Execution, Sovereignty and Sacrifice: Balzac's Un épisode sous la Terreur and El Verdugo

This article analyses Balzac's representations of the figure of the executioner in two early short stories, Un épisode sous la Terreur and El Verdugo. It is argued that these representations pick up on Joseph de Maistre's (in)famous discussion of the figure of the executioner in Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg — as helpfully glossed by Roger Caillois in his 'Sociologie du bourreau', a lecture delivered to the Collège de Sociologie — and also Maistre's broader discourses of sovereignty and sacrifice. The article starts by investigating Balzac's possible engagement with Maistre's ideas, especially in Les Deux Rêves, a text that foregrounds the continuity between archaic and modern power (sovereignty). The article then goes on to trace our contemporary theoretical discourses of sovereignty and sacrifice back to their earlier sociological analogues, showing, in part after Owen Bradley, how these in turn relate to Maistre's attempts to rehabilitate the concepts of sovereignty and sacrifice in the wake of the Terror. The article next analyses Maistre's pen portrait of the executioner before turning to Balzac's own account of this figure in Un épisode sous la Terreur, as well as to the discourses of sovereignty and sacrifice circulating in what might otherwise appear to be his no more than frivolously frenetic representations of execution in El Verdugo.