Nineteenth‑century penal reform deliberately sought to separate the search for truth from the violence of punishment, to mark the heterogeneity between crime and its penalty, and to render punishing power ‘innocent’ of atrocity by insisting that punishment follow from truth only as a legitimate consequence rather than as a spectacular counter‑crime.

By Michel Foucault, from Discipline and Punish

Key Arguments

  • Foucault writes that "The punitive practice of the nineteenth century was to strive to put as much distance as possible between the ‘serene’ search for truth and the violence that cannot be entirely effaced from punishment," so a new ideal of serene, non‑violent knowledge is opposed to the brutal spectacle.
  • This practice "set out to mark the heterogeneity that separates the crime that is to be punished and the punishment imposed by the public power," undoing the earlier mechanism where atrocity linked them in a single ritual economy.
  • He formulates the new normative relation: "Between truth and punishment, there should no longer be any other relation than one of legitimate consequence," implying that truth should simply ground a measured sanction rather than a mimetic or excessive counter‑atrocity.
  • Punishing power now "should not soil its hands with a crime greater than the one it wished to punish. It should remain innocent of the penalty that it inflicts," articulating the Enlightenment and post‑Enlightenment demand that the state not commit atrocities in the name of justice.
  • Quoting Pastoret—"‘Let us hasten to proscribe such tortures. They were worthy only of the crowned monsters who governed the Romans’"—Foucault exemplifies the new discourse that delegitimizes atrocious supplices as barbarous and unworthy of a civilized penal order.

Source Quotes

And it joined both together in the tortured body. The punitive practice of the nineteenth century was to strive to put as much distance as possible between the ‘serene’ search for truth and the violence that cannot be entirely effaced from punishment. It set out to mark the heterogeneity that separates the crime that is to be punished and the punishment imposed by the public power.
The punitive practice of the nineteenth century was to strive to put as much distance as possible between the ‘serene’ search for truth and the violence that cannot be entirely effaced from punishment. It set out to mark the heterogeneity that separates the crime that is to be punished and the punishment imposed by the public power. Between truth and punishment, there should no longer be any other relation than one of legitimate consequence.
It set out to mark the heterogeneity that separates the crime that is to be punished and the punishment imposed by the public power. Between truth and punishment, there should no longer be any other relation than one of legitimate consequence. The punishing power should not soil its hands with a crime greater than the one it wished to punish.
Between truth and punishment, there should no longer be any other relation than one of legitimate consequence. The punishing power should not soil its hands with a crime greater than the one it wished to punish. It should remain innocent of the penalty that it inflicts. ‘Let us hasten to proscribe such tortures.
It should remain innocent of the penalty that it inflicts. ‘Let us hasten to proscribe such tortures. They were worthy only of the crowned monsters who governed the Romans’ (Pastoret, on the subject of the punishment of regicides, II, 61). But, according to the penal practice of the preceding period, the proximity in the public execution of the sovereign and the crime, the mixture that was produced in it of ‘demonstration’ and punishment, were not the result of a barbarous confusion; what joined them together was the mechanism of atrocity and its necessary concatenations.

Key Concepts

  • The punitive practice of the nineteenth century was to strive to put as much distance as possible between the ‘serene’ search for truth and the violence that cannot be entirely effaced from punishment
  • It set out to mark the heterogeneity that separates the crime that is to be punished and the punishment imposed by the public power
  • Between truth and punishment, there should no longer be any other relation than one of legitimate consequence
  • The punishing power should not soil its hands with a crime greater than the one it wished to punish. It should remain innocent of the penalty that it inflicts
  • ‘Let us hasten to proscribe such tortures. They were worthy only of the crowned monsters who governed the Romans’

Context

Midway through the passage, Foucault contrasts the old atrocious ritual with nineteenth‑century reformist penal ideals, highlighting a shift in how truth and punishment are supposed to relate and how state violence is morally framed.