The Civilization of Capital Punishment in France

Abstract

Is Norbert Elias’s theory that Europe underwent a historical civilizing process the most relevant way to think about capital punishment? This is a relevant question to ask as Elias himself scarcely refers to capital punishment in his written work. The figure of the executioner is mentioned only in passing in The Civilizing Process, when his wretched condition is compared to the lot of a prostitute.¹ In The Loneliness of the Dying, he depicts the extinction of the keen interest in judicial executions as an expression of the repression of death by civilization, stating: “No doubt the scope of identification is wider than in earlier times. We no longer regard it as a Sunday entertainment to see people hanged, quartered, broken on the wheel.”² Generally, Elias has not integrated the evolution of extreme penalty in his theory and has not included criminal law as an informative factor in court trial conduct, probably because he believed that legislative changes do not possess a specific nature but simply mirror previous changes in custom.³ Yet, a state monopoly on violence and monopoly on tax go hand in hand with a monopoly on legislation, especially in countries like France, which had several legal traditions that had to be unified, codified, and centralized, for the most part, at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.⁴ An apparent softening of penalties followed these monopolizations, both with the “fading glamour of Ancient Regime tortures,” which took place in the eighteenth century according to Michel Foucault, and their abolition by the revolutionaries of 1789.

Translated from the French. The author wishes to thank the Scientific Commission of the Institute of Political Studies of Grenoble (France).