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Introduction. Three writers and a punishment -- New abolitionist poetics: Hugo's Le dernier jour d'un condamn? -- The death penalty, from representation to expression -- Pain and punishment: the guillotine's torture -- Words that kill in Baudelaire -- Prose praising sacrifice: Hugo, Maistre, and beyond -- Poeticized slaughter? Execution in Les fleurs du mal -- Camus's capital fiction and literary responsibility -- Ad nauseam: Camus's narrative roads to abolitionism -- Poetic accountability: critical language and its limits -- Conclusion: Ink and the scaffold. "'Capital Letters' sheds new light on how literature has dealt with society's most violent legal institution, the death penalty. It investigates this question through three major French authors with markedly distinct political convictions and literary styles: Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, and Albert Camus. Working at the intersection of poetics, ethics, and law, Ève Morisi uncovers an unexpected transhistorical dialogue both on the modern death penalty and on the ends and means of post-Revolutionary literature. She offers close textual analysis and careful contextualization of the representations of state killing that these prominent writers crafted over two centuries during which the guillotine consistently fulfilled its function. Combined with concepts forged by critics of violence such as Agamben, Foucault, and Girard, this detailed examination reveals that, despite their differences, Hugo, Baudelaire, and Camus converge in questioning the humanitarian redefinition of capital punishment dating from the late eighteenth century. Conversely, capital justice leads all three writers to interrogate the functions, tools, and limits of their art"--Provided by publisher
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