Death wishes

Georges Minois' exhaustive study traces the long, strange history of suicide.

By Daren Fonda

Feb 5, 1999 | 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.

The history of suicide, as one might expect, isn't pretty. But if you set aside the sad but essentially a historical fact of men and women taking their own lives -- usually because of unbearable misery -- this thread of history yields a surfeit of bizarre funeral rites, church- and state- sanctioned condemnation and a running soap opera of moral outrage. After reading the deranged details that Minois so carefully documents, it's tempting to see our own customs as enlightened compared to those of our ancestors. But if we consider some recent public spectacles of suicide-as-entertainment -- a police chase ending in a suspect's suicide caught by nightly news crews, "60 Minutes'" broadcast of Dr. Jack Kevorkian's helping a terminally ill patient into his good night, breathless newspaper reports of "suicide by cop," in which desperate men goad police into shooting them -- Minois' historical view reminds us that suicide is not simply an act of private will but an ever-evolving problem of social meaning.

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.

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