Title: The Last Day of a Condemned Man - Followed by Claude Gueux and the Tapner Affair - Victor Hugo - book
Summary :
"V. Hugo wrote admirable poems, he wrote admirable novels and admirable dramas; but, for us, his capital work - when the executioner has been chased away - will be to have helped to chase the executioner away.
"There is something greater than a great poet or a great novelist, and that is a wise man. There is something more beautiful, more enviable than imagination, and that 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 he, this condemned man? What crime has he committed? We will never know. With his hand, with his pen, he simply has to lead us towards his immediate future. How can we think about man when man decides on the death of man?
