Nobody kills: Constance Debré

Instead of a literature on the death penalty

Constance Debrés Text Protocols It begins immediately with a bureaucratic notice: “Vous avez été condamné à mort” (“You have been sentenced to death”). This address forces the reader into either the position of the condemned person or that of a passive witness, informed of the rules for the next 35 days. There is no introduction, no description of the crime, and no moral justification—only the bare legal fact. The opening pages meticulously detail the rules of surveillance (“Death Watch”). The material restriction is particularly striking: the condemned person may only possess items that fit into 30-centimeter cubes. This extreme spatial and material confinement demonstrates the power of the protocol, which reduces the individual to an object to be managed. The lights remain on constantly, surveillance is total; life becomes a mere preparation for its technical termination. The subject's autonomy exists here only in the choice to submit to total subjugation to the protocol and to remain on the “surface” of reality.

The modern treatment of the death penalty in French literature would be unthinkable without Victor Hugo and his seminal work. Le Dernier Jour d'un condamné (1829) inconceivable. Hugo revolutionized the genre by portraying the condemned man not as a criminal with a specific story, but as a nameless subject suffering vicariously for all humanity. His intention was to compose a "plaidoirie générale et permanente" (general and permanent plea) for all present and future defendants. The condemned man's diary serves as a medium of self-affirmation in a space where time shrinks to the moment of execution. Hugo deliberately employs registers of pathos and lyricism to provoke an emotional response in the reader, making them an ally in the fight against the scaffold. In doing so, he contrasts the organic vitality of consciousness with the mechanical coldness of the guillotine, which he depicts in Notre-Dame de Paris and Les Misérables as an almost mythical monster.

In his political speeches, such as before the Constituent Assembly on September 15, 1848, Hugo transferred this literary poetics to the parliamentary arena. He defined the death penalty as the "eternal sign of barbarism" and demanded its complete abolition as a necessary step toward civilization. The connection between his poetics and his political conviction lies in the sacralization of human life: since life is given by God, the state has no right to dispose of it.

Albert Camus dissects in the Reflections on the Guillotine (1957) ¹ The seemingly rational justifications for the death penalty – deterrence, exemplarity, societal self-defense – are moral fictions. Camus' Reflections on the Guillotine Camus combines a strictly rational argument with a deliberately employed, emotionally powerful narrative to logically refute the death penalty while simultaneously making its moral untenability sensually palpable. His starting point is not legal argumentation, but rather a physical manifestation of revulsion: the father's vomiting at an execution exposes state-sanctioned killing as an act that does not establish order, but rather doubles the crime. The death penalty rests on the presumption of absolute innocence on the part of judges and society; this very innocence is, for Camus, fundamentally unattainable. Where the state kills, it elevates its own violence to the norm and transforms law into legitimized murder. The guillotine appears to Camus as a cipher for an ideological modernity that renders death administrative and sacrifices humanity to abstraction.

Central to Camus's argument is the motif of irreversibility and the fiction of infallibility: because justice is necessarily fallible, every execution becomes a scandal that is, in principle, irreversible and undermines the very foundations of the legal order. These rational considerations, however, are not presented abstractly; they are framed narratively through concrete scenes and accounts of personal experience—for example, the description of execution as a mechanical, cold act or the recollection of the traumatic effect of an execution on Camus's father. The narrative generates the "evidence" of revulsion that purely legal language lacks, making it clear that the death penalty is not merely a normative problem, but an attack on fundamental human sensibilities. Stylistically, Camus employs clarity, laconicism, and moral dispassion; pathos does not arise from rhetorical exaggeration, but rather from the tension between objective argumentation and the inescapable cruelty of the depicted reality. Thus, the text intertwines logos and pathos into an ethical strategy of persuasion, in which reason demonstrates the untenability of the death penalty, while the narrative condensation makes its existential inhumanity tangible.

In light of the death penalty, Constance Debré argues, literature loses its hermeneutic, moral, and imaginative mediating function because the law itself establishes an unsurpassable reality that can neither be supplemented nor interpreted. Debré also refers to Camus when she states:

From this perspective, she invokes four paradigmatic authors, each of whom explored the relationship between guilt, judgment, punishment, and existential boundary experiences in their literature: Dante situates punishment cosmologically and theologically within a transcendent economy of justice; Dostoevsky radicalizes the proximity of death as an extreme psychological and moral experience for the subject; Camus exposes the death penalty as a metaphysically absurd act of state arrogance; and Kafka, finally, demonstrates the impenetrable, self-referential violence of the law, which entangles the individual in a culpable process without a transparent authority. The crux of the argument, however, lies in the fact that even these canonical literary explorations lose their validity in the face of actual legal killing: The law suspends the symbolic work of literature by making an irrevocable decision that can no longer be conveyed through narrative, rendering all poetic meaning-making obsolete.

