Execution in Paris (1857)

On 6 April 1857 (OS: 25 March), during his first journey abroad, Tolstoy watched a man put to death by guillotine in Paris. The PSS commentary to A Confession dates it and says only that the man executed was a murderer.¹ The name of the condemned man is NEEDS PRIMARY SOURCE.

What A Confession says

In chapter III, the execution is the first of two cases where, against the faith in progress he lived by in those years, “not by reason but by instinct” he revolted: “during my stay in Paris, the sight of an execution revealed to me the instability of my superstitious belief in progress.”² It goes on: “When I saw the head part from the body and how they thumped separately into the box, I understood, not with my mind but with my whole being, that no theory of the reasonableness of our present progress could justify this deed; and that though everybody from the creation of the world had held it to be necessary, on whatever theory, I knew it to be unnecessary and bad; and therefore the arbiter of what is good and evil is not what people say and do, nor is it progress, but it is my heart and I.”³

The second case, in the same paragraph, is the slow death of his brother (Nikolai Nikolaevich, d. 1860).⁴ Both are called “rare instances of doubt”: he went on living by the faith in progress all the same.

The diary entry

The commentary quotes the diary for that day: “Ill, got up at 7 and went to see the execution. A thick, white, healthy neck and chest. He kissed the Gospel, and then — death; what senselessness! — A strong impression, and not one that passed for nothing. I am not a political man. Morality and art. I know, love and can… The guillotine kept me from sleep for a long time and made me keep looking round.”⁵

The same note points to two other places he wrote about it: a letter to V. P. Botkin the same day (PSS 60:167–169) and chapter II of What Then Must We Do? (PSS 25:190). Neither is in this dive’s extracts.

How it entered the book

The episode is not in the earliest surviving redaction, which lacks both the Paris execution and the brother’s death. On a later full copy (manuscript 3 in the commentary’s list) a margin plan-note reads: “At that time, the guillotine. Something gave a jolt, but I found nothing and went on living the old way, only began to search among the mass of the people.”⁶ The passage itself first appears in the first author’s proof, together with the brother’s death.⁷

An earlier wording printed among the variants shares the first half of the final sentence but draws a different conclusion. Where the final text makes the judge “my heart and I”, the draft says he understood “that people had done a terrible deed with no excuse, and that I was a participant in it, if only in not having done all I could to prevent it”.⁸ The draft also has people hiding from themselves “the absence of any faith” where the final text has “their lack of understanding of life”.⁹ Our reading: the draft makes the point one of his own complicity; the final text makes it one of where moral judgment comes from.

Open questions

• The condemned man’s name and crime (NEEDS PRIMARY SOURCE).
• The Botkin letter (PSS 60:167–169) and What Then Must We Do? ch. II (PSS 25:190) are not yet extracted; they would show how he told the event at the time and again in 1884–85.
• Which manuscript the draft wording comes from: the variant numbering in our extract does not match the numbering in the commentary’s manuscript list, so it is left unassigned here.

Dive provenance

• 1879-1882-a-confession — ch. III final text, PSS commentary notes 13–14 and manuscript list, and the ch. III variant. Asked for in Johan’s reader annotations (III.2, “the Paris stay”), 2026-10-01.