The abolition of the death penalty in France on September 18, 1981 is the culmination of a long process that began at the beginning of the 20th century. Until the 1980s, the debate on capital punishment had been periodically revived in France, the last European nation to maintain it. Abolition being part of the program of the left, a bill to this effect was presented to the National Assembly immediately after the election of François Mitterrand as President of the Republic. Carried by the Minister of Justice Robert Badinter, this bill will end up being adopted despite the deep division of public opinion and the political class on the subject;
Towards the abolition of the death penalty in France
The vote on the law abolishing the death penalty is the culmination of a fight started in 1908 by Jean Jaurès and Aristide Briand, who failed to hear their hostility to this sentence, like Victor Hugo half a century before. From the 1950s, fourteen years after the ban on public executions, the opposition became more numerous and structured:Albert Camus took the lead in Reflections on Capital Punishment (1957) and became a school; intellectuals (Arthur Koestler, then Michel Foucault and Gilles Perrault), journalists (Albert Naud, then Jean-Marc Théolleyre), singers (Julos Beaucarne, Claude Nougaro), lawyers (Robert Badinter) committed themselves to abolition.
Beginning in 1978 (within the year following the last execution, in September 1977), the fight abolitionist movement was led relentlessly in the National Assembly by the left-wing opposition, but also by part of the majority:deputies from the Rassemblement pour la République (RPR), in particular Pierre Bas, Philippe Séguin and Jacques Chirac, tried to obtain a parliamentary debate from the Keeper of the Seals, Alain Peyrefitte. The latter is personally attached to the maintenance of the death penalty:he sees in it the supreme weapon of deterrence in the fight against crime, while his companions affirm that there is no link between the death penalty and the evolution bloody crime.
While death sentences, almost non-existent between 1977 and 1980, increased sharply (ten between October 1980 and May 1981), the Socialist Party (PS) included in its program the abolition and François Mitterrand, candidate for the presidential election, recalled in March 1981 that he was "in conscience against the death penalty" and that he would not proceed, before the abolition of the law, with any execution.
The law of September 18, 1981
On the evening of François Mitterrand's election, everyone knows that the guillotine is over. Lawyer Robert Badinter, who has become Minister of Justice, proposes the abolition law to parliamentarians:“Tomorrow, thanks to you, French justice will no longer be justice that kills. Tomorrow, thanks to you, there will no longer be, to our common shame, furtive executions, at dawn, under the black canopy, in French prisons. Tomorrow, the bloody pages of our justice will be turned. »
On September 18, 1981, the National Assembly voted for abolition by 363 votes in favor and 117 against. The analysis of the ballot shows that 16 RPR deputies and 21 UDF approve the text, while 68 RPR and 38 UDF vote against; the left-wing deputies came out almost unanimously in favor of abolition. This law “ takes France out of this period which had banished it from the great civilized nations “, in the words of Raymond Forni, the rapporteur of the bill.
The last state in Western Europe to abolish the death penalty, three years after Spain, France confirmed its decision in 1984 by ratifying the European Convention on Human Rights, international treaty that formally excludes the use of the death penalty.
Guillotines have now become museum pieces. The two models formerly used in Fresnes prison are now in the reserves of the Carnavalet museum in Paris.
To go further
- History of the abolition of the death penalty, by Jean-Yves Le Naour. Perrin, 2011.
- Abolition, by Robert Badinter. Paperback, 2011.
- The Death Penalty:From Voltaire to Badinter. Flammarion, 2007.
- History of the death penalty. Executioners and torture (1500-1800), by Pascal Bastien. Threshold, 2011.