Conversely, the obfuscation of individual guilt through the protocols is addressed as a central component of the state's killing machine. Moral responsibility is fragmented to such an extent through a radical division of labor and technical precautions that ultimately no single individual can be identified as a "murderer."

In a firing squad, individual guilt is minimized through deliberate anonymization and uncertainty about the lethal projectile: The shooters are positioned behind a wall approximately seven meters from the condemned. The rifle barrels are inserted through an opening in the wall, so the shooters are not visible to witnesses. Typically, five shooters are used. Of these, four rifles are loaded with live ammunition and one with a blank cartridge.charged with whiteHowever, since no one knows who received the blank cartridge, the psychological possibility remains open for each shooter that they did not fire the fatal shot.

Debré states it explicitly: "There is no executioner" ("Il n'y a pas de bourreau"). Instead, the execution is divided into a multitude of specialized groups: a Command Team, IV Team (for injection), a Maintenance Response Team (for the technical aspects) and many more. Since each team member only performs a small part of a predefined procedure and strictly follows rules, the act is decoupled from the person. Guilt is not obscured by denying the act, but rather by its technical and bureaucratic dissection until only an indifferent process remains.

The radical nature of writing: From "I" to "protocol"

The book's central motto, "Aux purs tout est pur" ("To the pure, all things are pure"), a quote from the Apostle Paul, sets the tone for Debré's aesthetic program. In conjunction with her earlier reflections in Offenses Does this suggest a "purity through absolute opposition"? If the world is perceived as corrupt and deceitful, the only purity lies in a radical retreat to the factual and in indifference towards moral judgments.

The concept of purity permeates the work as a central leitmotif, unfolding on different levels and increasingly deconstructed: Starting with Paul's motto, purity initially appears as a religious-ethical framework, but is then ironically exposed as a social pose within the context of "puritanical" US morality and subsequently reduced to a superficial, consumerist "clean" aesthetic (of a cigarette). At the same time, the text reveals the political and violent flip side of the concept in the description of a former Nazi officers' settlement as an "enclave of purity" ("une enclave de pureté"), before finally culminating in the vision of a "totally white place," a radical emptiness and numbness, so that purity ultimately appears as a complete emptying of thought, feeling, and moral discernment.

In their conceptual art project Last Words In *Dis Voir* (2015), the American poet and criminal defense lawyer Vanessa Place radically engages with the death penalty by recording the last words of all prisoners executed in the state of Texas since 1982 in her own voice. The project, which exists as both a book and an audio installation, refrains from any personal commentary or moral judgment of the crimes; instead, the official records of the Department of Justice are transposed verbatim into the realm of art. Through this appropriation of the perpetrators' voices—with silence represented by five seconds of stillness—Place confronts the audience directly with the human dimension of state-sanctioned killing and questions the role of language at the threshold of death, as well as the ethical position of the listener as a member of society.

Constance Debré occupies a unique position in contemporary French literature, characterized by a progressive radicalization of both her style and subject matter. With her work Protocols (2026) this development reaches a provisional climax by finally crossing the boundary from autofiction to clinical systems analysis. While its previous works Who Play boy and Love me tender still addressing the individual break from bourgeois identity templates, Protocols This represents a total desubjectification. Debré's literary path can be described as a "guide to radical liquidation." It began in Last Name Nor does it involve erasing one's own name, origin, and parental authority in order to design a "radical modernity" without inheritance; rather, their gaze turns to Protocols on the institutional annihilation of humanity. The radicalism here lies in the shift in perspective: The in Last Name The programmatic "I" gives way to... Protocols often a “you” that is directly involved in bureaucratic processes.

In Protocols The condemned are not portrayed as tragic heroes (as in existentialism) or moral subjects, but rather as objects of administrative and physical processes. The literary depiction consistently follows the cool poetics announced in the title, which translates human fate into technical data and procedural processes. The process begins 35 days before the execution with the so-called "Death Watch," staged as a form of ritual vigil. The condemned is transferred to a special cell where the light is permanently on and every movement is monitored around the clock. This surveillance does not serve to protect the individual; it ensures that the state can enforce its monopoly of violence on the day of execution. Suicide is considered an impermissible escape attempt that must be prevented through constant observation.

