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Sovereign truth was reserved to the king as a jealously guarded privilege

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tagsja-picks, xref, causal_relationships, trade, singleton, category/causal-relationships
aliases@foucault_discipline_1975, loc. 86

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Sovereign truth was reserved to the king as a jealously guarded privilege

Evidence

The secret and written form of the procedure reflects the principle that in criminal matters the establishment of truth was the absolute right and the exclusive power of the sovereign and his judges. Ayrault supposed that this procedure (which was more or less established by the sixteenth century) originated in ‘the fear of the uproar, shouting and cheering that the people usually indulge in, the fear that there would be disorder, violence, and outbursts against the parties, or even against the judges’; the king wished to show in this that the ‘sovereign power’ from which the right to punish derived could in no case belong to the ‘multitude’ (cf. Ayrault, LIII, chapters LXXII and LXIX). Before the justice of the sovereign, all voices must be still. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 86

Categorization

  • XREF: Truth as the ‘absolute privilege’ of the sovereign anticipates Foucault’s later thesis that the disciplinary regime redistributes knowledge asymmetrically among bodies. — connects to: The king’s pardoning power displayed sovereignty more fully than the execution itself. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 107; The punished body anchors sovereign power’s manifestation — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 110; The colonized withhold truth from the colonizer as a defense. — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 463 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

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