In future times people will look back on the death penalty as a piece of barbarity just as we now look back on torture.' These confident words were spoken by a member of the 1848 Frankfurt Parliament, which voted amid cheers to abolish capital punishment, except in military law. By the spring of 1849 it had been ended in a score of German states, including Prussia. Like the liberty trees and torchlit processions that greeted the outbreak of revolution, ending capital punishment was a symbolic act. It was intended to mark the end of princely arbitrariness, show the state's respect for human life and provide the cornerstone to a new, higher morality.

LRB 17 July 1997 | PDF Download