ExecutedToday.com

Every entry on this blog is, of course, an ending of a sort.

But some endings are more final than others.

For centuries in the British Empire and its descendant countries, the hanging — and especially the public hanging — were the very image of the death penalty; its most characteristic venue at the corner of Hyde Park is still marked with a stone.

For many reasons, that model changed in the 19th and 20th centuries: gradually and unevenly, hangings moved behind prison walls or were replaced with (purportedly) more humane methods, even as capital punishment itself came under pressure.

For the remainder of the week, Executed Today remembers a few milestones in the changing landscape of hanging under English-inspired jurisprudence in the mid-20th century.

• The last hangings in England

• The last public hanging in America
• The last hanging in Scotland

Paris, 1794

It is Thermidor — Month of Heat — by that queer artifact of the times, the Revolutionary calendar, and in the blistering summer the guillotine rots its own scaffold.

It is the climax of that emblematic moment of the French Revolution, often wrongly standing to casual observation as synonymous with the entire revolution. Jarring indeed how brief the span of those pregnant, dangerous days, that upon the storming of the Bastille the guillotine had not yet been erected and from that traditional birthdate of the Revolution were eclipsed successively the Bourbon monarchy, the Constitutionalist Assembly, the Girondin liberals, Marat, Danton … culminating in the bloody hegemony of Robespierre and the fatal test between the Jacobins and their enemies.

By the spring and summer of 1794, Paris is delivered fully to Robespierre. “Terror,” he says, “is only justice prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct principle than a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing wants of the country.” A blip on the screen chronologically, this period seems endless to those who survive it, and it reverberates endlessly to those who succeed it.

For the next week, join Executed Today in 1794’s Month of Heat as day by day the Terror rages at its apex, inscrutably suffering citizens to live or die — until of a sudden it succumbs to its own rot.

• July 22 (4 Thermidor): The Noailles family
• July 23 (5 Thermidor): Alexandre de Beauharnais
• July 24 (6 Thermidor): Not Thomas Paine
• July 25 (7 Thermidor): Andre Chenier
• July 26 (8 Thermidor): Loizerolles and others for the “Conspiracy of the Prisons”
• July 27 (9 Thermidor): The last cart of the Terror, not including the Marquis de Sade
• July 28 (10 Thermidor): Maximilien Robespierre

The human body can be a hardy creature, resistant to the best-calculated plans to kill it … and the ignominy of scaffold work has seen many an amateurish headsman trod the boards.

Between the two, we reap a cornucopia of botched executions that practically seem more normal than the “successful” ones.

A few data points to that effect in these next four executions over four different centuries: no mere miscalculated drop from the scaffold, but horrifically grim pratfalls to mock the solemnity of the proceedings and leave egg on the executioner’s face.

Still, if you think that’s bad, you should see the other guy.

• July 12: William Fly

• July 13: Thomas Egan
• July 14: Horace Franklin Dunkins, Jr.
• July 15: James Scott, Duke of Monmouth

Capital punishment’s limitless literary potential has drawn the written word to it since time immemorial.

We touch through the condemned, a living creature poised on the threshold of death, that most universal and awful mystery of existence: small wonder that one of history’s most successful religions traces its foundation, its symbology, and its most sublime literature, to the execution of a Roman subject 2,000 years ago.

Conversely, the condition of a human being — even an infamous malefactor — helpless before the scaffold elicits the interest of the empathetic soul, awakens it to the compelling challenges of life.

What are justice, goodness, mercy?

What is an individual’s place (for an execution is an intrinsically social event) among his or her fellows?

Sophocles poses this question in Antigone; so does Stephen King in The Green Mile; between and beyond them lie unnumbered works both immortal and obscure, from every land and time and genre that if they have no other virtues at least concur upon one essential fact:

The death penalty makes for damned good drama.

Just as artists draw Calvary into their work, that work has drawn artists themselves unto Calvary — or the specter of the Calvary drawn artistry from seemingly modest men and women. “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully” as Dr. Johnson had it, and we might observe this oft-repeated pith was issued in the most urgent context: a petition for clemency for a condemned clergyman who hanged at Tyburn nevertheless.

