Death as a public spectacle
Death as a public spectacle
Was the past really “a different country”?
Introduction
While I was a student of history I attended a lecture on the subject of medieval medicine. The speaker spoke about the practice of placing leeches on the body of a patient to facilitate blood-letting, a common medical procedure during the Middle Ages. One of my fellow-students was astonished by the very idea. As we left the lecture room he whispered to me, “They were all mad back then, weren’t they?”.
His comment stayed with me, maybe because I felt he was not referring merely to an obsolete medical practice. What he said seemed to encapsulate an assumption in the modern mind that humanity has progressed to such a higher plane of consciousness that the attitudes and behaviours of our ancestors now look primitive and barbaric.
I wanted to see if there was any substance in the charge. I wondered if an examination of historic attitudes to punishment and death would tell me what I wanted to know. So I decided to dig a little deeper.
The question in my mind was this. In their overall sensibilities towards pain and suffering, were the citizens of earlier societies less refined and sophisticated than the modern man or woman? Or to put it another way, was L. P. Hartley correct when he wrote: “The past is a different country: they do things differently there.”?
What follows is an essay I wrote on this topic in 2012. Most of my research related to ancien regime (pre-revolutionary) France. I have edited the original to make it more readable and taken out some irrelevant bits.
What do modes of capital punishment reveal about society in ancien regime France? (2012)
In March 1792, the French Legislative Assembly issued a decree concerning the manner in which sentences of capital punishment would henceforth be carried out. The decree, which stated ‘that humanity requires that the death penalty be as painless as possible’, heralded the introduction of the guillotine as the sole means of execution ‘throughout the entire kingdom’.
The guillotine’s inventor, Dr. Antoine Louis, in a submission to the Assembly two weeks earlier, emphasised the necessity of moving away from the traditional forms of capital punishment, which he stated were ‘horrible for the victim and the spectators’, to a method that ‘would cause no feeling and would scarcely be perceived’.Spectators? Yes, executions took place in a public space with sometimes thousands of onlookers witnessing the protracted agonies of the condemned person. In some countries, like the USA and France, these grim spectacles continued well into the 20th century. In parts of Africa and Asia, executions are still carried out in public. In this essay, however, the focus is on the more distant past, i.e. the late middle ages and the early modern period. So, for instance, how did the French state execute convicted criminals before the guillotine?
Five options were available to the judiciary in deciding on the most appropriate form of capital punishment to be applied to a guilty person. They were decapitation, hanging, burning at the stake, drawing and quartering, and breaking on the wheel. While the last two were designed to inflict pain on the victim, the first two often failed to deliver the kind of instantaneous end a modern observer might have assumed.
Decapitation was carried out with a sword and sometimes it took several blows to sever the head from the body. In 1699 at the Place de Grève in Paris, the state executioner, Charles Sanson de Longval, finally beheaded Madame Tiquet on his third attempt, delivered according to family records, ‘with a kind of frenzy’. By then he was covered in blood as a result of his previous botched efforts to dispatch the victim. The account does not record if she was already dead before the coup de grace.
Hanging, the most common form of execution, did not bring immediate death either. Unlike the later technique which broke the victim’s neck when he or she dropped through a trapdoor, the condemned man or woman was slowly strangled after being pushed from a ladder. As with beheading, a lack of expertise by the executioner could prolong the victim’s torment. In one example from late-seventeenth-century Avignon, a problem with the ladder prevented the rope swinging freely. In order to expedite his task, the hangman leapt onto the condemned man’s shoulders and began kicking him in the stomach. However, the victim was saved when the crowd stormed the scaffold and rescued him ‘after he had been hanging there longer than it took to say a full Miserere’.
Although being burnt at the stake theoretically involved a period of intense agony before death ensued, the victim was usually strangled quickly before the fire was lit. Consequently, of the five modes of execution, this was probably the least painful for the victim. The execution of Joan of Arc on 30 May 1431 is an exception that proves the rule. She was to be put to death in the market place of Rouen having been convicted of the crime of heresy. Given her fame and the great number of spectators expected, Joan was placed on a raised platform so that her death could be seen clearly when the burning wood below consumed her. However, the executioner later revealed his distress at the fact that, because of the inaccessibility of the platform, he could not end the victim’s life before she was engulfed by fire.
