The Catalan essayist and poet Gabriel Alomar i Villalonga (1873-1941) was, like many leftist political thinkers, passionately opposed to the death penalty, whose use was still widespread in the western Europe of the early 20^th century.  Throughout his essays, mostly published as newspaper columns, he condemns all instances of the death penalty as judicial murder, arguing that its use produces morally noxious effects on all individuals, whether on the executioner himself or on the member of society in whose name the punishment is exercised.  Alomar illustrates this moral decay by means of an extended civic metaphor, casting the death penalty as a barbaric irruption into a metaphorical City, the image of the difference between civilization and a Hobbesian war of each against all.  In this paper, I analyze how this metaphor is deployed in the collection of essays La pena de mort, published as one volume in Barcelona in 1912, and the wider ramifications of Alomar’s understanding of the transformation in penology of rhetorical policy into real and harmful State actions upon the bodies of human persons.