These stories — the fictional and the factual, borderless at the plane of the eternal; the gesture of saying what must not be said either in mortifying defiance of one’s milieu or from the ironic safety of certain death — these stories are mileposts marking a timeless path: from the bosom of a community to expulsion, where the corporeal death (however awful and real) is for its witnesses the metaphor of isolation, the lot alike of great heroes, great villains … and great artists.

From March 4 - 11, in the longest themed set yet employed in these pages, Executed Today takes an incomplete tour through the annals of artistry and execution.

• Mar. 4: Thomas Usk
• Mar. 5: Ferrante Pallavicino
• Mar. 6: Jurgen Stroop
• Mar. 7: Perpetua
• Mar. 8: An Italian highwayman
• Mar. 9: Emanuel Ringelblum
• Mar. 10: Dante Alighieri condemned
• Mar. 11: Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry

The United Kingdom came out on the winning side of World War II, but its hold on its globe-spanning territorial dominions was irrevocably weakened. As its own imperial offspring, the United States, took up the hegemon’s place, British colonies started breaking free — and those social and political sunderings frequently brought violence.

The next two days’ executions were true calendar neighbors, merely hours apart in 1942, as an empire at the end of its run fought for its survival.

• Feb. 12: Avraham Stern
• Feb. 13: Patrick Stanley Vaughan Heenan

Simultaneous with — but in many senses outside — the Protestant Reformation sweeping continental Europe, England in the 16th and early 17th centuries shook with the day’s fatal upheaval.

If the transition from Catholicism proposed by Henry VIII appears theologically mild in retrospect, it wrought earth-shattering changes: desperate conflict between faiths in shifting dynastic alliances; the germ of a vast middle class seeded with confiscation of the Church’s enormous estates; the evolution of governmental forms — and political theory — to comport with a landscape of redistributed power.

Many thousands suffered the ultimate penalty in those days for reasons godly, venal, or a little of both. The next three dates frame the contest over a century’s time, the violent birth of modern England.

• Jan. 29: Not Thomas Howard
• Jan. 30: Charles I
• Jan. 31: Guy Fawkes

The elimination of public executions in America might have aimed at public decorum, but it certainly did not remove executions from the domain of spectacle.

Inevitably, death attracts attention.

Over hedge rows — outside prison walls — in pulpits, legislatures, and the rising din of the mass media — the spectacle took new forms.

The next three dates all capture American executions after the end of public hangings … and the new ways this now-secret punishment announced itself in the communities carrying it out.

• Jan. 15: Sue Logue, George Logue and Clarence Bagwell
• Jan. 16: Albert Fish
• Jan. 17: Gary Gilmore

Inherited from England, the ceremony and theater of public hangings in the youthful United States and its antecedent colonies present an almost impossibly dramatic variety for characters, costumes and stagecraft. The ritual has — at least in the U.S.A. — slipped out of time into history, myth, even kitsch.

How representative of public hangings are any of the phenomenon’s instantly recognizable tropes remains another matter.

The next four dates offer a handful that alongside their inherent interest suggest — if only by illustration — the diverse circumstances that have gathered men and women under the gallows in the New World.

• Dec. 26: 38 Sioux
• Dec. 27: Penelope Kenny and Sarah Simpson
• Dec. 28: Levi Kelley
• Dec. 29: John Murphy

Our third Themed Set installment.

During the last century B.C.E., Rome was convulsed by civil wars. When the flames subsided, the Roman Empire had been born out of the ashes of the Republic — though the powerless forms of the latter were diligently preserved by the emperors.

The three executions remembered next all took place during — and as consequence of — this epochal struggle for power.

• Dec. 5: Publius Cornelius Lentulus
• Dec. 6: Arsinoe IV
• Dec. 7: Cicero

The entries of today and tomorrow will hardly be the last women, the last anti-fascists, or the last women anti-fascists to grace these pages.

But this small themed set offers a complementary couplet of resistance: women of almost diametrically opposed circumstances who in vastly different ways opposed fascism at the risk (and ultimately, the forfeit) of their lives.

• Nov. 29: Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya
• Nov. 30: Lilo Gloeden, Erich Gloeden and Elisabeth Kuznitzky