In these modes of execution, the infliction of pain on the convicted person was not an intentional part of the execution process itself. However, in the case of the two remaining methods, i.e. drawing and quartering and breaking on the wheel, mental and physical suffering was an inevitable and deliberate consequence of what was designed to be a prolonged procedure, albeit one that was confined to men.
A sentence of quartering entailed the application of sundry tortures to the condemned man’s body, following which he was torn limb from limb by four horses. In early modern France, the most notable victim was Robert–François Damiens, sentenced in 1757 for a knife attack on King Louis XV. Damiens’ execution was modelled on that of François Ravaillac, who was dismembered in 1610 for the murder of one of Louis’ predecessors, Henry IV. Given that quartering was reserved for those convicted of attacking members of the royal family, it was only ever applied twice throughout France in the two centuries prior to the Revolution. Indeed, historians are aware of only twelve examples of its use in Europe as a whole since classical Roman times. Consequently, this penalty was by no means a typical example of early modern justice. Much more common, and almost as excruciating for the victim, was the last mode of capital punishment to be reviewed: breaking on the wheel.
Up to the turn of the eighteenth century, breaking on the wheel was second only to hanging as the most common form of execution in early modern Europe. It was introduced into France in the early sixteenth century, and continued to be applied, albeit with decreasing frequency, up to its abolition in 1788. An example from seventeenth-century Paris illustrates the procedure.
In 1665, two brothers named Touchet were brought to a scaffold at the Pont-Neuf where they were to be executed for the murders of the city’s police lieutenant and his wife. Each man was stripped of his clothing and tied face-up to a large x-shaped horizontal cross. Then, using a heavy metal bar, the executioner proceeded in a systematic fashion to break the limbs of both men before smashing their rib-cages with several further blows. He and his assistants then bound the broken but still living bodies to two large cart-wheels where they were left to die. The executioner had to remain at the scene until his victims expired. So when, nine hours later, he saw that the Touchets were clinging stubbornly to life, he strangled them both.
A century later, this same process was used in the execution of a Huguenot from Toulouse named Jean Calas, convicted of the murder of his son. In his case, only two hours were allowed to elapse between being lashed to the wheel and his final dispatch.
Although by the eighteenth century hanging was the preferred sentence for capital offences meted out by French courts, convicted criminals were still condemned to be broken on the wheel in small but significant numbers. For instance, in 1787 alone, the parlement of Paris confirmed eleven sentences of execution by breaking on the wheel, compared to thirty-two hangings. Given that breaking on the wheel took place throughout France, it is likely that hundreds more suffered this penalty over the course of the eighteenth century, with their deaths watched by many thousands of citizens.
Historians of the period have developed various theories to explain the employment of public displays of torture and death, not just in France, but throughout early modern Europe. These can be categorised into two main schools of thought, not mutually exclusive, but indicative of either a secular or a religious emphasis.
The secular scenario can be explained as follows. Although France, unlike most other European countries, had a police force (known as the Maréchaussée), it was not resourced sufficiently to deal with the level of crime then prevalent. Violence in particular was endemic and many assaults, for instance, never came to the attention of the authorities. The only possible deterrent available to the state was to demonstrate its power over those whom it did manage to bring to justice. In the case of capital offences, it did this by staging executions as public rituals in order to impress upon the masses that, however unlikely it was that criminals would be prosecuted, when they were the outcome would be hideous for them. Consequently, citizens were encouraged to view these spectacles in order to deter them from crime. As Foucault asserted, ‘The public execution did not re-establish justice; it reactivated power’.
This historiographical perspective is complemented by another that draws upon the medieval Christian heritage that remained alive in France up to the Revolution. According to this theory, the state was as much concerned with punishing sin as it was in prosecuting civil crime. Indeed, blasphemy and sacrilege were offences for which the perpetrators could be mutilated or executed. In 1766, for instance, the young Jean François Lefèvre, chevalier de La Barre, was decapitated in Picardy for having defiled a crucifix.
