The debate on suicide -- the right to kill oneself -- in the Enlightenment discourse was one of the ideological struggles that people fought to become free from the church's and the state's powers to monopolize the right to give _and take_ moral and physical lives (the same goes for the debate on abortion).
***** Death Wishes
Georges Minois' exhaustive study traces the long, strange history of suicide.
BY DAREN FONDA | It is Christmas Eve, 1773. France's ancien régime is nearly bankrupt. Social tensions are simmering. Voltaire has issued a battle cry against moral absolutism; Rousseau is demanding government that reflects the people's will. Against this backdrop two young soldiers take a room at a St. Denis inn. They order supper and retire early for the evening. The next morning they stroll about town and return to their room for lunch, dining on a brioche and some wine. Afterward, seated at their table, they perform a final act: They point their pistols into their mouths and shoot themselves.
As Georges Minois tells the story in his new book, "History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture," the deaths of Bourdeaux, 20, and Humain, 24, created an enormous buzz in Paris society. Their suicide note, released by the police, prompted reactions ranging from sympathy to stupor. "The curtain has been lowered for us," wrote Bourdeaux, the mastermind of the pact. "We have tried all pleasures, even those of obliging our fellows. Disgust with life is our only reason for quitting it."
What possessed these young soldiers to kill themselves? Undoubtedly, they were overwhelmed by the pressures of hiding their homosexuality. Had they been outed, they could have been executed for sodomy. But more significant to their final decision was that they accepted a logic of suicide: Because they could no longer endure a life that wasn't worth living, it made more sense to kill themselves. To the French authorities, such reasoned behavior was a radical assault against the fraying social contract between subject and ruler. The soldiers' bodies were punished accordingly: Their cadavers were dragged through the streets, pierced with stakes, hanged and burned. The state hoped such grisly spectacles (which, incidentally, were not unusual for suicides deemed of sound mind) would dissuade others considering taking their own lives. Bourdeaux and Humain, who had planned their deaths with methodical precision, had no chance of getting a Christian burial.Their ashes were scattered on a trash heap....
...Among Minois' most compelling ideas is that power will try to stop suicide in any context. "Whatever its nature," he writes, "power seeks to prevent and conceal suicide. The subject must dedicate his life to the king; the citizen must conserve his life for the homeland. Desertion is out of the question. The social contract requires everyone's participation in maintaining the state, which, in exchange, watches over everyone's well-being." It's an idea alive today through crisis-intervention centers, suicide hot lines and the analyst'scouch. But its roots, as Minois shows, go back to medieval Judeo-Christian ethics and European folklore. At least as far back as the Middle Ages, those who tried suicide and failed could expect prison terms or death sentences. Those who succeeded faced eternal damnation. The Christian church revived ancient traditions -- like the Greek rite of cutting off the cadaver's right hand so the ghost couldn't commit a crime. In England, the corpse would be banished from the community and buried at a crossroads, so the ghost couldn't find its way home. The family might pay a fine to cover the cost of an inquest. As far as the church was concerned, suicide was the devil's work, the deadliest of sins for which a miserable afterlife was guaranteed. Dante's Inferno described the consequences: Suicides were banished to the seventh circle of hell, below the burning heretics and murderers; transformed into trees, their punishment was to stand immobile while Harpies tormented them by picking at their leaves.
Minois traces the church's harsh position to St. Augustine, who condemned suicide in the fifth century to stop the thousands of zealous Christians who sought martyrdom by killing themselves. Borrowing arguments from Plato, Pythagoras and Aristotle, Augustine blasted suicide as a violation of the Sixth Commandment, declaring that self-murderers usurped God, "natural law" and the state. The Council of Orlean enforced his doctrine in 533, denying funeral rites to suicides awaiting trial for a crime. In 693, the Council of Toledo ordained excommunication for anyone attempting it. The crown got in on the act too, penalizing suicides with a host of civil penalties including confiscation of their estates. Theoretically, only a coroner's verdict of "not guilty by reason of insanity" could spare a suicide victim's family from forfeiture. In practice, a double standard was often at work: Aristocratic suicides tended to be judged insane and awarded a Christian burial; peasants, serfs and merchants provided steady income for the king's treasury.
Of course none of these penalties prevented ordinary folk from killing themselves for familiar grievances: financial ruin, terminal disease, unrequited love. Causality is tricky with suicide; each case carries somedegree of mystery. A clearer portrait emerges, Minois suggests, from studying statistics that show that suicide claimed victims regardless of class, nationality or religious affiliation. Moreover, such historical analysis often disproves the prevailing myths. For example, the notion that suicide was an "English malady" caused by too much rich food and lousy weather was bunk, according to Minois, and had more to do with the fact that English newspapers reported the details of suicides more frequently than those on the Continent.
A century after Shakespeare broke open the medieval taboo on even discussing it (there are some 52 instances of "self-slaughter" in his plays), suicide began to achieve a renaissance throughout Western Europe. The church's declining hold on moral authority, coupled with modernism's evil twins -- secularism and free-market capitalism -- produced a climate for it to flourish.
One of the first signs of a growing acceptance of suicide appeared in 1770, when a young Lyons fencing master named Faldoni was informed by his doctor that he was about to die. His lover Therese swore not to live without him; so they holed up in a chapel, bound their left arms with a cord attached to their pistols' triggers, and waited for the slightest movement to set off the guns. The press wrote about them affectionately and the episode inspired Rousseau to characterize the growing ambivalence about suicide -- a kind of guilty infatuation -- seeping into English and French society. "Simple piety sees nothing but a crime in it," he remarked, "sentiment admires, and reason keeps silent."
Like the two young soldiers of Paris, Faldoni and Therese struck a nerve. They were seen as tragic figures in the heaviest Romantic sense. People were outraged at the financial penalties levied against their families, and their lives inspired a novel and a play. What apparently captured the public's fancy was the idea that their suicide was somehow acceptable, a reasoned response to an impossible situation. Afterward, Minois reports, suicide fantasies increasingly began filtering from literature into reality. Within a decade, Goethe's Young Werther would kill himself out of unrequited love for a married woman, spawning a slew of imitators and setting a new standard for Gothic despair. It was an age, Minois tells us, when destitute poet Thomas Chatterton would swallow arsenic at 17 in a squalid London rooming house -- instantly acquiring mythic status to the young and depressed. Soon after, Shelley, Keats and Byron would mythologize melancholia in poetry, forging an unbroken link between the artist's life and work....
<http://www.salon.com/it/feature/1999/02/05feature.html> & <http://www.salon.com/it/feature/1999/02/05feature2.html> ***** -- Yoshie
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