Gallows Literature in the Colombian Nineteenth Century: The Restoration of Behaviors

Abstract

This article aims to approach the role that these writings maintained during the nineteenth century in the context of a rising republican regime and its judicial system from a methodology of documentary analysis focused on representative samples that originated in the public execution of those sentenced to death on the gallows. In the terminology proposed by Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink we have categorized them as "Gallows literature" which, in its varied range of forms such as court judgments or farewell letters, provided stories concerning the defendant sentenced to death and the rituals of execution conceived as mechanisms of the State that strengthened its capacity to exercise justice. The executive judgments showed a language that has allowed us to compare them with the moralizing message, whose purpose had to do with the restoration of the behaviors, the romances of Spanish crimes since the literary origin and intentions are similar.