Some historians have argued that public executions such as this represented a type of ‘passion play’ in which the possibilities of atonement and redemption were enacted before the crowd. The convicted prisoner was encouraged to admit his guilt and to seek forgiveness, thereby ensuring his eternal salvation once the executioner had completed his task. A priest was close at hand to encourage any last-minute repentance and acknowledgement of sin by the prisoner. This underlined the Church’s teaching that acceptance of suffering was a means of imitating Christ and thereby contributing to the redemption of mankind. Consequently, if a condemned man was seen to have expressed remorse on the scaffold, he was associated with the ‘good thief’ whom Jesus forgave on Calvary. As a proponent of this line of reasoning has written:
The image of each penitent sinner could enter, in the mind's eye, into a macrocosmic economy of pain, a community of suffering anxiously geared towards redemption. The reeking gallows, splashed with the potent blood of martyrs, was its cult station, and the demolished body of the criminal its living cult image.
But what did ordinary people think of the way society punished capital crimes, particularly those who witnessed executions or who heard about them later? Unfortunately, perhaps due to a dearth of source material, historians have not managed to come up with a satisfactory answer to that question. Instead, historical attention has tended to focus on the writings of the eighteenth-century writers, such as Montesquieu, Beccaria, and especially Voltaire, who campaigned against the perceived injustices of the ancien regime criminal justice system. The clear implication conveyed in the historiography is that key Enlightenment figures created a new perspective that ultimately led to a change of thinking by both state and citizen.
One scholar underlined this argument by quoting approvingly from Paul Hazard’s 1935 work, The Crisis of the European Mind, 1680 -1715, : ‘One day the majority of the French people were thinking like [Bishop Jean-Bénigne] Bossuet [chaplain to Louis XIV], then suddenly in a flash they were thinking like Voltaire: it was a revolution.’
Up to this point, according to another view, the ever-present reminders of death in the lives of ordinary people through famine, child mortality, etc., had contributed to a normalisation of the use of public torture and execution. In the words of yet another scholar, people were living in ‘the era of humanitarianism’s prehistory’.The historiographical case can be summarised as follows: through a combination of religious indoctrination and cultural desensitisation, the generality of the population in ancien regime France accepted a penal system, the inherent barbarism of which was revealed only through the writings of the eighteenth-century philosophes.
Was it really because of enlightened thinking by a few visionaries that humanity was finally able to break free from the grip of medieval superstition and enter a more civilised state of being? Was my colleague correct in his judgement of the pre-modern mentality? Had the minds of the people become coarsened and corrupted, reflecting society’s preoccupation with sin and punishment?
I do not believe so.
There are clues in the historical record to indicate that the officially-sanctioned public slaughter of human beings was capable of provoking abhorrence or empathy long before Enlightenment thinking on the subject became a cultural imperative. A woodcut printed in Paris in 1541 entitled Execution in a Crowded Square, depicts a number of different types of execution being carried out before a large crowd. At the bottom of the picture, in the foreground, the artist included an image of a boy struggling to leave the throng with an expression that illustrates his distress at what he has witnessed.
Perhaps the anonymous artist intended to convey the inhumanity of the scene through the reaction of this young observer. If so, his view was endorsed several decades later by a French writer, Michel de Montaigne, in his 1580 essay Cowardice, mother of cruelty. In it Montaigne articulated more directly the simple humanitarianism only suggested in the woodcut:
All that is beyond plain death seems to me pure cruelty. Our justice cannot hope that the man who will not be deterred from doing wrong by the fear of dying on the block or the gallows will be prevented by the idea of a slow fire, or pincers, or the wheel.
