Death by Firing Squad
The background to Manet’s extraordinary series of paintings of the demise of a Mexican emperor.
Is it the ignominious end of traitors and spies or the honourable death accorded to those soldiers who deserve to die no other way? Saddam Hussein clearly saw it as the latter when he requested it for his execution while the SS during the Second World War evidently believed it to be the former, using firing squads to dispose of members of the French Resistance captured alive. Death by firing squad also provided the catalyst for a series of the most striking paintings of the nineteenth century, Edouard Manet’s ‘The Execution of Emperor Maximilian’.
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