Seeing Justice Done: The Age of Spectacular Capital Punishment in France by Paul Friedland (review)

In this brilliant book about changing taste . . . in executions, Friedland begins colorfully with the execution of the sow of Falaise in fourteenth-century Normandy, an act that strikes us as bizarre but would not have been strange to contemporaries. The author deconstructs the now-elaborate story, which rests on a single slip of paper with few details. He ends with the last public guillotining in France (1939): "We citizens of the modern world have an almost visceral need to believe that [punishment] is primarily about one thing: deterrence" (5).

Along the way, Friedland turns aside from his tale to reject the conventional division of French legal practice into a Roman law South and a Germanic law North. Rather, it was the recovery of Roman jurisprudence in the eleventh century that engendered the division and contributed the idea of degrees of "malicious intent." The Christian emphasis on "penance and atonement" completed the mix that the modern Western world inherited (33, 45). The intricacies of medieval legal history are only one of Friedland's erudite interests. He also offers an elaborate anthropological explanation of spectacular capital punishment, although he insists that he is more interested in "understanding . . . the theory and practice of punishment in the present" (15).

"Increasingly spectacular punishment" spawned a new, despised group in the thirteenth century, professional executioners (63, 71). These social pariahs lived apart, married among themselves, and earned much of their income from cleaning sewers and handling offal. Tainted by their vile tasks and profession, they disappeared as a caste on the night of August 4, 1789, when the French Revolution abolished feudal privileges.

The apogee of public executions came in 1757 when Damiens, who had attempted to assassinate Louis XV, suffered a gruesome ordeal by an absurdly sadistic series of punishments. Much of Paris, including many aristocratic women, came out to see the show. Slowly the taste for such spectacles receded in the eighteenth century, hastened by the writings of Beccaria and the rise of sensibilité, whose prophet was Rousseau.¹

The invention of the guillotine in the French Revolution took the theatricality out of executions and "mirrored the process of industrialization" (261). Penance and atonement, exemplary punishments, and extravagant tortures were gone, replaced by deterrence, but the death penalty remained. The last step in this long and bloody history was the triumph of the notion that the aim of capital punishment was to remove criminals from our midst: There would be no more public executions.

This thoughtful and thought-provoking book is filled with interesting, arcane information. The argument is clear and the research admirable, but the writing is dense, sometimes repetitive, and ungraceful.

Friedland's book, like so many cultural histories, says virtually nothing about politics or economics, the states and societies that created and enjoyed grotesque public executions, or the vast upheavals, especially the Reformation, that brought new victims to stake and gibbet. He insists that "spectators . . . in early modern France did not" see executions as "a manifestation of political sovereignty" (13). Yet it was the state and the church, the embodiments of sovereignty, who sanctioned, staged, and presented these spectacles.