Paf! La tête tombât” (151). This “time-space” (spatialization of time) exists, however, within the law, and by exploiting it, Lacenaire can infiltrate this space and produce a subversive discourse. Investigating the common characteristics of Lacenaire’s story and Hugo's political fiction reveals another aspect of literary narrative authority. Hugo’s Les Derniers jours d’un condamné, a text that is resolutely political in the light of the 1832 preface, reaffirms the author’s position against the death penalty. 31 It is the narrative of the last day of an anonymous man, “un condamné quelconque, exécuté un jour quelconque, pour 31 See the 1832 preface to the novella. 56 un crime quelconque” (26). Yet a profound tension exists in this text between the professed anonymity of the main character and the recurrence of the first-person “je.” This character, whom anonymity elevates to an emblematic figure, is also intensely emotional and individualized: Je laisse une mère, je laisse une femme, je laisse un enfant. Une petite fille de trois ans, douce, rose, frêle, avec de grands yeux noirs et de longs cheveux châtains . . . . Ma pauvre petite Marie, qui rit, qui joue, qui chante à cette heure, et ne pense à rien, c’est celle-là qui me fait mal! (599) This tension between the universal and the individual is likewise visible in Lacenaire’s memoirs—the literary space that allows him to discuss what the legal sphere denies him. As Derrida has emphasized in Force de loi, the law cannot be particularized, but the singularity of literature demands justice and calls up the law. Therefore a precondition for asking how Lacenaire’s literary enterprise challenges the law is remembering that there is no place for the “I” in the law that strives to present a universal face. But Lacenaire’s writings, like Hugo’s, trouble the law by challenging its machine-like repeatability through the singularity of the narrative (or performance) they imagine (Without Alibi 133). Arasse argues that “the guillotine’s impact on imagination is that it reduced death and bodies to instances of the law” (143). 32 In the light of Lacenaire’s writings, I would hold that literature counteracts this “ultimate banality” by displacing the anonymous and 32 On the impact of the guillotine, “the egalitarian penalty,” on the public imagination, see Arasse 20-21, 40. 57 egalitarian instance of the law. Literature individualizes the executed and gives them a heart. In Derrida’s words: I protest in the name of my heart when I fight so that the heart of the other will continue to beat—in me, before me, after me, or ever without me. Where else would I find the strength and the drive and the interest to fight and to struggle, with my whole heart, with the beating of my heart, against the death penalty? (The Death Penalty 257) Derrida poses “le cœur” as the element that constitutes the ultimate abolitionist argument, the readers being themselves potential criminals (“condamné à mort que nous sommes en puissance,” The Death Penalty 348). And it is literature that allows this “heart of the other” to write and appeal to the readers’ own hearts, as Lacenaire emphasizes repeatedly: “Je ne te promets qu’une chose, moi, c’est de te faire lire dans mon cœur aussi bien que moi-même et de t’en faire compter tous les battements, toutes les pulsations” (5). 33 This heart suggests that literature is truly the alternative public sphere where the ultimate abolitionist argument can be made. 33 Lacenaire makes a similar statement about all men being criminals when reflecting on man’s tendency to imitate his fellows: “En voyant le criminel fait comme un autre homme, lui qu’on s’était peint comme un monstre; un je ne sais quoi qui fait qu’on y trouve plus autant de répugnance, et si l’accusé est ferme, quel encouragement! Je serai comme lui, se dit-on; ne suis-je pas un homme comme lui? . . . et si le criminel vient à montrer que c’est la société qui a tort avec lui, chacun se dit: elle a tort aussi avec moi ; pourquoi la ménagerais-je plus que lui? . . . . Tout cela est dans l’homme; osez me dire que non, je vous dirai que vous ne le connaissez pas. Que sera-ce encore, ajouterais-je, lorsque ce criminel sera moi?” (94) 58 3. Poetics of Recapitation: Literature and the Right to Outlive Death Lacenaire, after reclaiming his head and his heart in the shadow courtroom he creates to reopen his case and invite the public to pass a new judgment, recapitates himself through his autobiographical enterprise by establishing his own authority in the text as an author. 34 The autobiographical enterprise places the “I” at the center of the text and allows Lacenaire to establish himself as the subject of his own discourse, a project 34 Writing is an interesting gesture if one considers that Lacenaire’s hand was also severed from his body and discussed not only by phrenologists but also by one of France’s most famous poets and novelist,s Théophile Gautier in “Etude de main: Lacenaire, 1852.” http://www.toutelapoesie.com/poemes/GAUTIER/1.HTM Pour contraste, la main coupée De Lacenaire l'assassin, Dans des baumes puissants trempée, Posait auprès, sur un coussin. . . . . Momifiée et toute jaune Comme la main d'un pharaon, Elle allonge ses doigts de faune Crispés par la tentation. . . . . Tous les vices avec leurs griffes Ont, dans les plis de cette peau, Tracé d'affreux hiéroglyphes, Lus couramment par le bourreau. On y voit les œuvres mauvaises Ecrites en fauves sillons, Et les brûlures des fournaises Où bouillent les corruptions; . . . . Saints calus du travail honnête, On y cherche en vain votre sceau. Vrai meurtrier et faux poète, Il fut le Manfred du ruisseau! 59 that is evident from the opening lines of his memoirs where he declares: “je me décide, moi, bien vivant, sain de corps et d’esprit, à faire de ma propre main mon autopsie et la dissection de mon cerveau” (4). The legal phrase “sain de corps et d’esprit” figuratively re-associates the mind (as a metonymy for the head) and the body that will soon be separated. This motif is recurrent in the memoirs in which he constantly reclaims his unity and his self, and thereby performs a discursive recapitation. Despite what his head might “say” after his death in the scientific theaters, Lacenaire’s written testimony intends to ensure that his voice will not be lost and that he will not simply “be spoken.” While he knows that the act of writing will give him a life after death, he takes his poetics of recapitation one step further by anticipating censorship and rejecting its authority: “[la société] voudra châtier mes pages après avoir mutilé mon corps . . . cette seconde mutilation de moi sera pire que la première. Car ils auront beau dire, les savants et criminalistes, ils saisiront le fait, ils ne saisiront pas l’intention” (112, my emphasis). “L’autopsie intellectuelle d’un condamné” is Hugo’s literary enterprise in Le Dernier jour d’un condamné (570) and one of the main gestures of Lacenaire’s autobiographic enterprise, inscribing him in a larger literary tradition of abolitionist writings. The guillotine’s lethal power is subverted as the machine emerges as an instrument of creation, giving life to an author. * In the opening of the memoirs, Lacenaire declares, “je n’ai plus d’amour-propre, quoique je sois devenu tout à coup un personnage fort remarquable” (5). Considering the 60 different meanings of “personnage” in French, it can be advanced that Lacenaire is referring to himself both as “an important figure” (which he is, in the light of the notoriety of his trial) and “a character in a story.” In light of his autobiographical writings, one may argue that he establishes himself as a character in his own story and within the larger French literary tradition (Le Bris 7-9). For Lacenaire, murder itself is not a work of art (Demartini 349), but turning himself into a literary character and a hero is his main aesthetic preoccupation. Tracing the guillotine as a topos in Lacenaire’s memoirs reveals that the guillotine gives life to a literary character: a new criminal hero. This literary recapitation challenges the law by undoing the work of the guillotine (in fiction) and by elevating the criminal to the status of hero, punished yet glorified. Lacenaire alludes to his favorite classical writers such as Molière, La Fontaine, l’Abbé Prévôt, and works such as Gil Blas or Don Quichotte (47), which, it can be argued, shape the different facettes of his persona in the aubiographical project. For instance, the figure of the picaresque hero stands out in Lacenaire’s memoirs and recalls Alain-René Lesage’s eponymous character in the picaresque novel Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (1715-1735), who, born into an unfortunate household, experiences a series of turmoils and misfortunes. An observer of society, like Lacenaire, he often encounters disreputable people and is talked into doing illegal actions (but unlike the poète-assassin, Gil Blas finally manages to make a fortune and live an honest life). Gil Blas declares: “Je me sens né pour éterniser mon nom par des ouvrages d'esprit” (7046). Lacenaire shares this passion for writing and, like his literary hero, wants his name to survive him. Lacenaire’s main literary influence however is evidently Rousseau whose Confessions he partially imitates, as I have previously emphasized. Lacenaire also visibly 61 positions his narrative within different (more contemporary) literary traditions (Le Bris 10-11). He refers to Vidocq’s memoirs as an influence on his thinking and writing (82). Eugène Vidocq, a French criminal who escaped the penal colony, became a detective and later was appointed director of the Sûreté Nationale. His apocryphal memoirs, published in 1828, quickly became notorious in Europe, and his life later inspired several writers such as Victor Hugo or Honoré de Balzac. In Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862), the convict Jean Valjean and his antagonist, inspector Javert, recall the two faces of Vidocq— Valjean being the escaped convict and Javert the ruthless policeman. Balzac’s character Vautrin, in La Comédie humaine (1799-1850), also brings Vidocq to mind: as an escaped convict and criminal mastermind, Vautrin constantly outwits the police and his deeds earn him the nickname Trompe-la-mort, for avoiding the death penalty several times. 35 Thus, Lacenaire’s memoirs and the character they delineate belong to a literary tradition in which the guillotine, as a backdrop for a story written in prison, gives life (a form of recapitation) to a character, a criminal hero glorified and punished. In his study of the criminals who marked French literature and culture, Assassins, hors-la-loi, brigands de grands chemins. Mémoires et histoires de Lacenaire, Robert Macaire, Vidocq et Mandrin (1996), Michel Le Bris confirms this reading of Lacenaire as a literary character, and proposes that his memoirs marked the beginning of detective fiction in France. As he traces the history of the detective novel in French literature, Le Bris 35 Vautrin (also known as Jacques Collin) appears in Le Père Goriot, Illusions perdues and Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes. On the different “faces” of Vidocq in Balzac’s novels, see Le Bris 18. 62 conceptualizes Lacenaire as a literary character who was at the origin of a genre that marked the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, along with Vidocq and Macaire. 36 If, as Michel Le Bris claims, “il a élevé la guillotine au niveau de la gloire” (8), Lacenaire has also been elevated to glory by the guillotine. He establishes himself within a larger literary tradition as a character in his own text: the decapitated criminal is recapitated as a literary hero. Lacenaire’s writings, like Blanchot’s, speak of the impossibility of dying (The Death Penalty 119). A new Lazarus, Lacenaire stands between life and death—already dead (as we are reading him) and yet constantly brought back to life. He imagines his resurrection (another recapitation), portraying himself as a caricatural Christ. Throughout the memoirs, he presents himself as a martyr, imagining himself achieving salvation after death: “j’espère qu’en récompense de ce dévouement, ils voudront bien, après mon décès, ne pas éparpiller mes membres dans leurs amphithéâtres et les laisser paisibles dans leur trou pour être plus à portée de se réunir au grand jour de la résurrection” (4). 37 Lacenaire’s humorous vision of his resurrection refers to the idea of recapitation by imagining a complete re-membering of his body. Besides, he parodies the Bible with this theatrical declaration: “mes témoins existent 36 Eugène Vidocq (1775-1857) was a French criminal who became a detective and later the director of the Sûreté Nationale and founded the first private detective agency. Vidocq’s apocryphal memoirs are notorious, and his life has inspired many writers such as Victor Hugo and Eugène Sue. Robert Macaire is a literary character who first appeared in a play in the fourteenth century and was revived in the nineteenth century as an archetype of the villain and murderer. 37 On the association of the criminal to be executed and Christ, see this poem by George Rouault (dated 1929): Le condamné s’en est allé / Indifférent et fatigué / Son avocat en phrases creuses / Et imposantes / A clamé son innocence / L’homme rouge tonitruant / Et se dressant / A disculpé la société et chargé l’accusé / Sous un Jésus en croix / Oublié là. (Qtd in Crime et Châtiment 159) 63 probablement tous encore aujourd’hui. Qu’il y en ait donc un seul qui se lève et qui dise: j’ai vu trembler cet homme” (90). This declaration recalls the Bible: “que celui qui n'a jamais péché lui jette la première Pierre” (Jean 8:7). This biblical episode narrates the story of an adulterous woman who, according to the law, should be lapidated. Jesus faces the crowd and prevents her execution by giving them this challenge: “let the one who has never sinned cast the first stone.” Since none can claim they have never sinned, the woman is saved. This indirect reference to escaping the death penalty can be read as another image of recapitation in Lacenaire’s text. The fictional dimension of Lacenaire as a character is complicated by the numerous alterations made in the memoirs. Indeed, the text published four months after Lacenaire’s death, after being significantly censored and modified. Demartini offers a fairly comprehensive list of these “revisions,” and emphasizes the fact that not only 172 lines were cut from the text but also other more discreet changes were made: for instance certain words were cut off and the style was often slightly modified (318-9). More important are the fragments added to the text. Indeed the last part of Lacenaire’s memoirs was not written by the famous poète-assassin but the identity of the apocryphal writer has never been established. Jacques Arago’s connection with and frequent visits to Lacenaire in prison could lead the reader to suspect that Arago may be at the origin of the apocrypha. A journalist and a writer, he took an interest in Lacenaire, visited him in prison and published a narrative of Lacenaire’s life in 1836. Besides, one of Arago’s brothers, Etienne Arago, a politician and the founder of the Figaro newspaper, was also a writer. It could be advanced that one of the brothers may have produced the apocrypha. 64 Lacenaire, as an author/character, is recuperated by a different author who, like Lacenaire, mixes fact and fiction. This foregrounds the question of fiction in the memoirs even further as it doubly establishes Lacenaire as a character in his own text. One can argue that, although Lacenaire’s text has been “guillotined” (i.e. censored), it has been recapitated through the apocrypha. Interpreting the apocrypha as a literary trope to compete with law’s power over life and death, one can advance that this apocryphal section constitutes the ultimate subversion of the law, not only by giving the dead a new voice, but more important, by establishing Lacenaire’s writings as an ethical discourse within a significant abolitionist tradition. The apocryphal writer also complicates the Hugolian influence already at work in the original text. Writing in the style of Le Dernier jour d’un condamné, he turns Lacenaire into one of Hugo’s heroes. The apocryphal writer, who goes as far as to make Lacenaire directly mention Hugo’s famous condamné and writes: “on m’a dit que M. Victor Hugo fait monter une grosse araignée sur le pied nu de son condamné” (151). The apocryphal writer therefore conspicuously thematizes Lacenaire as a character in a novel, but also makes him part of a larger literary abolitionist tradition by associating him with Hugo. While Lacenaire’s writings present no stylistic originality, the last fifteen pages (in my edition) stand out as highly melodramatic and full of morbid exaggerations. Their style and content differ greatly from the rest of the memoirs, with motifs, images and a tone that are not encountered anywhere else in the text, making the imposture immediately evident. Interestingly, the motif of the voix secrète is recurrent in the apocryphal section—pointing out the apocryphal writer’s presence to the reader. This secret voice organizes the apocryphal narrative of Lacenaire’s last dreams and visions, 65 and recapitates him in different ways. For instance the first mask that the narrator calls “la contre-épreuve de moi-même” (149) is described as the imperfect copy of the work of the executioner: “M. Dumoustier . . . a fait la section du plâtre . . . et a enlevé deux quartiers; le bourreau n’en fera qu’un morceau” (149; my emphasis). The narrator presents the executioner as performing an act of unification, again pointing to the concept of recapitation. The apocryphal writer goes as far as to imagine a different death for Lacenaire, a death that would not cost him his head— another recapitation. He sees him dying of suffocation while the first mask is being made, therefore dying with his head on: “On m’emportait, la tête sur les épaules” (149). Later in the apocryphal section, Lacenaire has a dream in which he is taken to the guillotine; his head is placed under the blade; but he miraculously escapes: Est-ce que cette planche va basculer?... Ah ! Quel bruit sur ma tête, c’est la lucarne qui se ferme…miséricorde !...un ressort crie…oh ! mon dieu !...je laisse à juger dans quel état je suis sorti de cette représentation mentale…j’étais froid des pieds aux cheveux ; mon cou était engourdi par un douloureux torticolis, et une sueur glacée coulait sur les joues. Au bruit imaginaire du ressort qui tient la corde du coutelas, je faillis crier ; ma poitrine a jeté un son plaisant ; le soldat, qui baillait comme un bienheureux, a suspendu le cours de sa satisfaction et, la bouche ouverte, m’a regardé avec effarouchement….J’ai ri de bon coeur d’autant que je revenais vivant de la guillotine. (154-155) 66 This apocryphal narration of the dream in which he comes back alive from the guillotine constitutes the ultimate recapitation. However, it can be argued that this particular excerpt—full of broken, interrupted sentences and images—also thematizes the great criminal as a catalyst for a dialectical relationship between law and literature in which literature questions the law and law (as embodied by the language of the dominant discourse) challenge’s literature’s power to represent what exceeds representation. In this “snapshot” vision of an execution by the guillotine, it is salient that words will not allow the literary representation of an act that exceeds representation and denies all human values. Finally, it is important to point out the similarities between the apocryphal section and Bonnelier’s autopsy report published a few days after Lacenaire’s death. Indeed Bonnelier, who claims he has not read the memoirs, narrates his visit to Lacenaire’s cell in terms that echo (or have influenced) the apocrypha. For example, Bonnelier describes the making of the mask by Dumoutier and imagines the possibility of Lacenaire suffocating and dying during the process: Témoin de cette belle opération, j’en pourrais raconter les incidents . . . je pourrais dire l’émotion mal dissimulée de ce Lacenaire aux apprêts de la toilette imitative, lorsqu’il sentit le masque de plâtre s’étendre sur sa face . . . A la vue de ce corps étendu immobile sur un lit, n’offrant qu’un tronc …et à la place de la tête le simulacre d’un énorme monceau de linge. Il vint un instant dans la pensée intimidée des gardiens que la science pouvait prévenir et remplacer le bourreau. (11) 67 This image of death under the plaster mask is recuperated by the apocryphal writer, who makes Lacenaire, not his guardians, envision it as a possibility of escaping death on the scaffold: Je me suis vu mort ; le moulage terminé, on dépeçait le plâtre, on me découvrait le visage, on me regardait, on m’appelait, néant ! Plus de Lacenaire! . . . On reprenait les lamentations, et cela tout bonnement, parce que j’étais mort prudemment et tout entier sur un lit ! (149) The redundance between the apocryphal section of the memoirs and Bonnelier’s report (to which the public had access shortly after the execution) is salient and reveals one of the various ways in which the text itself takes on a life of its own, and is constantly rewritten—or recapitated. Victor Cochinat’s Lacenaire, ses crimes, son procès et sa mort, d'après des documents authentiques et inédits, suivis de ses poésies et chansons is another example of one of the developments of “Lacenaire-as-a-text.” Cochinat, a journalist and former lawyer, published a new edition of Lacenaire’s memoirs in 1864 which, not unlike Lacenaire’s version, mixes fiction and facts without signaling the transition from the jurisdiction of fact to the realm of fiction, amplifying Lacenaire’s legend. With the death of its author, the text keeps growing and mutating. Literature, through Lacenaire’s text, reclaims law’s authority and defies the guillotine by producing an ethical discourse against the death penalty through the literary trope of recapitation. The apocryphal writer acknowledges the power of literature to challenge the law with this 68 preface to his creative scenes of death and recapitation: “c’est en ce moment que j’ai apprécié ce que la pensée de l’homme peut franchir de murailles et d’espace, peut enfanter de choses diverses, avec la rapidité d’un éclair et d’un tourbillon, fantasmagorie!” (148) The murailles are the high walls of prison that literature can cross. * Equally important is literature’s power to challenge the law through parody. Arasse has demonstrated the theatrical dimension of the guillotine and Lacenaire’s text reaffirms this theatricality. But a tension appears between the execution as a final act and its parodic representation in the apocrypha. 38 The memoirs display a creative playfulness, in which “le je” elicits “le jeu.” 39 For instance: Le moulage m’avait tourné l’esprit vers la guillotine. Voyons, me suis-je dit, préparons-nous. J’ai lu, dans je ne sais quel livre que les prisonniers du Comité de salut public jouaient à l’échafaud dans leur prison ; figuraient avec des tables, des bancs, le plancher, la charpente, les bras de la charrette, la lucarne, la planche à bascule, et tout à tour, simulaient le bourreau et le supplicié . . . . Ils s’entr’excitaient. (150; my emphasis) 38 See “The Precession of Simulacra,” in Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 99- 135. The representation precedes and determines the real. It is impossible to make any distinction between reality and its representation. There is only the simulacrum. 39 See Jacques Derrida, L’Ecriture et la difference 53. “Le jeu” in French means “game” and “play” (as in space, or slack). 69 This description of the inmates’ pastime, playing “the guillotine game,” introduces “du jeu” (“slack”) in the guillotine’s works. In this scene the guillotine becomes a toy, a source of entertainment (“le jeu” as game), but also a stage (“le jeu” as acting). The possibility of parody subverts “the machine-like repeatability” of the law and transforms the criminal into an image that can be appropriated, replayed and transformed. 40 Lacenaire’s poetics of recapitation at work in the game-scene captures this “jeu” and exploits it as the death penalty is theatricalized and subverted through parody. The potential for subversion contained within the parody of the law in Lacenaire’s narration of the inmates’ game can be compared to a famous unruly scene in ‘Le Schpountz’ (1938), a comedy by one of France’s great classical directors, Marcel Pagnol, in which the pronouncement “tout condamné à mort aura la tête tranchée” is the morceau de bravoure of a scene known as “the man condemned to death.” This French film, made just a year before Weidmann’s execution, points to the possible subversion of the law through parodic repetition. In this scene French actor Fernandel recites this “cutting” 40 This virtualization of the criminal and its potential for subversion were epitomized by the events surrounding Weidmann’s decapitation a century later. Paul Friedman reports: “In the days following Weidmann’s death, the press expressed a growing indignation at the way the crowd had behaved. A report in Paris-Soir, published the day after the execution but seemingly drafted in the heat of the moment, characterized the spectators as a “disgusting” and “unruly” crowd that was “devouring sandwiches” and “jostling, clamoring, whistling.” The exuberance . . . seems like a rather thin pretext on which to base a radical change in the execution of justice. . . . What made this execution different was the fact that it had been delayed beyond the usual twilight hour of dawn and there had been sufficient light for several startlingly clear photographs to be taken. Photographs soon appeared in magazines across the world, including Match and Life. Worse still, from the authorities’ point of view, someone had managed to capture the entire event on film.” http://blog.oup.com/2012/06/last-public-execution-france-17-june- 1939/ 70 statement embodying different persona, combining comedy and pathos 41 This sentence— one could almost write verse— becomes a poetic text performed through a large array of fictional emotions. The legal sentence is thereby given a literary and theatrical dimension as the law is turned into a spectacle and becomes poeticized. This “fête sérieuse” engages all the key elements that constitute the poetics of recapitation at work in Lacenaire’s memoirs and ‘trouble’ the law. 42 Finally, parody is also at work in the apocryphal section of the memoirs as Lacenaire (who is then being taken to his execution) is presented as a king. Lacenaire had already compared himself to the king in his famous poem, “Pétition d’un voleur à un roi voisin,” but the apocryphal writer goes further and makes him a member of the Bourbon family, the last of which, King Louis XVI was decapitated in 1793. 43 Indeed, in the apocryphal section, the servant who enters the cell to prepare Lacenaire is named Lebel 41 “Le plus tranchant” in Fernandel’s words, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uxn8YyJZUNA 42 “The festival as a serious thing,” is a Nietzschean concept revisited by Jacques Derrida in his seminars on the death penalty (149-150). Also see Antoine Garapon and Denis Salas’s recent analysis of law and literature in France, Imaginer la loi. Le droit dans la littérature. It poses fiction as an ethical and aesthetic nexus between law and literature, claiming that “le droit est un poème sérieux” (15). 43 Sire, de grâce, écoutez-moi: Sire, je reviens des galères… Je suis voleur, vous êtes roi, Agissons ensemble en bons frères. . . . . Sire, que Votre Majesté Ne se mette pas en colère! Je compte sur votre bonté ; Car ma demande est téméraire. Je suis hypocrite et vilain, Ma douceur n’est qu’une grimace; J’ai fait se pendre mon cousin: Sire, cédez-moi votre place. http://frankzumbach.wordpress.com/2013/04/page/68/ 71 (156), the name of the French kings’ premier valet de chambre since Louis XV. Lacenaire is therefore associated to the figure of the sovereign, a sacred figure, who, since the Revolution, has sometimes been compared to Christ, the victim. As Clair emphasizes, la désacralisation du roi sacralise la Révolution dont la guillotine devient l’emblème. A la rhétorique du sacré répond, sur le registre du sacré également, la rhétorique contre-révolutionnaire qui fait du roi . . . un martyr authentique. . . . Le roi a racheté la France comme Jésus Christ a racheté le genre humain. (68) Literature challenges the law by introducing “du je/u” and re-claims the authority that the law keeps for itself. If the law intends to discipline and punish the criminal as Foucault contended, it certainly allows literature to glorify him. Literature, through Lacenaire’s writings, interrogates the law and foregrounds it as part of the French imaginative culture and fantasy in which the guillotine, as a specter of the revolution, recapitates the criminal and makes him a hero. Literature, with unbounded imagination and license, can undo the work of the guillotine, challenge the law and recapitate the dead in a narrative. C’était un jour d’exécution, nous n’en savions rien ni l’un ni l’autre, et nous ne nous en aperçûmes qu’en face de la guillotine. Là, mon père 72 s’arrêta, et me montra l’échafaud avec sa canne: “tiens, me dit-il, c’est ainsi que tu finiras si tu ne changes pas.” Horrible prédiction dans la bouche d’un père! Sur quoi était-elle basée? Dans toute ma vie, je n’avais jamais fait à la maison un seul acte de méchanceté. Dès ce moment, un lien invisible exista entre moi et l’affreuse machine . . . Je finis par m’habituer tellement à cette idée que je me figurais que je ne pouvais pas mourir autrement. (57) Such are Lacenaire’s words in his memoirs as he recalls his first encounter with the guillotine. His father, who was driving him back home after he had been expelled from school, is compared to a “procureur du roi,” (“prosecutor” 56) and then described as “bourru,” (“rough” or “gruff”), a term that calls to mind the word “bourreau” (“executioner”) in French. In The Death Penalty, Derrida actually makes another association between “bourru” and “bourreau” as he recalls an anecdote: “le bourreau” is said to have precipitated Guillotin’s birth as his mother was traumatized by the screams of a man being tortured on the wheel; and “Bourru” was the name of the doctor who delivered the eulogy when Guillotin died (194). Lacenaire’s father therefore embodies two legal functions: the prosecution and the sentencing. His father makes a deadly prediction that will provoke his son’s downfall, sealing his fate and condemning him to die on the guillotine. Such is Lacenaire’s interpretation of this scene that he narrates as the event that forges an ineluctable link between him and the machine. More important, this is the scene that marks the beginning of his obsession with the guillotine, as he will be walking relentlessly towards the scaffold from that moment. 73 Images of decapitation torment and fascinate him from an early age. For instance, he is only fifteen years old when he describes the political situation of 1818 using terms that recall the Terror: “tout le monde perdit la tête” (72). This expression, which signifies “losing one’s mind” in French, literally means “losing one’s head” and reflects the mentality of 1818, a time when France and Europe were still shaking from the Terror and striving to find political stability. In 1818, only four years after the Restoration, the new king, Louis XVIII, had just signed an agreement that made France part of the Sainte- Alliance with Russia, Austria and England, a union of monarchies that was meant to maintain the peace and prevent other revolutions. While some were exhilarated by this prospect, few could forget the events of the Revolution. The guillotine had started to shape the French imaginary (Arasse 134-43). Though he was born a few years after the Revolution ended, Lacenaire recognizes the strong influence the guillotine exerts upon his mind: “toutes ces scènes ne m’avaient pas échappé” (72). The ever-present shadow of the guillotine cast over the French cultural imaginary has not escaped him—neither will he escape it. He declares, in his memoirs, “que de fois j’ai été guillotiné en rêve!” (57), thereby revealing the premises of an enduring fascination for the lethal machine. But, as Lautréamont warns the reader in Les Chants de Maldoror (1869): “c’est très mauvais de rêver qu’on marche à l’échafaud” (V.3. 