The identity of the condemned is reduced to a minimum of material possessions. Only items that fit into cubes with 30-centimeter edges are permitted. Debré illustrates this fragmentation of personality through detailed inventory lists in which personal letters and religious documents appear alongside hygiene items such as soap and toothpaste, which are immediately discarded after use. In one particularly poignant passage, a condemned person is defined after death by a list of their belongings, ranging from 22 audio cassettes to a single sock and a pair of nail clippers.

During the execution itself, the condemned man is consistently referred to as the "corps du sujet" (body of the subject). His humanity gives way to a purely physical consideration of physiological data, the preparation of his body, and its destruction: the condemned man's weight is used to calculate the drop height during hanging or the necessary voltage (2.640 volts) to break the body's resistance. He is shaved, coated with conductive gel, or forced to wear diapers to administratively manage bodily reactions during the agony (such as uncontrolled excretions). The texts describe the physical decomposition without empathy: bulging eyes, melting fat, burnt flesh, and smoke escaping the body.

A central aspect of the discussion is the failure of technology on the human body. Debré describes how a third of executions by lethal injection are considered "failed" or "unsatisfactory" because veins cannot be found or the chemicals cause the condemned to suffocate painfully without killing them immediately. In these moments, the condemned becomes the scene of a macabre medical dilemma: paramedics desperately try to establish intravenous access, while protocol requires a defibrillator to be readily available to resuscitate the condemned in case of a heart attack before the execution, so that they can be carried out properly.

Although those condemned are granted a "final statement," Debré addresses its interchangeability and meaninglessness. The last words—often standard phrases like "I love my family" or "Sorry"—are published on state websites and archived there along with the technical data of the execution. Ultimately, there is utter isolation: The condemned can only perceive the world and witnesses through a pane of glass, while the bureaucratic machinery ensures that, by dividing tasks among different teams, "no one kills," since everyone follows only a protocol.

Reflection on the law

In Protocols While legal reflections can certainly be found, these differ fundamentally in quality and thrust from those in OffensesThe law is in Protocols It has solidified into a total, clinical form that no longer allows for a meta-level (and no literature).

While in Offenses The portrayal of the courtroom as a stage for a “hysteria of speech” – an institutional din that struggles to drown out the silence of the crime – is in Protocols All speech falls silent. In Offenses Was the murder an attempt to "stop" something, but the system reacted with a ritualistic exploitation of the perpetrator? Protocols This stagnation has solidified into indifference. Law no longer appears as a site for discovering truth, but rather as an "empty form" and a "structure of subjugation." Debré, who herself worked as a lawyer, uses her insider knowledge to expose the law as a machine that reduces the subject to a body to be administered.

The law is described as a power that transforms gestures into fate. There is no longer any debate about justice or guilt; instead, it is stated that the protocol always remains the same, regardless of what it is applied to. According to the narrator, the rule has "no other cause or finality than itself"; it simply has to be fulfilled. Reflection here does not arise from introspective analysis, but rather from the naked confrontation with ritualized power and bureaucratic procedures. The law is understood as a "functioning normality" whose violence lies precisely in its rule-bound nature.

The narrator explicitly chooses to remain on the "surface" at the end, ceasing to reflect on good and evil. In a world that is a "sum of decisions" made by others, the law is accepted as an indifferent structure that suppresses questions. "Protocoles" contains no "theorizing" in the sense of an academic treatise, because the work presents the law itself as the ultimate and only remaining theory of reality. Legal reflection here is total submission to form, ultimately resulting in a "totally white place" where one feels and thinks nothing.

Interpretation of the title: “Protocoles” as an instrument of power

The title Protocols "Protocol" is a generic term. The protocol opens up a world that has been domesticated through total rule-following. It is a precise set of instructions that leaves no room for individual discretion or moral doubt. Debré shows that the law, in the form of these protocols, exercises a power akin to "fatum": "The rule has no other cause or finality than itself."

In the world of the novel, protocols serve to atomize responsibility. In the execution of the death penalty, there is no longer an individual agent, but only specialized teams – from the "Intravenous Team" to the "Witness Escort Team." The system is designed so that in the end "no one kills," since everyone involved merely follows a predefined procedure. The title thus refers to the anonymization of violence.

Constance Debré's work Protocols It employs formal mimicry by directly incorporating the bureaucratic structure of real execution guidelines into its literary framework. The text explicitly reflects this form and describes the documents as technical manuals.

