French Literature Reviews - 2026

È. Morisi, Capital Letters: Hugo, Baudelaire, Camus and the Death Penalty
Other Literary Studies

Ève Morisi,

Capital Letters: Hugo, Baudelaire, Camus and the Death Penalty,

Northwestern University Press, collection "Flashpoints", 2020,

280 p.— EAN13 : 9780810141513.

Capital Letters sheds new light on how literature has addressed society’s most violent legal institution: the death penalty. It investigates this question through the works of 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 on both the modern death penalty and the ends and means of literature after the French Revolution. Through close textual analysis, careful contextualization, and the critique of violence forged by Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, and René Girard, Morisi reveals that, despite their differences, Hugo, Baudelaire, and Camus converge in questioning France’s 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. Capital Letters shows that the key modern debate on the political and moral responsibility—or autonomy—of literature crystallizes around the death penalty. By inflecting traditional modes of representation and writing self-reflexively or self-critically, Hugo, Baudelaire, and Camus unsettle the commonly accepted divide between strictly aesthetic and politically committed writing. Form, rather than overtly political argument, at once conveys an ethical critique of justice and reflects on the possibilities and duties of literature.

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The debate over capital punishment has long occupied a central place in the French literary tradition, often serving as a catalyst for inquiries into the nature of justice and the state. Capital Letters examines the works of Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, and Albert Camus, situating these authors within a historical trajectory that questions the humanitarian justifications for state-sanctioned violence. The analysis draws upon theoretical frameworks by Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, and René Girard to explore how the legal apparatus of the death penalty intersects with the evolution of modern French aesthetics and the ethical responsibilities of the writer.

This investigation highlights how the tension between political commitment and aesthetic autonomy is mediated through the formal choices made by these three writers. By moving beyond a simple dichotomy between art and activism, the work illustrates how literary form can function as a critique of legal violence. The discussion centers on the ways in which these authors reflect on the limits and possibilities of their craft when confronted with the reality of capital justice. Readers interested in the history of French literature and the philosophical critique of state violence may find this analysis relevant.