2503). * As one of James Joyce’s characters describes very scientifically in Ulysses, the erection is often the direct organic result of hanging : 74 The instantaneous fracture of the cervical vertebrae and consequent scission of the spinal cord would, according to the best approved traditions of medical science, be calculated to inevitably produce in the human subject a violent ganglionic stimulus of the nerve centres, causing the pores of the cobra cavernosa to rapidly dilate in such a way as to instantaneously facilitate the flow of blood to that part of the human anatomy known as the penis or male organ resulting in the phenomenon which has been denominated by the faculty a morbid upwards and outwards philoprogenitive erection in articulo mortis per diminutionem capitis. (Ulysses 12: 473) But the Revolution has transformed the death penalty and with it, shaped a new imaginary, leading criminals to see the guillotine itself as an object of desire. Derrida in his Death Penalty theorizes this concept and maintains that, “one must connect this logic of erection to decapitation since people say that it is often organically linked to the experience of hanging for men” (58). Recalling Badinter’s analysis of two criminals’ reaction to the prospect of decapitation in L’Execution, Derrida draws a parallel between the erection that is the result of hanging and the arousal triggered by the idea of the guillotine: 44 44 Robert Badinter (1928-) is an eminent French criminal lawyer who is famous for his long-standing fight against the death penalty. Since the abolition of the death penalty in France in 1981, he has continued his fight across the world. L’Execution, published in 1973, focuses on the trial of Claude Buffet and Roger Bontems, two criminals who were both executed in 1972. Bontems had taken a prison guard and a nurse hostage during a 75 [Buffet] is fascinated by what is going to cut off his head, by what is going to cut him off from his head, by the machine that is going to erect him by making his head fall, and he desires this machine, the blade of the guillotine, which is essentially the same as his knife. (But it is Bontems who will cry out at the last moment addressing the attorney general: “So, you got a hard-on! [tu bandes!]” (The Death Penalty 58). “Bander,” a motif that is famously developed in the texts of Jean Genet, another French criminal writer, who will be the focus of the next chapter, is recurrent in Lacenaire’s writings. Lacenaire’s expression of his love and desire for the guillotine constitutes the climax of his poetics of recapitation, as the desire produced by the prospect of decapitation erects him. In his memoirs, Lacenaire emphasizes the guillotine as a motivation for his crimes: “Oh! Si j’avais eu un bel et bon assassinat à déclarer . . . j’aurais réclamé l’échafaud” (106), suggesting he is impelled by the guillotine to commit the ultimate crime. He chooses a life of criminality for he wants to experience the guillotine’s love. Therefore the poète-assassin embraces his lust with lyrical words and unsuccessful crimes as emphasized in his ‘Ode à la guillotine’: “Et pour sa fiancée oser choisir la mort” (III, 18). The criminal rises to his fatal yearning: “Et celui qui dormait tout à coup tressaillit” (II, 11). But his lethal mistress carries him to a deadly bed: “Mais il descend plus bas, car la tête qui tombe / Roule dans le linceul pour dormir dans la tombe” (I, 33- prison uprising in Clairvaux in 1971. Buffet killed the hostages but both were sentenced to death. 76 34). In Lacenaire’s poems, the guillotine is a figure of the female lover and the criminal is her consumed fiancé. 45 It is important to note that Lacenaire’s first experience of the guillotine is heavily marked by the vision he has of it. For Freud, the Medusa is also associated with the genitals of the mother that embody the terror of castration and also lead to the male homosexual repulsion for women. In this scene, it is Lacenaire’s father (not his mother) who is associated to this terror. Following a Freudian interpretation, the scene can be read as a scene of castration by the father. In the memoirs, Lacenaire briefly describes his interactions with women. He claims to have been in love only once and prefers the company of prostitutes. He mentions his general avoidance of women: “j’ai appris ce que c’était que l’amour . . . c’est un ennemi qu’il ne faut jamais s’aviser de combattre, que ce n’est qu’en fuyant qu’on peut éviter sa défaite . . . lorsqu’une femme faisait une certaine impression sur mon cœur, je l’évitais comme la peste” (64). Instead, Lacenaire turns his passion towards the guillotine. His poetry in particular leaves no doubt about his passion and desire for his “belle fiancée.” “Le Dernier Chant,” is a poem written by Lacenaire in La Conciergerie prison in November 1835, less than two months before his execution. This text personifies the guillotine as a feminine lover: “Salut à toi, ma belle fiancée, / Qui dans tes bras vas m’enlacer bientôt!” (9-10). Lacenaire, in this poem, claims his inevitable bond (or indeed his “coupling”) with the guillotine, as he does in the memoirs: “Et puis à votre loi tout entier je me livre… / Que voulez-vous de moi? Vous parlez d’échafaud? / Me voici... J’ai vécu…j’attendais le bourreau” (“Dernier Chant” 47-49). This fatal attraction that 45 Christine Planté associates this to the figure of the vampire, in Masculin/féminin dans la poésie et les poétiques du XIXe siècle 137. 77 motivates his crimes also inspires his writings. Lacenaire has “le cerveau en érection” as Lauvergne, a phrenologist, had qualified the criminals (qtd. in Clair 222). “Ode à la guillotine,” a long and lyrical text and one of Lacenaire’s most famous poems, written in prison in January 1836 as he is awaiting his execution that will take place on January 9 th , depicts the guillotine as a muse and a seductive and irresistible woman. But she laughs a sinister laugh, with the French Revolution in the background: Une femme parut, qui pressait dans sa main Des roses et des fleurs, fumier du lendemain. Cette femme riait d’une effrayante joie; Comme un peuple qui rit près d’un trône qu’il broie. (II, 3-6) This woman triggers instant love in the soul of the one she will kill (“l’amour lui vint au coeur; l’insensé le lui dit.” II, 12). The guillotine’s ominous voice tries to dissuade the man from committing the deed that will provoke his downfall: “Fuis, car de mon amour tu serais la victime, / Car je veux être aimée, et m’aimer est un crime” (II, 22). Equating the crime and the victim through this rhyme, Lacenaire poses himself as the victim of the crime (not its perpetrator), and suggests that the fall of the head provokes the rise of his passion and desire. Jean Clair in his catalogue of the Crime et Châtiment exhibition presented at Orsay in Paris in 2010, analyzes the influence of the guillotine on nineteenth-century art and makes a comparable connection between the severing of the head and the penis (40). 78 He demonstrates how the genitals, in art, have gradually become the new geometrical center of the body (as opposed to the head), as suggested by this illustration: Figure 4: https://www.amherst.edu/system/files/styles/original/private/media/0023/acephalemag.jpg This cover of the magazine Acéphale, a public review created and directed by Georges Bataille and published from 1936 to 1939, was designed and illustrated by French surrealist artist André Masson. His drawing is clearly inspired by Leonardo Da Vinci’s 79 famous Vitruvian Man, but the figure is headless, with a skull placed over the genitals. Once beheaded, the body exhibits the genitals that have become the new focus. Clair states: Sexus vient de secare, trancher. L’organe en lui-même porterait sa peine, tout comme le mot « coupable » renvoie à un état, non à l’acte. Le sexe . . . serait en lui-même et déjà, un corps potentiellement coupé ? . . . l’homme sans tête, avançant comme un poulet décapité, et tout entier livré à ses pulsions, à sa violence, enfin délivré du contrôle de la raison et des limites imposées par la morale mais surtout par le contrôle de l’encéphale. (40) Freed from the head, the man is empowered by sex and desire. The decapitation is therefore what allows the desire to be revealed and reaffirmed (recapitation). The guillotine, as a metonymy for the law, is a castigating yet enabling force. Rising as he is falling, Lacenaire embodies the ultimate subversion of the law as his theater of death exposes the complicity of law and desire. Mark Taylor, in his deconstructionist reading of the relationship between law and desire, maintains that, “since law is the resistance of transgression, law needs yet cannot bear transgression” (“Desire of Law, Law of Desire” 1271-2). And indeed the guillotine in Lacenaire’s “Ode” confesses, “je veux être aimée” (II, 22), and “she,” in turn, will love the criminal, giving him the final kiss of death: “Puis un baiser vient humecter sa bouche” (II, 37). But the guillotine is also the daughter of the revolution. The significance of the “instant révolutionnaire”—which constitutes the backdrop of Lacenaire’s writing—is 80 emphasized by Derrida when he draws attention to the mutual desire between the law (or the guillotine as a metonymy of the law in Lacenaire’s text) and the criminal (Force de loi 98). In France, the beheading of the king on the guillotine catalyzed this “instant,” this strong moment of founding violence that marked the French imaginary. According to Derrida, the criminal is an epitome of the Terror, a repetition (or a difference in repetition) of the “instant révolutionnaire,” and has the power to challenge the law and thereby establish new law. Seductive yet castigated, the criminal is a tragic figure that opens up a space of disorder within the law and therefore allows the law to exist. His disorder, like Benjamin’s violence, is law-making and law-preserving. It is therefore possible to conceptualize Lacenaire, not as an outlaw, but as a figure of lawfulness that is both within the law and exceeds the law (excess, another recapitation). If Lacenaire’s writings are an invitation to rethink the relationship between law and disorder, they are also searching for the more essential nature of the relationship between law and literature. While literature reclaims law’s authority by envisioning recapitation and disseminating the abolitionist discourse, it is itself reclaimed, like Lacenaire, by the law and becomes part of its mythical story, providing the law with a narrative that will give it authority. Michel de Montaigne claims, “Nostre droict mesme a, dict-on, des fictions légitimes sur lesquelles il fonde la vérité de sa justice” (Essais, III, ch. XIII 1203), an idea Derrida develops in his fundamental reflection on law, “Force de Loi: Le fondement mystique de l’autorité,” in which he takes hold of the law and proceeds to demonstrate its “mystical foundation” (Force de loi 29). Derrida also maintains that the law “must be without history, genesis or any possible derivation”—such is the law of the law (Before the Law 191). Its categorical authority lies in fiction: “the fictions of law 81 are . . . more than ideological mystifications. They are meant to speak in place of the unspeakable, to protect the origin and thus the authority of the law by keeping its origin silent” (Schneck 50). Analyzing Lacenaire’s poetics of recapitation reveals parts of the fiction that ‘troubles’ the law and yet maintains it. A myth in construction at the intersection of law and narrative (the criminal belongs to the penal code and to fiction), Lacenaire is indeed constantly re-narrated and becomes a discourse on, and a performance of, the mystical origin of the law and its founding violence. His poetics of recapitation are a catalyst for the most intense relationship between law and disorder. Presenting Lacenaire as a mirror of post-revolutionary France or a reflection of our society falls short of capturing this relationship between law and disorder. The public’s interest in Lacenaire (who both constitutes and transgresses the law) reveals a fascination for the apparatus of the law and an attempt to return to a foundational moment and access the forbidden. Lacenaire takes the readers through the looking-glass and invites them to enter the fascinating realm of the apparatus of the law and gaze at the mythical dimension of the law and its founding violence. 82 Chapter III: Genet’s Tight-Rope Dancers: An Aestheticization of the Criminal Photo: Gilbert Garcin 83 1. Perilous People “Une paillette d’or est un disque minuscule en métal doré, percé d’un trou. Mince et légère, elle peut flotter sur l’eau. Il en reste quelquefois une ou deux accrochées dans les boucles d’un acrobate” (107). Such is the ethereal opening of one of Jean Genet’s lesser-known texts, Le Funambule. Published in 1957, it is dedicated to his long-time lover Abdallah Bentaga, a circus acrobat who committed suicide in 1964. Critics have traditionally interpreted this text as an aesthetic theory on art and representation or a semi-biographical narrative. 46 Arguably, it shows the marks of a love poem and of an ars poetica, offering a reflection on love, art and death. Yet, limiting Le Funambule to its autobiographical dimension or to its reflexive discourse on art falls short of meeting the challenge of reading this kaleidoscopic text. With unrelenting movement and a complex elliptical structure, the narrative, like the funambulist, “jumps.” Uniting body and text, it thereby displays a certain instability. 47 This is exemplified by the polyvocality of the narrative. Two voices, indicated by different typefaces and tones, alternatively admonish and praise the 46 On the question of the poetic image of the movement, see Pierre Caron, “Pour quelques paillettes en plus... “Le Funambule” de Jean Genet et l'image poétique du mouvement,” in Littérature 24-43. On the question of aesthetics, see John Cruickshank, Jean Genet: The Aesthetics of Crime. Also see Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr. 47 Derrida underlines the analogy between the tightrope walker and the writer in Genet’s text: “body and text, text and body, and endlessly reciprocal combination that demonstrates and clarifies the analogy between funambule and writer” (Glas 117). 84 acrobat. 48 The juxtaposition of these two different voices, a formal component shared by several of Genet’s other writings, creates a tension in the poetic composition. 49 Consequently, the text, like the equilibrist, performs an airy oscillation between the light poetic texture of its erotic address to the lover and the gravity of its admonishment of the artist. As one might expect, this vacillation generates a profound sense of danger, and the tightrope walker risks his life with every step he takes. “Tout se passe comme si nous . . . subissions la fascination du spectacle de la Mort qui danse,” declares Pascal Caron in his aesthetic reading of Le Funambule (25), recalling Genet’s own portrait of the acrobat—“un cadavre marchant sur un fil” (116). Violence and death are indeed at work in this text that makes the spectator/reader long for blood. Le Funambule effectively recalls both the beauty and the horror that define Genet’s main characters—criminals he loved and glorified—in his more notorious works such as Miracle de la rose and Notre- Dame-des-Fleurs. Renowned for his apology of crime and his own criminal experience, he celebrates his beloved thieves, prostitutes, and murderers through literature. “Je veux chanter l’assassinat puisque j’aime les assassins” (107), declares Genet in Notre-Dame- des-Fleurs, capturing thereby the spirit of his main novels in which the glorification of evil and the beauty of horror are central motifs. Therefore, when the narrator admonishes the tightrope walker “bande, et fais bander” (121), one may speculate that he is not simply addressing the lover and/or the artist. Can the reader ignore the remarkable 48 One voice is in Roman, the other one in italics. Excerpts from Le Funambule quoted in italics in this chapter were written as such in the original text. 49 A remark made by Menozzi about another of Genet’s text, Prisoner of Love, in Caroline Rooney, and Rita Sakr, The Ethics of Representation in Literature, Art and Journalism: Transnational Responses to the Siege of Beirut 137. 85 resonance with Genet’s erotic discourse on the criminals in his major novels, in which “bander” conspicuously defines the locus of his thinking? For Genet, “le bandit est un mâle qui bande” (Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs 112). Within the frame of this study of the great criminal in the shadow of the revolution, this chapter examines how Genet, from the heights of his own literary wire, reveals his (and the public’s) love and fascination for the cursed yet sacred figure of the grand criminal. This chapter builds on the concepts of alternate public sphere and “shadow courtroom” defined in chapter II in order to open up the reflection on the ethical power of literature to the question of aesthetics, for Genet’s alternate public sphere is the circus. Magnifying the criminals, his alternative public sphere is different from Lacenaire’s shadow courtroom and takes the reader/spectator directly to the middle of the circus, the center of a cruel festival. Le Funambule, whose poetic texture and aesthetic dimension have been compellingly analyzed by critics, can also be read as a reflection on the criminal. “Comme si le bourreau va ce soir te décapiter” (116) writes Genet in Le Funambule, binding unequivocally the acrobat’s performance to another type of spectacle—the theatrical execution by the guillotine. Following this thread, one can draw an analogy between the funambulist and the criminal, with the metal wire as a metonymy for the guillotine. Reflecting on Stokes’s statement that “acrobats offer aesthetics lessons in space, showing themselves to be exceptional, borderline between action and imitation so they define, yet disturb, many of our ideas about creative performance [and offer] lessons applicable to other kinds of performance” (277-8), one can suggest that Genet develops these “lessons” and provides an ethico-aesthetic reflection on the great criminal. At times 86 a king, at times a beggar, the hunter and the hunted, the beast and the sovereign, a god and a fallen/falling angel, the funambulist embodies the great criminal in a theatrical performance of death. Then carrying this interpretation over to Genet’s most celebrated works such as Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs (1948), Journal du Voleur (1949), and Miracle de la rose (1986), one can conceptualize his criminals as tight-rope artists—fascinating figures elevated to the glory of kings and Christ and performing a beautiful dance of death as Genet develops a unique reflection on, and aesthetic questioning of, the criminal as an artist in the shadow of the revolution. Opening up these texts to a larger reflection on law and literature, this chapter asks: how does literature, in the shadow of the revolution, compete with law’s power over life and death? What kind of discourse does literature forge through the figure of the great criminal in Genet’s writings? How does Genet endow the literary with the ethical power to play with (and against) the rules and logic of the law by bringing together the artist and the criminal at the intersection of law, aesthetics, and desire? * In Glas (1974), a book offering a side-by-side reading of Hegel’s philosophical writings and Genet’s autobiographical works, Derrida identifies le fil (the metal wire) as the true subject of Genet’s Le Funambule, a thread that “appears, disappears, and re- appears between the récit and the apostrophe of its structure” (117). Interestingly, Glas, written in two columns in different type sizes, shares a formal component with Le 87 Funambule in that both texts contain a double, intertwined conversation that invites an exploration of their own interstices. But if the thread is indeed a central motif—one could say, a central character—in Le Funambule, it would be, according to Genet, nothing but dead metal without the funambulist who, in turn, comes to life (and death) on the wire: Ton fil de fer charge-le de la plus belle expression non de toi mais de lui. Tes bonds, tes sauts, tes danses – en argot d’acrobate: tes flic-fac, courbette, sauts périlleux, roues, etc., tu les réussiras non pour que tu brilles, mais afin qu’un fil d’acier qui était mort et sans voix enfin chante. . . . À son tour le fil fera de toi le plus merveilleux danseur. (108) Derrida identifies this unique connection between the acrobat and the wire as a “filiation,” making an association between the words “fil” (wire) and “fils” (son). But one should also examine the different meanings of the word “fil.” The acrobat’s life is hanging by a thread (“la vie accrochée à un fil”), a thread that, through powerful imagery, takes the reader from the metal wire (le fil) that perilously guides the funambulist’s foot, to the sharp edge of the guillotine’s blade that can sever the criminal’s head in an instant (“le fil de la lame” in French). Conceptualizing the wire as a metonymy for the guillotine is possible through a close reading of Genet’s text. Although in English he is called a “tight-rope walker,” the acrobat does not dance on a rope strictly speaking, but on a cable wire. Just as hanging men with a rope was replaced with the execution by the guillotine at the turn of the eighteenth century, the tightrope walker has traded the old silk rope for a metal cable. 88 From the beginning, the narrator emphasizes the metallic nature of the wire on which the acrobat dances, “le fil de fer.” This thick cable wire is gradually given a more frightful dimension when it is, for instance, compared to the blacksmith’s anvil—“l’enclume du forgeron” (108). Increasingly present and impressive, the metal wire rapidly becomes associated with death: “Le fil de fer, comme la panthère et comme, dit-on, le peuple, aime le sang,” declares the narrator (108). Images of death multiply as the tightrope walker’s foot meets the deadly wire. The acrobat is even admonished to rest his cheek on it—“Et pose, gentiment, ta joue contre la sienne” (107)—indirectly evoking the contact of the blade with the neck of the executed. From then on, the wire’s metonymical relation to the guillotine becomes obvious, reaching an apex in the overt description of the acrobat as a man to be executed: “c’est le maillot collant du Cirque, en jersey rouge sanglant. Il indique exactement ta musculature, il te gaine, il te gante, mais, du col – ouvert en rond, coupé net comme si le bourreau va ce soir te décapiter” (116). In this description, the funambulist is associated with the criminal executed by the guillotine, with the image of his torso covered in blood (“bloody red”) and the cut of the shirt recalling the outfit that men condemned to death wore to the scaffold. Equally important, while the executioner and the wire become metonymically connected in this excerpt, the wire itself is called “la machine” (118), a term that is highly unusual in French as a reference to a cable wire, but commonly used to refer to the guillotine in the French imaginary (Arasse 30-1). Moreover, the motifs of the cut and the wound are recurrent in the text. Genet declares for instance, “ne redoutez pas la cruauté: coupante, elle vous fera scintiller,” describing the metal wire as a cruel, cutting, instrument (120). The text itself seems to 89 evoke the guillotine, by its structure and composition, full of cuts, and open, bleeding wounds. 50 Finally, death by the guillotine occurs when the blade falls, as it often does in the circus when the tightrope walker falls off the wire. The imagery of the fall and images of upward/downward movements abound in the text. Compare for instance these two consecutive paragraphs: Si tu tombes, tu mériteras la plus conventionnelle oraison funèbre : flaque d’or et de sang, mare où le soleil couchant . . . Tu ne dois rien attendre d’autre. Le cirque est toutes conventions. . . . . Pour ton arrivée en piste, crains la démarche prétentieuse. Tu entres : c’est une série de bonds, de sauts périlleux, de pirouettes, de roues, qui t’amènent au pied de ta machine où tu grimpes en dansant. Qu’au premier de tes bonds – préparé dans la coulisse – l’on sache déjà qu’on ira de merveilles en merveilles. (118, my emphasis) The oscillation of the text that takes the tightrope walker up and down, down and up, presides, in a movement similar to that of the guillotine’s blade, over the life and death of the acrobat. * 50 See for instance the numerous interruptions within the lyrical evocation of different acrobats’ tragic deaths. 90 Joseph McMahon, one of Genet’s most prominent critics, highlights the author’s unconventional vision and describes him as “an enigmatic man” (30). Yet the biographic resonance is not McMahon’s main focus as he centers his research on Genet’s imagination. In his famous analysis, The Imagination of Jean Genet (1963), the critic declares: [Genet] shows both the close relationship between the articulation of ideas and the forms chosen for this articulation, and because, in the midst of the assorted annoyances of the theater of the absurd, he offers clear evidence that neither the artist nor his art can grow if either is constricted by a priori acceptance of a limited register of expression. (8) Le Funambule is evidence that Genet’s register of expression has indeed no limits as he takes the reader/spectator from the funambulist’s act in the circus to what critics have acknowledged as the main locus of his literary enterprise—the criminal and the guillotine. “Le peuple aime le sang,” writes Genet, using the word “peuple” (people) instead of the expected “public” (108). This choice of lexicon, it could be argued, calls to mind the French Revolution that inscribed “le peuple” in the French imaginary and charged it with historical and political resonance in the “Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen” and other revolutionary texts. Indeed the shadow of the revolution lingers in Le Funambule in which the circus show is presented as the spectacle of a public execution. Death presides over the 91 tightrope walker’s act and the two narrators compare it to a solemn night, the wake preceding a funeral: Comme le théâtre, le cirque a lieu le soir, à l’approche de la nuit, mais il peut aussi bien se donner en plein jour. Si nous allons au théâtre c’est pour pénétrer dans le vestibule, dans l’antichambre de cette mort précaire que sera le sommeil. Car c’est une Fête qui aura lieu à la tombée du jour, la plus grave, la dernière, quelque chose de très proche de nos funérailles. Quand le rideau se lève, nous entrons dans un lieu où se préparent les simulacres infernaux. C’est le soir afin qu’elle soit pure (cette fête) qu’elle puisse se dérouler sans risquer d’être interrompue par une pensée, par une exigence pratique qui pourrait la détériorer. (124) It is essential to notice that the two narrators repeatedly call this spectacle “la Fête” (festival, party). If it is indeed a festival, it has to be une Fête cruelle, in the Nietzschean sense. In Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche claims, “without cruelty there is no festival: thus the longest and most ancient part of human history teaches—and in punishment there is so much that is festive!” (Second Essay, Section 6). While Nietzsche does not directly discuss the death penalty in this excerpt, the question of torture and cruelty allows us to make this connection, as emphasized by Derrida in The Death Penalty: I am interpreting here texts of Nietzsche that are not concerned directly with . . . the death penalty. . . . What authorizes me to do this . . . is the 92 allusion to torture and punishment, . . . to a logic of cruelty . . . of the relations between the cruelty of life and the law. (147) In his analysis of Nietzsche’s concept of the fête cruelle, Derrida concludes: The [cruel] festival is a serious thing . . . . One does not laugh at the festival, one isn’t having fun [on n’est pas à la fête]; one suffers and causes suffering in order to take pleasure [jouir], wherever there is some solemn ritual feast. (149) Similarly, the circus, in Genet’s text, becomes a place of suffering and “jouissance” as soon as the tightrope walker comes on stage. Like Nietzsche, he links the question of cruelty to the formation of human memory. Addressing the acrobats, he writes: Vous êtes les résidus d’un âge fabuleux. Vous revenez de très loin. Vos ancêtres mangeaient du verre pilé, du feu, ils charmaient des serpents, des colombes, ils jonglaient avec des œufs, ils faisaient converser un concile de chevaux. . . . Le jour vous restez craintifs à la porte du cirque – n’osant entrer dans notre vie – trop fermement retenus par les pouvoirs du cirque qui sont des pouvoirs de la mort. . . . Dehors, c’est le bruit discordant, c’est le désordre ; dedans, c’est la certitude généalogique qui vient des millénaires, la sécurité de se savoir lié dans une sorte d’usine où se forgent les jeux 93 précis qui servent l’exposition solennelle de vous-mêmes, qui préparent la Fête. (125, my emphasis) Associating the spectacle of death in the circus with the cruelty of capital punishment suggested in his text by the frequent evocations of the guillotine, Genet pictures death on the scaffold as an aesthetic, cruel and festive event, an event that is also a solemn ritual, the “solemn ritual feast” that Nietzsche identifies as presiding over the all acts of memory (The Death Penalty 213). Equally important are the numerous references to blood in this spectacle. Derrida claims, in his analysis of Nietzsche, “cruelty . . . has the odor of blood and torture, on a ground soaked with blood” (The Death Penalty 148). The image of blood is recurrent in Le Funambule—red being the only color mentioned in this text. Derrida also traces a link between the color of blood. “le rouge du sang,” and the hot iron that imprints memory, “le fer rouge” (148)—the red iron—a thought that one can connect to the thread that Genet himself is following, from the funambulist’s metal wire to the iron blade of the guillotine that marks the French imaginary. The circus becomes the stage of a public execution with all the cruelty and fascination associated with the spectacle of death (Arasse 24). Finally, when conceptualizing Genet’s representation of death as a cruel festival in the Nietzschean sense, one has to evoke Genet’s own theory of the theater. The theater of cruelty was a form originally conceptualized and developed by playwright Antonin Artaud as a means to assault the senses of the audience and allow them to feel 94 unexpressed emotions. 51 Artaud, in the Second Manifesto on the theater of cruelty, maintains that, whether they admit it or not, whether a conscious or unconscious act, at heart, audiences are searching for a poetic state of mind, a transcendent condition by means of love, crime, drugs, war or insurrection…the theater of cruelty was created in order to restore an impassioned convulsive concept of life to theater . . . . This cruelty will be bloody if need be . . . and will merge with the idea of a kind of severe mental purity, not afraid to pay the cost one must pay in life. (The Theatre and its Double 94) The tightrope walker embodies this conception of the theater in Genet’s works, bringing together love, death and poetry. Conjured up in Genet’s most famous plays such as Le Balcon (1955) or Les Bonnes (1946), the tenets of the theater of cruelty are also reflected in Le Funambule, with the acrobat allowing Genet to create his own vision of death using “a unique language somewhere between gesture and thought,” an echo of Artaud’s First Manifesto on the theater of cruelty: “Instead of harking back to texts regarded as sacred and definitive, we must first break the theater’s subjugation to the text and rediscover the idea of a kind of unique language somewhere between gesture and thought”(Artaud 68). Hence Genet describes: Négligemment j’ai ouvert son portefeuille et je fouille. . . . je trouve une 51 See Albert Bermel, Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty 23. 95 feuille de papier pliée où il a tracé de curieux signes : le long d’une ligne droite, des traits à gauche – ce sont ses pieds, ou plutôt la place que prendraient ses pieds, ce sont les pas qu’il fera. Et en regard de chaque trait, un chiffre. Puisque dans un art qui n’était soumis qu’à un entraînement hasardeux et empirique il travaille à apporter les rigueurs, les disciplines chiffrées, il vaincra. (109, my emphasis) 52 The emphases in Genet’s description of the piece of paper on which the artist drew the steps he will take on the wire point to this “unique combination of gesture and thought,” as embodied by the funambulist he describes. Therefore, drawing on Artaud and Nietzsche, one can argue that the underlying principles of Genet’s theater of cruelty and the fête cruelle come together in Le Funambule. Accordingly, Genet writes: “J’éprouve comme une curieuse soif, je voudrais boire c’est-à-dire souffrir, c’est-à-dire boire mais que l’ivresse vienne de la souffrance qui serait une fête” (120). Derrida defines this notion of counter-pleasure as: the counter-pleasure that goes to the limit of itself . . . it is a matter of cruelty right up to death, to the death that the living must endure by dying living in some sense, by dying in its lifetime (The Death Penalty 163). And indeed, Genet’s tightrope walker comes to life as he dies, as he is already dead. 52 On the unique combination of gesture and thought, see Genet: “un geste est un poème et ne peut s’exprimer qu’à l’aide d’un symbole, toujours le même” (Notre-Dame-des- Fleurs 335). 