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

This book is a study of the history of judicial torture in France, between the early seventeenth century and its formal abolition by the Crown at the very end of the old regime. Lisa Silverman has sought to explore the relationship of legal torture to the epistemologies of truth and pain, so the book also has a genuine interest for historians of medicine. One chapter is devoted to developing a useful contrast between the juridical concept of the body in pain as a vehicle of truth and the surgical notion of pain as a troubling, indeed disabling, symptom that was both symptomatic and causative of illness. Silverman hopes to demonstrate here the gap that developed after 1650 or so between a static treatment of pain and the body in the law that owed much to religious ideals, and a more secular and enlightened outlook that sought to relieve pain and reduce the occasions for its application by the state.

Silverman's research focuses on a close examination of municipal justice in early modern Toulouse, one of the many cities in Languedoc that retained a vibrant system of local justice throughout the great period of Bourbon legal and institutional centralization. Long after the practice had virtually disappeared elsewhere, justice in Toulouse was dispensed with the aid of judicial torture consisting of the "questions" of "mordache" and "d'eau"—the former applied with the aid of various machines used to break or strain joints, the latter being the forced ingestion of huge quantities of water. Though these legal interventions retained some of their identity as expiatory punishments for sinning against God, they had become means for extracting confessions and information from defendents in situations where other evidence was lacking or in conflict. Silverman identifies nearly a hundred cases where the "question" was applied with various results in Toulouse over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She shows rather convincingly that jurists never imagined that they were exacting punishment prior to conviction, or that the pain experienced by defendants was anything other than a way of gaining access to evidence concealed in the body that reasoned methods could not reach. Indeed, she argues, the legal domain was, with the church, the last stronghold to resist the all-vanquishing ideal of the Enlightenment that truth lay in the dialectics of reason, not in the vital instincts of the organism.

This is a very learned study of the law and legal processes and of the culture of pain and penitence in early modern France. Alas for the reader, Silverman's more interesting findings of the ways that pain and human suffering operated in the early modern cosmos are embedded in legal and technical arcana that are of greater interest to legal historians than to the general reader, and they are surely compromised by the unrepresentative nature of her data. This is good local history, but it is still local history. Annoyingly, the author feels obliged to endlessly remind the reader that, contrary to our present belief that pain is bad and something to be avoided, early modern people thought that pain was occasionally productive of the truth and that experiencing it allowed sufferers to partake of the suffering of Christ and make an advance payment on the erasure of their own sins. Nonetheless, this book can be read with profit by medical and legal historians and by students of the Enlightenment. Silverman has composed here a thoughtful and well-researched account of an important transition in the history of Western sensibilities.