General History of Civilisation in Europe, From the Fall of the Roman Empire Till the French Revolution. A Treatise on Death Punishments.

Considered generally, and in its moral efficacy, capital punishment, like all other punishments, has a double effect--inspiring aversion to crime, and fear of chastisement. The...

I know that the prejudiced will here rouse themselves to repel me, and I know what they will say. They pretend that everything is foreseen and absolute in the execution of crimi...

The efficacy of punishments is either physical, or moral, or both. It is physical by the impotence to which it reduces the guilty, and moral by the example it offers. The physic...

Need I say that if there were a justice anterior and superior to legal justice, there would be no legal justice. Montesquieu has made this principal truth the principal idea of...

I meet here with prejudices of another kind, as unreasonable in my opinion, but more respectable, inasmuch as they are probably more disinterested and sincere. Some persons supp...

I might dispense with this part of the question. If capital punishment is of little efficacy, and I think I have proved the fact, how can it be necessary? However, I will glance...

What power seeks in the employment of capital punishment is security. I have shown that this it does not find; but that it often finds what it does not seek, and what it should...

It may be asked, perhaps, what I hope from this work? I do not hope, I admit, that governments will be convinced of the inutility of capital punishment, still less that they wil...

I shall say but one word of external matters. The Restoration found war in France, and France, like Europe, weary of war. This was both for France and Europe a pledge of peace....

It is not a philosophical question of which I wish to treat, neither do I solicit a change in legislation. This is not a time at once calm and active enough for the principles a...

Before concluding, I have read again that treatise in which it is said we may discover the deepest and most odious secrets of tyranny--the treatise of _The Prince_; and I have f...

Is there any one who does not demand the legal abolition of capital punishment as a political engine? I think there is, and I have contracted the obligation of proving the fact....