96 “Mourir de son vivant,” is a concept Genet explores in Le Funambule. He calls the tightrope walker “un cadavre marchant sur le fil” (116) and admonishes him: La Mort – la Mort dont je te parle – n’est pas celle qui suivra ta chute, mais celle qui précède ton apparition sur le fil. C’est avant de l’escalader que tu meurs. Celui qui dansera sera mort – décidé à toutes les beautés, capable de toutes. . . . Malgré ton fard et tes paillettes tu seras blême, ton âme livide. C’est alors que ta précision sera parfaite. Plus rien ne te rattachant au sol tu pourras danser sans tomber. Mais veille de mourir avant que d’apparaître, et qu’un mort danse sur le fil. (110) In Genet’s text, there are two deaths: the physical death (Genet reminds the tightrope walker “tu dois risquer une mort physique définitive,” 113) and the other death, the one that precedes everything and allows the artist (and the great criminal as I will later analyze) to separate from themselves and become an image: “c’est ton image qui va danser pour toi” (110). Death is evidently associated with the counter-pleasure produced by the cruel festival in Genet’s text. Moreover, borrowing a reflection by Menozzi in his study of another text by Genet (The Prisoner of Love), one can assert that the concept of counter-pleasure resonates with the notion of counterpoint (138). Menozzi suggests that Genet could be compared with Theodor Adorno’s approach to artistic forms through the concept of counterpoint: 97 Adorno describes the counterpoint as a joining together by means of a process of mutual exclusion and as a procedure that “taxes the ear to separate out several independent voices simultaneously while also listening for their interrelationship.” (138) 53 Applying this interpretation to Le Funambule, one can advance that the poetic composition of the polyvocal text, full of tensions and contradictions, reflects this melodic theory. Consequently the narrative produces a tension between the violence and cruelty of the images of death and the feelings of beauty, joy and sensuality described. Putting the concept of counterpoint in parallel with the notion of counter-pleasure, one can have a more complete vision of Genet’s representation of death in this text as the ultimate source of (counter) pleasure in the circus/the guillotine. Genet’s imaginative prose seems to have no limit but the narrator warns the reader/spectator against the problem of representation. This question, on which he also reflects in his other works, is at the center of the relationship between law and literature. The poetic composition of Le Funambule with multiple cuts and “jumps,” as well as the polyvocality of the text, suggest that his writing is confronted with the impossibility of representing the unspeakable—sacrificial death by the guillotine and the violence of the law. Genet evokes the problem of representation directly when describing the audience’s attitude during famous acrobat Camilla Meyer’s performance: 54 53 Also see: Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, and Edward Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain. 54 Genet repeatedly emphasizes the public’s closing their eyes, refusing to look—an attitude which he also defines as “being rude”: “Impolitesse du public: Durant tes plus 98 Camilla Meyer qui venait de l’autre extrémité, arrivait sur le fil horizontal. . . . En bas, sous elle, toutes les têtes s’étaient baissées, les mains cachaient les yeux. Ainsi le public refusait cette politesse à l’acrobate : faire l’effort de la fixer quand elle frôle la mort. (117) 55 The public refuses to look at death and the ultimate challenge to gravity (which can be read as a metaphor of the law itself) and turns away from a vision that cannot/should not be represented or accessed. Yet Genet’s narrator, his poetic voice, takes a different stance and reveals himself as the one who will look and tell: - Et toi, me dit-il, qu’est-ce que tu faisais ? - Je regardais. Pour l’aider, pour la saluer parce qu’elle avait conduit la mort aux bords de la nuit, pour l’accompagner dans sa chute et dans sa mort. (117) The narrator takes the risk of facing the unspeakable, the unthinkable, and looks at her. Il la regarde. Elle, Camilla. LA mort. She, too, is death dancing on a wire. Genet, through his narrator(s) challenges the problem of representation and imagines death dancing on a wire, providing a moment of fictional visibility. The funambulist’s act allows a certain mode of representation to open up a door into “les flancs du monstre” (125)—as Genet périlleux mouvements, il fermera les yeux. Il ferme les yeux quand pour l’éblouir tu frôles la mort” (124). 55 Camilla Mayer (Genet spells her name “Meyer”), born in 1918, was a famous German acrobat. She died in 1940 in an accident during a show. 99 defines the inside of the circus. As this analysis of Genet is a conversation with Derrida, it is important to connect the circus as Genet describes it in Le Funambule to Derrida’s analysis of Kafka’s ‘Before the Law.’ Indeed, when Genet writes, “le jour vous restez craintifs à la porte du cirque – n’osant entrer dans notre vie – trop fermement retenus par les pouvoirs du cirque qui sont des pouvoirs de la mort” (125), one can hear an echo of Kafka’s short story in which the country man stands before the law and asks to enter but is constantly denied entry. As Derrida comments in “Préjugés,” “la loi ne devrait jamais donner lieu, en tant que telle, à aucun récit . . . . Telle serait la loi de la loi. . . . On ne peut pas avoir affaire à la loi” (La Faculté de juger 109-110). This is where Genet makes his most powerful literary intervention, for his funambulist is the one who can touch and strike the law, dancing on the edge of the blade, the threshold of the law. In other words, it can be argued that Genet’s text, through narrative and aestheticization, poses the literary as a necessary mode of expression (the funambulist is also the poet), and seems to be asking, like Derrida: “Et si la loi, sans être elle-même transie de littérature partageait ses conditions de possibilité avec la chose littéraire?” (La Faculté de juger 109). * As the funambulist’s wire gradually becomes a metonymy for the guillotine and the acrobat’s act in the circus is associated with a public execution in a festival of cruelty, the funambulist himself becomes an aesthetic lens through which Genet celebrates and theorizes the great criminal—the locus of his major works. Le Funambule, as one his 100 most kaleidoscopic texts, provides many indications that allow one to draw an analogy between the funambulist and the criminal. The acrobat in Le Funambule is called l’incendiaire (121)—the arsonist, the pyromaniac. But the list does not stop there, for he is also referred to in many other terms that evoke the criminal such as: “Monstre à coup sûr” (114) “à la fois gibier et chasseur” (119), “le public est la bête que finalement tu viens poignarder” (124). While images of the guillotine are recurrent, the prison is also evoked several times: “prison” (120), “prisonnier” (123); and the wire itself is compared to a prison with the image of the cage (“ses six mètres de long sont une ligne infinie et une cage,” 123). More important, the narrators also admonish the funambulist with violence, urging him to reach a level of moral degradation through corruption and the pursuit of evil: L’argent ? Le pognon ? Il faudra en gagner. Et jusqu’à ce qu’il en crève, le funambule doit en palper . . . C’est alors que l’argent peut servir, apportant une sorte de pourriture qui saura vicier l’âme la plus calme. Beaucoup, beaucoup de pognon ! Un fric fou ! Ignoble ! . . . Je lui dis encore : - Tu devras travailler à devenir célèbre… - Pourquoi ? - Pour faire mal. (122) 56 56 See Bataille’s comment on Sartre’s famous essay on Genet (Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr). Bataille declares: “Sartre a mis en lumière le fait que, recherchant obstinément le Mal, Genet s’est enfermé dans une impasse . . . si le méchant n’a point d’horreur du Mal, s’il le fait par passion, alors le Mal devient un Bien” (La Littérature et le mal: Emily Bronte, Baudelaire, Michelet, Blake, Sade, Proust, Kafka, Genet 201). 101 One should remark that the choice of the funambulist, as a reconfiguration of the great criminal is highly significant if one considers the subversive nature of acrobats in the cultural imaginary. Celebrated in French literature since the Middle Ages, the funambulist has long been associated with the criminal. 57 French journalist and politician Hughes Le Roux (1860-1925) suggested in Les Jeux du cirque et la vie foraine that, sexual ambiguity apart, le funambule remains a subversive, a descendant of the dangerous commedia troupes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a symptom of potential disorder even in the nineteenth, in urban politics, as in art, acrobats are linked with criminals. (Qtd in Stokes 285-6) Similarly, John Stokes, in his literary history of the tightrope walker, defines the acrobat as: an escapologist . . . the supreme type of the ideally autonomous artist, outdoing the tragic actor, the dancer even, because of the risk he takes . . . Only le funambule can break the deadlock – for he, alone, by chancing injury, even death, practices a ritual that is real (293). 57 See Stokes 278-9, for a brief summary of the literary history of the acrobat. 102 The words he uses to describe the acrobat clearly conjure the figure of the criminal: the tightrope walker “escapes,” and “breaks out” of the rules. 58 Challenging the laws of gravity, as the criminal does the laws of society, the acrobat represents the ultimate risk- taker. Acrobats after all are “perilous people” (Stokes 277) and it is therefore hardly surprising to find numerous connections in Genet’s texts between the tightrope walker and the criminal—his most beloved subject— in this highly aesthetic celebration of love and death. Famous for his glorification of evil, Genet offers, in his most famous novels, an erotic discourse on the criminals in which “bander” (have a hard-on) constitutes his center of reflection. “Bander” is also a central motif in Le Funambule where the common meaning of the verb (to stretch, to tense) competes with its slang acceptation. When the narrator admonishes the tightrope walker “bande et fais bander,” he plays on the double meaning of the word, referring to the tension of the wire and the upright posture of the acrobat’s body on this wire, but also to the desire and fascination the funambulist must feel and trigger. Le Funambule, like Genet’s major novels, has a distinct erotic dimension, as suggested by his address to the reader at the end of the text: “Il s’agissait de t’enflammer, non de t’enseigner” (127). This interpretation of the tightrope walker as a figure of the great criminal can be substantiated by comparing Genet’s portrait of the acrobat with his description of famous criminal Eugene Weidmann in the opening of one his most celebrated novels, Notre- 58 On the tightrope walker as an escapologist, see for instance this poem by Banville in Odes funambulesques (1859): “Tribun, prophète ou baladin,/ Toujours fuyant avec dédain/ Ces pavés que le passant foule,/ Il marche sur les fiers sommets/ Ou sur la corde ignoble, mais/ Au-dessus des fronts de la foule.” (Odes funambulesques 24). 103 Dame-des-Fleurs. Published in 1948, within a decade of Le Funambule, Notre-Dame- des-Fleurs opens with a portrait of Weidmann: 59 Weidmann vous apparut dans une édition de cinq heures, la tête emmaillotée de bandelettes blanches, religieuse, et encore aviateur blessé, tombé dans les seigles, un jour de septembre pareil à celui où fut connu le nom de Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs. (1) The motif of “bander” (in the sense of “bandage”) is present here, as it is in Le Funambule: the tightrope walker’s head is not entirely covered in “bandelettes,” but the narrator exhorts him to dance blindfolded: “tu danseras . . . les yeux bandés” (110), repeating the word “bander.” This resemblance between the description of the great criminal Weidmann and the acrobat points to an analogy between these two tragic figures. Furthermore, in his analysis of the incipit of Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, Derrida emphasizes the apparition of the criminal condemned to death who is endowed with tremendous theatricality and becomes an object of fascination and fantasy (The Death Penalty 31). For instance Genet writes: Tu seras cette merveille embrasée, toi qui brûles, qui dure quelques minutes; tu brûles. Sur ton fil tu es la foudre. Ou si tu veux encore, un danseur solitaire. Allumée je ne sais par quoi qui t’éclaire, te consume, 59 Eugene Weidmann (1908-1939) was condemned to death for multiple murders and executed in 1936 by the guillotine. He was the last person to be publicly executed in France. 104 c’est une misère terrible qui te fait danser. Le public ? Il n’y voit que du feu, et, croyant que tu joues, ignorant que tu es l’incendiaire, il applaudit l’incendie. (121) Hence one can emphasize another relevant parallel between the tightrope walker and the great criminal, for the acrobat, flirting with death in his erotic dance, is also an object of fascination and fantasy. It is therefore possible to claim that the great criminal on the scaffold and the funambulist on the wire constitute a similar apparition in Genet’s texts. The analysis of the funambulist as he is perceived in the cultural imaginary and conjured up by Genet allows one to draw an analogy between the tightrope walker and the great criminal. Let us recall here Benjamin’s definition of “the great criminal:” The great criminal, however repellent his ends may have been, has aroused the secret admiration of the public. This can result not from his deed but only from the violence to which it bears witness. In this case, therefore, the violence that present-day law is seeking in all areas of activity to deny the individual appears really threatening, and arouses even in defeat the sympathy of the masses against the law. By what function violence can with reason seem so threatening to the law, and be so feared by it, must be especially evident where its application, even in the present legal system, is still permissible. (“The Critique of Violence” 239) 105 The great criminal on the scaffold, glorified and punished, is the locus of Genet’s writings—principally Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, Miracle de la rose, and Journal du Voleur. In his most celebrated works, his criminals can be conceptualized as tightrope artists performing a beautiful dance of death in the shadow of the revolution. Le Funambule can be used as a springboard into his major novels with the tightrope walker as the ultimate aestheticization of the great criminal, and the most poetic expression of Genet’s love for the great criminal. 2. The Shadow of the Revolution Pairing real criminals with fictional ones is the fundamental approach of this study but also the core of Genet’s novels in which he glorifies notorious criminals such as Eugene Weidmann and Maurice Pilorge, with “le talent de donner un chant à ce qui était muet” (Journal du Voleur 123). Weidmann was condemned to death for multiple murders and executed in 1939 by the guillotine. He was the last person to be publicly executed in France. Pilorge, known as “the dandy murderer,” was also executed by the guillotine in 1939 for the murder of his lover. Genet’s works, as he himself admits, are haunted by these criminal figures and images of death by the guillotine. Hence he declares, in the epigraph of Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, a novel that opens with a portrait of Weidmann and is dedicated to Pilorge, “sans Maurice Pilorge dont la mort n’a pas fini d’empoisonner ma vie je n’eusse jamais écrit ce livre. Je le dédie à sa mémoire.” Le Condamné à mort, a 106 long erotic poem published by Genet in 1942, is also dedicated to the glory of Pilorge (“A la mémoire de Maurice Pilorge assassin de vingt ans”). 60 Arasse has clearly delineated the fascination associated with the spectacle of death by the guillotine since the Revolution. The shadow of the revolution is visible in Genet’s works, which are full of phantasms generated by its bloody instrument, the guillotine. Tracing the guillotine as a topos in Lacenaire’s memoirs in chapter II has revealed that the guillotine gives life to a literary character: a new criminal hero. Lacenaire’s literary recapitation challenges the law by undoing the work of the guillotine (if only in fiction) and by elevating the criminal to the status of hero, punished yet glorified. Like the acrobat’s metal wire in Le Funambule, the guillotine also gives life to the great criminal in Genet’s novels, elevating the murderer to a multi-faceted heroic dimension. Through a carefully constructed narrative and rich imagery, Genet takes the reader/spectator from one spectacle of death (the circus) to another (the guillotine) as the funambulist’s act becomes the spectacle of a public execution. Unlike Lacenaire, Genet does not conceptualize any recapitation, for the cutting of the head is what triggers his phantasms. Genet’s great criminals, following Benjamin’s definition, are also glorified 60 Edmund White reports in Genet: A Biography that “Jean Genet’s personal icon was a newspaper photograph of Eugène Weidmann on the day of his arrest, a handsome young German who murdered six people, who was tried in 1937 and executed in 1939, whose name is the first word of Our Lady of the Flowers. Genet called it ‘”the image of a bloodied archangel trapped by earthly policemen.’” Lola Mouloudji recalls that when Genet would settle into a new hotel room . . . he would immediately hang the photo on the wall. Genet said to her, “The angel, for me, is Weidmann.” Wherever Genet lived with his lover Java, off and on from 1947 to 1954, usually in hotels, he would hang his photo of Weidman on the wall. He gave similar photos to his friend Olga Kechelievitch and to Cocteau.” Qtd. on http://rictornorton.co.uk/famous.htm 107 and castigated, and their glory lies in their (capital) punishment—“la mort à l’échafaud qui est notre gloire” (Miracle de la rose 10). The shadow of the revolution is indeed visible in many of his novels and plays, and is particularly prominent in the texts that constitute the focus of this chapter. Notre- Dame-des-Fleurs (1943), Genet’s debut novel, is the poetic narrative of a man’s memories of the underworld in Paris. This novel brings to life the world of prostitutes, homosexuals, thieves, transvestites, and murderers. The two main characters are Divine, a transvestite living in an attic overlooking the Montmartre cemetery, who dies of tuberculosis and attains sainthood through abjection and death; and Notre-Dame-des- Fleurs, a murderer who achieves his ultimate glory through his execution by the guillotine. Miracle de la rose (1946) mixes narratives about a prisoner serving a sentence in Mettray and Fontrevault and semi-autobiographical stories from Genet’s adolescence. Its non-linear structure and Genet’s transformative writing endow the novel with a fantastical dimension. The narrator combines visions of miracles with evocations of his homosexual erotic desires. One of the main characters, a prisoner called Harcamone, is the object of the narrator’s phantasms. As he approaches death by the guillotine, Harcamone becomes a figure of the king and of Christ, and his chains turn into a garland of flowers. Journal du Voleur, a 1949 novel with an autobiographical dimension, does not focus on the guillotine but makes homosexuality, theft, and betrayal central themes in order to explore the subversion of moral laws and create an aesthetic of the abject. 108 Genet’s Christian imagery is important in this novel as each crime is endowed with a religious ritualistic dimension. 61 When Sartre declares in his biography of Genet, “Genet is a passéiste . . . [he] carries in his heart a bygone instant” (2), he refers to Genet’s tendency to re-live specific moments of his youth. 62 Genet admits in Journal du Voleur, “j’aime les souvenirs” (202). Taking this thought one step further, one may argue that Genet also reenacts l’instant révolutionnaire, the cut, the beheading of the king that marked the French imaginary and history, a fascination that imprints his works and elevates his criminals to the glory of kings. Stéphanie Boulard, in a study of the guillotine in Genet’s works, declares: On sort auréolé par la lunette et toute tête ayant la promesse d’être touchée par le couteau de la guillotine connait son heure poétique, son moment solaire. Positivité de la coupure! Le condamné est littéralement érigé en divinité royale car avoir la tête tranchée c’est connaître le sacre des rois. (303) 61 While these three novels, along with Le Funambule, constitute the main focus of this chapter, other texts by Genet can be evoked, such as Le Condamné à mort, a long poem dedicated to Maurice Pilorge in which the narrator addresses a very erotic discourse to a man condemned to death. Also see some of Genet’s plays, such as Le Balcon, a masterpiece of modern theater taking place in a brothel in an unnamed town under the threat of the revolution. In this upscale brothel, all the clients are themselves performing a role (Bishop, General, Queen) reflecting the power system of the regime outside the brothel. 62 “Genet is a passéiste; continues to relive this period of his life as if it had lasted only an instant. To say ‘instant’ is to say fatal instant. The instant is the reciprocal and contradictory envelopment of the before by the after. One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life. . . . Genet carries in his heart a bygone instant . . . there was a death, that is all. And Genet is nothing other than a dead man.” (Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr 1-2). 109 Her use of the word “solaire” brings to mind the Bourbon family, from King Louis XIV known as “le Roi-Soleil” to his descendant, King Louis XVI, executed by the guillotine in 1793. Within the image of the guillotine lies a profound sense of retrospective in Genet’s writings. Consequently, the guillotine, as a shadow of the revolution, springs forth in his novels, as it does in Le Funambule. He re-enacts, with a certain nostalgia and lyricism, the execution of the King and the glory of the monarchs. This is particularly salient in his usage of the word “couper” and other synonyms and alliterations. Boulard points out for instance the innumerable occurrences of the phrase “tout-à-coup” in Notre- Dame-des-Fleurs (303). One can see the word “coup” (as in “le coup de hâche,” the stroke of the blade), but also hear “cou” (the neck) in this phrase that additionally implies instantaneous action (like the decapitation—and again recalls “l’instant révolutionnaire”). 63 The recurrence of the word “couper” is also noticeable in Le Funambule in which the acrobat—the ultimate aestheticization of the great criminals and the most poetic expression of Genet’s love for them—earns his glory by risking his life on the metal wire (a metonomy for the guillotine). “Ton fil cependant – j’y reviens – n’oublie pas que c’est à ses vertus que tu dois ta grâce,” declares Genet; “l’un à l’égard de l’autre, ne redoutez pas la cruauté: coupante, elle vous fera scintiller. . . . Ce privilège est réservé à peu de héros” (126, my emphasis). Like the funambulist, most of Genet’s heroes are bound to die. Having impressed the shadow of the revolution upon them, he defines their tragic end on the scaffold as 63 Also see Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida, The Instant of My Death/Demeure: Fiction and Testimony. 110 their only possibly destiny—for the king has to die. Accordingly, he describes Notre- Dame’s first crime in these terms: Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs fait son entrée solemnelle par la porte du crime, porte dérobée, qui donne sur un escalier noir mais sompteux. Notre-Dame monte l’escalier . . . Il a seize ans quand il arrive au palier. . . . Il sait que son destin s’accomplit. (104, my emphasis) The terms Genet chooses to describe the criminal’s first murder, the crime that will take Notre-Dame to the scaffold, already evoke the guillotine, with an emphasis on the steps he has to climb—an image that is almost always conjured up when describing the ascension to the scaffold. In Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, stairs systematically lead to death. Of the stairs leading to Divine’s apartment, an attic in Paris, it is said “l’escalier monte à la mort” (19). Frieda Ekotto, in her study on prison literature and legal discourse, L'Ecriture carcérale et le discours juridique chez Jean Genet, mentions this passage and remarks: “la description de l’acte meurtrier commence par une image qui représente une figure ‘royale’ montée de toute pièce par son créateur . . . il s’agit d’un roi près de la mort” (106). “Il fallut qu’il mourût,” announces Genet early in the novel (Notre-Dame-des- Fleurs 27). * 111 This dernier acte has allowed literature since the revolution to write the great criminal into a figure of the king, for the man condemned to death wears the crown of monarchs on his head (“on pourrait voir une couronne royale” Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, 306). Lacenaire, in the early nineteenth century, was compared to a member of the Bourbon family, decapitated like King Louis XVI (1793). Similarly, Genet’s heroes also claim their place in the lineage of the French kings. Métayer, an eighteen-year-old boy incarcerated at Mettray with the narrator of Le Miracle de la rose, believes himself to be a direct descendant of the Bourbons: Le gosse le plus audacieux, celui qui osa la plus folle parure, ce fut Métayer . . . . J’accepte de me rappeler ses abcès rouges, son visage triangulaire . . . ses gestes dangereux. Il raconta aux plus attentifs, et surtout à moi, qu’il était le descendant des rois de France. . . . Il prétendait au trône. . . . Il se voulait l’héritier des rois de France. (294, my emphasis) Even the boy’s face, a triangle, evokes the guillotine’s blade (Boulard 303). He will encounter the blade as King Louis XVI, his imaginary ancestor, did—as a royal privilege. Harcamone, a murderer awaiting his execution when the narrator meets him in Le Miracle de la rose, is another of Genet’s kings, with a name mirroring the word “monarque” in French (Hanrahan 40). Similarly, the main criminal figures in Genet’s other novels are described in royal terms. In Journal du Voleur, Stillitano, the narrator’s 112 main love, is called “un monarque faubourien” (378). 64 Of Mignon, a pimp, in Notre- Dame-des-Fleurs it is said: Les gens qu’il croise…sans le connaitre….accorde une sorte de souveraineté discontinue et momentanée à cet individu, de qui tous ces fragments de souveraineté feront tout de même qu’à la fin de ses jours il aura parcouru la vie en souverain. (143) 65 The great criminal’s portrait would not be complete if one stopped with the image of the king, for Genet’s homosexual heroes are often transvestites associated with the queen. Therefore, in Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, Divine la Toute-Belle, who lives in an attic overlooking the Montmartre cemetery, which she shares with her pimp Mignon and other lovers, announces, “je serai reine quand même” (213). Boulard notes that the head of the tragic Marie-Antoinette, queen of France, executed by the guillotine in 1793 during the Terror, floats over the novel (304). One can have a more complete vision of Genet’s great criminals by analyzing the concept of the sovereign as defined by Bataille in La Littérature et le mal. Bataille claims that, 64 Also see for instance the kingly descriptions/attitudes of the characters in Le Balcon, especially the Bishop, the General and Irma/the Queen. Also in Le Condamné à mort, the detainee is described as “royal” (12) and “auguste” (13). 65 For a detailed list of all the royal references in Genet’s novels, see Bataille, La Littérature et la mal 195. 113 la souveraineté est le pouvoir de s’élever, dans l’indifférence à la mort, au dessus des lois qui assurent le maintien de la vie. Elle ne diffère de la sainteté qu’en apparence, le saint étant celui qu’attire la mort, tandis que le roi l’attire au-dessus de lui. (197, my emphasis) Arguably, this definition of the sovereign brings to mind the funambulist—Genet’s aesthetic vision and ultimate aestheticization of the great criminal. Bataille adds: Jamais d’ailleurs nous devons oublier que le sens du mot ‘saint’ est ‘sacré’ et que sacré désigne l’interdit, ce qui est violent, ce qui est dangereux, et dont le contact seul annonce l’anéantissement: c’est le Mal. Genet n’ignore pas qu’il y a de la sainteté une représentation inversée, mais il la sait plus vraie que l’autre: ce domaine est celui ou les contraires s’abiment et se conjuguent. (197) This vision is conveyed by the words emphasized in Genet’s quote that recall almost directly the description of the tightrope walker raising above the ground to incredible heights (“Tu entres: c’est une série de bonds, de sauts périlleux, de pirouettes, de roues, qui t’amènent au pied de ta machine où tu grimpes en dansant. . . . On ira de merveilles en merveilles,” [118]), ready to risk everything and perfectly indifferent to death (“décidé à toutes les beautés, capable de toutes . . . d’une audace invincible,” [110]). The great criminal, a risk-taker and a tragic artist in Genet’s vision, plays with the law and risks death like a funambulist in the spectacle of death. 114 A fable published in 1792 during the French revolution by Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian, called “Le Danseur de corde et le Balancier” (the tightrope walker and the balance pole), also evokes this connection between the funambulist and the great criminal: Sur la corde tendue un jeune voltigeur Apprenoit à danser ; et déjà son adresse, Ses tours de force, de souplesse, Faisoient venir maint spectateur. . . . Il s’élève, descend, va, vient, plus haut s’élance . . . Notre jeune danseur, tout fier de son talent, Dit un jour: à quoi bon ce balancier pesant Qui me fatigue et m’embarrasse? Si je dansois sans lui, j’aurois bien plus de grâce, De force et de légèreté. Aussitôt fait que dit. Le balancier jeté, Notre étourdi chancelle, étend les bras, et tombe. . . . Jeunes gens, jeunes gens, ne vous a-t-on pas dit Que sans règle et sans frein tôt ou tard on succombe? La vertu, la raison, les loix, l’autorité, Dans vos désirs fougueux vous causent quelque peine; C’est le balancier qui vous gêne, 115 Mais qui fait votre sûreté. (My emphasis) 66 This fable illustrates the risks associated with defiance. Challenging the laws of gravity, the funambulist risks his life, like the great criminal, a borderline figure, dancing in the margins of the law, on the edge of the guillotine’s blade. Placing oneself above the law, in perfect indifference to death, is the attribute of the sovereign according to Bataille’s definition and Genet’s vision of the great criminal. In this regard, Ekotto remarks: “Genet montre que la souveraineté signifie plus que le fait d’avoir des sujets, de présider aux cérémonies et de mourir. Un souverain doit gouverner. Il s’inscrit ainsi dans une généalogie fictive où il peut jouer tous les rôles: Roi/sujet” (107). In other words, the great criminal, as a figure of the sovereign, must govern by making and enforcing the law. 67 Still, while he can be above the law, he is never outside the law. Similarly, the great criminal is never outside the law for his very existence is defined against the law. This is exemplified by Genet’s analysis of Divine: “pour Divine, commettre un crime afin de se libérer du joug des puissances morales, c’est encore avoir partie liée avec la morale” (Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs 359). But the great criminal, like a king, can be both the sovereign and the subject and thereby displace the law’s definition, boundaries, and application. 66 http://www.poesie-francaise.fr/jean-pierre-claris-de-florian/poeme-le-danseur-de-corde- et-le-balancier.php. Note that Genet, in Le Funambule, also associates the tightrope walker with the poet. The poet as a tightrope walker is a motif that is sometimes evoked in literature. Rimbaud for instance makes this comparison in his Illuminations: “J'ai tendu des cordes de clocher à clocher; des guirlandes de fenêtre à fenêtre ; des chaînes d'or d'étoile à étoile et je danse” (‘Phrases’ in Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations). 