The Headsman

by James Fenimore Cooper Book 3 in the European Trilogy series.

First published 1833

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2.7(17)

Travellers crossing the Alpine and Swiss world are brought together by danger, mistaken identity and a murder whose consequences extend to the shores of Lake Geneva. At the centre of the novel is Balthazar, the hereditary headsman of Bern, whose office makes him necessary to the legal order while condemning his family to social exclusion.

Cooper links the investigation to questions of birth, honour and inherited status, particularly through the effect of Balthazar’s profession on his children and on relationships that cross class boundaries. The festival of the Abbaye des Vignerons at Vevey provides a public spectacle of communal harmony against which the novel tests how far an apparently free society will tolerate people marked by occupation and ancestry.