[Giovanna Clairval]

Here (not in short, alas!) the reflection your billet d'humeur --that is to say opinion piece--inspired me, Teresa.


In the Real World – Medieval violence in modern Justice and how it was banned.

Torture before a trial was commonplace up to the beginning of the 20th century in Europe.
A few years ago, I was working on my research at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and, because of a mistake in the filing system, I was given a pamphlet on torture, written by a jurist under Napoleon. I learned that medieval torture was still used in Switzerland on A.D. 1803.

A real story had me gaping. A judge had put a suspect to the question by using iron greaves. The man wore these special leggings a bit too long, and his shins were irremediably burnt. Later on, he was found to be innocent. In the following year, the victim, leaning on his crutches, would wait in front of the judge’s houseand would painstakingly follow him to the Hall of Justice. At the end of his day’s work, the judge would find the cripple waiting for him again. This went on for months. The man never said a word; the magistrate handed out his resignation.
Never had this modern Inquisitor incurred a disciplinary procedure. He had just been doing his job, if with too great a zeal.

The French jurist who wrote the pamphlet was echoing a debate that had been sparked by Italian jurist Cesare (Marquis of) Beccaria, who had published his Dei delitti e delle pene (On Crimes and on Punishments) in 1764, in which he put forth the first arguments ever made against the death penaty. The same short treatise advocated reform of the criminal law system.

Beccaria also suggested—for the first time—that criminal justice should conform to the rational principles of the Illuminism.

Michel Foucault in Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison (1975; Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 1977) explains how corporal punishment, especially when administrated publicly, was a symbolic substitute for the King’s personal retaliation after an offence.

“[Foucault] argues that the public spectacle of torture was a theatrical forum which served several intended and unintended purposes for society. The intended purposes were:

• Reflecting the violence of the original crime onto the convict's body for all to see.
• Enacting the revenge upon the convict's body which the sovereign seeks for having been injured by the crime. Foucault argues that the law was considered an extension of the sovereign's body, and so the revenge must take the form of harming the convict's body.

Some unintended consequences were:
· Providing a forum for the convict's body to become a locus of sympathy and admiration.
· Creating a site of conflict between the masses and the sovereign at the convict's body. Foucault notes that public executions often led to riots in support of the prisoner.
Thus, he argues, the public execution was ultimately an ineffective use of the body, qualified as non-economical. As well, it was applied non-uniformly and haphazardly. Hence, its political cost was too high. It was the antithesis of the more modern concerns of the state: order and generalization.” (Source: Wikipedia)
In this perspective, the humanisation of convict treatment is not the effect of a growing respect of the person advocated by the Century of the Lights; on the contrary, humanism would have gained permission to express itself because of the introduction of more effective punishment…

I will not comment on this. It is just a theme of reflection.

The second part: Violence in Fiction, in the following post.