France and the United States share a very ambiguous relationship with capital punishment. Hiding the Guillotine examines the question of State involvement in violence by tracing the evolution of public executions in France, where its very existence and modalities were never really explained to the population. The death penalty is an old chastisement: while important enough to remain in the punitive arsenal, it remains quite obscure today, almost as if pedagogical work on it takes the risk of highlighting and dismissing it. The question of the death penalty often crystallizes on the stake of its abolition or its retention, and the “debate” turns always around the same arguments, which, for some, have been disputed for two centuries ago…