Capital punishment was rare in classical-age penal practice

Evidence

But we must not be misled. There was a considerable gap between this arsenal of horrors and everyday penal practice. Public torture and execution was by no means the most frequent form of punishment. To us today the proportion of death sentences in the penal practice of the classical age may seem high: at the Châtelet1 during the period 1755–85 under 10 per cent of the sentences passed involved capital punishment: the wheel, the gallows or the stake (Petrovitch, 226ff); the Parlement of Flanders passed thirty-nine death sentences, out of a total of 260 sentences, between 1721 and 1730 (and twenty-six out of 500 between 1781 and 1790 – cf. Dautricourt). — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 82