67 On the question of the sovereign, see Derrida’s reading of Schmitt: “the sovereign is the one who decides on the exception.” (The Death Penalty 83) 116 Arguably, the man condemned to death has a superior and theatrical power to defy the law, a point Foucault makes when he claims: “si la foule se presse autour de l’échafaud . . . c’est aussi pour entendre celui qui n’a plus rien à perdre maudire les juges, les lois, le pouvoir, la religion” (Surveiller et punir 73). Hence the great criminal becomes what Derrida calls ‘the sovereign exception” (“l’exception souveraine de celui qui a su ou bien défier et contester la monopolization de la violence par le droit . . . ou bien se réapproprier, comme individu, la violence que le droit a soustraite aux individus” Force de loi 93-94). In Foucault’s argument, this final act of defiance is made possible by the guillotine. Paradoxically the guillotine, as a symbol of the revolution, also marked an act of ultimate defiance to the established order by which the outlaws founded new law. But it is the power of words, not the blade, that empowers the great criminal as a sovereign and his “sovereign speech” enables him to challenge the law. Yet the “sovereign speech,” if one follows Bataille, is also the attribute of the writer. “Faire oeuvre littéraire est tourner le dos à la servilité . . . c’est parler le language souverain” (La Littérature et le mal 209). In light of Genet’s subversive representation of the criminal and his literary reappropriation of violence, it can be claimed that literature—like the scaffold—is also the place where ultimate acts of defiance to the law can be made. * “Quelle machine réussit mieux à repousser les limites de l’imagination ?” asks Boulard about the guillotine (299). It certainly pushes back the limits of Genet’s poetry, 117 allowing him to abolish all distinctions between beauty and ugliness, between good and evil. “Bulkaen était le doigt de Dieu, Harcamone étant Dieu puisqu’il est au ciel . . . que je me crée et auquel je me voue corps et âme” (Miracle de la rose 20), writes Genet, conjuring up the Christian imagery that permeates many of his works. Within the frame of a reflection on law and literature and more specifically, on the ethical power of literature as a force competing against law’s power over life and death, the previous chapter has highlighted Lacenaire’s ability to create “a shadow courtroom.” In this alternative sphere, he subverts, if only symbolically, law’s power and seeks to establish his own rule. In other words, he comes to embody different roles all at once, the attorney, the judge, the witness and the accused, enabling literature to establish a separate system of judgment. Similarly Genet, by making the great criminal a king, but also a figure of the sacred, displaces the law’s traditional definition of the criminal. The analysis of Genet’s title, “le miracle de la rose,” reveals his vision of the great criminal as a saint, an angel, and a figure of Christ. This title is explained at the beginning of the novel when the narrator describes a scene in which the chains worn by Harcamone (a man condemned to death) suddenly transform into a garland of white of roses: Je sentais, dans toutes mes veines, que le miracle était en marche. Mais la ferveur de notre admiration avec la charge de sainteté qui pesait sur la chaine serrant ses poignets—ses cheveux ayant eu le temps de pousser, leurs boucles s’embrouillaient sur son front avec la cruauté savante des torsades de la couronne d’épine—firent cette chaine se transformer sous nos yeux à peine surpris, en une guirlande de roses blanches. . . . Le 118 même mouvement que font les fidèles fanatiques pour saisir le pan d’un manteau et le baiser, je le fis . . . et je coupai la plus belle rose. . . . La tête de la rose tomba sur mon pied nu et roula sur la dallage. . . . Je la ramassai et relavai mon visage extasié, assez tôt pour voir l’horreur peinte sur le visage d’Harcamone, dont la nervosité n’avait pu résister à la préfiguration si sûre de sa mort. (25, my emphasis) Analyzing this long excerpt is central to understanding Genet’s transformative writing. He gradually metamorphoses the great criminal into a saint, and a figure of Christ wearing a crown of thorns. This miracle takes place through the symbolic decapitation of the rose (a metonymy for Harcamone’s head) and turns the great criminal into a sacred figure. Such examples can be multiplied through a close reading of the novels that serve as the focus of this chapter, for most of Genet’s criminals are endowed with sainthood and divinity. Sartre for instance explains about Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs “Culafroy et Divine, aux gouts délicats, seront toujours contraints d’aimer ce qu’ils abhorrent et cela constitue un peu de leur sainteté, car c’est du renoncement” (79). The very name of “Divine” in Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs already suggests the religious. The great criminal is loved and glorified. This sacralization goes as far as to suggest that the great criminal— the body of Christ— is shared and eaten through communion like the host (Boulard 304): “Divine lui a fait connaître Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs. Un autre jour, lui a montré bonne fille, une photo de l’assassin, une petite ‘Photomaton.’ Mimosa prend la photo, la pose sur sa langue tendue, l’avale. – Je l’adore, ta Notre-Dame, je la communie” (Notre- 119 Dame-des-Fleurs 228). As the head becomes the host, the man condemned to death is shared through communion—one of many dissolutions of identity in Genet’s writing, a central characteristic of the great criminal. One can recall the ending of The Perfume, a 1985 novel by Patrick Süskind, that ends in a spectacular metamorphosis of the murderer into a figure of the divine and his subsequent cannibalization by the ecstatic crowd. This interpretation can be even further substantiated by the description of Notre-Dame’s trial: Les douze jurés sont douze braves hommes soudain souverains juges. Donc la salle, dès midi, s’était remplie. Une salle de festin. La table était mise. Je voudrais parler avec sympathie de cette foule assise . . . hostile à Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs. (Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs 321). This scene recalls the Last Supper during which the twelve apostles symbolically shared the body and blood of Christ. One can even hear “hostie” (the host) in the word “hostile.” In Le Condamné à mort, the narrator calls one of the inmates “mon Jésus” (22) and the Christian imagery present in Genet’s writings reappears through the recurrent image of the crown of thorns. Interestingly, the images evoked to describe this man’s head recall the description of the funambulist, the ethereal vision emphasized in the opening of this chapter: “une paillette d’or est un disque minuscule en métal doré, percé d’un trou. Mince et légère, elle peut flotter sur l’eau. Il en reste quelquefois une ou deux accrochées dans les boucles d’un acrobate” (107). Similarly, this vision is conjured up in Le Condamné à mort when Genet describes the man’s hair: “le gel étincelant . . . qui poudrait tes cheveux de clairs astres d’acier” (12). For a brief moment, the reader can see 120 the fleeting image of the funambulist. 68 To mention but one other example regarding the similarities between the funambulist and other Genetian criminal heroes, one can compare the obvious echo between these two descriptions: “Donc, fardé, somptueusement, jusqu’à provoquer, dès son apparition, la nausée. Au premier de tes tours sur le fil on comprendra que ce monstre aux paupières mauves ne pouvait danser que là” (Le Funambule 115) and “au coin de la bouche ou à l’angle des paupières, le signe sacré des monstres” (Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs 14). In Le Condamné à mort, the man waiting to be executed is also physically elevated in the text by his position (in the cell above the narrator’s cell). Therefore the narrator finds himself in the position of the acrobat’s public, looking up, gazing at the brilliance of this rising star, this falling angel. As regards the angel, Boulard makes an interesting connection between the description of the criminal’s head in Genet’s texts and Hugo’s vision of Gauvain’s head in Quatrevingt-Treize. 68 On the funambulist as a figure of the angel, see this 1599 sonnet, from the preface to the French translation of an Italian treatise on the art of tight-rope walking: Se lancer dedans l'air, dans son vuide azuré, Voltigeant, y tracer d'un corps prompt et agile Mille tours et retours, puis se trouver liabile, A terre, d'un plein saut, sur ses pieds asseuré Faict croire à Tignorant que ce vol aëré N'est seulement conduit que de la main subtile D'un démon imposteur, pauvre sot et débile Qui voudroit que tout fust par son œil mesuré. Archange docte, expert par son discours, démontre Qu'en cet art ne se faict de charme aucun rencontre Et que la seule cause est sa dextérité. Il mérite entre tous une double louange Et qu'on sacre son nom à la postérité. Car bien dire et sauter sont les faicts d'un Archange. https://archive.org/stream/mmoiresdunedan00gini/mmoiresdunedan00gini_djvu.txt 121 Et puisqu’il est question d’échafaud, il est de toute évidence d’abord question de tête. Chez Genet, l’apparition du criminel, et a fortiori d’une tête de criminel, est toujours surprenante, brutale. En ceci que c’est une tête d’ange. Ange ou archange. A l’image de cette autre tête hugolienne dans Quatrevingt-treize qui aura pu attirer l’attention de Genet par son côté somme toute très féminine et qui est, bien sûr, celle de Gauvain sur le point d’être guillotiné: « il ressemblait à une vision. Jamais il n’avait paru plus beau. Sa chevelure brune flottait au vent [...] Son cou blanc faisait songer à une femme, et son œil héroïque et souverain faisait songer à un archange » (Quatrevingt-treize 1064). (301) This excellent analysis of the similarities between Hugo’s and Genet’s vision of the man condemned to death as an angel leads to another parallel between Hugo’s and Genet’s texts, a connection that also points to the sacralization of the executed. In Journal du Voleur, the narrator describes himself in these terms: “je m’étais raidi jusqu’à devenir une sorte de signe hiératique . . . un héros” (108, my emphasis). The phrase “signe hiératique” endows him with a solemn, ritualistic dimension, but also associates him with the religious through the reference to the liturgical tradition. 69 The last chapter of Hugo’s Quatrevingt-treize opens with this awe-inspiring description of the guillotine: En même temps que le jour, une chose étrange, immobile, surprenante, et que les oiseaux du ciel ne connaissaient pas, apparut sur le plateau de la 69 On the different meanings of the word “hiératique,” see http://www.cnrtl.fr/lexicographie/hiératique. 122 Tourgue au-dessus de la forêt de Fougères. Cela avait été mis là dans la nuit. C'était dressé, plutôt que bâti. De loin sur l'horizon c'était une silhouette faite de lignes droites et dures ayant l'aspect d'une lettre hébraïque ou d'un de ces hiéroglyphes d'Egypte qui faisaient partie de l'alphabet de l'antique énigme. (1046) Considering that in linguistics, the word “hieratic” actually refers to the Egyptian cursive writing derived from ancient hieroglyphs, and observing the exact symmetry of the two phrases “signe hiératique” in Genet and “lettre hébraïque” in Hugo (a syntactical, lexical, and phonological symmetry), one can suggest that there is more than one connection between the Hugolian glorification and sacralization of Gauvain on the scaffold and Genet’s Christian imagery. 70 Most of Genet’s criminals are indeed falling angels. Derrida complicates this reading through the notion of “pervérité chrétienne” that he develops in The Death Penalty: The Christlike allegory or metonymy. . . in our Abrahamic culture, makes of the condemned to death a kind of repetition or parody, a comedy of Christ’s Passion, an imitation of Jesus Christ. (29) While reading this list of those who died on the field of honor of capital punishment, of these martyrs and these saints, I will underscore certain Christlike features, perversely Christlike, but with a perversity that both 70 Of course, one could also analyze the significance of the word “hébraïque” in the Abrahamic culture. 123 reveals and betrays perhaps what could be called a Christian perverity. (61) Illustrating this theory through the analysis of Weidmann’s portrayal (that I discussed earlier in this chapter) and several other examples, Derrida analyzes Genet’s Christian imagery (59-68), and connects it with the question of the death penalty. Through the story of Christ’s resurrection and the “bandelettes” emphasized in the incipit of Notre-Dame- des-Fleurs, Derrida speaks of “poetic miracle” (65) to describe the resurrection, the elevation of the man condemned to death and executed. This “miracle” is at work in Genet’s novels—as it is in Le Funambule, the poetically concentrated expression of the author’s vision of the great criminal. In Derrida’s words: “[Our Lady of the Flowers] plays, mimes, simulates in a serious manner a kind of chant of mourning and resurrection that describes but also poetically provokes, produces, performs, and glorifies the elevation, the ascension of the victims of the scaffold”(64). Here again the power of words is emphasized: the chant does not simply “describe,” but has a performative and transformative power. Literature performs a redemption, competing against law’s power over life and death—a “poetico-literary quasi redemption” (The Death Penalty 64). In Genet’s writings, the great criminal becomes Christ, the ultimate figure of redemption, a miracle performed through the power of literature. 124 3. The Power of Poetry, the Power of Crime 71 For Genet, as for Baudelaire, there is something seductive about evil. With an extraordinary power to create, these two poets metamorphose the abject into the beautiful. “Je reconnais aux voleurs, aux traitres, aux assassins, aux méchants, aux fourbes, une beauté profonde—une beauté en creux,” maintains Genet in Journal du Voleur (124). Genet depicts the great criminal as a being of extreme beauty as he transforms the most abject details into poetry. Menozzi accurately perceives that, “what we find in Genet is a redefinition of beauty itself, . . . an unnamable insolence and fullness of life” (144). Many examples of this transfiguration can be found in his works. For instance, in Miracle de la rose, his portrait of Botchako, one of the inmates, illustrates the poetic transformation of horror into beauty. The man is first described as an exemplum of cruelty, abjection, and ugliness: “Le mec le plus acharné, possédé d’une cruauté que rien ne paraissait expliquer . . . Ses dents, mal rangées mais solides, semblaient relever ses lèvres. Son visage était tâché de rousseurs, on lui supposait les cheveux rouges. . . . La rage l’illuminait” (29). Then Genet operates an aesthetic transformation: La laideur est de la beauté au repos: quand il parlait sa voix était enrouée et sourde, elle avait encore quelques stries acides qui étaient comme des craquelures, des gerçures, et songeant à la beauté de sa voix quand il 71 A term used in Cruickshank, 208: “Genet . . . discusses the possibility of transmuting the theater into crime in the belief that beauty in art must have the power of poetry—that is to say, the power of crime.” 125 chantait, j’examinai cette voix parlée avec plus d’attention. Je fis cette découverte: c’était l’enrouement énervant qui, forcé par le chant, se transformait en une teinte veloutée, si douce, et les craquelures devenaient les notes les plus claires. C’est quelque chose comme si, en filant d’une pelote au repos, ces notes se fussent épurées. (29) It can be argued that the poetic dimension of this metamorphosis is highlighted in the portrait through a meta-discourse on speech, for it is through Botchako’s voice that the transformation can be performed. The power of words allows Genet to extract beauty from the poetic distillation of horror, abjection, and crime. Hence he reveals, “la beauté est la projection de la laideur et . . . en développant certaines monstruosités, on obtient les plus purs ornements” (29). The image of the tightrope walker—the ultimate aestheticization of the great criminal—is conjured up in this excerpt through the word “pelote” (the ball of yarn) with evokes “le fil” (the thread) that directs Le Funambule. In this perspective, Le Funambule, as a manifestation of Genet’s glorification of the great criminal, can be read as an aesthetic concentration of the author’s transformative writing. This aesthetic transfiguration is confirmed in the following excerpt in which the narrator describes the transformations that the acrobat must undertake when he comes on stage: Si je lui conseille d’éviter le luxe dans sa vie privée, si je lui conseille d’être un peu crasseux, de porter des vêtements avachis, des souliers éculés, c’est pour que, le soir sur la piste, le dépaysement soit plus grand, 126 c’est pour que tout l’espoir de la journée se trouve exalté par l’approche de la fête, c’est pour que de cette distance d’une misère apparente à la plus splendide apparition procède une tension telle que la danse sera comme une décharge ou un cri, c’est parce que la réalité du Cirque tient dans cette métamorphose de la poussière en poudre d’or, mais c’est surtout parce qu’il faut que celui qui doit susciter cette image admirable soit mort, ou, si l’on y tient, qu’il se traîne sur terre comme le dernier, comme le plus pitoyable des humains, j’irais même jusqu’à lui conseiller de boiter, de se couvrir de guenilles, de poux, et de puer. Que sa personne se réduise de plus en plus pour laisser scintiller, toujours plus éclatante, cette image dont je parle, qu’un mort habite. (110) The metamorphosis the acrobat must go through, from dust to gold, is conjured up by the narrator through a series of oppositions between the most abject aspects of life (rags, lice, stench) and the utmost beauty conveyed by words that also recall divine exaltation (“splendide apparition,” “image admirable”). Moreover, here again, the power of words (and dance) in the aestheticization process is suggested: the phrase “la danse sera comme une décharge ou un cri” recalls the concept that Artaud sought to develop in the theater of cruelty, “a unique language somewhere between gesture and thought” (68). The great criminal in Genet’s texts is indeed a dancer—beyond Le Funambule. Throughout the novels that constitute the main focus of this chapter, his criminal heroes are often described in terms of dance and costume. And like the acrobat, their ornaments return to dust and abjection when “the show is over.” The description of Notre-Dame’s 127 trial is particularly interesting for this analysis of Genet’s transformative writing when he describes the testimony of the witnesses—transvestites who are suddenly destitute, having lost their beautiful attire and their “stage names” (the judge calls them by their real names): Les petites tantes de Blanche à Pigalle perdaient leur plus belle parure: leur noms perdaient leur corolle, comme la fleur de papier que tient le danseur au bout de ses doigts et qui n’est plus, le ballet fini, qu’une tige de fer. Ne valait-il pas mieux qu’il dansât toute la danse avec un simple fil de fer? (Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs 339) The way he describes this scene vividly calls forth the image of a flower losing its petals, one by one. The narrator uses words that evoke the Le Funambule such as “le fil de fer” and “la danse.” Genet’s transformative writing hinges upon these apparitions, a complex poetic imagery that creates echoes between the different texts. It is therefore possible to read the funambulist as a figure of the great criminal, and maintain that, in Genet’s writings, the great criminal is aestheticized as a dancer, an artist, and a poetic expression of beauty. “Tu m’as donné ta boue et j’en ai fait de l’or,” declares Baudelaire in Les Fleurs du mal (Pléiade I 192). Unlike many of his contemporaries, he chose to focus on the abject and the macabre, distilling horror into “the flowers of evil,” a poetic process through which he wanted to “turn mud into gold.” Genet’s aestheticization of the great criminal can be seen as a conversation with Baudelaire. Obviously the motif of the flower 128 is salient in the very titles of two of the novels that constitute the main focus of this chapter, but also the names of Genet’s characters evoke Baudelaire’s flowers. Genet’s discourse about these names in Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs is very important: Il m’est guère possible de préciser les raisons qui m’ont fait choisir tels ou tels noms: Divine, Mimosa, . . . Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs. . . . J’ai quelquefois l’impression de les avoir recueillis parmi les fleurs artificielles ou naturelles dans la chapelle de la Vierge Marie. (340) Genet’s flowers have been picked up from the ground, the tombs, and the altars. Derrida acknowledges this elevation and the association of the flower to Christianity, as well as to the Baudelairian tradition when he declares: The flower of evil, the possibility of the poetic and of poetic blossoming that ties the tradition of the Flowers of Evil to Our Lady of the Flowers, evil being in Baudelaire, as much as in Genet, that which even death (criminal death or death as punishment for the crime, the two being indissociable here) awakens to poetry and to literature, grants the right to literature, <both> defies a certain Christianity and confirms a certain Christianity. (The Death Penalty 128) Within a reflection on law and literature, and specifically on literature as a force against law’s power over life and death, this analysis can foreground Genet’s aestheticization of 129 crime and the criminal as a counterpoint to law’s discourse (here specifically the law of Christianity). For instance, Boulard analyses the concept of “mourir en beauté” evoked by Genet in Miracle de la rose (23) as the ultimate transgression of the law, as death by the guillotine becomes the consecration of the great criminal (301-2). Genet’s aestheticization process is also visible in the narration of crime. Ekotto distinguishes between two categories of murder narrated in Genet’s works: those that are committed rapidly and do not allow/lead to much commentary by the narrators, and those that are narrated slowly, carefully, with detail and precision. She claims, “on discerne plus de lenteur, une préméditation qui les transforme en assassinats marqués par le verbal . . . C’est cette brèche qui s’ouvre et par laquelle Genet fera jaillir son écriture. Il y a un ralentit, ici, au niveau de l’acte même qui le livre au verbal” (104). One last example can confirm Genet’s transformative writing, with an excerpt from Journal du Voleur and the portrait of a criminal called Java: Je voyais une diarrhée jaune couler le long de ses cuisses monumentales. . . . Ce cataclysme était fou d’oser déranger de si nobles proportions, de si exaltants rapports, et si harmonieux, et ces proportions, ces rapports étaient à l’origine de la crise, ils en étaient responsables, si beaux ils en étaient même l’expression puisque ce que je nomme Java était à la fois maître de son corps et responsable de sa peur. Sa peur était belle à voir. Tout en devenait le signe: la chevelure, les muscles, les yeux, les dents, le sexe et la grâce virile de cet enfant. (125) 130 This example raises an important question for it suggests the transformation of language, through language: “tout en devenait le signe,” writes Genet, suggesting a displacement of signification. Through the power of literature, a sign can signify something else, and the great criminal can become a king, a god, and an artist. It is therefore possible to suggest that this is how literature, through Genet’s poetic gesture, becomes law’s counterpoint, an aesthetic force competing against law’s power over life and death. Here one can recall a scene from the French film called ‘Le Schpountz’ (1938) discussed in Chapter II. 72 In this scene the legal sentence is given a literary and theatrical dimension as the law is turned into a spectacle and becomes poeticized—which can be read as a subversion of the death penalty through theatricalization and parody. In light of Genet’s transformative writing, and of the emphasis of “tout en devenait le signe” as the transformation of language through language, one may add that Fernandel’s recitation is a form of aestheticization. But also, and more important, his comic act is a way to challenge the law by displacing the sign through the power of literature: the literary has the power to make the language of the law signify something else—or nothing at all. This ultimate power of literature is evoked by Genet when he analyzes Notre-Dame’s psychiatric report (the language of the law) and concludes, very poetically: “de ce rapport ailé, tombaient à terre des mots comme ceux-ci: déséquilibre…psychopathie…fabulation . . . déséquilibre, déséquilibre, déséquilibre, déséquilibre…équilibriste” (Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs 345), an eerie oscillation of the signifiers that recalls the funambulist’s dance. 72 “Le plus tranchant” in Fernandel’s words, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uxn8YyJZUNA 131 * Investigating the complex relationship between law and literature through an analysis of the representations of the great criminal in the shadow of the revolution, this chapter seeks to excavate Genet’s vision of the great criminal and understand how, from the heights of his own literary wire, he reveals his (and the public’s) love and fascination for the cursed yet sacred figure of the grand criminal. This prompts a reflection on the question of aesthetics as “the experience of someone actually witnessing the spectacle” (Black 2). As Derrida’ claims, “the spectacle and the spectator are required. The state, the polis, the whole of politics, the co-citizenry—itself or mediated through representation— must attend and attest, it must testify publicly that death was dealt or inflicted, it must see die the condemned one” (The Death Penalty 2). Or, in Genet’s words, “c’est sans doute, se dira-t-on, cette particularité qui le pose sur un fil, c’est cet œil allongé, ces joues peintes, ces ongles dorés qui l’obligent à être là, où nous n’irons – Dieu merci! – jamais” (Le Funambule 115). Death is mediated by spectacle in Genet’s works, as is the great criminal. In The Aesthetics of Murder, Black traces the meaning of the word “aesthetics,” from the Greek ethymology (aistheta: perceptible things) to De Quincey’s definition in “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” (that which is “in relation to good taste”), and highlights a “misappropriation” from the original meaning and concludes that this semiotic evolution in the Anglo-Saxon languages resulted in the association of murder to spectacle (3). He states: 132 Once we recognize the peculiar inception of the word aesthetics in the English language, . . . we may begin to sense . . . the extent to which our customary experience of murder and other forms of violence is primarily aesthetic, rather than moral, physical, natural or whatever term we choose as a synonym for the word real. (3) He concludes that capital punishment has a greater aesthetic impact on its audience. This is the reason why, according to Black, in the nineteenth century, the public has been seen abandoning the theater to go see a public execution (4). In this aesthetic experience lies the power of the spectacle of death by the guillotine. The circus in Le Funambule, presented as the spectacle of a public execution, “la fête cruelle,” is a space in which Genet clearly transforms the death penalty into an aesthetic act as the great criminal—the acrobat, the ultimate risk-taker—lends himself to spectacle. While Lacenaire creates his own “shadow courtroom,” Genet’s alternate public sphere is the artist’s world and takes the reader/spectator directly to the middle of the circus, the center of a cruel festival—whether it takes places in the real circus, in prison, or on the streets. The great criminal is therefore an actor, and the center of a spectacle of death. “Il ne restait plus à l’acteur qu’à mourir” (Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs 169), writes Genet. One can examine a parallel between the description of the acrobat in Le Funambule and a description of Harcamone in Miracle de la rose. The funambulist dances on the wire, blindfolded, taking small careful steps, erect and majestic, while the fearful public looks away or covers their eyes. Similarly, Genet writes about Harcamone: 133 Il était debout dans toute la beauté de son corps . . . il portait son béret posé sur les yeux . . . . [Ce prodige] est la preuve de sa puissance, de sa grâce, car la chair est encore le moyen le plus évident de certitude. Harcamone “m’apparaissait” . . . . Comme les tournesols vers le soleil, nos visages se tournèrent et pivotèrent nos corps sans même que nous nous en rendissions compte . . . et quand il s’avança vers nous à petits pas . . . comme lui-même dansait la Java, nous eûmes la tentation de nous agenouiller ou . . . de poser la main sur nos yeux, par pudeur. (24-5, my emphasis) A figure of the dancer, Harcamone, the man condemned to death who is the focus of the narrator’s fantasies at the beginning of the novel, becomes an actor at the center of a spectacle described in terms very similar to Genet’s circus of death in Le Funambule. Conversely, the virtualization of the great criminal reconfigured as the acrobat is also apparent in Le Funambule: S’il rêve, lorsqu’il est seul, et s’il rêve à lui-même, probablement se voit-il dans sa gloire. . . Donc il s’efforce à se représenter tel qu’il se voudrait. Et c’est à devenir tel qu’il se voudrait, tel qu’il se rêve, qu’il s’emploie. Certes de cette image rêvée à ce qu’il sera sur le fil réel, il y aura loin. C’est pourtant cela qu’il cherche : ressembler plus tard à cette image de lui qu’il s’invente aujourd’hui. Et cela pour, qu’étant apparu sur le fil d’acier ne demeure dans le souvenir du public qu’une image identique à 134 celle qu’il s’invente aujourd’hui. Curieux projet : se rêver, rendre, sensible ce rêve qui redeviendra rêve, dans d’autres têtes ! (115) In this excerpt, Genet highlights the image as imago (from the Latin etymology of the word “to imitate”), and thereby outlines the virtualization of the great criminal who becomes an object of fascination and spectacle. 73 In the perspective of literature as a counterpoint to law’s power over life and death, one can advance that literature is a medium that can make the death penalty and the violence of the law visible—the aesthetic lens opening up to an ethical questioning of the law. Coming from a different direction, Hamon reaches a similar conclusion when she states, En renversant l’ordre du visible et de l’invisible, le condamné devient l’équivalent du Dieu caché, terrifiant et majestueux. Rendue visible aux yeux de tous, sa mise à mort signifie tout à la fois sa puissance et la force destructrice et fascinante qui émane de lui et la présence d’un pouvoir supérieur qui le broie. Le condamné joue un rôle, tragique, devant la société puisque son châtiment tout en consacrant ses crimes, fait également apparaître sa destiné immuable. Victime et bourreau, le criminel ne peut se déprendre ni de l’une ni de l’autre facette. Cette double dimension accentue encore la dimension polémique de la représentation du criminel puisque la référence à la tragédie et au destin place l’individu 73 “Spectacle” is derived from the Latin “spectare,” which means “to look” 135 hors du système social et d’une possible correction de l’individu par la prison. Celle-ci devient dès lors le symbole de la toute-puissance du pouvoir face aux individus et constitue le point de rencontre de deux ordres supérieurs qui déchirent tragiquement l’individu criminel : la destinée et le pouvoir qui punit. . . . La question esthétique du visible conduit ainsi à une représentation éthique des criminels magnifiés et sublimés. (32) Her argument hinges upon the criminal as a figure of the hidden god who is endowed with a paradoxical dimension: both a victim and an executioner, he becomes highly visible. Genet also asks: “Ce n’est pas toi qui danseras, c’est le fil. Mais si c’est lui qui danse immobile, et si c’est ton image qu’il fait bondir, toi, où donc seras-tu?” (Le Funambule, 110). This rhetoric of absence calls attention to the ubiquity of the image that overshadows the being. This profound duality, and the theatricality and fascination that stem from it, are embodied by Genet’s works. The ethico-aesthetic argument can be used to expand the reflection on the relationship between law and literature. Following Foucault, who, like Derrida, acknowledges the special importance of the great criminal in the spectacle of death, it can be advanced that, Murder is connected to spectacle—whether it is legal murder (capital punishment) or the crime that leads to the guillotine. Murder it is that makes for the warrior’s immortality . . . murder it is that ensures criminals 136 their dark renown. . . . Murder establishes the uncertainty of the lawful and the unlawful (I, Pierre Rivière 206) What Foucault does not recognize here is the fact that this uncertainty stems from the narration of murder, not murder itself. Murder, whether legal (by the guillotine) or illegal, is endowed, through narrative, with a literary quality—the possibility of a narrative that the law does not allow. There can be no narrative in the law, and that the law of the law lies in this impossibility to tell. Presenting the great criminal as a figure of spectacle in the shadow of the revolution, Genet puts forward his image, a fiction within the law, desired by the law to justify its own violence. Hence he suggests: “tu danses pour ton image . . . . Mais c’est d’autre chose que de coquetterie, d’égoïsme et d’amour de soi qu’il s’agit. Si c’était de la Mort elle-même?” (Le Funambule 110). It can be advanced that the crux of Genet’s enterprise lies in the literary gesture that establishes literature as a counterpoint to law’s power. Literature, through Genet’s texts, brings the law to the bar and reveals the fictions that underlie and preserve it. Derrida, in his seminars on the death penalty, reflects upon the theatricality surrounding the man condemned to death, as he remembers Eugene Weidmann, “a real- life character” (59, my emphasis) and highlights “the theatricality and the fascination with the spectacle, with the immediate or deferred spectacle” of the guillotine (59). As I previously emphasized, the noticeable resemblance between the description of Weidmann and the acrobat points to an analogy between them. In his analysis of the opening of Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, Derrida recalls the tremendous theatricality of Weidmann’s apparition both in Genet’s novel and in the newspapers of 1939 (The Death Penalty 31). 