Tortured Subjects: Pain, Truth, and the Body in Early Modern France (review)

Tortured Subjects: Pain, Truth, and the Body in Early Modern France. By Lisa Silverman (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2001) 264 pp. $42.00 cloth $20.00 paper

Silverman's work is an important contribution to our understanding of the late eighteenth-century cessation of French judicial torture, the infliction of pain on a defendant in a criminal trial to elicit evidence to convict that person or others. Historians traditionally explained the termination of torture as the result of Enlightenment criticism, until John H. Langbein, Torture and the Law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancien Régime (Chicago, 1976), dated torture's demise earlier, as a result of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century legal developments. New codes permitted judges to find guilt in serious crimes without the two eyewitnesses to the offense or a confession, often elicited by pain, long required in Roman law procedure; many judges thus abandoned torture.

Indeed, legal scholars now have documented a steady decrease in the incidence of torture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, although some judges continued the practice until a royal edict of 1788 abolished its last vestiges. Silverman explains torture's persistence, despite legal changes, by examining the cultural setting of the judges of the Parlement of Toulouse. She applies methods of the new cultural history to study the judges there, who were reputedly far more committed to the practice of torture than their peers elsewhere. Silverman shows that parlementaires understood pain in both traditional legal terms and in religious terms. They participated in penitential confraternities that employed flagellation and believed that the infliction of pain salutarily suppressed the will and self-interests of humans, thus compelling defendants to provide questioners with honest answers.

Jurists had scant understanding of the physical and psychological effects of pain on the body, conceiving truth as a commodity that could be released from the body. Such views became the basis for a late eighteenth-century debate between jurists and the philosophes, who, informed by surgical texts, viewed pain in secular terms, and saw its pursuit as a form of deviance. They argued, too, that the effect of pain on the human body so clouded the mental functions of defendants as to make truth impossible to elicit with torture.

Although the philosophes' views did not convince all jurists, by defining pain in the public forum, they contributed to torture's abolition. Silverman's fine study explains why torture outlived its legal necessity; cultural and legal historians will welcome it.