The postmark is military, and it seems perhaps to be a trophy photograph taken when Senegalese tirailleurs had their sanguinary revenge on the Rifi bands who had bested them at the battle of Ehri in A very nasty picture. But what is more extraordinary than the subject is that the sender — a young French officer writing to his mother, or aunt — writes nothing at all about the picture on his card.
No, he seems to be saying with his photo, we do the real stuff. So whenever it was that this card was sent to Madame Robin, the sight of a line of severed heads was so unexceptional as to need no comment. It was interesting, but mundane enough to be turned into a postcard suitable for mothers and aunts, and to be put proudly on a mantelpiece in Bourges.
The picture came to mind when I read last week that in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo massacre Marine Le Pen had called for the return of the death penalty in France — the death penalty for Muslims, of course, though she was too circumspect to put it quite like that. It is still not a very distant memory. The last public execution in France took place outside the prison at Versailles in , and the fact that it was both photographed and filmed, and that those pictures were widely published, led to the more discreet prison-yard execution of future decapitees.
The last was a Tunisian called Hamide Djandoubi, found guilty of a spectacularly nasty murder, and then judicially decapitated, in The French penal system is an instrument disproportionately geared to processing Muslims. The total population of France is 66 million, the Muslim population perhaps 5 million, or about 7.
It would be a very unfortunate and unattractive symmetry. Severed , written by a British anthropologist called Frances Larson, explores the polyvalent significance of the human head when it is separated from the body. What is very clear and scarcely surprising is that the human head is a part of the body endowed with a very special significance; and its removal is a highly symbolic act.
