Used book – The Last Day of a Condemned Man - Claude Gueux - The Tapner Affair, Victor Hugo, Guy Rosa, Robert Badinter

"Victor Hugo wrote admirable poems, he wrote admirable novels and admirable plays; but, for us, his capital work - when the executioner has been driven out - will have been to have helped drive out the executioner.

"There is something greater than a great poet or a great novelist, it is a sage. There is something more beautiful, more enviable than imagination, it is the heart."

This was at a time when Joseph de Maistre saw the death penalty as the keystone of the social edifice. But Pierre Larousse was right to congratulate himself on the effectiveness of this strange book. Hugo reinvents his art to serve the noblest of causes. Who is this condemned man? What crime did he commit? We will not know. By hand, by pen, it is enough that he leads us towards his immediate future. How can one think of man when man decides on the death of man?

edited by Guy Rosa.