Maximillien Robespierre

“ The desire to live cedes before pride, the most imperious of all the passions that master the heart of man. The most terrible of all punishments for social man is opprobrium, is the overwhelming sight of public execration. When the legislator can strike the citizen in so many sensitive places and in so many ways, why would he reduce himself to employing the death penalty? Punishments aren’t imposed to torment the guilty, but in order to prevent crime by the fear of incurring them. ”

“ Outside of civil society, if a bitter enemy makes an attempt on my life or, pushed away twenty times, he returns again to ravage the field that I cultivated with my own hands; since I have only my individual strength to oppose to his I must either perish or kill him, and the law of natural defense justifies and approves me. But in society, when the force of all is armed against only one, what principle of justice could authorize it to kill him? ”

“ Has Russia been in turmoil since the despot who governs it entirely suppressed the death penalty, as if by this act of humanity and philosophy he wanted to expiate the crime of holding millions of men in the yoke of absolute power?
Listen to the voice of justice and reason. It cries out to you that human judgements are never certain enough to justify a society of men subject to error dealing death to another man. ”

“ Man is no longer for man so sacred an object: we have a less grand idea of his dignity when public authority puts his life at risk. The idea of murder inspires less fear when the law itself gives the example and the spectacle. The horror of crime is diminished when it is punished by another crime. ”

“ The legislator who prefers death and atrocious penalties to the gentler means in his power outrages public feeling and weakens the moral sentiment among the people he governs; like a clumsy preceptor who, by the frequent use of cruel punishments, stupefies and degrades the soul of his student; he wears out and weakens the springs of government by wanting to wind them up too strongly. ”

“ Witness Japan: the death penalty and tortures are nowhere more widely used, and nowhere are crimes so frequent and so atrocious. One might almost say that the Japanese want to dispute in ferocity the barbaric laws that outrage and irritate them. Did the Greek republics, where penalties were moderate and where the death penalty was either infinitely rare or absolutely unknown, offer more crime and less virtue than the countries governed by blood laws? ”

“ Even if you could imagine the most perfect judicial order, even if you had found the most upright and enlightened judges, there would still remain some room for error or caution. Why forbid yourselves the means of repairing them? Why condemn yourselves to the inability to lend a helping hand to oppressed innocence? ”

“ If in place of this powerful, calm and moderate severity that should characterize it they place anger and vengeance; if they spill human blood that they could spare and that they have no right to spread; if they spread out before the people cruel scenes and cadavers wounded by torture, it then alters in the hearts of citizens the ideas of the just and the unjust; they plant the seed in the midst of society of ferocious prejudices that will produce others in their turn. ”

“ The death penalty is necessary, say the partisans of ancient and barbarous routine. Without it there is no brake strong enough for crime. Who told you this? Have you calculated all the gears by which penal laws can act on human sensibility? Alas, before death how much physical and moral pain can man endure? ”

“ Do you think that Rome was soiled with more crimes when in the days of its glory, the Porcian Laws wiped out the severe laws carried out by kings and decimvirs, than it was under Scylla, who revived them, and under the emperors, who carried their rigor to a point of excess worthy of their infamous tyranny. ”

“ The news having been brought to Athens that citizens had been condemned to death in the city of Argos, people ran to the temples, where the gods were called upon to turn Athenians away from such cruel and dire thoughts. ”