Tortured Subjects: Pain, Truth, and the Body in Early Modern France

by Lisa Silverman

At one time in Europe, there was a point to physical suffering could be a path to redemption. This religious notion suggested that truth was lodged in the body and could be achieved through torture. In Tortured Subjects, Lisa Silverman tells the haunting story of how this idea became a fixed part of the French legal system during the early modern period.

Looking closely at the theory and practice of judicial torture in France from 1600 to 1788, the year in which it was formally abolished, Silverman revisits dossiers compiled in criminal cases, including transcripts of interrogations conducted under torture, as well as the writings of physicians and surgeons concerned with the problem of pain, records of religious confraternities, diaries and letters of witnesses to public executions, and the writings of torture's abolitionists and apologists. She contends that torture was at the center of an epistemological crisis that forced French jurists and intellectuals to reconsider the relationship between coercion and sincerity, or between free will and evidence. As the philosophical consensus on which torture rested broke down, and definitions of truth and pain shifted, so too did the foundation of torture, until by the eighteenth century, it became an indefensible practice.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, France, Politics

296 pages, Paperback

First published May 15, 2001

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent discussion of the use of torture during the early modern period in France. It is not written from the all-too-common point of view of enlightened disdain (much less outrage) at unreasoning man's inhumanity to man, but rather from the point of view that humane, rational people do inhumane things rationally based upon the premises of their philosophical point of view. Silverman finds that according to intellectual theories of the day, “to suffer was to eliminate the self, the will, and the consciousness in order to make room for God, God’s will, and the consciousness of the divine” (8). Lying is, by definition, a conscious act of will. “Criminal procedure implied that only by bypassing the will, by eliciting testimony that is not willed, that is not the product of human intent, could pure truth be achieved…[t:]orture inflicted pain as a means of achieving the spontaneous truth of the body rather than the composed truth of the mind" (9). This was all the more logical in the context of a religious culture that encouraged self-flagellation among the professional classes (including the jurists who ordered torture for the accused).
In modern democratic North America, this logic seems tortured: we tend to assume that a person suffering pain will confess to anything, just to make the torture stop - and this is confirmed by fictional portrayals of medieval torture, at least since Victor Hugo's time. Before that, philosophers such as Voltaire had called the old theories into question, and a cultural shift took place which made them heard and understood. Torture, which had seemed acceptable and reasonable in France for centuries, now became a violation of the rights of individuals. Ultimately, Silverman says, ideas do matter, and by changing definitions of truth, pain, and the body, it was possible for "abolitionists" to change social behavior and create what was for them a more just society.

[Erika · Rating 3 out of 5]

Placing torture within the larger context of how early modern Frenchmen and women experienced pain, this book argues that we can only enter into the use of torture by grasping a conception of the relationship between pain and truth that seems counterintuitive to us. For 16th and 17th century Europeans, truth, lodged in the body, could only be grasped through pain, in an imitation, Silverman argues, of Christ's suffering. Arguing against the idea that the use of torture was arbitrary or irrational, Silverman instead shows, through a careful reading of the court records of Toulouse, that the opposite is instead closer to the truth.

[Victoria · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting perspective on the ritual function of judicial torture; loses credibility in its discussion of the decline of judicial torture, which links the rise of flagellant confraternities in later early modern France with a reluctance to use torture to extract evidence. A comparative study of similar confraternities in Italy would suggest otherwise: flagellant confraternities no longer existed, but officials were equally cagey about the use of torture. Unconvinced.