137 The problematic of the image is central in Derrida’s description as he defines Genet’s incipit as a vision and also emphasized the photograph he remembers seeing in the newspapers. Weidmann, who occupied the front page of the newspapers in 1939 before his execution, also captures Genet’s interest. The murderer was indeed the last person to be publicly executed in France and Genet’s works, as the author himself admits, are haunted by his image. It is important to recall the reason why Weidmann was the last man to be executed publicly in France: the French government decreed the end of public executions in 1939, shortly after the execution of Weidmann had taken place in front of a very raucous crowd. But what truly triggered the passing of this new law was the fact that, for the first time, a public execution had been captured on tape and circulated (now this video is actually available on Youtube). It could therefore be argued that this mediated death—a mediatised event—triggered a reaction from the law that sensed its potential for subversion. The great criminal’s dance on the guillotine could reveal the fictions of the law and establish the law itself as a fiction. * Conceptualizing the funambulist, the ultimate risk-taker, as a figure of the great criminal and analyzing Genet’s descriptions of other criminal characters through the image of the dancer, the poet, and the actor, reveal Genet’s kaleidoscopic aestheticization of the great criminal. An object of fascination and fantasy, the great criminal also becomes the center of a spectacle of death, a dead man watching his image dance. The analysis prompts a larger reflection on art, for a work of art entails the artist’s production 138 of an artifact, and, as Black underlines, “if murder can be experienced aesthetically, the murderer can in turn be regarded as a kind of artist—a performance artist or anti-artist whose specialty is not creation but destruction” (12). It can indeed be argued that Genet, reflecting on murder and creation, endows crime with an artistic, creative dimension. In Miracle de la rose he writes, about Harcamone’s last murder, “il eût la chance de pouvoir accomplir son dernier meurtre avec d’autres gestes que ceux qu’il fit lors de son premier . . . Il est douloureux d’inventer un nouveau geste difficile” (74). The repeated emphasis on the “gesture” brings to mind the acrobat and the dancer, and underlines the creative power of the great criminal as an artist. More important, the great criminal as an artist is also a figure of the writer/poet. This association, in Genet’s works, is twofold. On the one hand, his writings, notorious for their apology of crime, have a clear autobiographical resonance with the author’s own criminal experience. Celebrating thieves, prostitutes, and murderers through literature, Genet, himself a criminal, declares “mon talent sera l’amour que je porte à ce qui compose le monde des prisons et des bagnes” (Journal du Voleur 124). On the other hand, Genet himself reiterates the equation between the poet and the criminal as he presents the criminal as a writer. Hence Divine’s crime is compared to a book—“il relisait son crime comme une chronique” (Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs 335)—and Harcamone is compared to a writer telling his own story: Il fallut qu’il élevât son destin comme on élève une tour, qu’il donnât à ce destin une importance énorme, une importance détour, unique, solitaire, et que de toutes ces minutes il le construisit. Construire sa vie minute par 139 minute en assistant à sa construction, qui est aussi destruction. (Miracle de la rose 73). A figure of the writer, Harcamone is endowed with the power to write his life and turn himself into a tragic hero. His ink is blood. Several words bring the literary to mind in the way Genet describes Harcamone’s murder of the prison guard—the murder that will take him to the guillotine. For instance, Genet the guard’s murder is also called “un de ces poèmes brefs” (73). “Le bandit est un mâle qui bande” (Miracle de la rose 112) writes Genet with the same authority he admonishes the funambulist to “bande, et fais bander.” A direct echo of his discourse on the criminals in his major novels, “bander” defines the locus of his thinking. Yet, his funambulist is not only a figure of the great criminal but also of the poet—another connection between the writer and the criminal (“comme au poète, je parlais à l’artiste seul,” 113). Tracing Genet’s association makes it possible to argue that there is an aesthetic equation between the poet and the great criminal—a critical point within this reflection on literature’s role against law’s power over life and death. Reflecting on the main title of this section “the power of poetry, the power of crime,” one can advance that the great criminal, in Genet’s writings, is a figure of creative performance and literary creativity who decomposes the world to reorganize it through a different economy (crime as art). Remembering Stokes’s excellent analysis of the acrobat, one can say that the great criminals, like the funambulists, “show themselves to be exceptional, borderline between action and imitation, so they define, yet disturb, many of our ideas about creative performance” and “offer lessons applicable to other 140 kinds of performance”(277-8). It can be argued that the “lesson” offered by Genet’s great criminal is a literary narrative that comes as a forceful counterpoint to law’s power over life and death. His novels, as well as Le Funambule, his poetically concentrated vision of the great criminal, allow Genet to develop a complex reflection on the relationship between law and literature. His grand gesture, through the power of creation and aestheticization, provides moments of fictional visibility, moments when the writer and the criminal are united, and when law and literature actually come together, in front of each other, and “comparaissent ensemble” (La Faculté de juger 132). 141 Chapter IV: Jacques Mesrine: Public Enemy, National Hero 142 1. Mesrine: The Man of a Thousand Faces Jacques Mesrine (1936-1979) remains to this day the most famous criminal of the twentieth century in France. A contemporary of the political and social upheavals of 1968, he was notoriously nicknamed “public enemy number one” by the police in Europe and Canada. Yet Mesrine was a “great criminal” who, following Benjamin’s definition, “aroused the secret admiration of the public . . . and, even in defeat, arouse[d] the sympathy of the masses against the law” (“The Critique of Violence” 239). Glorified by the people as a national hero, he rapidly turned into a myth and became an unprecedented object of discourse as his photo and story were circulated in the newspapers and on television. Mesrine’s life was first marked by the war of Algeria in which he distinguished himself for his courage and fearlessness. Back in Paris after his demobilization, he received the Cross for Military Valor from General De Gaulle in 1959. The war is an event that Mesrine discusses at great length in his memoirs in which he remembers the German occupation during WWII and the summary executions he had to conduct in Algeria. He makes this accusation: “les guerres vécues, les guerres racontées, les guerres ressenties ne m’ont pas donné l’exemple du respect de la vie. . . . On m’a appris la violence et j’ai pris goût à la violence” (L’Instinct de mort 367). The year 1961 marked the beginning of Mesrine’s criminal career. The list of his crimes is extensive for he participated in multiple burglaries and over forty bank robberies. He was also responsible for several kidnappings including those of: Guérin, the 143 president of the tribunal in Compiègne where Mesrine was tried in 1973; Henri Lelièvre, a billionaire whom Mesrine ransomed for six million francs in 1979; and Jacques Tillier, in 1979, an ex-inspector of the French intelligence agency (Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire) who had become a journalist for the far-right weekly magazine Minute. Mesrine’s criminal activities extended across France, but also Italy, Spain, Quebec, Texas, Venezuela, and the Canary Islands. A robber and a killer, Mesrine was also famous for his art of disguise, in the tradition of Fantômas, the criminal hero of the collection of detective stories created by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre in 1911. Figure 5 Photo from the famous film Fantômas, dir. André Hunebelle (P.A.C., 1964) The Fantômas series established one of the most notorious arch-villains in French literary history, later revived in the 1960s in an equally famous series of films staging French actor Louis de Funès as Chief Inspector Juve chasing the constantly-escaping Fantômas, a faceless man with multiple masks. Known as “the man of a thousand faces,” Mesrine 144 showed a particular talent for changing his face in order to make it more difficult for the police to identify and track him. Figure 6 Photos from http://www.europe1.fr/fait-divers/mesrine-l-homme-aux-mille-visages Moreover, if his crimes earned him a solid notoriety, his multiple escapes from prison crowned his criminal career. “On ne s’évade pas de la prison de la Santé,” claimed the Chief of Police who arrested him in 1978. “Vous voulez parier?” was Mesrine’s answer (L’Instinct de mort 370). Mesrine notoriously escaped several times: in 1972 from the high-security prison of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul in Laval (Canada); in 1973, from the 145 tribunal of Compiègne; and in 1978, from the high-security quarters of the Prison de la Santé (Lormier 228). By the end of 1978, an anti-Mesrine police unit was created in France, and Mesrine was stamped “public enemy number one” by the press—a title both his enemies and his supporters used equally. Pierre Loutrel (1916-1946), the leader of the “Gang des tractions” that killed many policemen, also known as “Pierrot le fou,” was the first criminal to be called “public enemy number one” in France (Bauer 361). This phrase became more popular when the government formed an anti-Mesrine police unit and the press stamped him “ennemi public numéro un.” Figure 7 Photo from http://www.ebay.fr/itm/francesoirhorsserie-mesrine 146 In the French context, the expression “ennemi public” recalls the phrase “ennemi du peuple” that was used during the Terror in France, a fluid designation, previously used by several other groups to refer to their political opponents. The phrase hostis publicus (public enemy) was for instance used during the Roman empire, when the Senate declared that Nero was the empire’s public enemy. The phrase became widely used under the French Revolution when the Convention called “ennemi du peuple” anyone opposing the revolutionary movement and were threatening the newborn Republic—among which, of course, the monarchists. 74 Louis XVI himself was declared “ennemi du peuple” after fleeing to Varennes and was tried before this special tribunal (La Roche-Tilhac 164). Tracing the guillotine as a topos in Lacenaire and Genet’s writings has revealed a fascination for the machine, but also an intricate network of images with the executed man being represented as a martyr, a figure of the King or of Christ. Similarly, the shadow of the guillotine is cast upon Mesrine’s writings and the narratives that surround his persona in the media. While the guillotine is not as prominent a topic in Mesrine’s texts as it is in Lacenaire’s or Genet’s writings, the death penalty is still the backdrop of Mesrine’s stories. The famous series of photographs taken by Alain Bizos and published in Libération in 1979 evoke the possibility of decapitation for this great criminal, displaying his laughing head in a box: 74 http://www.antiqvitas.it/storia/r.nerone.htm 147 Figure 8 Photos from http://www.agencevu.com If the guillotine does not haunt Mesrine’s texts as much as it does Lacenaire’s or Genet’s, the presence of death is a recurrent theme in Mesrine’s autobiographical works 148 and in the images that surround his persona in the media. His constant challenge to death can be read as an ultimate rebellion against the violence of the law. He often claims: “Je n’avais ni peur de la prison, ni peur d’une condamnation à mort” (L’Instinct de mort 103). Also called “l’homme à abattre,” Mesrine was ultimately killed—some say executed—in an ambush on November 2 nd , 1979. Figure 9 Photo from http://pourquoipaspoitiers.over-blog.fr/article-mesrine.html His death, which occurred just two years before the death penalty was abolished, was a major coup médiatique as he was shot on the streets by the police, and the press 149 dramatically spoke of “public execution” and “assassination” (Bertherat 119). He was shot more than ten times and photos of the body were circulated in the newspapers, leading some to compare the spectacle of his death to the exhibition of Che Guevara’s body (Denis 143). The police finally got their man but Mesrine, as usual, stole the headlines (Odell 311). Despite his theatrical crimes and momentous escapes, Mesrine was not the only great criminal in France in the 1970s, but he certainly possessed an exceptional aura. Most critics have identified the press and television as the main reason for his prestige (Denis 143, Odell 312, Walker 36). Not only did the media take a deep interest in Mesrine’s criminal career, but Mesrine himself established a significant relationship with the press and television by giving interviews and publishing articles. It is in Canada that his fame started to take shape when he made a famous comment on television in 1972: held in chains and surrounded by police officers who were taking him back to Quebec, Mesrine shouted “vive le Québec libre,” echoing General de Gaulle’s memorable remark of 1967. 75 In 1977, he gave an interview to Libération, which selected him as the most sensational figure of the year. 76 In this interview he discussed his escape from Compiègne and the inhuman living conditions in the high-security quarters: “dans les centres de sécurité renforcée, on fabrique les ‘fauves’ de demain.” 77 Later, in 1978, Mesrine gave a long interview to Paris-Match in which he described his escape from La Santé and threatened to murder or kidnap the Minister of the Interior, Alain Peyrefitte, in order to force him to abolish the high-security quarters in prison which he denounced as 75 http://www.lactualite.com/culture/jacques-mesrine-revient-au-quebec/ 76 http://www.leparisien.fr/espace-premium/hauts-de-seine-92/mesrine-toujours- populaire-meme-six-pieds-sous-terre-20-10-2014-4226701.php 77 http://www.liberation.fr/societe/2008/10/22/un-bandit-tres-mediatique_154781 150 inhuman. 78 Another famous interview was published in Libération in 1979 with a series of photos by Alain Bizos that are now exhibited in the gallery Vu in Paris, staging Mesrine in a James Bond-like movie poster. Figure 10 Photos from gallerievu.com A legend has developed around Mesrine since the late 1970s, through films, music, and blogs that present him sometimes as a modern Robin Hood, sometimes as a self- proclaimed revolutionary anarchist (Odell 310). A great criminal par excellence, he scoffed at the authorities and manipulated the media. Extolling crime as a political gesture, he rapidly became a heroic figure in the eyes of the public. His mediatised fame did not stop with his death for numerous narratives have revisited his life (and death) since 1979. For instance, he left his mark in music: famous French singer Renaud dedicated his album Marche à l’ombre to Mesrine in 1980; a Québécois music group 78 Ibid. 151 called themselves Mesrine (1997-present); and Mesrine’s name can be found in different famous songs such as “Je descends le bar” by another famous singer, French Pierpoljack (2001). Moreover, the Mesrine saga has been the locus of a large textual production in the press (Libération, Paris-Match, L’Express, France-Soir) and in books, with the testimonies of his mistresses Jocelyne Deraiche, Sylvia Jeanjacquot, and Jeanne Schneider, the memoirs of his attorney Martine Malimbaum, and the famous memoirs of Chief of Police Broussard. 79 Numerous movies also evoke Mesrine such as the diptych made in 2008 by Jean-François Richet, which emphasizes Mesrine as a man who turned his life into a permanent biopic with the enthusiastic support of the French popular press. 80 As Benois Denis accurately remarks in his study of Mesrine, “Faire de sa vie une oeuvre para-littéraire,” these multiple narratives in the press and in the arts constitute a Mesrine-literature that is striking by its coherence and unity (143). Denis declares: “la littérature-Mesrine fonctionne en effet comme un vaste dispositif textuel proliférant, qui s’engendre à partir d’une matrice unique: l’autobiographie du ‘grand Jacques’” (144). Mesrine augmented this vast biographical chronicle by writing two books himself: L’Instinct de mort (1977) and Coupable d’être innocent (1979). These two different narratives reveal a man with dreams and ambitions who proudly acknowledges his crimes and makes numerous accusations against the law and society. Participating in the long literary tradition of criminals writing their memoirs in prison, Mesrine first wrote his most autobiographical narrative, L’Instinct de mort, while 79 See cited works. 80 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/jacques-mesrine-le-grand-gangster- 1766392.html. Another movie called “Mesrine” was made in 1984 by André Génovès, and the famous “Inspecteur Labavure” with Depardieu was also inspired by Mesrine. 152 a prisoner in La Santé (from which he escaped in 1978). Published in 1977, L’Instinct de mort opens with a scene in the high-security quarters (QHS). Mesrine is lying on his bed at night and is recalling his life: “il a trente-neuf ans et attend la prison à vie sinon la mort . . . . Sa liberté, il s’en foutait, il l’a jouée, perdue, rejouée, reperdue . . . . Il ne regrette rien” (17). Narrated in the third person, this opening sets the tone of the memoirs, which, like a movie, replay his life and examine his trajectory. This text makes numerous accusations against the prison system, society, and the law, but also contains intimate memories and depicts a man with a strong sense of honor and justice. “J’allais faire du crime une profession,” claims Mesrine (73), who describes himself as a cold-blooded killer who never attacked women or children and always followed a code of honor. Mesrine wrote his second volume, Coupable d’être innocent, while on the run after escaping from La Santé. Written like a case file, this book, published after his death in 1979, reexamines a case in which Mesrine and his partner were accused of murdering a hotel-keeper in Quebec. Although their innocence was proven and they were eventually acquitted, Mesrine wrote this book as a denunciation of the corruption and injustice of the legal system. Its tone is even more accusatory than L’Instinct de mort and recalls Lacenaire’s shadow courtroom in that it uses the legal discourse and structures to provide counter-evidence, make accusations, and eventually acquit the accused. Coupable d’être innocent also has a strong political vein, and develops Mesrine’s exhortation for a complete reform of the prison system. A criminal career in two volumes, L’Instinct de mort and Coupable d’être innocent often delineate the portrait of a revolutionary anarchist and a Robin Hood figure that has also been extolled by the leftist newspapers and has captured the public’s 153 imagination. Mesrine, through his writings and the wealth of reactions and opinions he triggered, therefore comes to embody the heroic criminal figure that has been part of the literary tradition in France since the early nineteenth-century—a phenomenon Foucault points out in his critique of Mesrine’s works: “on croirait du rewriting pour supermarché . . . Tout cela lui est venu des romans, des journaux, des illustrés, puis des films qui, depuis cent cinquante ans, nous racontent à la petite semaine la saga monotone des grands criminels” (Dits et écrits 253). In light of Mesrine’s writings, the reader might at first, like Foucault, think that L’Instinct de mort and Coupable d’être innocent are nothing more than second-rate literature. Arguably, Mesrine borrows a lot from popular literature and culture—from the American western or gangster movies to the romance novels—and even compares himself to James Bond (L’Instinct de mort 83). His prose is somewhat repetitive, and his images are unoriginal. Yet the minimal amount of scholarly research on his two books reveals a surprising lack of interest in the political and philosophical dimension of his writings. If his texts, like Lacenaire’s, lack the poetic quality of Genet’s style, his arguments, within the context of a reflection on law and literature and the representation of the great criminal, should be given more attention. 154 2. A Man in Revolt With a long criminal career marked by murders, kidnappings, robberies, and theatrical escapes, Mesrine, “public enemy number one,” earned his “title,” a title that both his admirers and his detractors used. Denis, in his study of Mesrine, remarks: L’ennemi public est celui qui refuse le pacte ou le contrat social instauré par la communauté. Plus qu’une sortie irréversible hors du cadre de la loi, l’ennemi public opère une contestation éminemment subversive de l’ordre social, qu’il met en péril par son action ou son refus. En somme, et à la différence du hors-la-loi, l’ennemi public est une figure politique de la contestation et de la révolte. (152) While the law calls Mesrine “public enemy number one” for the multiple crimes he committed, he claims his title as a figure of the rebel and states repeatedly: “j’ai choisi la révolte” (L’Instinct de mort 469). The revolt that animates him is exemplified by this famous photograph taken by Bizos as part of the 1979 series published in Libération and currently exhibited in the art gallery Vu in Paris : 155 Figure 11 Photo from http://www.agencevu.com This famous picture, which is on the cover of Mesrine’s Coupable d’être innocent, illustrates his defiance of the law and his insurrection against the injustice of the legal system that he describes in his texts. This vision of Mesrine as a man in revolt seeking justice against the law is also shared by some of the leftist newspapers in France and a substantial part of the population that admires him and associates him with a larger-than- life Robin Hood figure fighting oppression (Denis 143, Bowers 327). Bowers accurately points out: “Jacques Mesrine, France’s recent ‘Robin Hood,’ gained his reputation by acting out some of the classics from the myth: prison break, successful kidnapping of an 156 industrialist and a chief judge of a Paris appeal court, disguises, and finally the betrayal of his hide-out” (327). The portrait of the heroic outlaw stealing from the rich is also evoked in Mesrine’s self-description: Si j'ai volé, je n'ai jamais dépouillé des pauvres. Je me suis attaqué aux banques ou à des entreprises pour la plupart de mes agressions. Je n'ai jamais usé de violence sur un caissier ou un transporteur de fonds et je crois avoir toujours travaillé proprement. Je n'ai ni violé, ni agressé des vieillards, ni exploité la femme. Si j'ai épousé l'aventure, c'est que j'aimais le danger. (L’Instinct de mort 468) His association with Robin Hood in the public’s mind establishes him as the antagonist of an unjust system of power and a rebellious figure, constantly fighting corrupt judges and brutal law enforcements. * “Qu'est-ce qu'un homme révolté?” asks Camus, “un homme qui dit non. Mais s'il refuse, il ne renonce pas : c'est aussi un homme qui dit oui, dès son premier mouvement. Un esclave, qui a reçu des ordres toute sa vie, juge soudain inacceptable un nouveau commandement” (27). Accordingly, Mesrine writes: “L'homme à qui on refuse le droit de décision n'est qu'une moitié d'homme. Il se soumettra ou se révoltera” (L’Instinct de mort 157 466). The question of “being right” or “having the right to” is at the center of Mesrine’s revolt, as it is in the Camusian definition of the rebel. 81 Camus writes: [Le non] signifie, par exemple, « les choses ont trop duré », « jusque-là oui, au-delà non », « vous allez trop loin », et encore, « il y a une limite que vous ne dépasserez pas ». En somme, ce non affirme l'existence d'une frontière. On retrouve la même idée de limite dans ce sentiment du révolté que l'autre « exagère », qu'il étend son droit au-delà d'une frontière à partir de laquelle un autre droit lui fait face et le limite. Ainsi, le mouvement de révolte s'appuie, en même temps, sur le refus catégorique d'une intrusion jugée intolérable et sur la certitude confuse d'un bon droit, plus exactement l'impression, chez le révolté, qu'il est « en droit de... ». La révolte ne va pas sans le sentiment d'avoir soi-même, en quelque façon, et quelque part, raison. (27-8) By analyzing the arguments behind Mesrine’s bold claim “j’ai choisi la révolte” (L’Instinct de mort 469), one can delineate the portrait of a man in revolt, a rebel in the Camusian sense. Mesrine, as a man in revolt, expresses his rejection of a situation he deems unjust and unbearable and, through his writings, reclaims his right, “comme ayant un droit au 81 L’Homme révolté, known in English as The Rebel, is an essay published in 1951, in which Camus examines the metaphysical and the historical development of rebellion and revolution in Western society, through an analysis of different writers such as Lucretius, Sade, Hegel, Dostoyevsky or Nietzsche. In this essay, one of Camus’s main claims is that “l’histoire d'aujourd'hui, par ses contestations, nous force à dire que la révolte est l'une des dimensions essentielles de l'homme. Elle est notre réalité historique” (36). 158 droit” (Force de loi 87). He proceeds to make numerous accusations against the violence of the law and its injustice. Mesrine often uses the first person plural, “nous,” thereby including his readership in his fight and posing his battle as their common opposition to the law—a gesture that is also visible in the opening of his first book, with an epigraph dedicated to his supporters: “à toi, l’Ami qui te reconnaitra.” His first accusation concerns the war. He denounces its violence and blames society for legitimizing violence in the name of the state: “Le meurtre collectif est glorifié s'il se commet au son de l'hymne national. Les guerres vécues, les guerres racontées, les guerres ressenties ne m'ont pas donné l'exemple du respect de la vie. Elles n’ont fait que légaliser l'assassinat à mes yeux” (L’Instinct de mort 467). Then Mesrine proceeds to accuse the law itself, questioning not only its applications but also its premises. The law, in Mesrine’s texts, is not the instrument of justice. He recalls, for instance, his arrival in Canada where he was hoping to make a fresh start and find a decent job but was denied the right to work legally. He points out the many incoherences of the law: “j’avais trouvé un poste de contrôle dans la construction et obtenu mes papiers sociaux de façon frauduleuse. Même pour être honnête, il me fallait employer l’illégalité” (L’Instinct de mort 258). Like Camus’s man in revolt, Mesrine feels the discrepancy between his sense of justice and the apparent incoherence of the world, and castigates the law by highlighting the lack justice in its applications—a point deconstruction has largely discussed. 82 Moreover, Mesrine accuses the society that condemns people based on erroneous testimonies and unfair trials. His texts are defined by the extensive use of legal discourse 82 See for instance Derrida, Force de loi 144, or Kellogg, Law’s Trace 113. 159 and procedures. In L’Instinct de mort, he focuses his accusations on society and criticizes the corruption of the law: les lois n’existent que sur le code. A la vérité, elles sont régulièrement bafouées par ceux qui sont chargés de les faire appliquer . . . le simple geste qui condamne un homme à passer des années de sa vie en prison, l’erreur dans le témoignage, devraient envoyer ceux qui se trompent à l’ombre. Mais la société peut accuser en toute quiétude, tout comme le flic se donne le droit à la bavure. (L’Instinct de mort 421) This accusation is even more salient in Coupable d’être innocent. Written like a case file, Coupable d’être innocent makes abundant use of the legal discourse and methods of inquiry to reveal the corruption of the legal system. Like a judge, Mesrine reopens the case and reexamines the facts behind the false accusation of murder: “c'est que ceux qui sont chargés de rendre la Justice ont quelque chose à cacher” (10). Mesrine knows the law—as emphasized by a comment made by the Chief of Police who interrogates him in Canada: “vous avez l’air de bien connaitre nos lois pour quelqu’un qui ne fait que du tourisme” (L’Instinct de mort 233). Mesrine employs the language and strategies of an attorney, calling himself to the bar as a witness and making a strong defense speech. Then he proceeds with the accusation, denouncing the corruption of the police and the lies of the witnesses: “C’est là toute la gravité de cette affaire criminelle: on avait fabriqué deux coupables. On avait laissé des fausses preuves prendre forme d'accusation, 160 on avait préparé le spectacle” (Coupable d’être innocent 11). It criminalizes the state that sustains and is sustained by such a legal system and accuses the entire society: certains témoins de l'accusation mentent pour protéger le ou les coupables . . . le complice direct ou indirect de l'assassin devient témoin à charge . . . les policiers cachent délibérément des preuves prouvant votre innocence . . . deux procureurs du ministère public font de votre procès une affaire personnelle et ne cherchent que votre condamnation. (2) Like Lacenaire’s memoirs, Mesrine’s L’Instinct de mort and Coupable d’être innocent are a shadow courtroom, an alternative public sphere in which literature is empowered to challenge the law. Hence Mesrine becomes a witness for his owned fense and writes: “Pourquoi avoir écrit ce récit?. . . Il le fallait. Car cette société des bonnes consciences . . . cette société nous juge et nous condamne très souvent ‘sur le témoignage d'un de ses semblables’” (Coupable d’être innocent 289). Mesrine’s most important gesture lies in his fight for a transformation of the prison system—a political and social gesture that animates his “career” throughout the 1970s, as Denis underlines: ce statut d’ennemi public change la signification de la mort de Mesrine . . . elle devient un assassinat politique. Une telle lecture est permise par l’autobiographie de Mesrine. . . . La dimension politique émerge lorsqu’il est question de prison. Le basculement politique s’opère donc lorsque le 161 truand passe du récit de ses exploits criminels à celui de ses séjours en prison, lorsqu’il quitte le discours de la haine pour adopter celui de la révolte. (152) Indeed Mesrine’s numerous interviews in the press are all concerned with his denunciation of the QHS (“Quartiers de Haute Sécurité”), which he seeks to abolish, arguing that they constitute the ultimate degradation of the human being and only make criminals worse. After his very mediatised escape from the hardest and (supposedly) most secure prison in Canada (Saint-Vincent de Paul in Laval), he sent out a recording to the press describing in detail the degrading living conditions in this QHS, and the bestiality of the director and the prison guards. For instance, he describes: J’y ai vu des choses qui sont capables de révolter n’importe quelle personne qui a un minimum de respect pour les droits de l’homme . . . Pour commencer, je pense avoir une parole, une parole d’honneur, bien que je sois un voleur. Je peux vous affirmer une chose, la chambre à gaz de l’unité spéciale de correction elle existe, j’ai vu des gars en sortir et puis dans un drôle d’état. J’ai vu un p’tit gars qui était condamné à la prison à vie, je ne sais pas ce qu’il a fait et ce n’est même pas à moi à le juger, revenir le visage complètement brûlé, en plus il avait reçu des coups. On m’a dit qu’il avait reçu des coups, j’ai pas vu les coups qu’il avait reçus, mais j’ai vu les marques qu’il avait sur le visage et j’ai vu qu’il avait le visage complètement brûlé par les gaz . . . . Mais le problème à 162 l’unité spéciale, il reste, et si vous le laissez rester, vous en aurez d’autres des évasions, vous en aurez d’autres des “extrêmement dangereux.” Parce que vous qui prétendez justement être pour le bien du public, le bien du public ce n’est pas de créer des monstres. Parce qu’actuellement à l’USC, vous créez des monstres criminels et méfiez-vous des monstres criminels car quand ils sont intelligents c’est grave. C’est grave pour la société. (http://rebellyon.info/Le-2-novembre-1979-Mesrine-est.html) This description highlights the cruelty of the punishment system, the inhuman living conditions of the prisoners, and the violence of the law. His accusations try to situate the law between the realities of violence and the claims of justice—a concept Austin Sarat develops in Law, Violence, and the Possibility of Justice (2001) in which he reflects upon the fact that the violence of the law threatens the values on which the law stands (5-6). Following Mesrine’s accusations, Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, which had served as the country’s sole francophone correctional facility since 1873, was placed under examination, its director fired, and the punitive gas chamber closed. The prison itself was shut down in 1989. Mesrine continued his fight against the QHS in France as well through interviews given to newspapers and his two books. Mesrine’s revolt and the question of “being right” or “having the right to” delineated by Camus in L’Homme révolté, are salient in this description of life in prison: Il y avait cinq autres hommes, pas rasés et répugnants, tous couchés par terre sur des matelas dégueulasses. Il régnait dans cette pièce une odeur 163 d’urine et de crasse à faire vomir . . . Même