Capital Ideas; Denis Diderot

I did not include a piece by the 18th Century French encyclopedist, Denis Diderot, in Capital Ideas: 150 Classic Writings About the Death Penalty from the Code of Hammurabi to Clarence Darrow. I wish I had. He wrote a short piece, "On the Inconsistency of Public Opinion," about the tribulations of Chevalier Desroches, who was made a pariah by the public for his blatant infidelity to his wife. It would serve Tiger Wood  -- and the journalists reporting on his current tribulations -- well to read it.

In the telling of the life story of Desroches, Diderot recounts this incident about an impending execution:

Desroches becomes a conseiller in Parlement as a very young man; fortune favors him, and he is soon admitted to the Grand' Chambre, his turn comes round as a judge-advocate in the criminal court, and on the strength of a judgment of his a wrongdoer is sentenced to the extreme penalty. It is a custom that on the day of execution those who pronounced the sentence should be present in the Hotel de Vile to receive the victim's last requests -- should he make any, as was the case here. It was winter, Desroches and his colleague were sitting by the fire when word came that the victim had arrived. He was brought in on a mattress, his body mangled by torture, but he managed to raise himself as he entered and, with eyes toward heaven, explained, "Almighty God, your judgments are just!" There he was, on his mattress, right at Desroches' feet. "So, Monsieur," he cried to Desroches in a loud voice, "You condemned me, and I am guilty of the crime I am accused of; yes, I confess it. All the same you know nothing, nothing at all . . ." And he went over the whole legal process step by step, showing, clear as daylight, that there had been no substance in the proofs and no justice in the sentence. Desroches, seized with a mortal trembling, gets to his feet, tears off his magistrate's robes, and renounces forever the perilous profession of pronouncing upon men's lives. And this is the man they call mad! A man with self-knowledge, a man afraid to defile the garb of cleric by loose morals or to find himself, one day, stained with an innocent man's blood. -- The truth is we didn't know all this. -- The truth is, if one doesn't know things, one should hold one's tongue. --

. . . Meanwhile, Desroches was in need of a career. So he bought a regiment. That is to say, he exchanged the profession of condemning his fellow men to death for the simpler one of just killing them.

This short extract is from This is Not a Story and Other Stories, translated by P.N. Furbank (Oxford University Press, 1991.) An excellent, surprising modern little book!