According to the narrator, this process renders traditional literature obsolete, as the law offers a perfect surface devoid of any room for interpretation. The author acts almost exclusively as a copyist of an unrelenting logic: “I read the document, translated it, and copied it. There was nothing to omit. There was nothing to add.” (“J'ai lu j'ai traduit j'ai recopié le document. Il n'y avait rien à retrancher. Il n'y avait rien à ajouter.”) The book also reflects the timeline of an execution through a precise countdown that shrinks from 35 days to just a few hours. The focus is not on the dying itself, but rather on the pure execution: “L'essentiel est de suivre la procédure.” This procedure serves to distribute moral responsibility among specialized teams such as the “command team” or the “intravenous team.” Debré observes that in this structure the individual disappears: “We apply protocols, follow procedures, and adhere to rules. No one kills.” (“On applique des protocoles on suit des procédures on respecte des règles. Personne ne tue.”) The law thus transforms every human impulse into an administrative destiny. Here, the principle of absolute self-referentiality applies: “La règle n'a d'autre cause ni finalité qu'elle-même. Que de devoir être accomplie.” The work itself thus becomes a collection of facts and rules that, beyond their own execution, claim no further meaning or moral finality.

But the protocols can fail. Debré does not describe the death penalty as a moral problem, but rather as a challenge to bureaucratic organization. The descriptions of the methods of execution are presented with a technical precision that evokes physical discomfort in the reader, whether it be the electric chair, the gas chamber, or lethal injection. The author describes in detail the necessary voltage (2.640 volts) to break the body's resistance and depicts the gruesome physical consequences, such as melting body fat, bulging eyes, and the smell of burning flesh. Regarding the gas chamber, the use of Zyklon B and the agonizing hypoxia, in which the dying person's body is deformed by convulsions, are discussed. Debré exposes lethal injection as the supposedly "most humane" method by describing the medical ineptitude of those administering it and the use of unsuitable substances like midazolam, which lead to a sensation of drowning.

A central theme of the book is the discrepancy between the bureaucratic perfection of the protocols and their actual failures (“botched executions”). Debré shows that the technique often fails: veins are not found, chemicals do not work as intended, or the electric shock results in horrific smoke and fire on the condemned person's body. However, this failure is not seen as grounds for criticizing the system; it merely perpetuates the protocols. When an execution goes wrong, the protocol is “updated” or supplemented with new methods such as nitrogen hypoxia, which Debré describes as “horrific” for eyewitnesses. The system does not learn in a moral sense; it merely optimizes its procedures.

The image of the USA: A topography of decay

The narrator's relationship with her traveling companion ("elle") is characterized by physical closeness and emotional distance. The two spend a great deal of time driving through the American countryside in separate cars, interrupting their journey with banal stops at bars, restaurants, and small towns, and sharing everyday routines without truly merging—the narrator, for example, maintains her daily swim. Their closeness is paradoxical: they lie in bed together, yet adhere to a "puritanical" code that initially excludes sex, and their physicality can even take on ritualized violence ("Spank me"). The traveling companion appears as an aesthetically striking figure (red-haired, in Levi's, boots, sometimes wearing the narrator's shirt), but ultimately remains for the narrator an observed object rather than a trusted partner. In the end, the relationship remains as fragmentary as the narrator's perception of the world: in the final scene, she waits for the gray Ford, registers only her companion's new sunglasses, and professes the attitude "Je continue dans la surface."

In Constance Debrés Protocols The USA not only serves as a geographical setting, it forms the topographical extension of the execution protocols, in which the social coldness and total surveillance of the prisons seamlessly blend into everyday civilian life.

Although Donald Trump's name is not explicitly mentioned in the text, a situation is described that directly alludes to him and his legal battles. The narrator reports on a prestigious law firm that has just accepted the case to "defend the recently re-elected president in a matter involving money and a porn actress" ("défendre le président récemment réélu dans une affaire d'argent et d'actrice porno"). This mirrors the real-world media coverage of the hush money payments to Stormy Daniels.

In a moment of reflection on the power structures and secrets managed within large US law firms (such as Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs), the narrator recalls US history. She thinks of Eisenhower, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Kennedy assassination, and the subsequent Warren Commission. These names serve as markers for a US history marked by paranoia, conspiracies, and state secrets.

Elsewhere in the text, a party anecdote mentions the "daughter of a former president" who allegedly participated in group sex. Here, too, the president's name remains unmentioned, which fits the general atmosphere of rumor and the demystification of power figures in the society described. These references reinforce the impression of the USA as a backdrop of corruption and spectacle, where even the highest office in the land is entangled in legal protocols concerning sex and money. Thus, the image of the presidency fits seamlessly into the world described in the text, where morality is for sale and everything is regulated through legal or administrative procedures.