In 1682, the president of the Dijon parlement echoed these sentiments when he wrote, ‘I frankly confess that I am one of those who would prefer a speedy death to such intolerable sufferings (as torture)…’
Even a hardened executioner like Gabriel Sanson was not inured to the more extreme forms of capital punishment he was called upon to inflict. According to family records, Sanson became so overwrought at the prospect of carrying out Damiens’ sentence that he could not proceed and one of his assistants was bribed to take over. Sanson never recovered from the experience and resigned soon afterwards. The differing attitudes of the crowd are revealed in an account of the same event by the famous libertine, Giacomo Casanova. He admitted that he ‘was several times obliged to turn away my face and to stop my ears as I heard (Damiens’) piercing shrieks’. Yet his companions remained unmoved due to ‘their horror at the wretch’s wickedness (in attacking the king)’. These contrasting reactions reveal the complexity of the crowd who witnessed such events: some were horrified, others felt vengeful.Further evidence of the divergent responses of onlookers can be found in an account of a more common form of capital punishment. In Les Nuits de Paris published in 1788, the author Rétif de la Bretonne described a scene of execution he chanced upon at the Place de Grève. Three men were being broken on the wheel, but Rétif’s attention was on the crowd who ‘chattered and laughed as if they were watching a farce’. Then he spotted a ‘young girl, drenched in tears’, who approached him when she saw that he too ‘feels pity for those in anguish’.
As Rétif de la Bretonne’s narrative indicates, the majority of those who chose to attend such set-piece executions probably derived some satisfaction if not pleasure from what took place. However, what about those who stayed away from these spectacles, or who were deeply disturbed by what they saw if their curiosity got the better of them?
The examples offered above, from the boy fleeing the carnage of the public square to the girl weeping at the inhumanity of the wheel, show that early modern sensibilities included compassion and revulsion at another person’s suffering. The fact that capital offences were punished in a manner unheard of today, at least in the western world, should not be interpreted as a sign that those who made up society then were any different to their modern counterparts. Just because criminals are no longer executed publicly does not mean that the callous impulses evident in the crowd described by Rétif de la Bretonne have disappeared.
In March 2012, a newspaper report described how passers-by paused to film a woman’s dismembered body following a road accident in Manchester. Footage of the dead woman’s severed leg was later posted on Twitter. Other witnesses condemned as ‘revolting’ the behaviour of these ‘ghouls’.
An example like this suggests that those who thronged the Place de Grève on execution day did not represent a bloodthirsty aspect of the human condition long since rendered extinct.The continuation up to the eve of the Revolution of what are now regarded in civilised society as barbaric methods of capital punishment raises fundamental questions about the nature of the ancien regime and its people. In attempting to address these, historians have dwelt on the twin influences of a powerful state concerned with cementing its power and a Church founded on a creed of suffering and redemption. While both schools of thought go a long way towards explaining the persistence of these modes of execution, they also create a false perception that the people of pre-Revolution France were somehow lacking in the basic humanitarian instincts we take for granted today. That this was not the case is clear from the evidence presented here.
Early modern men and women were just as capable as their modern counterparts of recognising cruelty for what it was. The fact that criminals were put to death in an abhorrent manner was not due to the inhumanity of contemporary society. On the contrary, it was a reflection of the tenacious grip exercised by secular and religious power structures over the state and its people. Following the revolution of 1789, these power structures were forced to submit to the kinds of fundamental change they had resisted for so long.
L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (London, 1913), p. 9.
‘Decree concerning the Death Penalty, 20 Mar. 1792’, in John Hall Stewart, A documentary survey of the French Revolution (New York, 1951), pp 343-4.
‘Motivated Opinion on the Method of Decapitation, 7 Mar. 1792’, in ibid., pp 343-4.
Henri Sanson, (ed.), Executioners all; memoirs of the Sanson family from private notes and documents, 1688-1847 (London, 1962), p. 34.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison (London, 1977), p. 64.
Ibid., p. 58.
Mitchell B. Merback, The thief, the cross, and the wheel: pain and the spectacle of punishment in medieval and Renaissance Europe (London, 1999), p. 157.
Philip F. Riley, A lust for virtue: Louis XIV's attack on sin in seventeenth-century France (Westport, Conn., 2001), p. 170.
Merback, The thief, the cross, and the wheel, p. 157.
Donald M. Frame (ed.), The complete essays of Montaigne (Stanford, 1958), p. 530.
Adhémar Esmein, A history of continental criminal procedure: with special reference to France (Boston, 1913), p. 355.
Jacques Casanova De Seingalt, The Memoirs of Casanova Volume 3 of 6: The Eternal Quest, Arthur Machen, trans. (Teddington, 2007), p. 18.
Robert Forster, (ed.), European society in the eighteenth century (London, 1969), pp 386-9.
Irish Independent, 30 Mar. 2012.