Punishment and Brutalization in the English Enlightenment

“As punishments become more cruel, men become more ferocious.” That contention, voiced in this instance by a contributor to The Gentleman's Magazine in 1786, had been a respected tenet of Enlightenment penal theory since its articulation by Cesare Beccaria twenty years earlier. In the interim, commentators on both sides of the Channel had continued to theorize about the impact of public physical punishments on the temper of society. Repeated public executions, thought one contributor to The Times, led only to “a shameless apathy”; another cautioned that, “When the wantonness of oppression is made familiar to the eye, the sensibility of the people…degenerates into despondency, degeneracy and stupidity,…” and he repeated Montesquieu's sinister simile likening the tranquility of such a state to the mournful silence of a city that the enemy is about to storm. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, however, such speculation took on the chilling force of prophecy fulfilled, and for the next fifty years a chorus of increasingly alarmed English voices warned of the potential for insurrection inherent in physical punishments. Continued recourse to public executions, a “festival of blood, [was] calculated to shock or brutalize the feelings of man, [to] encourage ferocious habits in the people.” “Revolutions,” trumpeted the Morning Herald in 1835, “are always most bloody in countries whose laws have most familiarized the people with spectacles of vengeance.”