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Public execution made the condemned man co-author of his own punishment

Properties2
tagsja-picks, define, factual_claims, trade, singleton, xref, category/factual-claims
aliases@foucault_discipline_1975, loc. 95

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Public execution made the condemned man co-author of his own punishment

Evidence

It made the guilty man the herald of his own condemnation. He was given the task, in a sense, of proclaiming it and thus attesting to the truth of what he had been charged with: the procession through the streets, the placard attached to his back, chest or head as a reminder of the sentence; the halts at various crossroads, the reading of the sentence, the amende honorable performed at the doors of churches, in which the condemned man solemnly acknowledged his crime: ‘Barefoot, wearing a shirt, carrying a torch, kneeling, to say and to declare that wickedly, horribly, treacherously, he has committed the most detestable crime, etc.’; exhibition at a stake where his deeds and the sentence were read out; yet another reading of the sentence at the foot of the scaffold; whether he was to go simply to the pillory or to the stake and the wheel, the condemned man published his crime and the justice that had been meted out to him by bearing them physically on his body. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 95

Categorization

  • DEFINE: The amende honorable is defined in concrete ritual detail here — central to how the scaffold publishes the crime on the body.
  • XREF: connects to: Punishment doubled into an object relation producing the criminal as a known individual — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 163; Public executions let condemned criminals reversibly become heroes who mock authority — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 116

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