The American landscape is described as a succession of functional, soulless non-places that dictate the rhythm of the narrative. The narrator moves through a world of desert roads, mountain ranges, and wind farms, frequently stopping at 7-Elevens to buy coffee or peanuts. These places seem interchangeable and meaningless, a point underscored by the metaphor of the "death freeway"—a name given to the road by locals because of the numerous accidents, and one the narrator uses to orient herself in the nighttime emptiness.

A central symbol of this society's moral erosion is the recurring sign reading "We buy souls," often displayed alongside a phone number on posts next to banks or in parking lots. This motif reflects a world where human destiny and existence itself have become commodities in an "economy of dependency," where almost everyone lives off the money of others. The narrator describes this as a state where "the return is vague," highlighting the general meaninglessness and loss of a firm moral foundation.

The dystopian quality is particularly starkly evoked by the depiction of a "suicide epidemic" among young people. The text states that suicide is the leading cause of death among adolescents and that a third of them are already receiving medication for it. To combat this crisis, society relies on algorithmic control: schools install surveillance software such as GoGuardian, Gaggle, or Lightspeed on students' computers. These programs scan communications for keywords and, in cases of suspicion, trigger immediate police interventions, during which children are taken from class for questioning—a practice that extends the total surveillance of "Death Watch" into the civilian sphere.

The atmosphere in this setting is permeated by a constant anticipation of catastrophe. The narrator perceives a perpetual threat in the air, be it uncontrollable fires, violent winds that trigger migraines and violence, or the latent danger of earthquakes. This world appears as a place where everything is "provisional" and the balance can tip at any moment. There's a prevailing feeling that one "knows nothing" and could die at any time from a rampage, a drug overdose, or a sudden accident, yet people still manage to smile.

Ultimately, legal reflections on the law merge with this social reality. Just as prison protocol transforms every gesture into an impersonal fate, so too does life outside appear as a chain of administrative and technical processes that no longer possess any deeper meaning. In a world where "the rule has no other cause or finality than itself," the individual is left only with indifference or remaining on the surface while traveling through a landscape that already bears the hallmarks of a universal "hell."

The conclusion of Protocols This is to be understood as a definitive rejection of any form of transcendence or empathic resonance. The narrator returns to her everyday life, drives her car, drinks coffee, and observes:

This retreat to the "surface" is the logical consequence of the confrontation with the protocols. When the law transforms gestures into fate and obliterates all individuality, total indifference remains the only survival strategy. The "place where one feels nothing," a "totally white place," becomes the destination of the narrative movement. There is no purification, no judgment, only the continuation of order in a state of absolute emptiness.

Constance Debré's aesthetic coldness affects the reader like a "bucket of ice water," washing away any moral reassurance. By forgoing psychologizing and sympathizing, she denies the reader the cathartic relief that literature about crime often offers. This coldness makes the violence of the system visible beyond affective outrage. Readers are forced to see the law for what it is in Debré's work: a cold, functioning normality whose violence lies precisely in its rule-bound nature. The effect is a "precise disillusionment": the book leaves the reader in an atmosphere where silence is the only remaining form of autonomy.

Debré must certainly face the accusation of aestheticizing without moral imperative, a consequence of the narrator's consistently indifferent stance: she views supermax prisons like contemporary works of art, describes execution scenes primarily in terms of color, light, and composition, and empties concepts like guilt, innocence, victim, or executioner into "ridiculous superficial concepts." Resistance is, in her view, an illusion; within the system of protocol, there is neither struggle nor revolution, because the law transforms every action into an immutable one. Fatum transformed. Accordingly, she cultivates a program of radical indifference—no questions, no judgment, only a “yes” to the rule and the pursuit of a “totally white place” where neither death nor evil is contemplated. Since the law suspends any interpretation, she also declares morally or psychologically argumentative literature obsolete. Debré thus shapes the horror of the execution protocols into a “pure form” that confronts the reader with mere factuality and offers neither judgment nor a call to action—a legitimate criticism, because this strategy easily aestheticizes suffering and politically weakens it. Within the logic of Protocols However, this lack of a demand is not a deficit, but the logical consequence of a poetics that describes the law as a total, self-referential power against which there is no outside and therefore no effective protest.

This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.

Notes

1. Albert Camus, Reflections on the Guillotine (Paris: Gallimard Folioplus, 2008).>>>