les chiens dans nos chenils étaient traités avec plus d’humanité. Je me mis à haïr cette société à qui je reconnaissais le droit de me punir, mais pas celui de m’abaisser dans ma dignité d’homme. (L’Instinct de mort 167) This description emphasizes the violence of the punishment system that reduces man to an animal—a point Mesrine makes even more strongly in his famous poem, “Le Mitard,” published at the end of L’Instinct de mort: Oui, madame! Il tourne, il tourne en des milliers de pas Qui ne mènent nulle part Dans un monde béton, aux arbres de barreaux Fleuris de désespoir Inhumain..., rétréci..., sans aucun lendemain. Sa pitance est glissée sous une grille à terre Et dans un bol l'eau... pour qu'il se désaltère. Il est seul..., sans soleil Et n'a même plus son ombre. Infidèle compagne, elle s'en est allée Refusant d'être esclave de ce vivant mort-né. Il tourne... il tourne et tournera toujours Jusqu'au jour où vaincu en animal blessé 164 Après avoir gémi en une unique plainte Il tombera à terre et se laissera crever Pour trouver dans la mort sa seule liberté Je vous vois une larme...! Pourquoi vous attrister ? --Pauvre chien, me dites-vous ! En voilà une erreur... C'est un homme, Madame, Il est emprisonné. C'est celui que vos pairs ont si bien condamné En rendant la justice au nom des libertés. (471-2) In this poem, Mesrine denounces the inhuman treatment endured by prisoners and castigates the law and the society in which such a system prevails. “Between the idea and reality of common meaning, falls the shadow of the violence of the law itself,” (6) writes Robert Cover in Narrative, Violence, and the Law—a statement that provides an excellent context for this poem in which the shadow of man has been replaced by that of the law and marks “the tragic character of law's violence and its world-altering reality” (Sarat 4). The world-altering reality of law’s violence identified by Cover and Sarat is visible in this poem when trees turn into prison bars, bodies are deserted by their shadows, the sun no longer exists, and man becomes an animal. Law’s violence has played little role and occupied little space in legal theory and jurisprudence” (Sarat 3), but it occupies the front stage in Mesrine’s writings, whether in his memoirs or in his interviews, and 165 especially in this poem that appeals to the reader’s heart, calling for pity for this “dog” that turns out to be a man. “Justice” is absent until the very last line of the poem and does not have any role. In this text, justice is passive: it has been dispensed, with the idiomatic verb “rendre” that, in French, also means to return, to give back, and thereby evokes a certain loss, the fatality of a man being subjected to an inhuman legal system in which the law does not always bring about justice. Interestingly, the prisoner’s imaginary visitor, whom he respectfully calls “Madame,” like the law (“la loi” in French), is a feminine figure. So are “la justice,” “la société,” and “l’erreur.” The gender of the different nouns in the poem creates a thematic opposition between “l’homme” (also called “le chien”) and these feminine elements. One can argue that the arbitrariness of this gender distinction points to another arbitrariness: there is no symmetry in the relations among law (embodied by “Madame”), violence and justice, but, as Sarat highlights, “law sits poised between the present reality of violence and the promises of a justice” (8). The analogy between the prisoner and the dog in this poem also needs to be examined. While the association of the prisoner with a dog undoubtedly triggers a certain pity and even guilt on the part of the reader who might, like “Madame,” feel like crying over this poor creature, it contains a significant reflection on law’s violence and the great criminal. Drawing on Schmitt’s statement that, “in the name of the human, of human rights and humanitarianism, other men are then treated like beasts, and consequently one becomes oneself inhuman, cruel, and bestial,” Derrida develops a reflection on the question of the sovereign and the beast, and argues that: 166 Il y a entre eux une ressemblance troublante, mais aussi un accouplement, une copulation “onto-zoo-anthropo-théologico-politique:” il y a la bête et le souverain (conjonction), mais aussi la bête est (e.s.t.) le souverain, le souverain <est> (e.s.t.) la bête. Analogie et/est. (La Bête et le souverain 39) One can suggest that this dual relationship between the sovereign and the beast is visible in Mesrine’s writings, in which the great criminal is sometimes the beast (in the poem for instance) and sometimes the sovereign (above the law). Equally important, the sovereign (the law) is also a figure of the beast, using violence and inhuman cruelty. An excerpt from an interview Mesrine gave to Libération in 1978 illustrates this relationship between the beast and the sovereign. Mesrine explains the reasons behind his attack on a French judge and justifies his bestiality as a reaction to law’s own violence : J’ai appris la haine en QHS. Exécuter Petit, ce n’était pas une simple vengeance ; c’était pour foutre un impact terrible. . . . Je ne suis pas un type qui a une éducation politique. J’ai une éducation de combattant . . . Il est beau de me parler de la vie humaine mais quand j’ai combattu en Algérie, la vie humaine n’avait pas la même importance . . . Pour moi, la vie d’un juge ne vaut pas plus que celle d’un détenu. 83 “Foutre un impact terrible” is indeed what Mesrine did according to this statement by 83 http://www.liberation.fr/societe/2008/10/22/c-est-ma-facon-de-dire-merde-c-est-ma- facon-de-dire-merde_154782 167 French humorist Dominique Zardi who had met Mesrine in person: C’est un géant en ce sens qu’il a pu obtenir ce que des ministres n’ont pas obtenu. La suppression des Q.H.S (Quartiers de Haute Sécurité) par exemple. Du reste il a été très jalousé par des gens plus importants que lui dans la hiérarchie, de ce pays (la France). Il a été jalousé par le commissaire Broussard, il a été jalousé aussi par Giscard d’Estaing, qui a beaucoup œuvré pour qu’on débarrasse ce personnage du panorama français. C’est ainsi que ce bonhomme a été férocement éliminé. (http://rebellyon.info/Le-2-novembre-1979-Mesrine-est.html) Zardi’s statement illustrates the revolutionary status and political importance that some people in France give to Mesrine. However, while it accurately reflects the importance given to Mesrine, it fails to acknowledge the participation of many other agents in the transformation of the QHS system. Indeed, the QHS were abolished in France in the early 1980s (to be replaced by QI, “quartiers d’isolement”), as a result of a long series of petitioning, so it would be inaccurate to state that this transformation was due only to Mesrine’s intervention. Another prisoner, Roger Knobelspiess, who published a book entitled QHS in 1980 as well as Robert Badinter, the eminent French criminal lawyer who is famous for his long-standing fight against the death penalty, have made significant contributions in the public’s opinion and in politics, in order to change the law regarding QHS. Badinter, who was Garde des Sceaux for five years (1981-1986), contributed 168 directly to the abolition of the QHS. In an interview given to Le Monde in 2011, he recalls his role and explains his motivations: Ce que je voulais c'était humaniser, transformer les conditions carcérales. C'était très difficile compte tenu de l'état déplorable des prisons, de la surpopulation pénale et de la faiblesse de nos moyens budgétaires. Nous n'en avons pas moins beaucoup fait : dès mon arrivée, j'ai supprimé les quartiers de haute sécurité (QHS), au régime inhumain. Malgré les protestations de certains syndicats pénitentiaires qui disaient que l'abolition de la peine de mort et la suppression des QHS les livraient sans défense aux détenus. 84 Another influence of Mesrine over the law can be seen in a law passed in France in 1977, following the publication of the autobiography he had smuggled out of the high-security wing of the prison. 85 Sometimes referred to as the “loi-Mesrine,” the new law made it impossible for a prisoner to make a profit from the publication of books about their crimes. Arguably Mesrine’s rebellion had a limited scope but he clearly sought to transform the law and establish more justice, and his impact on the law, while it should not be exaggerated, cannot be overlooked. * 84 http://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2011/03/18/robert-badinter-l-independance-de-la- justice-est-primordiale_1495215_3232.html 85 http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/verbrecher-jacques-mesrine-der-mann-mit-den- tausend-verkleidungen-fotostrecke-110317-12.html 169 If Mesrine is clearly a figure of the rebel in the Camusian sense, he can be also directly compared to Yanek Kaliayev, the terrorist and revolutionary in Camus’s play Les Justes, published in 1949, and known in English as The Just Assassins. This play, based on the true story of a group of Russian Socialist-Revolutionaries who assassinated the Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich in 1905, is a palimpsest of Camus’s philosophical essay, L’Homme révolté, published two years later. Both explore the moral issues associated with murder, revolution, and terrorism. Having read Mesrine through the lens of his portrait of the man in revolt, one should examine this great criminal in light of Camus’s portrait of the “just assassin.” Mesrine and Kaliayev—two “real” criminals—are very similar. A revolutionary and a terrorist, Kaliayev presents himself as a man seeking justice and fighting against the tyranny of the government and a corrupted society—“un despotisme qui fera de moi un assassin alors que j’essaie d’être un justicier” (63). He is ready to risk his own life in order to seek justice and claim: “j’ai choisi de mourir pour que le meurtre ne triomphe pas. J’ai choisi d’être innocent” (67). The reader finds a very similar discourse in L’Instinct de mort and Coupable d’être innocent, with Mesrine presenting himself as a just assassin: “J’allais donc m’attaquer à [la société] et lui faire payer le prix de ce qu’elle avait détruit” (L’Instinct de mort 72). The language Mesrine and Kaliayev use is judiciary and seeks to redefine the boundaries and applications of the law. “Vous pouvez me tuer, non me juger,” (110) declares Kaliayev, echoing Mesrine’s statement, “si je lui [la société] reconnais le droit de me condamner, je ne lui donne pas celui de me juger” (L’Instinct de mort 469). Both criminals repeatedly affirm their love for life while 170 risking theirs, and are ultimately killed. “J’ai compris qu’il ne suffisait pas de dénoncer l’injustice. Il fallait donner sa vie pour la combattre” (25), declares Kaliayev, the main protagonist of Camus’s play, echoing Mesrine’s claim: “je n’avais peur ni de la prison, ni d’une condamnation à mort” (L’Instinct de mort 103). Both also oppose and denounce the law through their discourse and actions and seek to transform a system they deemed unjust through crime and rebellion: Kaliayev kills the Grand Duke to put an end to an abusive political system and establish democracy, and Mesrine kidnaps and tortures Jacques Tillier, in 1979, an ex-inspector of the French intelligence agency who had become a journalist for the far-right weekly magazine Minute whose writings had been directed against an improvement of the prisoners’ living conditions in prison (Denis 144). Mesrine also justifies his attack on the French judge Petit in 1978 by presenting his crime as an act meant to punish another crime: “j’aurais répondu à l’assassinat moral de ces gens par un autre assassinat.” 86 Mesrine also threatened to kidnap the Minister of the Interior (Peyrefitte) to force him to abolish the QHS. 87 Therefore, one can argue that crime becomes a way of punishing a society for its sins, a way of redistributing justice: “nous sommes des justes,” claims Kaliayev (92). The retributive impulse is visible in Mesrine’s writings when he claims: “je me savais capable de faire payer mes souffrances” (Coupable d’être innocent 127). Within a reflection on the representations of the great criminal, the similarities between Kaliayev, the renowned Russian revolutionary staged in Camus’s play, and Mesrine, a famous French gangster who staged himself in his own writings, raise a 86 http://www.liberation.fr/societe/2008/10/22/c-est-ma-facon-de-dire-merde-c-est-ma- facon-de-dire-merde_154782 87 http://www.liberation.fr/societe/2008/10/22/un-bandit-tres-mediatique_154781 171 significant point: their common discourse of revolt casts a revolutionary shadow upon the figure of Mesrine. His status, like Kaliayev’s, is ambivalent: when these men cease to be perceived as criminals, they become endowed with a political dimension. In Les Justes, Kaliayev declares “je suis un prisonnier de guerre, non un accusé . . . J’ai exécuté un verdict” (109)—a statement that can be compared to Mesrine’s transformation into a public enemy. Interestingly, it is their deaths that magnify Kaliayev’s and Mesrine’s status as revolutionary figures, great criminal-heroes: “Yanek n’est plus un meurtrier,” conludes Dora after Kaliayev’s execution (148). Similarly, Mesrine’s death, often described as a political assassination, glorifies him as a hero in the public’s imagination (Denis 153). The revolution has a paradoxical status: it originates in crime by subverting the existing law and replacing it with a different law, a cyclical phenomenon that can be illustrated by the original meaning of the word “revolution” in astronomy—“le mot révolution garde le sens qu'il a en astronomie. C'est un mouvement qui boucle la boucle, qui passe d'un gouvernement à l'autre après une translation complète” (L’Homme révolté 139). This is what Derrida describes as “l’instant révolutionnaire,” the founding moment of law, when the law becomes law, and replaces the existing law: la violence n’est pas extérieure à l’ordre du droit. Elle menace le droit à l’intérieur du droit . . . ce que redoute l’Etat, . . . le droit dans sa plus grande force ce n’est pas le crime ou le brigandage, même à grande échelle . . . l’Etat a peur de la violence fondatrice, c’est-à-dire capable de 172 justifier, de légitimer . . . ou de transformer des relations de droit . . . et donc de se présenter comme ayant un droit au droit. (Force de loi 87) What is a revolution if not a crime in the first place? Kaliayev’s and Mesrine’s common denunciation of the law and the crimes that the law itself leads them to commit (terrorist attack, kidnapping and torture) evoke the fact that the law is founded in crime and the violence. Thinking of the revolution as a moment of criminality that subverts the existing law and replaces it with its own law, one can therefore advance that the great criminal is a figure of the revolutionary. This particular reading of Mesrine with Camus, and a detailed comparison of Mesrine with Kaliayev, can allow one to advance that Mesrine, as a great criminal, has a revolutionary dimension. Although Mesrine’s actions never had the scope of Kaliayev’s and did not have enough impact to change the government, they provided him with the aura of a revolutionary. Equally important, Mesrine, like Robin Hood “prince of thieves,” is endowed with the status and the aura of the sovereign, not only in the perspective of Derrida’s analogy between the beast and the sovereign, but also as someone who can elevate himself above the law. In Bataille’s terms: “la souveraineté est le pouvoir de s’élever, dans l’indifférence à la mort, au-dessus des lois qui assurent le maintien de la vie. Elle ne diffère de la sainteté qu’en apparence, le saint étant celui qu’attire la mort, tandis que le roi l’attire au-dessus de lui” (La Littérature et le mal 197). This elevation above the law is the crux of Mesrine’s life. For instance he declares: 173 je me savais capable de dépasser toutes les limites du possible . . . je me savais capable de faire payer mes souffrances . . . je n'étais pas de ceux qui mettent un genou à terre ou baissent la tête devant l'épreuve. J'étais de ceux qui prennent leurs responsabilités . . . et qui devant l'injustice, se battent, se révoltent, quitte à y perdre la raison ou la vie. (Coupable d’être innocent 127) This vehement expression of revolt delineates another dimension of the sovereign as the one who must govern by making and enforcing the law. 88 A king in the criminal world, Mesrine establishes crime as a counterweight to law’s violence and injustice, and declares: “j’avais exécuté des hommes au nom de ma loi” (L’Instinct de mort 401). This is exemplified by his 1978 attack on a French judge, Petit, which Mesrine justified as a fair retaliation: La société assassine les détenus, jour après jour, nuit après nuit. Les QHS, c’est un assassinat légalisé. Donc j’aurais répondu à l’assassinat moral de ces gens par un autre assassinat. Ne demandez pas à un homme d’être raisonnable quand, justement, la justice et le gouvernement ne le sont pas. 89 88 On the question of the sovereign, see Derrida’s reading of Schmitt: “the sovereign is the one who decides on the exception.” (The Death Penalty 83). 89 http://www.liberation.fr/societe/2008/10/22/c-est-ma-facon-de-dire-merde-c-est-ma- facon-de-dire-merde_154782 174 The great criminal therefore becomes what Derrida calls “the sovereign exception,” “l’exception souveraine de celui qui a su ou bien défier et contester la monopolisation de la violence par le droit . . . ou bien se réapproprier, comme individu, la violence que le droit a soustraite aux individus” (Force de loi 93-94). In this perspective, Mesrine is an individual who castigates the law’s violence and reclaims it to lead his own battles: Depuis que j'ai vu le jour, les hommes se massacrent de par le monde, s'assassinent, se trahissent, se parjurent au nom d'un idéal qu'ils se donnent pour justifier leurs actes... Alors, aujourd'hui, face à mes juges, face à mes accusateurs, je resterai froid s'ils me parlent du respect de la vie. Car l'homme est un loup pour l'homme, et si, parfois, il se met en meute pour rendre sa justice, il n'en reste pas moins un loup, comme celui qu'il s'est autorisé à juger. (L’Instinct de mort 468) His claim that he is prepared to sacrifice his life for something that is higher than himself (“J'étais de ceux qui prennent leurs responsabilités . . . et qui devant l'injustice, se battent, se révoltent, quitte à y perdre la raison ou la vie,” Coupable d’être innocent 127) is in line with Camus’s portrait of the revolutionary Yanek Kaliayev and his definition of the rebel: S'il préfère la chance de la mort à la négation de ce droit qu'il défend, c'est qu'il place ce dernier au-dessus de lui-même. Il agit donc au nom d'une valeur, encore confuse, mais dont il a le sentiment, au moins, qu'elle lui est commune avec tous les hommes. On voit que l'affirmation impliquée dans tout acte de révolte s'étend à quelque chose qui déborde l'individu dans la 175 mesure où elle le tire de sa solitude supposée et le fournit d'une raison d'agir. (L’Homme révolté 30) Replacing Mesrine in a larger literary and philosophical tradition that examines and questions the law, its premises, and its applications, one can see that Mesrine undermines the “legitimacy” that the law pretends to have, and actually embodies the disorder engendered by “the law’s own ordering efforts”—a disorder the law denies, like the violence of its origins (Sarat 2). By forcing the public to face law’s violence, Mesrine promotes righteous rebellion and crime. 176 3. A Criminal in Search of an Author Although certain areas of literary theory have dismissed the role of the author in textual analysis, authorship remains an important notion in literature, as it does in the law, when researching the source/the perpetrator of an act. “L’auteur du crime” is another name for the criminal in French, as is “l’acteur du drame”—two expressions that point to the intertwinement of law and literature (as theater). One may therefore consider, like Ian Ward, that “in law and literature scholarship there is perhaps a case for reintroducing the author” (Law and Literature: Possibilities and Perspectives 28). Yet, if Ward defines a critical perspective in the study of the interdisciplinary law and literature movement, he overlooks the autonomy of the text itself. Hence this last section will first analyze Mesrine’s texts as the literary enterprise of a criminal in search of an author in the tradition of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, highlighting Mesrine as a tragic character trapped in law’s script. Then the analysis will consider his texts as literature’s autonomous discourse on its own limits and fights. * Arguably, Mesrine’s writings reveal an aesthetic lapse of imagination, which places the author—as Foucault accurately points out—in the tradition of what the French call “paralittérature” (as opposed to “belles lettres”). Alain-Michel Boyer in Paralittératures proposes this definition: 177 l’ensemble des livres de fiction . . . que le discours critique . . . ne considère pas, ou pas encore, comme appartenant à la littérature; il englobe à la fois les romans sentimentaux ou roses; les romans d’épouvante ou d’horreur; les romans d’espionnage; les romans de science-fiction ou policiers de consommation dite “courante”. . . les westerns romanesques très populaires. (1) Mesrine’s narrative technique and style in Coupable d’être innocent and L’Instinct de mort ostensibly place him the tradition of paralittérature. Mesrine’s writings borrow from popular genres, including the detective novel and gangster movies, with stereotypical emphases on destiny and bestiality: Pour moi, le règlement de comptes n'était que la loi de la jungle qu'est le milieu. J'étais sans pitié, car je savais que si j'avais été à leur place ils auraient été sans pitié pour moi. Dans notre milieu, c'est le plus féroce, le plus rusé, le plus dur, qui a une chance de survivre. Si un jour, par pitié, il laisse la vie à un rival ou à un ennemi, il se condamne lui-même à mort..., une mort cruelle que lui aura coûtée son instant de pitié. J'étais un tigre, dans un milieu de tigres, de serpents, de loups, de scorpions et de hyènes. (L’Instinct de mort 93) 178 The romance novel also figures prominently in Mesrine’s writings with what Denis called “un sentimentalisme syrupeux” and numerous sex scenes in the style of Gérard de Villiers (147): “son corps brûlant m'entraîna dans une ronde amoureuse. Mes lèvres refirent connaissance avec sa peau. J'aimais son odeur de femme, qui ne ressemblait à aucune autre ; nous vivions l'amour de façon total. Elle se donnait avec fureur” (L’Instinct de mort 42). Gérard de Villiers (1929-2013), a French journalist and writer, published a series of spy novels called SAS that have become popular bestsellers and are sometimes compared to Ian Fleming’s James Bond series or Marcel Allain’s Fantômas collection. In his study of popular fiction, Boyer remarks that, if everyone knows these famous characters, few can name the authors who invented them: “les auteurs . . . s’effacent au profit des héros” (1). Foucault makes a similar observation about Mesrine: “il parait que Mesrine existe. Ce n’est pas L’Instinct de mort qui m’en convaincra. Ce texte risque de lui coûter la tête? On le dit, je ne le souhaite pas. En tout cas il a déjà effacé son visage” (Dits et écrits 253). If Mesrine fails to make a name for himself as an author, he successfully establishes himself as a character in his own texts. For instance, he often speaks of himself in the third person: “son dossier criminel est un roman noir où les scènes burlesques, le sang, la violence, les cavales et l'amitié font bon ménage” (L’Instinct de mort 16). Mesrine’s texts meld into popular literary genres when he presents himself through a series of stock characters—from the gentleman cambrioleur to the cowboy. 179 Figure 12 Photo from gallerievu.com A master of disguise, he emphasizes the different parts he has played. For example, in L’Instinct de mort, he recalls a scene when a policeman accidentally mistook him for a detective. Enjoying the burlesque of the situation, Mesrine kept playing the role he had been attributed and says: “Cette persistance dans l’erreur m’amusait, mais, loin de le contredire, je jouais le jeu” (211)—a game another photograph by Alain Bizos has made famous: 180 Figure 13 Photo from http://paris-luttes.info/le-2-novembre-1979-mesrine-est Mesrine also liked to depict himself as the hero of an American Western movie, as exemplified by this description of his encounter with Chief of Police Broussard as a stereotypical scene of duel: Face à face il n’y avait plus l’ennemi public face au patron des antigangs, mais deux hommes, deux durs, qui savent la valeur de la parole donnée. Broussard prenait un risque énorme, mais c’était un homme qui avait calculé l’importance que prendrait son geste à mes yeux. J’ai toujours respecté un adversaire loyal. (L’Instinct de mort 415-6) The great criminal explores different dramatic genres, from the comedy and the burlesque to the tragedy. Recalling the false testimony of a witness in court, he writes: 181 Elle affirma ne pas nous connaître . . . de ne nous avoir jamais vus. Et elle affirmait tout ceci . . . avec un calme incroyable. Le contre-interrogatoire de Maître Daoust ne la troublant en rien . . . on aurait pu croire qu'elle récitait une leçon bien apprise. Je compris que la farce devenait tragique. (Coupable d’être innocent 78) Mesrine exists as a character, not only in his books but also in the proliferation of narratives (literature, press, films) that surrounds his persona. As Denis underlines, Tous ces textes composent une vaste “littérature-Mesrine” qui frappe par sa cohérence et son unité. La raison n’en est pas que tous les auteurs s’accorderaient miraculeusement sur les événements et leur interprétration, mais qu’en fait chacun, à son insu, joue dans une pièce déjà écrite ou dans un roman déjà composé. La “littérature-Mesrine” fonctionne en effet comme un vaste dispositive textual proliférant, qui s’engendre à partir d’une matrice unique: l’autobiographie du “grand Jacques.” (144) Denis, in this analysis, brings together law and literature as he describes the great criminal as a literary character playing a script. In all these texts, including his own, Mesrine appears as “l’acteur du drame,” a character playing parts already written for him. Like Bond or Fantômas, his name and image have been re-appropriated by numerous media (film, press). Like Allain or Fleming, he has little to no importance as an author. His very name has been transformed, as the press changed its pronunciation from /mé-rin/ 182 to the notorious /mès-rin/ that has since remained in the public’s memory. In “L’Acte criminel, du texte à la scène,” Lavenu emphasizes the role of the criminal as a character in a narrative: Le personnage textuel du criminel n’est jamais seul. Il se présente entouré d’un ensemble de discours le concernant en tant qu’auteur d’une faute . . . Devant cette somme d’écriture que représente le dossier criminel, il serait juste de se poser la question de qui en est l’auteur. Le juge d’instruction . . . nomme chaque fois les personnages du drame, indiquant qui parle. Il participe largement à la reformulation de ce que les personnages disent . . . une traduction en langage juridique . . . Avec l’application du code, le texte va se mouler dans une certaine forme que tous les dossiers prendront, quels que soient le crime et les criminels . . . La reconstitution du crime apparaît comme une parenthèse, un “acte sans paroles,” une suite d’indications scéniques, de lieux, de mouvements, une immense didascalie . . . Juger un homme, c’est spatialiser son acte face à la loi, à la société, c’est donc une façon de théâtraliser. (81-2) One can advance that Mesrine’s texts constitute a literary mise en abime of the great criminal as a “personnage textuel” in law’s theater. * 183 Within the context of a reflection on law and literature, Mesrine’s literary gesture (as well as its limits and failures), provides some critical directions. Like Pirandello’s six characters, Mesrine emerges as a character looking for an author in his own text but also in the theater of the law that forces him to play a script in which he has no voice. 90 Mesrine perceives the theatricality of the law in his very first trial and states: “le procès fût sans intérêt. Une comédie sans style jouée par de mauvais acteurs. La justice a du mal à se faire prendre au sérieux quand les fantoches qui la dirigent sont sans talent” (L’Instinct de mort 164). The notions of script and theater are essential when reading Mesrine’s texts. D’Estenne, in her analysis of Pirandello’s play, “Droit du théâtre et théâtre du droit dans Six personnages en quête d'auteur,” states: Les six personnages en quête d’auteur sont également, et peut-être avant tout des êtres en quête de droit, c’est-à-dire qu’ils convoitent l’accès à un statut ontologique institué, à une puissance verbale effective, en même temps qu’ils souhaitent que soit rétablie la justice . . . Dans ce théâtre, les personnages affrontent l’ordre établi et les divers codes dramatiques. (153) 90 On law’s scripts, see John Conley, and William O'Barr, Just Words: Law, Language, and Power and Peter Brooks’s Law’s Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric. Brooks describes the trial process as a “struggle over narratives” and explains: “witnesses do not usually tell their stories as uninterrupted narratives. All stories must be elicited by a series of questions and answers and the form of questioning and answering is governed by an elaborated system of rules. . . . a trial consists of fragmented narratives and narrative multiplicity. . . when there are multiple opinions, there is a debate occurring in the text itself, a debate in the text about its own meaning.” (8-12) 184 “Un être en quête de droit” exactly defines Mesrine’s literary enterprise. Accordingly, he writes in Coupable d’être innocent: “on avait fabriqué deux coupables. On avait laissé des fausses preuves prendre forme d'accusation, on avait préparé le spectacle. Il est rare que des metteurs en scène acceptent que deux figurants changent leur scénario” (11). A narrative within the narrative, play within a play, his writings, like Pirandello’s text, interrupt the law’s narrative. This second volume of his memoirs reopens a case in which he was wrongly accused of murder. A reenactment of his entire criminal case, this book “replays” every step of the case, from the witnesses’ interrogations to the trial, but tells a different story. The importance of speaking the truth and being heard is even more salient in the introduction of Coupable d’être innocent in which Mesrine opposed truth and silence with the repetition of terms such as “silence,” “dire,” and “mentir”: Le récit que vous allez lire est véridique. C'est le drame vécu, d'une femme et d'un homme accusés d'un meurtre qu'ils n'avaient pas commis. Du silence qu'ils ont été obligés de garder pour sauver leur liberté. De leur secret, de leur procès, de leur acquittement . . . . C'est aussi la preuve qu'en matière d'enquête criminelle et surtout au sujet d'un meurtre, ce qui représente parfois des preuves d'inculpation, n'est pas forcément "la preuve que l'on tient le coupable." Tout n'est qu'une question d'interprétation des faits par les enquêteurs. Il faut impartialité, intelligence et recherche totale de la vérité pour que la preuve soit indiscutable. Celui qui se contente de facilité et se fait, à la découverte de preuves contradictoires, le complice silencieux des événements . . . celui- 185 là est plus criminel que l'homme montré du doigt dans le box des accusés. Car il falsifie la Justice, il la détourne de son but qui est de trouver le ou les coupables pour les punir selon la Loi. Le pire dilemme pour un accusé est de se dire "Je suis innocent, mais si je dis toute la vérité, je serai condamné pour un meurtre que je n'ai pas commis. Il me faut mentir pour sauver ma peau et ma liberté." La cour de justice devient alors un lieu de duel où tous les coups sont permis dans le but de convaincre de son innocence. Car, si certains témoins de l'accusation mentent pour protéger le ou les coupables, . . . alors là! l'accusé est en droit d'employer les mêmes armes que ses accusateurs et de penser que face à l'arbitraire, face au refus d'étudier les faits avec impartialité . . . il en conclut qu'au moment de son procès . . . toute vérité n'est pas toujours bonne à dire! (Coupable d’être innocent, 7-8, my emphasis) Mesrine describes how the law forced them into being silent, a silence he broke by writing the book and revealing his truth. Presenting the law as a theater, Mesrine emerges as an actor who tries to break free from the script, a character seeking a different story. Hence one can develop Lavenu’s claim that “le sujet de cette représentation scénique, tout en restant fondamentalement le même (l’acte criminel à la rencontre de la loi) peut se décaler ou s’élargir” (85), and suggest that literature provides the great criminal with a stage where he can enact the disjunction between the role he is supposed to play and the script he wants to act out. Turning the public into his judge, the great criminal gradually becomes his own stage director and fills in the gaps of law’s discourse 186 with his own theatrical story. Hence Mesrine reveals: “J’avançais, pion par pion. Je dirigeais une partie que j’étais le seul à connaître . . . . Les armes étaient en place. C’était à moi de jouer” (Coupable d’être innocent 378). Like Pirandello’s six characters, who interrupt the rehearsal and demand to be given a story (“we want to live” 127), Mesrine reclaims not only his voice, but also his right(s) and his existence (“Je n’étais même pas personne” L’Instinct de mort 471). Within the context of a reflection on the relationship between law and literature, Pirandello’s play therefore offers some central tenets for understanding the role of literature as a counterpoint to law’s discourse. A play within the play, literature (embodied by the six characters) intervenes in the fictions of the law (interrupting the rehearsal), brings its own stories, and asks for justice. Similarly, Mesrine’s texts create an interruption in law’s script and call for justice: Le Juge Miquelon rouge de colère voulut intervenir... - Voulez-vous vous taire... Je lui avais coupé la parole... Debout dans mon box, je m'étais mis à crier ma rancoeur devant cette farce de Justice... devant cette odieuse comédie... - Non je ne me tairai pas... (Coupable d’être innocent 201) This excerpt exemplifies the interruption created by Mesrine who, as a persona, makes an intervention in the theater of justice, creates a rupture in law’s script, and seeks to reclaim his voice and his story. The legal concept of “person” and the literary notion of “character” (“personnage”) are both derived from the Latin “persona,” which refers to a theatrical 187 mask. The idea of being able to be heard on the stage and the ability to be recognized by one’s peers and granted existence among society have a common origin as emphasized by French historian Christian Biet in “Droit, littérature, théâtre: La fiction du jugement commun:” la personne juridique [est] une construction imaginaire, une sorte de fiction . . . avant tout prise dans un texte, un montage abstrait qui permet d’édifier d’autres personnes au sein d’un corps social . . . La persona détermine la place de l’homme reconnu tel dans la cité, sa condition dans le théâtre du monde, ce qui fait que, pour être une véritable personne, il faut être aussi un personnage inscrit et mis en scène dans la cité.” (81-2) Similarly, “like an actor wearing a mask,” Mesrine comes forward and, through his literary enterprise, seeks to identify his role in his own trial, and depicts it as a spectacle in which everyone is an actor: Qu'étais-je pour eux....? Une crapule? un salaud...? un coupable..? ou bien un accusé qui jusqu'à preuve du contraire, pouvait être innocent de l'accusation portée contre lui? . . . Au fond de la salle, les policiers avaient du mal à interdire l'entrée. La salle comble ne pouvant plus recevoir d'autres spectateurs. Car pour eux, ce n'était rien d'autre qu'un spectacle... (Coupable d’être innocent 127) 188 Pulling off the mask(s) the law tries to impose upon him as an actor in theater of justice, he chooses other masks (the hero, the cowboy, etc). Here one can nuance Foucault’s critique of Mesrine when he states that the banality of his writings have erased his face (Dits et écrits 253). Indeed, one may argue that Mesrine exists as a great criminal only because of the masks that hide his face but project his voice. 