From Spectacle to Silence: Capital Punishment, Social Complicity, and Unrestorative Justice in Victor Hugo’s The Last Day of a Condemned Man and Ballad of a White Cow

Abstract

This article offers a comparative analysis of Victor Hugo’s The Last Day of a Condemned Man and Behtash Sanaeeha and Maryam Moghaddam’s Ballad of a White Cow through the intersecting frameworks of capital punishment, social complicity, crowd psychology, patriarchy, and restorative justice. Although the two works emerge from different historical and cultural contexts, both expose capital punishment as more than a legal sanction. Hugo’s novel focuses on the condemned man’s final consciousness before execution, showing how the death sentence destroys time, subjectivity, familial bonds, and human dignity before the body is killed. Ballad of a White Cow, by contrast, shifts attention to the aftermath of execution: Babak has already been killed, his innocence is later discovered, and his widow Mina must confront not only the state’s bureaucratic compensation but also the social and patriarchal continuations of punishment. The article argues that the two works reveal complementary temporal structures of penal violence: “pre-execution destruction of consciousness” and “post-execution social punishment.” The first names the psychological and existential devastation produced before death; the second names the continuation of punishment in the lives of survivors. The article concludes that justice cannot be reduced to punishment. Genuine justice requires truth, recognition, accountability, and repair.