Kill One Man and You Are a Murderer: Who Actually Said It
In Masculin Féminin, Jean-Pierre Léaud walks down a Paris street in 1966 and says that if you kill one man you are a murderer, kill millions and you are a conqueror, kill them all and you are a god. The girl beside him answers that she does not believe in God. Godard does not tell you where the line came from. He almost never did.
It is not his line. It is not Megadeth's either, though a great many people are certain that it is. The sentence has been rewritten roughly every eighty years for the last two and a half centuries, by men with nothing in common except that each of them arrived at the same piece of arithmetic.
The bishop got there first
In 1759 Beilby Porteus published a poem called Death. Buried in it are three lines that do the whole job. One murder made a villain, millions a hero. Princes were privileged to kill, and numbers sanctified the crime.
Porteus went on to become Bishop of Chester and then Bishop of London, and he was the first Anglican in a position of real authority to challenge the church on slavery. So the man who noticed that scale launders murder was also the man telling an empire that its most profitable crime was still a crime. He was not being clever. He was describing something he could see from where he stood.
The biologist rewrote it
In 1939 the French biologist Jean Rostand published Pensées d'un biologiste, a book of aphorisms. One of them reads: on tue un homme, on est un assassin. On tue des millions d'hommes, on est un conquérant. On les tue tous, on est un dieu.
The detail that gets lost in every English version is that word on. It is impersonal, closer to one or we than to you. Rostand is not pointing at the reader. He is describing a mechanism, the way you would describe a reaction in a flask. Translators reach for you because it lands harder, and in doing so they turn a cold observation into an accusation. The French is colder, and worse for it.
He published it in 1939. Whatever he thought he was describing, the next six years were about to demonstrate it at a scale he had not budgeted for.
Then the screen, then the amplifier
Chaplin took the Porteus version first. In Monsieur Verdoux in 1947 his serial-murderer protagonist defends himself with the line about one murder making a villain and millions a hero, which is a bishop from 1759 arriving in an American courtroom drama and getting Chaplin investigated for his trouble.
Godard took the Rostand version in 1966 and put it in the mouth of a young man walking down a street, unattributed, the way he handled most of what he borrowed. Megadeth took it again in 1992, on Captive Honour, where Dave Mustaine sings that when you kill a man you are a murderer, kill many and you are a conqueror, kill them all and you are a God. That is the version most people alive have actually heard, which is why the credit tends to stop there.
Where it ended up
Search the line today and the first page is quote aggregators copying each other, none of them naming Rostand or Porteus, and a Quora thread where the whole sentence is presented as a quotation from Adolf Hitler.
Sit with that for a second. A line written by an abolitionist bishop about how body count converts murderers into heroes, rewritten by a biologist on the eve of the war that proved it, is now circulating under the name of the man it describes.
Why it ends up on a shirt
The Masculin Féminin tee takes the Godard version, three stills down the chest, one line of the escalation on each, drawn in charcoal and left without explanation. That is the correct treatment. The sentence has survived two and a half centuries precisely because nobody ever needed it explained.
Four men, two hundred and thirty-three years, one observation that none of them could improve on. It keeps getting rewritten because it keeps being true, and it keeps being misattributed because the people who quote it are usually more interested in the sentiment than the source.
Related: the rest of the catalogue, or the film shelf, including Inglourious Basterds and Nosferatu. It also sits well beside 12 Shirts for People Who Peaked in the Video Store.
More provenance of the same kind in 12 Shirts for People Who Finished the Book.