91 Mesrine’s rebellion as a persona in the theater of justice, gives him, like Pirandello’s characters, an existence: A character, sir, may always ask a man who he is. Because a character really has a life of his own, marked with his special characteristics; for which reason he is always ‘somebody.’ But a man may very well be a ‘nobody.’ (Six Characters in Search of an Author 158) * Mesrine, a criminal in search of an author, is clearly a Pirandellian character seeking to reclaim his voice and his right. “J’étais écœuré de constater qu’une fois enfermé l’homme détenu est considéré comme inexistant. Il perd beaucoup plus que sa liberté, il perd le droit de s’exprimer” (L’Instinct de mort 156), declares Mesrine. But does literature allow him to express himself? In light of his disputable attempt at producing “literary” works through the publication of two books, can his texts be more efficiently read as literature’s autonomous discourse on its own fights and limits—une comparution before other texts? And from Mesrine’s disputed “literary” gesture, what 91 “Personare” also means “to sound through.” 189 reflections can one draw about literature as a force competing against law’s power over life and death? Like a jurist seeking to differentiate between first-degree and second- degree murder, the literary critic of Mesrine may formulate a more crucial analysis from a second-degree reading envisioning the two books as literature’s autonomous discourse on its own possibilities and limits. As emphasized previously, Mesrine’s texts cannot claim an affiliation to the French belles lettres. “Qui décide, qui juge, et selon quels critères, de l’appartenance de ce récit à la littérature?” asks Derrida in “Préjugés. Devant la loi” (La Faculté de juger 104), a text that highlights the affinity between the structures of legal and literary narratives. In this essay, Derrida analyzes Kafka’s text “Before the Law” as a narrative that speaks of literature and the law and their mutual relationship, and states: “un texte [a] le pouvoir de faire la loi, à commencer par la sienne, mais cela à la condition que le texte lui-même puisse comparaitre devant la loi d’un autre texte, d’un texte plus puissant, gardé par des gardiens plus puissants” (132). This statement provides two critical directions for an analysis of literature’s autonomous discourse in Mesrine’s texts: relegated to the ranks of paralittérature by Foucault, and usually overlooked by most critics, L’Instinct de mort and Coupable d’être innocent stand before literature as they stand before the law. Derrida argues that literature always stands before the law in that the law protects it (La Faculté de juger 133). For instance, the famous disclaimer “any resemblance with persons existing or dead is purely coincidental” has become part of the popular legal knowledge, and reveals that the notion of the literary allows one to suspend referential certainty but can only do so under the protection of the law, which thereby guarantees 190 literature a certain degree of freedom. This “double-bind” of literature was materialized in the law passed in France in 1977, following the publication of the autobiography Mesrine had smuggled out of the high-security wing of the prison. 92 Sometimes referred to as “loi-Mesrine,” the new law made it impossible for a prisoner to make a profit from the publication of books about his/her crimes. “Quelle que soit la structure de l’institution juridique et donc politique qui vient à garantir l’oeuvre, celle-ci surgit et reste toujours devant la loi” (La Faculté de juger 133). While Mesrine’s texts stand before the law, they also stand before literature and speak of their own limits. As emphasized previously, Mesrine’s two books stand before numerous narratives belonging to popular culture such as the detective novel, the gangster movie, the American western, or even the romance novel. Mesrine’s aesthetic lapse of imagination and style places him—as Foucault points out—in the tradition of “paralittérature” and his main literary gesture lies in his ability to establish himself as a character in his fictionalized narratives. Mesrine exists as a character, not only in his books but also in the proliferation of narratives that surrounds his persona. While Mesrine’s gesture creates an interruption in law’s script and calls for justice, he is trapped in his role as a literary character. This criminal, who notoriously escaped from high- security prison several times, never seems to be able to escape the frames in which he has been inscribed. In that sense, one can claim that literature, like the law, lets him down and does not offer him justice or redress. In his well-known study on law and literature, Raconter la loi. Aux sources de l’imaginaire juridique (2004), French jurist and philosopher Francois Ost points out this phenomenon in his reading of Pirandello’s play: 92 http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/verbrecher-jacques-mesrine-der-mann-mit-den- tausend-verkleidungen-fotostrecke-110317-12.html 191 “les personnages vont comprendre que la seule existence scénique que le Directeur a à leur offrir passe obligatoirement par le truchement des acteurs . . . . Ils ne portent pas de masque mais incarnent néanmoins des rôles stéréotypés, lisses et cohérents” (164). Literature offers Mesrine an escape through the opportunity to reclaim his voice and change his part in law’s script but re-inscribes him as a character trapped in the clichés of popular literary genres. He cannot think outside the frames of the “roles” he and others play in his stories, and he declares, for instance: “les accrochages avec mon juge étaient parfois violents. Car, en dépassant son rôle, il perdait toute autorité à mes yeux. A la vérité, il m’amusait . . . il était fait pour la pêche à la ligne, pas pour la chasse au tigre” (L’Instinct de mort 422). Mesrine ultimately points out his awareness of literature’s betrayal when he claims: “par ce livre, je me suis condamné moi-même. Il est mon pire réquisitoire. En l'écrivant, je me suis refusé à tricher” (L’Instinct de mort 466). Therefore, a sense of complicity between the law and literature emerges. Yet, one can also advance that Mesrine’s texts constitute a literary mise en abyme of the great criminal as a “personnage textuel” in law’s theater, and that literature, by revealing its limits and betrayals, denounces the law’s own limits and betrayals. Derrida suggests: “Et si la loi, sans être elle-même transie de littérature partageait ses conditions de possibilité avec la chose littéraire?” (La Faculté de juger 109). Reading Mesrine’s writings at a meta-level, one can suggest that they stage literature’s own mise-à-mort: by rejecting the art and style that constitute the belles-lettres and admitting servility to scripts and clichés, literature stabs itself and reveals the law’s own artifice and corruption. 192 Conclusion Voici donc un monde imaginaire, mais créé par la correction de celui-ci, un monde où la douleur peut, si elle le veut, durer jusqu'à la mort. . . . L'homme s'y donne enfin à lui-même la forme et la limite apaisante qu'il poursuit en vain dans sa condition. Le roman fabrique du destin sur mesure. C'est ainsi qu'il concurrence la création et qu'il triomphe, provisoirement, de la mort. . . . L’essence du roman est dans cette correction perpétuelle. (L’Homme révolté 330) This project, with the ambitious task to reflect upon the relationship between law and literature, raised some significant questions but also presented a number of methodological, definitional, and intellectual challenges. First, the large time-period covered by this dissertation (1791-1981) did not allow for an in-depth analysis of the different historical moments evoked. Many significant historical forces are at work in the period covered by this study, with different governments, the establishment of the republic, and major social transformations. Lacenaire’s era—the focus of Chapter II— was marked for instance by the Monarchie de Juillet, “Les Trois Glorieuses” of 1830, the rise of the individual and the bourgeoisie, Romanticism and the growing obsession of science with crime. Lisa Downing and Anne-Emmanuelle Demartini have efficiently 193 demonstrated that the various representations of Lacenaire, in the press and in literature, reflect the questions and issues of specific historical, political, and cultural moments and systems of thoughts. Genet (1910-1986), whose writings form the core of Chapter III, lived through two world wars, three different republics and major social and cultural changes. So did Mesrine (1936-1979), whose life was particularly marked by his direct experience of the war of Algeria (1954-1962) and the cultural revolution of 1968 in France. Some of the events and persons evoked in this dissertation have been the focus of new historicist studies such as Lisa Downing’s recent book, The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality, and the Modern Killer (2013). This project, although it makes occasional connections to specific historical or cultural forces (such as the development of the press) and follows a chronological approach, does not seek to provide a historical narrative. Moreover, the primary corpus of this study is meant to be paradigmatic and the two main criteria for selecting these criminals are the abundance of representations and narratives they triggered, but above all the fact that they themselves produced texts. Therefore, choosing these criminals required excluding the less visible, such as faits divers and women. 93 Few women criminals had to face the guillotine in France (in comparison to their men counterparts), and fewer achieved the level of notoriety of “great criminals” such as Lacenaire or Mesrine. Similarly, literature has produced some tragic women figures such as Emma Bovary or Thérèse Raquin, but never offered a female counterpart to fascinating criminals such as Vautrin or Arsène Lupin. Because of the quasi non-existence of women great criminals and their different treatment in the law and 93 On faits divers see Walker’s article “Literature, History and Factidiversiality.” 194 in literature, women were kept out of this project. A possible extension of this dissertation would be a separate study of French women criminals focusing for instance on Henriette Caillaux, the wife of prime minister Joseph Caillaux (she shot the Figaro’s director Gaston Calmette in 1914), Marguerite Steinheil, the mistress of French president Faure and of minister Aristide Briand (she was involved in a complex criminal affair in 1908 linked to the suspicious death of several members of her household), and the notorious fraudster Thérèse Humbert who became famous for her financial machinations. Such a study would examine how some of these women could gain visibility and fame through a theatrical performance of “male” criminality, or how, using the master narratives of the law, they could either escape the law or be punished like their glorified male counterparts. Such a study could also examine how some women, as exemplified by Steinheil who published famous memoirs, gain legal and literary visibility by writing themselves, and turning their testimony into a work of art and fiction. * In the opening of these “Literary Case Studies of the Great Criminal,” two central questions were asked: how does literature, in the shadow of the guillotine, compete with law’s power over life and death? And what kind of discourse does literature forge through the figure of the great criminal? Examining literature as law, each chapter examined a different instance of literature’s power, from Lacenaire’s “shadow courtroom” 195 in which the literary text produces an ethical discourse against the death penalty, to Genet’s circus that stages a poetically concentrated vision of the great criminals as tight- rope artists flirting with law and death in a beautiful erotic dance, to Mesrine’s pop- fiction that establishes the great criminal as a “personnage textuel” in law’s theater. Through the power of creation and aestheticization, literature provides moments of fictional visibility, moments when the artist/writer and the criminal are united, and when law and literature actually come together. The criminal-writer gradually emerges as a figure of authority in the various public spheres he creates through their literary production, and the texts, in turn, acquire their own authority devant la loi. From law in literature to law as literature, much emphasis has been given to law, and it has been one of this project’s ambitions to reaffirm the importance of literature, and even make a case for the power of the literary text at a time when literary studies are often discounted. Examining the question of authority through different public spheres, this project posed the great criminal as a figure of discursive authority, and literature as a “different regime of truth, tied to different discursive modalities” (Leclerc 205). 196 Works Cited Ackerknecht, Erwin. “P. M. A. Dumoutier et la collection phrénologique du Musée de l'Homme.” Bulletins et mémoires de la société d'anthropologie de Paris, 10.7 (1956) 289-308. Web. 10 Mar. 2013. Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Continuum, 2002. Print. Allain, Marcel, and Pierre Souvestre. Fantômas. Paris: Laffont, 2013. Print. Arago, Jacques. Lacenaire après sa condamnation: ses conversations intimes, ses poésies, sa correspondance, un drame en trois actes. Paris: Marchant, 1836. Print. Arasse, Daniel. The Guillotine and the Terror. Trans. Christopher Miller. London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 1989. Print. Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. London: Penguin, 1996. Print. Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and Its Double. Trans. Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove, 1958. Print. Balzac, Honoré De. La Comédie humaine, Œuvres complètes. France: Arvensa Editions, 2013. Kindle. Banville, Théodore Faullain De. Odes funambulesques. Paris: A. Lemerre, 1943. Print. Bataille, Georges. La Littérature et le mal: Emily Brontë, Baudelaire, Michelet, Blake, Sade, Proust, Kafka, Genet. Paris: Gallimard, 1957. Print. Baudelaire, Charles. Oeuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard, 1975. Print. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan, 1994. Print. 197 Beccaria, Cesare. On Crimes and Punishments; and Other Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Print. Benjamin, Walter. “Critique of Violence.” In Illuminations. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978. Print. Bentham, Jeremy. The Rationale of Punishment. London: R. Heward, 1830. Print. Bermel, Albert. Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty. New York: Taplinger Pub., 1977. Print. Bertherat, Bruno. “Cadavre à la « une »: la télévision et la mort de Jacques Mesrine, ennemi public n° 1.” Le Temps des médias 1 (2003): 119-38. Web. 19 mar. 2013. Biet, Christian. “Droit, littérature, théâtre: La fiction du jugement commun.” Raisons politiques 3.27 (2007): 91-105. Web. 5 Feb. 2015. Black, Joel. The Aesthetics of Murder: A Study in Romantic Literature and Contemporary Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991. Print. Blanchot, Maurice. “La Littérature et le droit à la mort.” La Part du feu. Paris: Gallimard, 1949. Print. Blanchot, Maurice, and Jacques Derrida. The Instant of My Death/Demeure: Fiction and Testimony. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2000. Print. Bonnelier, Hippolyte. Autopsie physiologique de Lacenaire, mort sur l'échafaud le 9 janvier 1836. Paris: Imprimerie de Capelt, 1836. Print. Boulard, Stéphanie. “Jean Genet: nouvelle perspective sur la guillotine.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 14.3 (2010): 299-306. Web. 24 Jan. 2014. Bowers, R.H. “Foleuyles Lawes.” Notes and Queries 8 (1967): 327-8. Web. 11 Mar. 2015. 198 Boyer, Alain-Michel. Les Paralittératures. Paris: Armand Colin, 2008. Print. Brooks, Peter. Troubling Confessions. Speaking Guilt in law and Literature. Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 2001. Print. Brooks, Peter, and Paul Gewirtz, eds. Law’s Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998. Print. Broussard, Robert. Mémoires. Paris: Stock, 1997. Print. Camus, Albert. L'Homme révolté. Paris: Gallimard, 2000. Print. -----------------. Les Justes. Paris: Gallimard, 2012. Print. -----------------. L'Etranger. Eds. Germaine Brée and Carlos Lynes. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1955. Print. -----------------. Réflexions sur la peine capitale. Ed. Arthur Koestler. Paris: Calmann- Lévy, 1957. Print. Caron, Pascal. “Pour quelques paillettes en plus... Le Funambule de Jean Genet et l'image poétique du mouvement.” Littérature 139.3 (2005): 24-43. Web. 10 Jan. 2013. Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quichotte. Paris: Norph Nop, 2011. Kindle. Chafer, Tony, and Emmanuel Godin, eds. The French Exception. New York: Berghahn, 2005. Print. Clair, Jean, and Robert Badinter. Crime et châtiment. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2010. Print. Cochinat, Victor. Lacenaire, ses crimes, son procès et sa mort, d'après des documents authentiques et inédits, suivis de ses poésies et chansons. Paris: Jules Laisne, 1864. Print. 199 Conley, John, and William O'Barr. Just Words: Law, Language, and Power. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1998. Print. Cover, Robert. Narrative, Violence and the Law. Michigan: U of Michigan press, 1995. Print. Cruickshank, John. Jean Genet: The Aesthetics of Crime. Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1964. Print. De Florian. Fables de Florian: suivies des poëmes de Tobie et de Ruth. Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1872. Print. Demartini, Anne-Emmanuelle. L'Affaire Lacenaire. Paris: Editions Aubier, 2001. Print. Denis, Benoit. “Faire de sa vie une oeuvre para-littéraire. Quelques réflexions autour de la littérature-Mesrine.” Etudes françaises 47.1 (2011): 141-55. Web. 5 Feb. 2015. De Quincey, Thomas. Miscellaneous Essays. Ebook: Gutenberg, 2004. Web. 2 Jan. 2015. Deraiche, Jocelyne. J’ai tant aimé Mesrine. Montréal: Stanké, 1979. Print. Derrida, Jacques. The Death Penalty, Volume I. Ed. Geoffrey Bennington, M. Crépon, and Thomas Dutoit. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Chicago and London: U of Chicago, 2014. Print. ----------------. Force de loi. Paris: Editions Galilée, 2005. Print. ----------------. Glas. Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1974. Print. ----------------. La Bête et le souverain. Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2008. Print. ----------------. “Préjugés: Devant la loi.” In Derrida, et al. La Faculté de juger. Paris: Editions de minuit, 1985. Print. ----------------. L’Ecriture et la différence. Paris: Seuil, 1979. Print. 200 ----------------. Without Alibi. Ed. and trans. Peggy Kamuf. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2002. Print. Downing, Lisa. The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality, and the Modern Killer. Chicago: U of Chicago, 2013. Print. Dumas, Alexandre. Le Comte de Monte-Cristo. Paris: Norph-Nop, 2011. Kindle. -------------------. Femmes qui votent et femmes qui tuent. Paris: Calmann Levy, 1880. Print. Ekotto, Frieda. L'Ecriture carcérale et le discours juridique chez Jean Genet. Paris, France: L'Harmattan, 2001. Print. Estenne, Céline de. “Droit du théâtre et théâtre du droit dans Six personnages en quête d'auteur.” Revue interdisciplinaire d'études juridiques 1.62 (2009): 153-77. Web. 5 Jan. 2015. Foucart, François. Lacenaire, l'assassin démythifié. Paris: Perrin, 1995. Print. Foucault, Michel. Dits et écrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1977. Print. ----------------. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage, 2006. Print. ----------------. History of Sexuality. London: Penguin, 1992. Print. ----------------. I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother...: A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century. Trans. Blandine Kriegel. New York: Pantheon, 1975. Print. Freud, Sigmund. “Medusa's Head.” Writings on Art and Literature. Ed. Neil Hertz. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1997. 264-65. Print. 201 Frye, Northrop. “Literature and the Law.” “The Critical Path” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1963-1975. Toronto: U. of Toronto, 2009. 27-43. Print. Gaboriau, Emile. L’Affaire Lerouge. Paris: Norph-Nop, 2011. Kindle. Garapon, Antoine, and Denis Salas. Imaginer la loi. Le droit dans la littérature. Paris: Michalon, 2008. Print. Gasché, Rodolphe. Of Minimal Things: Studies on the Notion of Relation. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999. Print. Genet, Jean. Le Balcon. Paris: M. Barbezat, 1962. Print. --------------. Le Condamné à mort et autres poèmes suivi de Le Funambule. Paris: Gallimard, 2004. Print. -------------. Miracle de la rose. Paris: L'Arbalète, 2010. Print. -------------. Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs. Paris: Gallimard, 2007. Print. -------------. Journal du voleur. Paris: Gallimard, 1989. Print. Grimm, Jakob. Kleinere Schiften. Berlin: Google Ebooks, 2006. Web. 21 Mar. 2015. Habermas, Jürgen. Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. Print. Hamon, Pascaline. “Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs et Miracle de la rose de Jean Genet. L’écriture mise au secret.” Les Dossiers Du Grihl 2011.01 (2011). Web. 28 Oct. 2012. Hanrahan, Mairéad. Lire Genet: Une Poétique de la différence. Montréal: Presses de L'Université de Montréal, 1997. Print. Hugo, Victor. Ecrits sur la peine de mort. Paris: Actes Sud, 1979. Print. 202 --------------. Le Dernier jour d'un condamné. Paris: ebooksfrance, 2011. Kindle. --------------. Claude Gueux. Paris: ebooksfrance, 2011. Kindle. --------------. Les Misérables. Paris: ebooksfrance, 2011. Kindle. --------------. Han d’Islande. Paris: ebooksfrance, 2011. Kindle. --------------. Quatrevingt-treize. France: Gutenberg, 2000. Kindle Hunt, Lynn. Inventing Human rights: a History. London: Norton, 2008. Print. Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1989. Print. Jeanjacquot, Sylvia. L’Instinct de vie. Dix-huit mois de cavale avec Mesrine. Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1988. Print. Joyce, James. Ulysses. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Print. Knobelspiess, Roger. QHS: Quartier de haute-sécurité. Paris: Lutter, 1980. Print. Lacenaire, Pierre-François. Mémoires, révélations et poésies de Lacenaire écrits par lui- même à la Conciergerie. Paris: Les Marchands de nouveauté, 1836. Print. Lacenaire, Pierre-François. Mémoires. Paris: Edition du Boucher, 2002. Print. -----------------. Mémoires et autres écrits. Ed. Jacques Simonelli. Paris: José Corti, 1991. Print. Lautréamont, Isidore Ducassé. Les Chants de Maldoror. Paris: Genonceaux, 2011. Kindle. La Roche-Tilhac, Poncelin de. Le procès de Louis XVI, ou collection complète, des opinions, discours et mémoires des membres de la convention nationale, sur les crimes de Louis XVI. Paris: Debarle, 1795. Web. 26 Feb. 2015. Lavery, Carl. “Ethics of the Wound: A New Interpretation of Jean Genet's Politics.” Journal of European Studies 33.2 (2003): 161-76. Web. 23 May 2014. 203 Lavenu, Evelyne. “L'acte criminel, du texte à la scène.” Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse 31 (1985): 67-91. Web. 5 Feb. 2015. Leblanc, Maurice. Arsène Lupin. London: Penguin Classics, 2007. Print. Le Bris, Michel. Assassins, hors-la-loi, brigands de grands chemins. Mémoires et histoires de Lacenaire, Robert Macaire, Vidocq et Mandrin. Bruxelles: Editions Complexe, 1996. Print. Leclerc, Gérard. “Histoire de la vérité et généalogie de l'autorité.” Cahiers internationaux de sociologie 2/2001 (n° 111): 205-231. Web. 23 June 2015. Leclerc, Yvan. Crimes écrits. La littérature en procès au XIXe Siècle. Paris: Plon, 1991. Print. Le Rouge, Gustave. Cinq nouvelles extraordinaires. Paris: ebooksfrance, 2007. Kindle. Leroux, Gaston. Le Mystère de la chambre jaune. Paris: Create Space, 2014. Print. Lesage, Alain René. Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane. Paris: Norph Nop, 2011. Kindle. Le Roux, Hughes. Les Jeux du cirque et la vie foraine. Paris: Plon, 1889. Print. Lormier, Dominique. Les 35 plus grandes affaires criminelles en France depuis 1900: de Landru aux époux Fourniret. Paris: Editions Trajectoire, 2008. Print. Madival, Jean. Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860. Paris: Librairie administrative de Paul Dupont, 1877. Print. Malimbaum, Martine. Mesrine intime. Monaco: Editions du Rocher, 2008. Print. Masson, Jean-Pol, and Alain Berenboom. Le Droit dans la littérature française. Bruxelles: E. Bruylant, 2007. Print. McMahon, Joseph H. The Imagination of Jean Genet. New Haven: Yale UP, 1963. Print. Mesrine, Jacques. Coupable d'être innocent. Montréal: Stanké, 1979. Print. 204 ------------------. L'Instinct de mort. Paris: Flammarion, 2008. Print. Montesquieu, Charles De Secondat. De L'esprit des lois. Paris: Flammarion, 1979. Print. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Horace Barnett Samuel. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1918. Print. Odell, Robin. The Mammoth Book of Bizarre Crimes. London: Running Press, 2010. Print. Pirandello, Luigi. Ecrits sur le théâtre et la littérature. Trans. George Piroué. Paris: Gallimard, 1990. Print. ---------------. Six characters in search of an author. In Pirandello, Pirandello's Theatre of Living Masks: New Translations of Six Major Plays. Trans. Umberto Mariani and Alice Gladstone. Mariani. Toronto: U of Toronto, 2011. Print. Plato. The Republic of Plato. Ed. Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1991. Print. Pynchon, Thomas. Vineland. New York: Penguin Classics, 1997. Print. Reneville, Marc. “Un Musée d'anthropologie oublié: Le cabinet phrénologique de Dumoutier.” Bulletins et mémoires de la société d'anthropologie de Paris 10.3-4 (1998): 477-84. Web. 01 Feb. 2013. Ricoeur, Paul. Le Juste, la justice, et son échec. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996. Print. Rimbaud, Arthur. Illuminations. Paris: Gallimard, 1999. Print. Rooney, Caroline, and Rita Sakr. The Ethics of Representation in Literature, Art and Journalism: Transnational Responses to the Siege of Beirut. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Les Confessions. Paris: ebooksfrance, 2011. Kindle. 205 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Œuvres poétiques de J.J. Rousseau. Paris: Lefèvre, 2013. Google Ebook. Sade, Donatien, Marquis de. La Philosophie dans le boudoir. Paris: Folio, 1976. Print. Said, Edward W. On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain. London: Bloomsbury, 2006. Print. Sarat, Austin. Law, Violence, and the Possibility of Justice. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001. Print. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr. Trans. Bernard Frechtman. New York: George Braziller, 1963. Print. Schneck, Peter. “The Laws of Fiction.” European Journal of English Studies 11.1 (2007): 47-63. Web. 24 Jan. 2014. Schneider, Jeanne. Je n’ai pas droit à l’oubli. Il était une fois Janou et Jacques Mesrine. Paris: Hachette, 1980. Print. Smith, Philip. Punishment and Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago, 2008. Print. Steinheil, Marguerite de. Mes Mémoires. Paris: E. Ramlot. 1912. Print. Stokes, John. “Aux Funambules: Acrobatics and Aesthetics.” FCS, iii (1992): 277-98. Web. 11 Nov. 2014. Struve, Laura Christine. The Shadow Courtroom: Literature, Law, and Narrative Authority in Victorian England. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. Print. Süskind, Patrick. Perfume. London: Penguin Classics, 2010. Print. Taylor, Mark. “Desire of Law, Law of Desire.” Cardozo Law Review 11 (1989-1990): 1269-274. Web. 12 Mar. 2013. Villiers de l'Isle d'Adam, Auguste. Contes cruels. Paris: Ebooksfrance, 2011. Kindle. 206 Wald Lasowski, Patrick. Les Échafauds du romanesque. Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1991. Print. Wald Lasowski, Patrick. Guillotinez-moi. Paris: Gallimard, 2007. Print. Walker, David. “Literature, History and Factidiversiality.” Journal of European Studies 25.97 (1995): 035-50. Print. Ward, Ian. Law and Literature: Possibilities and Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Print. Weisberg, Richard. Poethics, and Other Strategies of Law and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Print. White, Edmund. Genet: A Biography. London: Penguin, 1994. Print. Wigmore, John. “A List of One Hundred Legal Novels.” Illinois Law Review 2.9 (1922): 574-93. Web. 01 July 2012. Yoshino, Kenji. “The City and the Poet.” The Yale Law Journal Vol. 114, No. 8 (Jun., 2005): 1835-1896. Print. Zola, Emile. Oeuvres complètes. Paris: Arvensa, 2013. Kindle. * Fantômas. Dir. André Hunebelle. Perf. Louis de funès. P.A.C., 1964. DVD. Le Schpountz. Dir. Marcel Pagnol. Perf. Fernandel. 1938. Web. 01 Mar. 2012. 207 Mesrine: l’instinct de mort. Dir. Jean-François Richet. Perf. Vincent Cassel. La Petite Reine, 2008. DVD. Mesrine. Dir. André Génovès. Perf. Nicolas Silberg. G.R. Productions, 1984. DVD.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract This study investigates the complex relationship between law and literature through an analysis of the representations of the great criminal in modern France. Crossing swords one more time with the law, great criminals, such as Pierre-François Lacenaire or Jacques Mesrine, embody disorder and, through their writings, enter into a complex conversation with legal texts, the press, and France’s most famous writers, from Hugo to Camus and Genet—canonical writers known for their philosophical reflection on the law and their stance against capital punishment. ❧ This research follows a case-based approach bridging two essential dates of French legal history (1791-1981), and reads the writings of real criminals against the literary production of canonical French writers focusing on great criminals. Through close readings of novels, plays, newspapers articles and criminals’ writings, one can trace links between criminal discourse and literary representation in order to examine the relationship between law and literature. Defining new perspectives in a field that needs to gain visibility, this project asks: how does French literature, in the shadow of the guillotine, compete with law’s power over life and death? What kind of discourse does literature forge through the figure of the great criminal?

