The Last Day of a Condemned Man by Victor Hugo

Dead man talking

Victor Hugo’s third novel, The Last Day of a Condemned Man, was published in 1829. By that time, Hugo had already established a reputation as one of the world’s great poets. He had previously published two novels that were not received with earth-shattering acclaim, Hans of Iceland and Bug-Jargal. With The Last Day of a Condemned Man, however, Hugo proved himself not just a fine poet but also a formidable writer of prose fiction.

Hugo wrote The Last Day of a Condemned as a literary argument against capital punishment. In particular, he speaks out against the brutality of the guillotine, the prevalent means of execution in France at the time. The novel is presented as a series of “papers” left behind by a death row inmate. In these writings, the unnamed prisoner narrates in the first person the story of his trial and incarceration and notes down for posterity the thoughts and feelings he experiences as he contemplates his impending death.

Hugo is known as the leading figure in the Romantic school of literature. This novel is an example of Romanticism in that it focuses on the interior turmoil of the lead character. Its description of the penal system and process of execution, however, is realistic to France at this time in history, and the plot is blunt and straightforward. Though Hugo is known for epic novels like The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Les Misérables, and Ninety-Three, The Last Day of a Condemned Man is a brief and intimate work that opts for a deep psychological portrait of its principle character, a common man in a cruel and unusual situation.

Hugo’s intention is to bring the horror of the death row experience to his readers, so that they recoil at the reality of capital punishment. In order to do so, however, he must make his protagonist somewhat sympathetic to his audience. By identifying with the condemned prisoner, readers can view his plight with a “There but for the grace of God go I,” attitude. Hugo makes the prisoner such an everyman, however, that the reader ends up knowing very little about him. He has a daughter whom he loves, and a wife who doesn’t seem to care much about him. The nature of the prisoner’s crime is never revealed to the reader, which is not the wisest choice on Hugo’s part. The lack of specificity to the prisoner’s story sometimes veers the narrative into the realm of a generic sob story. One can only assume that the narrator has been condemned for a seriously heinous act, probably a murder, in order to merit the death penalty. This vagueness hinders one’s ability to feel for the prisoner. Nevertheless, Hugo succeeds in illustrating the inhumanities of the prison system and the disgusting barbarity of public beheadings by guillotine.

While on death row, the prisoner meets a fellow inmate whose life of crime began with the theft of a loaf of bread. This immediately calls to mind Jean Valjean, the hero of Les Misérables. The Last Day of a Condemned Man also reads like a prototype of later existential psychological novels of crime and punishment like, literally, Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, or Albert Camus’s The Stranger. In terms of literary importance and sheer impressiveness of narrative, The Last Day of a Condemned Man may not quite measure up to Les Misérables or Notre-Dame de Paris, but it is nevertheless a powerful work by one of world literature’s all-time greats.
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