From Public Execution to Penal Modernity by Wyatt Wiggins

Hello everyone, and welcome to the third and final episode of our mini-series on crime and punishment throughout France and its empire. Over the past two episodes, we’ve moved from the Ancien Régime through the colonial world and into the beginning of the French revolution. In this final chapter, we attempt to bring those threads together—tracing how systems of punishment evolve, break, and re-form as the political landscape and colonial situation changed at an accelerated pace. Just think, in 1791, the most profitable colony in the entire Caribbean - Saint-Domingue or modern day Haiti – successfully overthrew French rule and established a republic. In that same year, a new penal code was born in France, officially changing a legal system in France that had been around since the middle ages. In order to make sense of this fundamental change over vast spaces, we are going to look through the lens of punishment and justice, to examine how the state fundamentally sought to express its own authority, especially during moments of crisis and transformation.

Of course in the last episode, we moved outward from the centre of the French state. From Paris to Saint-Domingue, from the scaffold to the plantation, from public execution to colonial circulation. And what we saw was not the disappearance of punishment, but its redistribution across space. And in this transition, violence did not vanish, but instead; it relocated and became uneven, fragmented, and structurally dependent on the geography of empire. One vivid example of this redistribution is the colonial policing of Saint-Domingue in the 1780s, where runaway slave patrols operated with legal sanction but often brutal improvisation, showing how coercion was already being externalised and delegated before the Revolution even began.

But that leaves us with a final problem. If punishment is displaced outward—into colonies, into peripheries, into spaces where metropolitan norms are suspended—what happens when those spaces are no longer external? What happens when the logic of coercion returns to the centre, but under a different form? This idea was first introduced by the Martinician poet and writer Aimé Césaire, who’s work entitled “On Colonialism” introduced what he called the “terrific boomerang,” whereby methods of policing and punishing in the colonies would, inevitably, return back to the metropole. This idea is interesting when we consider the dimensions of the upcoming revolutionary moment

Because by the end of the eighteenth century in France, punishment did not disappear with the decline of the scaffold. It is actively reimagined during the Revolution itself. And this moment is not a smooth transition between old and modern systems. It is a rupture in which law, order, and punishment are rebuilt under conditions of profound political instability.

To understand this, we need to pause on the French Revolution—not as background context, but as a central laboratory in the transformation of penal power.

On the eve of the French Revolution, Louis XVI convened the Estates-General in 1789 in a final, fraught attempt to reconcile the growing class divide. Months before delegations arrived in Versailles, local communities across France prepared lists of grievances, or cahiers des doléances, alongside formal requests in order to remedy them. Compiled by each parish, guild, or corporation and later synthesized into a single document representing the local electoral district (bailliage or sénéchaussée), these cahiers collectively constitute an invaluable record of popular concerns and potential solutions. A vast majority of these documents dedicate significant sections to the criminal justice system, detailing the reforms townspeople and rural parishioners wished to see, particularly with how crime and justice were administered by the Crown.

The diverse opinions expressed in the cahiers regarding branding provide key insights into the public’s complex relationship with longstanding practices of judicial punishment. Many voiced a progressive critique of its excessive severity. For instance, a cahier from the Third Estate in La Rochelle protested against the “terrifying disproportion that exists, in many cases, between the crime and penalties…” While this critique encompassed the death penalty for theft, banishment as “unhelpful to society,” and the pillory as a “pointless” punishment, it was particularly harsh on branding. The cahier notes that “branding inflicts too frequently, even, by marking in perpetuity the shame of the one who has only rendered himself guilty of a very considerable misdemeanor” and ends up “plung[ing] [himself] into the abyss of the most extreme crimes…” Branding could often also be applied for extremely minimal crimes, like one man from Auvergne who a court ordered to be marked for stealing a shirt he saw drying on a hedge.

Yet, this narrative of judicial progressivism is complicated by counterintuitive demands for increased punishment and severity. Contradicting the call for leniency, the cahier representing the clergy from Lille actually prescribes branding. The clergy wished to denounce fraudulent creditors or bankers, demanding they be prosecuted and condemned “to the whip, the brand, and [then] placed in a house of labor for ten years.” Furthermore, a cahier from the nobility in Soûle complained about the state of justice generally, arguing that “wrongdoers are almost always unpunished; those who are condemned to the galleys are released and return, by new crimes, to deserve new sentences; those who are only banned do not care…those condemned to flogging quickly lose the memory of punishment…” These requests reflect a widespread frustration with judicial leniency and a demand for punishments that created indelible marks, both physical and psychological.

By presenting such a complicated and almost counterintuitive array of complaints and judgements toward the criminal justice system, the cahiers showcase a remarkable diversity of attitudes towards crime, lawbreakers, and the royal reforms the Crown should prioritize. This tension is further evident in the treatment of beggars, a population the Crown struggled to effectively brand. The clergy from Rouen warned that begging “fill[ed] the cities with vagabonds and the countryside [with] thieves and incendiaries, [and therefore] deserves the attention of the assembled nation.” They demanded that a means of stopping this “destructive scourge” be enacted immediately; however, their plea was cushioned by a language of compassion. The police “will remember that beggars are human beings and that if justice describes suppressing their disorders, humanity makes it a duty to provide for their needs.” This dual appeal – calling for suppression while emphasizing humanity and state-sponsored care – stands in stark contrast to the clergy from Villeneuve-de-Berg who clearly attested that begging and wandering “must incite all the zeal of the Estates-General” because beggars were often “disguised [as] thieves and assassins, who traverse cities and countryside with impunity…”

This regional and class-based divergence is reinforced by a complaint from the Third Estate from Beaujolais which argued unequivocally for increased punishment, asking that the Crown “renew the laws against fraudulent bankrupts, especially thieves who have gone unpunished for far too long” and “increase the penalties pronounced against them and ensure that they are rigorously executed.” While some communities stressed the humanity of law-breakers and the dangers of disproportionate punishment, others demanded the full and rigorous execution of severe penalties. These different cahiers demonstrate the multifaceted, often contradictory, prerevolutionary debates that defined the popular understanding of royal justice and the role of punishment in maintaining social order.

These tensions would not resolve neatly into a unified philosophy of reform. Instead, they would be carried directly into revolutionary legislation. In the early revolutionary period, particularly in the debates surrounding the 1791 Penal Code, legislators attempted to construct a radically new legal order grounded in equality before the law and the elimination of arbitrary punishment. Yet, as Roberto Martucci argues, the primary objective of the committee responsible for drafting the code was not simply to enact Enlightenment ideals, but to strategically prevent the emergence of an overly broad and arbitrary system of criminal justice being created by the National Assembly itself. In other words, even reform was shaped by a fear of uncontrolled power.

And yet almost immediately, this project collides with the realities of governance in crisis.

As Samuel Scott’s work on law and order in 1790 shows, the so-called “peaceful year” of the Revolution masks a far more unstable situation on the ground. Across France, the collapse of old policing structures creates gaps that new institutions struggle to fill. Municipal authorities interpret laws differently. Enforcement becomes uneven. Popular mobilisations intervene directly in questions of justice. In many regions, the authority to punish is no longer clearly defined, and the very concept of public order becomes politically contested rather than institutionally guaranteed. In Paris itself, this instability becomes visible in episodes like the September Massacres of 1792, where prison populations were killed by armed crowds acting outside formal judicial procedure—an extreme but revealing instance of justice collapsing into popular vengeance.

So Order, at this moment, is not a settled condition. But more importantly, it is a problem revolutionaries must continuously confront.

And this instability produces one of the most important developments in modern penal history: which is of course the rapid politicization of surveillance and policing.

In the absence of more stable enforcement structures, revolutionaries in France began to construct new mechanisms of observation and control. Municipal guards become reorganised, local surveillance committees emerge, and citizens are encouraged—and even sometimes explicitly required—to monitor one another. Policing becomes inseparable from political vigilance, and law enforcement becomes entangled with emerging and transforming questions of loyalty, citizenship, and revolutionary commitment. In Paris and other major cities, the Comités de surveillance established in 1793 required residents to report “suspect” behaviour, effectively turning neighbourhoods into semi-formal intelligence networks of revolutionary oversight.

This dynamic intensifies dramatically after 1792, when war and internal dissent transform the Revolution into a state of emergency. Under the Committee of Public Safety, surveillance expands, arrests multiply, and categories of suspicion widen. The state is no longer simply punishing crimes in a legal sense; it is identifying threats to the survival of the newly emerging political order itself. The Law of Suspects of 1793 formalises this shift, allowing for the arrest of individuals not for proven actions, but for vague categories of “counter-revolutionary” disposition—marking a decisive move toward anticipatory justice.

What comes out of this here is a shift that is crucial for the entire trajectory of modern punishment. Punishment begins to detach from the model of reactive justice and move toward preventive political governance. The question is no longer only what someone has done, but what they might become, or what they might already represent within a fragile revolutionary order.

This is where the guillotine, often misread as a symbol of pure egalitarian rationality, must be understood more carefully. It is not only a tool of equal execution. It is embedded within a broader system of classification, surveillance, and political categorisation. Revolutionary justice does not simply eliminate bodies. It sorts populations. It determines who belongs within the political body and who is excluded from it – often making use of colonial spaces when necessary. This logic is also visible in the public execution of figures like Louis XVI in 1793, which was not just punishment of a king, but a symbolic act of redefining sovereignty itself as residing in the nation.

Even after the fall of the Jacobin regime, these administrative and surveillance structures did not disappear. During the Directory and later under Napoleon, they were stabilised and institutionalised. Revolutionary emergency governance becomes an administrative routine. And as Jean-Marc Berlière and René Lévy have shown in their work on French policing, nineteenth-century institutions are deeply shaped by these revolutionary precedents, even as they are reorganised into more durable bureaucratic forms.

Napoleonic France, in particular, consolidates an expanding system of internal administration in which policing, documentation, and surveillance become central tools of governance. Prefects monitor local populations, identity papers regulate movement, and internal circulation becomes increasingly subject to administrative scrutiny. To move through space is to be potentially recorded, classified, and made legible to the state. The creation of the Napoleonic prefect system in 1800 is especially important here, since it establishes centrally appointed officials tasked with reporting local political moods back to Paris—effectively institutionalising political surveillance at scale.

At the same time, punishment itself shifts away from public spectacle toward institutional confinement. The prison becomes central to this transformation, but it is crucial not to understand it as a simple replacement for the scaffold. The scaffold was instantaneous, theatrical, and final. The prison is durable. It does not end punishment in a moment; it extends it across time. It reorganises daily life, regulating movement, labour, silence, and social interaction. Punishment becomes not an event, but a condition of existence. This shift is visible in institutions like La Force prison in Paris, where detainees were held not only for punishment but for extended administrative detention during periods of political uncertainty.

This is the transformation that Michel Foucault famously identifies as the emergence of disciplinary power: a form of power that does not primarily operate through spectacular violence, but through continuous regulation. It does not need to destroy the body. It needs to shape it, train it, and render it predictable.

And this shift is not purely theoretical. It is grounded in concrete institutional developments across nineteenth-century France and Europe more broadly. As Clive Emsley has shown, policing and penal policy during this period increasingly converge into integrated systems of social regulation, in which crime is treated less as an isolated legal violation and more as a social phenomenon embedded within broader patterns of behaviour, mobility, and economic life. By the mid-nineteenth century, French police prefectures were already compiling annual crime statistics for Paris, tracking patterns of theft, vagrancy, and political unrest in ways that would later feed into early criminological analysis.