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Hysteria in Lourdes and miracles at the Salpêtrière: the intersection of faith and medical discourse in late nineteenth-century French literature

PDF

Danser la maladie, contaminer la beauté: a viral approach to the (choreo)graphed body

PDF

'L'autre chez nous': defining the national body in French literature, 1800-1848

PDF

La galvanisation du corps: le cinéma français et la biopolitique

PDF

The world in the nation: Migration in contemporary anglophone and francophone fiction; 1980-2010

PDF

Responsibility and rights: a search for a principled distinction between criminal law and tort law

PDF

The tyrant and the migrant: the bonds between Syracusan hegemony and mobility from Dionysius I to Agathocles

PDF

Luso-Hispanic archipelagos: the imaginary of Asia in Brazilian and Cuban literary and visual culture

PDF

Between literary training and literary service: school writing instruction in the Russian Empire, 1780-1860

PDF

Vagrancy, law, and the limits of verisimilitude in Russian literature

PDF

Reproducing the line: 1970s innovative poetry and socialist-feminism in the U.K.

PDF

Mourning melancholia: modernist poetics and the refusal of solace

PDF

The poetics of disillusionment: the legacy of the eighteenth-century ceremonial ode in nineteenth-century Russian lyric poetry and pastoral prose

PDF

Histoire, nation et identité: les femmes dans l'espace autobiographique entre la France et l'Algérie

PDF

Senses of history: colonial memories, works of art, and heterogeneous community in America's Asia-Pacific since 1945

PDF

Towards an inter-disciplinary approach to the study of transnational relations

PDF

Towards a politics of perfect disorder: carceral geographies, queer criminality, and other ways to be

PDF

The mind of the slave: the limits of knowledge and power in Roman law and society

PDF

In/visible constituents: the representation of undocumented immigrants

PDF

The interplay between the state and civil society: a case study of honor killings in Turkey

Asset Metadata

Creator Le Bris, Katy D. (author)

Core Title Law and disorder: literary case studies of the great criminal in the shadow of the guillotine

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program French

Publication Date 08/20/2015

Defense Date 06/22/2015

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag criminal,death penalty,France,guillotine,Law,Literature,OAI-PMH Harvest,revolution

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Kamuf, Peggy (committee chair), Farenga, Vincent (committee member), Meeker, Natania (committee member)

Creator Email lebris@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-637396

Unique identifier UC11305864

Identifier etd-LeBrisKaty-3835.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-637396 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-LeBrisKaty-3835.pdf

Dmrecord 637396

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Le Bris, Katy D.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA