the execution and its message ny execution, especially a public one, had or has one message or several. Although much of the focus here will be on those constructing Aand sending messages, primarily the church, the state, and the condemned, the receivers of their messages should not be forgotten. Annulla Linders focuses on the public when she writes ”it is through the eyes of the audience that the execution event, and by extension capital punishment itself, is evaluated and judged.”106 The execution was not only enacted by the executioner, officials, and clergy. It was rather often a familiar scene for the attending crowds which also could act. Johann Heinrich Knauth, one of the attending clergy, disapprovingly reported applause and shouts of ’Bravo’ when the head of Johann Gottlieb Lehmann had fallen at an execution in Saxony in 1825.107 The action of the crowd at an execution in mid–nineteenth–century France has been described as playing games and dancing while they waited, and at another execution there were shouts that the wagon that had transported the condemned must be moved as it was blocking their view of the execution.108 Game is indeed a relevant word. Executions could be re-enacted in the games of children. When such a re-enactment in Bavaria in 1780 ended with the condemned being fatally wounded, the other two roles having been executioner and ”Galgenpater”.109 It was probably significant for the understanding many shared about who were the important persons on the scaffold. Aubry de la Motraye describes how the same three main characters were active when some Swedish children around 1690 played executions and the executioner successfully decapitated the condemned. Because of his youth, the court would not sentence him to any other punlonging for the scaffold 106 Linders 2002 p 644. 107 Knauth 1825a p 47. 108 Laget-Valdeson 1863 p 9. 109 Münchener-Intelligenzblatt no 36 (28 July) 1780 p 348 ’priest following the condemned’. 54
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