Criminality itself becomes something that can be studied, mapped, and managed. Even before the formal emergence of criminology as a discipline, the foundations of statistical reasoning, classification, and social typology are already being laid. The state begins to understand its population not only as a collection of legal subjects, but as a field of measurable tendencies.

And this requires a deeper transformation: the production of legibility.

To govern effectively, the state must be able to see its population. This is where censuses, police registries, identity papers, and bureaucratic documentation become essential tools of modern governance. They do not simply record reality. They produce it in a form that can be acted upon. Increasingly, what matters is not only what individuals have done, but whether they can be located within a system of classification at all.

But this transformation cannot be understood without the colonial dimension that structured it.

Because as we saw in the previous episode, empire functions as a space where forms of coercion can be displaced, intensified, and reorganised beyond the constraints of metropolitan political visibility. In the nineteenth century, this relationship became even more direct.

French Guiana, in particular, becomes a key site of penal transportation. As Miranda Spieler’s work demonstrates, deportation is not merely geographic removal. It is a legal transformation. Individuals sent to penal colonies are not only displaced physically; they are placed into juridical spaces where their legal identity becomes unstable, diminished, or permanently altered. Deportation is, in this sense, a mechanism of unmaking—of dissolving the social and legal conditions that define political existence in the metropole. This becomes especially visible in the use of the Îles du Salut and later Devil’s Island, where transported convicts were effectively removed from the protections of metropolitan legal life.

What emerges across the French imperial system is not a unified penal structure, but what we might call a dispersed penal archipelago. Prisons in metropolitan France, colonial penal settlements, military disciplinary regimes, and administrative systems of confinement all form part of a wider network of coercion distributed unevenly across space.

And this is where the deeper continuity becomes visible.

Because the apparent restraint of metropolitan punishment depends on the availability of other spaces where coercion can be displaced. The colony is not outside the system of modern punishment. It is constitutive of it. It allows the metropole to present itself as rational, humane, and restrained, while maintaining access to forms of violence that are geographically and politically externalised.

This is not a division between two different systems. It is a single system organised through spatial inequality.

And once we recognise this, the French Revolution itself must be reinterpreted. Because it is not simply a moment of legal reform or political rupture. It is the moment in which modern penal logic becomes structurally possible. It introduces a model of governance in which instability, emergency, and population management become central to the exercise of power.

Even when the Revolution seeks to abolish arbitrariness, it generates new forms of administrative control. Even when it rejects spectacle, it produces new forms of surveillance. Even when it declares equality before the law, it expands the capacity of the state to classify, monitor, and intervene in everyday life.

So across this three-part series, a single transformation becomes visible.

In the first episode, punishment is a spectacle.
In the second, punishment is circulation.
And in the third, punishment becomes infrastructure.

But between spectacle and infrastructure lies the Revolution—the moment where punishment stops being a visible ritual of sovereign power and becomes a problem of governing uncertainty itself.

And that is the deeper story.

Not the disappearance of violence, but its reorganisation into forms compatible with modern political order.

Because the scaffold was at least honest in one sense: it demanded to be seen. It gathered the city into a single moment and made power visible, even if only briefly.

Modern punishment does something far more complex.

It disperses itself into institutions that appear neutral. Into files that appear technical. Into categories that appear objective and into procedures that appear routine.

And precisely because of that, it becomes harder to recognise as punishment at all.

The more rational it appears, the more continuous it becomes. The more administrative it becomes, the more deeply it enters everyday life. The more invisible it becomes, the more difficult it is to locate, interrupt, or even name.

And so the fire does not go out.

It recedes from view.
It moves from the square into the system.
From the body into the file.
From spectacle into structure.

And once it is there, it no longer needs to announce itself.

Because it has already become something more durable than visibility.
It has become ordinary.

And that is where the story ends.

Not with the abolition of punishment.
But with its transformation into the background conditions of modern life.