Claude Guillon

Claude Guillon (born September 17, 1952 in Paris ) is a French writer, essayist and political activist.

Life

Guillon stood out in particular as a staunch advocate of the right to self-determined death. He achieved great fame in 1982 with his book Suicide, mode d'emploi: histoire, technique, actualité (published in German as instructions for suicide ), which was written together with Yves Bonniec and which sparked a heated social and political controversy on the subject in Mitterrand's France "Right to suicide" and euthanasia and became a bestseller with more than 100,000 copies sold .

As a political activist, Guillon attracted attention through numerous leaflets in which he attacked the military and capitalist economic structures. Guillon has also published literary texts, such as 42 reasons for women to avoid me (with illustrations by Edmond Baudoin ).

The "instructions for suicide"

Guillon's main work is the book Suicide, mode d'emploi: Histoire, technique, actualité . In this he propagates the right to suicide . Immediately after its publication in France in 1982, the book sparked a lively, sometimes bitter social debate about the legitimacy and illegitimacy of suicide as a human act and, in particular, about the acceptability or unjustifiability of suicide-willing information about the paths and possibilities, as easily and painlessly as possible on their own Making suicide a reality, making it accessible, out.

In Germany a translation of the work was published under the title Instructions for Suicide .

On the one hand, Guillon's book presents a cultural history of suicide by systematically describing the prevailing perspectives that have prevailed over the course of history in various societies, state systems, social milieus (e.g. penal systems, military, etc.), religious communities, legal systems, philosophical schools and theological directions on the phenomenon of suicide were taken.

In addition, the work contains in the appendix a guideline for the most successful possible implementation of a suicide. In this various practices for the realization of a suicide are listed and their sequence is described. In addition, these suicide methods are also evaluated for their chances of success, i. H. to indicate the chance there is that they will cause death. In doing so, information is also given as to how quickly or slowly, how painfully (or without pain), etc., certain suicide methods have shown (usually) to cause death according to experience. The findings of the work are based on information that Guillon obtained through questioning doctors, forensic pathologists and other experts, as well as through the evaluation of relevant specialist works. The effectiveness of the suicide methods outlined in the book was later u. a. confirmed by the Deutsches Ärzteblatt .

In France, after heated debates in parliament, in the media and in public, the book was finally banned after it was used as the occasion for an amendment to the killing laws passed in 1987 : Since then, a person has been “encouraged” or “prompted” to Suicide is a punishable offense in France. The goal desired by Parliament of preventing further distribution of the book was only achieved to a limited extent, as the book had meanwhile sold more than 100,000 copies in France alone and had already been translated into six other languages. After more than ten criminal proceedings had been brought against the work in addition to the parliamentary investigation into the matter, the sale, but not the possession or distribution of the instructions for use, was finally banned in 1991 .

In the Federal Republic of Germany, the work met with a mixed response: There was a great rush for the book, with many customers asking for delivery to their home address, as they feared being "looked wrong" when picked up in the bookstore. The publisher who edited the translation also received numerous letters of thanks in which he was thanked for this. The weekly newspaper Die Zeit noted with a view to the fact that many letters of thanks were in Sütterlin script, that these apparently came from old people who were relieved by the information made available to them by the book, as they were the wish they had cherished to escape a qualitatively severely impaired or agonizing existence (e.g. due to illness or loneliness) through death, in the most pleasant and painless way possible.

In 1983 the translation of the book was placed on the index by the Federal Examination Board for Writings Harmful to Young Persons . However, by a judgment of the Cologne Administrative Court on July 14, 1985, the ban was declared unlawful and lifted. The reasoning stated that the test center had "evaded an overall assessment of the book". Since then the book has been freely available.

In 2004 Guillon published a second book, in which he deals with the controversy surrounding himself and his book.

Results

In his work, Guillon takes the view that every person must be free to do anything with his own person and his own life that does not harm any other person, that it is nothing other than the good right of every person to himself to kill when he no longer wishes to live, and that it is therefore nothing more than a command of decency to provide a person who is fundamentally and permanently no longer interested in life with information and means of suicide. Guillon's opponents, however, accused him of the fact that his work irresponsibly animate people to suicide, as it raises this into their consciousness as a practicable possibility. In particular, the 10th chapter of the instructions for use, which describes which drugs, taken in which dosage, lead to quick and painless death, got into the crosshairs of critics - mainly from church and conservative circles.

In the form of a cross-sectional analysis of reports made by him by medical professionals as well as of medical, toxicological and forensic works dealing with the subject of suicide, Guillon also provided guideline values ​​for the lethal doses (LD) of drugs used at the time (in France) the relevant specialist studies together:

Works

• Claude Guillon et Yves le Bonniec: Suicide, mode d'emploi: histoire, technique, actualité . Alain Moreau, Paris 1982 (réimpr. 1987), ISBN 2852090007 . ( Digitized version )
  • Claude Guillon et Yves le Bonniec: Instructions for using suicide: a pamphlet for the right to a freely chosen death . Robinson, 1982. ( digitized version )
• Claude Guillon, Droit à la mort: Suicide, mode d'emploi, ses lecteurs et ses juges. Hors Commerce, Paris 2004, ISBN 2915286345 .
• Claude Guillon: Droit de réponse au texte de Marcela Iacub. In: Liberation, November 1, 2005

literature

• Frankfurter Rundschau of December 14, 1985

Web links

• Literature by and about Claude Guillon in the catalog of the German National Library
• Suicide. First aid . In: Der Spiegel . No. 46 , 1982, pp. 256-257 ( online - review of the suicide instructions).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Know how to die. Recipes for perfectly camouflaged suicide, in: Deutsches Ärzteblatt from October 7, 1983, volume 80 (1983), issue 40, p. 67f.
2. ^ "Scandal suicide", in: The time of December 3, 1982.
3. ↑ Suicide book released . In: Der Spiegel . No. 51 , 1985, pp. 151 ( online ). ; Suicide counselor , in: Frankfurter Rundschau of July 15, 1985.
4. ↑ Guillon: Suicide , éd. Alain Moreau, Paris 1982, chapter 10.