Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Penguin Social Sciences)

by Michel Foucault

The function of the public torture and execution was to reveal the truth; and in this respect it continued, in the public eye, the work of the judicial torture conducted in private. It added to the conviction the signature of the convicted man. A successful public execution justified justice, in that it published the truth of the crime in the very body of the man to be executed.

In the old system, the body of the condemned man became the king’s property, on which the sovereign left his mark and brought down the effects of his power. Now he will be rather the property of society, the object of a collective and useful appropriation. This explains why the reformers almost always proposed public works as one of the best possible penalties; in this, they were supported by the Cahiers de doléances: ‘Let those condemned to penalties short of death be put to the public works of the country for a time proportionate to their crime.’

‘It is no part of our morality to treat men in this way; one must avoid providing in the towns that the convoy passes through so hideous a spectacle, which, in any case, teaches the population nothing’ (Gazette des tribuneaux, 19 July 1836). It was necessary, therefore, to break with these public rites; to subject the movements of convicts to the same mutation as the punishments themselves; and to bring them, too, under the veil of administrative decency.