Liberal rationalism led in the early 1840s to an active debate in
the bourgeois public sphere about abolition of capital punishment.
Although new criminal law codes, such as the Prussian Criminal Code
of 1851, did not abolish the death penalty, the debate about
potential abolition caused sovereigns to exercise their powers of
clemency to commute sentences to life imprisonment out of
considerations of caution and fairness. In sharp contrast to
England, the death penalty ceased for property crimes that did not
involve homicide, and while legislatures debated new codes in
mid-century, executions ceased altogether. In Prussia, there were
no executions between 1868 and 1878, and abolition seemed imminent.
Bismarck's course change in 1878 renewed the death penalty in
Prussia. He made the execution of the would-be assassin Hoedel in
1878 part of his campaign to play upon the contradictions of
liberal convictions, to play their abolitionism off against their
fear of Social Democracy, to expose their elite rationalism to a
populist audience that favored the death penalty as just
retribution. Abolitionism and retentionism became fundamental
political positions, and the politics of the death penalty
reflected divergent theories of the state. The death penalty served
far more as an instrument of state policy that an aspect of penal
policy.
