| Abstrakt: |
This article discusses the disappearance of torture as a public spectacle. By the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, the gloomy festival of punishment was dying out, though here and there it flickered momentarily into life. In this transformation, two processes were at work. They did not have quite the same chronology or the same raison d'êre. The ceremonial of punishment tended to decline; it survived only as a new legal or administrative practice. The public exhibition of prisoners was maintained in France in 1831, despite violent criticism; its was finally abolished in April 1848. |
