The story is totally written in the first person, of a man condemned to the scafold, never the reader being told about who was the man and which crime did he commit. As the days passes, the end approaches and we begin to feel ourselves in that man's skin, suffering with him, groping for some way out of his whole misery. I suppose this is a book which must have caused a lot of controversy and anguish at the time of its first publication, but I am afraid that the impact is not the same today, with a lot of books and films showing the same theme, only changing the dreaded guillotine for the terrible electric chair. The book is a libel against the death penalty, something Victor Hugo did not manage to achieve in his lifetime.

After reading Les Miserables I bought The Last Day of a Condemned Man, I was not expecting an masterpiece like Les Miserables and, because of that, I had such a great surprise, it's a short book but with an energetic message, it shows the horrors of the condemned, the psycological efects in his person when hes own daughter do not recognize him, everiday expecting only death, and with feeling, truth and talent, Victor Hugo show us why the penalty of death is horrendous to anyone.

I originally read the French version of this book, with a preface (which is probably in the English translation, no doubt) that is an essay of the reasons to abolish the death penalty. Abolishing "la peine de mort" was the point of this book, published in 1830, a year before Hugo published Notre-Dame de Paris (a.k.a. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame); Hugo was 27. The essay logically spells out why the death penalty should be abolished; the actual narrative of the story - a journal that the main character keeps of his every thought and feeling in the six weeks from his sentencing to the moment before he is taken to the Place de Greve to be guillotined - moves the reader emotionally. What was relevant in France in the 18th cent. is relevant in the U.S. today.