How Punishment Changes (And Stays The Same) by Wyatt Wiggins

            One of the most important fields of inquiry in history, politics and a number of other fields is how the state controls people as individuals and as a whole. My specialty is on how the governments of France and Britain created modern surveillance organizations during World War I. I even published a scholarly book on the topic and produced a three-part series for this podcast. While I focus on the modern world, scholar Wyatt Wiggins specializes in the French Revolution. In this three part series he shows how political power adjusted, adapted and refined to fit the revolution and empire.

Wyatt Wiggins:
Hello everyone, it is an absolute pleasure to be back on the podcast. This is the first episode of what will be a mini-series on crime and punishment in French history. However, this isn’t going to be a simple story about barbarism giving way to humanity, or cruel kings eventually learning enlightenment values. The deeper you look into the history of punishment, the more unstable that narrative becomes. Because states never really stop punishing. What changes over time is where punishment happens, how visible it is, and what political function it serves. And France is one of the best places to study that transformation because over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries you can watch punishment move from the public square into prisons, bureaucracies, police systems, colonial territories, and administrative records. The violence doesn’t disappear. Instead it shapeshifts and migrates. So across this three part mini-series we’re going to trace that migration. We’ll begin in Old Regime France, where punishment is theatrical, public, and spectacular. Then we’ll move outward towards empire, where violence increasingly gets displaced beyond the metropole itself. And finally we’ll arrive in the modern world of prisons, surveillance, and bureaucratic control, where punishment becomes quieter but also more continuous. And the central question running through all of this is deceptively simple: what happens when punishment stops being visible? Because one of the strangest things about quote-on-quote modernity is that the state often becomes more powerful at the exact moment it appears less violent.

Imagine standing in Paris in the middle of the eighteenth century. A crowd is gathering in a public square before sunrise. Vendors move through the streets selling bread and wine. Children climb onto rooftops for a better view. Church bells ring in the distance. And at the center of the square is a scaffold. Today someone is going to die. Not privately. Not behind prison walls. But publicly and ceremonially. This is not merely an execution on its own terms. Rather, it is a theatrical performance of political power. In the ancien régime, punishment was inseparable from spectacle. Justice was meant to be seen. The public nature of punishment was not incidental to the process—it was the process. Executions, torture, public confessions, humiliations, forced processions through city streets: these were rituals through which the state demonstrated its authority over the body. And what’s important is that these spectacles were carefully choreographed. The route the condemned walked through the city mattered. The order of rituals mattered. The priests, guards, executioners, crowds, and officials all played roles in a highly structured drama. The historian Esther Cohen describes medieval and early modern executions as ceremonies meant to repair a rupture in the social order. Crime disrupted the moral fabric of society, and punishment symbolically restored it. Which means punishment was never just about the criminal. It was about the audience. The crowd was essential because punishment was a form of communication. The state needed people to witness what happened when sovereign authority was violated.

And perhaps no example captures this more vividly than the execution of Robert-François Damiens in 1757. Damiens was a domestic servant who attempted to assassinate Louis XV with a small penknife. The king survived with relatively minor injuries. But because the king represented the body of the state itself, the punishment became overwhelming. Damiens was sentenced to one of the most infamous executions in French history. He was publicly tortured before a massive crowd in Paris. Flesh was torn from his body with heated pincers. Boiling liquids were poured into the wounds. Horses were eventually used in an attempt to tear his limbs apart. The execution lasted for hours because the human body resisted the machinery designed to destroy it. And this is the scene that Michel Foucault famously uses to open Discipline and Punish. For Foucault, the point was not simply that earlier societies were cruel. The point was that sovereign power expressed itself physically and theatrically. Punishment was political theater. The destruction of the body publicly restored the authority of the crown.

And yet by the late eighteenth century, something begins to change. Not immediately. Not cleanly. But perceptibly. Increasingly, elites across Europe—and especially in France—began questioning whether these spectacles were actually effective. Because public executions were unstable events. Crowds did not always behave the way authorities hoped they would. Sometimes spectators sympathized with the condemned. Sometimes riots broke out. Sometimes executions became carnivalesque rather than reverential. In other words, spectacle could undermine the authority it was supposed to reinforce. At the same time, Enlightenment thinkers began launching philosophical critiques of punishment itself. Figures like Montesquieu and Cesare Beccaria argued that punishment should not be arbitrary, theatrical, or excessive. In Beccaria’s influential work On Crimes and Punishments, he argued that the purpose of punishment should be prevention rather than vengeance. What mattered was not severity but certainty. A rational legal system, according to Beccaria, should deter crime through proportionality and consistency, not terror. And this marks a profound intellectual shift because punishment slowly stops being understood primarily as revenge against the body and starts becoming a problem of administration. How do you manage populations? How do you regulate behavior? How do you produce orderly citizens?

This is where the history becomes especially interesting because punishment starts moving away from singular moments of violence and toward continuous systems of supervision. The French administrator Nicolas Delamare captured this emerging mentality in his Traité de la Police. For Delamare, policing was not merely about catching criminals. It was what he called the art of procuring a “convenient and tranquil life.” And that sounds almost benign until you realize how expansive the category actually was. Police monitored markets. They inspected food. They regulated labor. They tracked migrants entering cities. They supervised prostitution, gambling, sanitation, and begging. Street lighting, grain supplies, public morality, urban circulation—all of these became matters of state concern. In other words, the state increasingly sought not merely to punish disorder but to manage society continuously. To govern effectively, the state first had to see. And that phrase really matters for understanding modern punishment. Because once states begin collecting information systematically, punishment changes character. It becomes administrative. This is part of what Foucault means when he argues that modern power operates less through spectacular violence and more through discipline. Discipline is quieter. But it is also more invasive. Instead of occasional dramatic punishments, modern systems create environments where people regulate themselves because they know they may be watched, categorized, examined, or recorded.

