It's been a long time (*cough*25 years*cough*) since I last did French-to-English translation like this; let's see if I still can...
News having been brought to Athens that some citizens had been condemned to death in the city of Argos, they ran into the temples, and prayed to the gods to turn the Athenians away from such cruel and deadly thoughts. I come to ask not the gods, but the legislators, who must be the organs and the interpreters of the eternal laws which Providence has dictated to men, to wipe from the French Legal Code the laws of blood which command judicial murders, and are repugnant to their customs and their new constitution. I want to prove to them, 1st that the death penalty is essentially unjust, 2nd that it is not the most effective of penalties, and that it multiplies crimes much more than it prevents them.
Outside civil society, should a fierce enemy come to attack me or, repelled twenty times, return again to ravage the fields that my hands have cultivated, since I can only oppose my individual strength to his own, it it necessary that I perish or that I kill him; and the natural law of self-defence justifies me and approves. But in society, when the force of all is armed against one alone, what principle of justice can authorise giving him death? What necessity can absolve them of it? A conqueror who puts to death his captive enemies is called barbarian! A grown man who cuts the throat of a child whom he could disarm and punish, seems a monster! An accused man whom society condemns is nothing more to them than a conquered and powerless enemy; he is before them weaker than a child before a grown man.
no subject
News having been brought to Athens that some citizens had been condemned to death in the city of Argos, they ran into the temples, and prayed to the gods to turn the Athenians away from such cruel and deadly thoughts. I come to ask not the gods, but the legislators, who must be the organs and the interpreters of the eternal laws which Providence has dictated to men, to wipe from the French Legal Code the laws of blood which command judicial murders, and are repugnant to their customs and their new constitution. I want to prove to them, 1st that the death penalty is essentially unjust, 2nd that it is not the most effective of penalties, and that it multiplies crimes much more than it prevents them.
Outside civil society, should a fierce enemy come to attack me or, repelled twenty times, return again to ravage the fields that my hands have cultivated, since I can only oppose my individual strength to his own, it it necessary that I perish or that I kill him; and the natural law of self-defence justifies me and approves. But in society, when the force of all is armed against one alone, what principle of justice can authorise giving him death? What necessity can absolve them of it? A conqueror who puts to death his captive enemies is called barbarian! A grown man who cuts the throat of a child whom he could disarm and punish, seems a monster! An accused man whom society condemns is nothing more to them than a conquered and powerless enemy; he is before them weaker than a child before a grown man.
[to be continued...]