This is why Foucault becomes fascinated with the Panopticon, the prison model proposed by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The Panopticon was a theoretical prison design where inmates never knew when they were being observed. A single guard tower sat at the center while prisoners occupied cells around the perimeter. The brilliance of the design was psychological. If prisoners might be watched at any moment, they eventually begin policing themselves. And that, for Foucault, becomes a metaphor for modern society itself. Power no longer needs to constantly display violence because people internalize surveillance. The body is no longer broken publicly. It is disciplined continuously. And France in the late eighteenth century sits directly in the middle of this transformation. Because even as Enlightenment reformers criticized spectacular punishments, the monarchy still depended heavily on coercion, especially in areas like military discipline, labor control, and policing mobility. Desertion became a major obsession for the French state in the decades before the Revolution. Soldiers disappearing from military service represented not merely lost manpower but failed control. Vagrancy laws expanded. Beggars increasingly became objects of suspicion. Authorities worried constantly about unattached people moving between regions without supervision or documentation. And here we begin seeing something extremely modern emerge: the dangerous person is increasingly not merely the violent criminal. It is the unregistered person. The person who cannot be classified. The person outside administrative visibility.

That anxiety only intensifies during the French Revolution. And this is where the story becomes paradoxical. Because the Revolution genuinely does abolish many forms of arbitrary and spectacular punishment associated with monarchy. Revolutionary reformers wanted laws that were rational, equal, and universal. Torture was abolished. Feudal judicial privileges disappeared. Punishment became theoretically standardized. The guillotine itself was introduced partly as a humanitarian reform because it promised a supposedly equal and painless execution regardless of class. That is one of the strange ironies of modern history: the guillotine was originally imagined as progressive technology. But revolutions do not eliminate states. They rebuild them. And as the revolutionary government expanded, so did administrative systems. Population records expanded. Documentation expanded. Surveillance expanded. The Revolution did not simply reduce state power. In many ways, it centralized and intensified it. This becomes even clearer under Napoleon. The Napoleonic state dramatically expanded bureaucratic administration across France. Prefects monitored local regions. Police systems became more centralized. Internal passports and identity papers became increasingly important. To travel, work, or move often required documentation. And suddenly anonymity itself became suspicious. Under the ancien régime, punishment focused heavily on visible acts. Under the modern administrative state, concern shifts toward legibility. Can the state identify you? Can it classify you? Can it locate you inside a system of records? If not, you begin to appear dangerous almost by definition.

And this is where the older story about humanitarian progress starts becoming insufficient. Because yes, modern Europe gradually moves away from torture in the public square. But at the same time, entirely new systems of social control emerge. Prisons expand. Police bureaucracies expand. Records expand. Surveillance expands. The violence becomes less theatrical but more permanent. And this is exactly why Foucault argues that modern punishment should not be understood as the disappearance of power but as its diffusion throughout everyday life. The prison becomes central to this story. What makes prisons historically fascinating is that they present themselves as humane institutions. The prison claims to reform. To rehabilitate. To discipline constructively rather than destroy publicly. But nineteenth-century prisons often became spaces of isolation, psychological control, forced labor, and constant surveillance.

And in France especially, the prison system became deeply entangled with colonialism. Because one of the things modern European states increasingly did was export punishment outward. Instead of displaying violence in Paris, punishment could be displaced geographically. French penal colonies like Devil's Island became laboratories of exclusion where undesirable populations could be removed from the social body entirely. And that movement—from public execution to colonial exile—is incredibly important. The violence does not disappear. It relocates. Empire becomes one of the places where Europe externalizes forms of punishment and coercion that become politically uncomfortable inside the metropole itself. Which is something we’ll talk about much more in the next episode.

But even within France itself, punishment increasingly disappears into institutions. And that disappearance matters politically. Because visible violence creates moral friction. People react to executions. They recoil from torture. They witness suffering directly. Invisible systems are often more durable precisely because they appear neutral. A prison looks administrative. A police file looks bureaucratic. A census looks technical. A database looks objective. But embedded inside all of these systems are decisions about who becomes visible to power and who becomes marked as suspicious. This is partly why twentieth-century thinkers like Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno become so skeptical of Enlightenment rationality itself. Because systems designed to create order, predictability, and universal administration can also produce new forms of domination. The modern state does not usually need to carve punishment into flesh. It governs through files, institutions, classifications, documentation, and surveillance.

And perhaps the most unsettling part of this history is that modern punishment often functions best when it becomes ordinary. When it disappears into procedure. When nobody notices it anymore. The eighteenth-century scaffold at least announced itself openly. Modern systems often present themselves as mere administration. And yet they continue shaping who belongs, who is monitored, who is excluded, and who remains permanently suspect. So the story of punishment in France is not a straight line from cruelty to civilization. It is a transformation in political technique. The scaffold gives way to the prison. Public torture gives way to surveillance. Spectacle gives way to bureaucracy. But the underlying question remains remarkably consistent: how does the state make people legible? How does it produce obedience? How does it distinguish between order and disorder? And once you begin looking at punishment this way, you start realizing something uncomfortable. Modern societies may not be less punitive than earlier ones. They may simply punish differently. The violence becomes quieter. Cleaner. More administrative. Less visible. But not necessarily less real. And perhaps that is the central paradox running through the history of punishment: the disappearance of visible cruelty does not necessarily mean the disappearance of coercion. Sometimes it simply means power has learned to hide itself better.