Key Arguments

• Foucault asserts that “The public execution is to be understood not only as a judicial, but also as a political ritual. It belongs, even in minor cases, to the ceremonies by which power is manifested,” explicitly framing it as a manifestation of power.
• He states that “The public execution, then, has a juridico-political function. It is a ceremonial by which a momentarily injured sovereignty is reconstituted. It restores that sovereignty by manifesting it at its most spectacular,” indicating that the goal is sovereign restoration via spectacle.
• Execution is placed alongside “coronation, entry of the king into a conquered city, the submission of rebellious subjects,” as “great rituals in which power is eclipsed and restored,” emphasizing its role in cycles of sovereign eclipse and triumph.
• Its aim is “not so much to re-establish a balance as to bring into play, as its extreme point, the dissymmetry between the subject who has dared to violate the law and the all-powerful sovereign who displays his strength,” so imbalance and asymmetry are central.
• Punishment is staged to give “a spectacle not of measure, but of imbalance and excess; in this liturgy of punishment, there must be an emphatic affirmation of power and of its intrinsic superiority,” prioritizing excess over proportionality.
• This superiority is concretely physical: it is “the physical strength of the sovereign beating down upon the body of his adversary and mastering it,” with the prince (or his delegates) seizing, marking, beating, and breaking the condemned body.
• Foucault explicitly calls the ceremony “an exercise of ‘terror’.” He contrasts earlier practice with later eighteenth‑century jurists who reinterpret cruelty as needed for example; he argues that “what had hitherto maintained this practice of torture was not an economy of example, in the sense in which it was to be understood at the time of the idéologues (that the representation of the penalty should be greater than the interest of the crime), but a policy of terror: to make everyone aware, through the body of the criminal, of the unrestrained presence of the sovereign.”
• He concludes pointedly: “The public execution did not re-establish justice; it reactivated power,” summarizing his thesis that the scaffold’s true function is power’s theatrical self-assertion, not juridical equilibrium.

Source Quotes

It is an essential element, therefore, in a penal liturgy, in which it must serve as the partner of a procedure ordered around the formidable rights of the sovereign, the prosecution and secrecy. The public execution is to be understood not only as a judicial, but also as a political ritual. It belongs, even in minor cases, to the ceremonies by which power is manifested. An offence, according to the law of the classical age, quite apart from the damage it may produce, apart even from the rule that it breaks, offends the rectitude of those who abide by the law: ‘If one commits something that the law forbids, even if there is neither harm nor injury to the individual, it is an offence that demands reparation, because the right of the superior man is violated and because it offends the dignity of his character’ (Risi, 9).

In the execution of the most ordinary penalty, in the most punctilious respect of legal forms, reign the active forces of revenge. The public execution, then, has a juridico-political function. It is a ceremonial by which a momentarily injured sovereignty is reconstituted. It restores that sovereignty by manifesting it at its most spectacular. The public execution, however hasty and everyday, belongs to a whole series of great rituals in which power is eclipsed and restored (coronation, entry of the king into a conquered city, the submission of rebellious subjects); over and above the crime that has placed the sovereign in contempt, it deploys before all eyes an invincible force.

The public execution, however hasty and everyday, belongs to a whole series of great rituals in which power is eclipsed and restored (coronation, entry of the king into a conquered city, the submission of rebellious subjects); over and above the crime that has placed the sovereign in contempt, it deploys before all eyes an invincible force. Its aim is not so much to re-establish a balance as to bring into play, as its extreme point, the dissymmetry between the subject who has dared to violate the law and the all-powerful sovereign who displays his strength. Although redress of the private injury occasioned by the offence must be proportionate, although the sentence must be equitable, the punishment is carried out in such a way as to give a spectacle not of measure, but of imbalance and excess; in this liturgy of punishment, there must be an emphatic affirmation of power and of its intrinsic superiority.

Its aim is not so much to re-establish a balance as to bring into play, as its extreme point, the dissymmetry between the subject who has dared to violate the law and the all-powerful sovereign who displays his strength. Although redress of the private injury occasioned by the offence must be proportionate, although the sentence must be equitable, the punishment is carried out in such a way as to give a spectacle not of measure, but of imbalance and excess; in this liturgy of punishment, there must be an emphatic affirmation of power and of its intrinsic superiority. And this superiority is not simply that of right, but that of the physical strength of the sovereign beating down upon the body of his adversary and mastering it: by breaking the law, the offender has touched the very person of the prince; and it is the prince – or at least those to whom he has delegated his force – who seizes upon the body of the condemned man and displays it marked, beaten, broken.

Although redress of the private injury occasioned by the offence must be proportionate, although the sentence must be equitable, the punishment is carried out in such a way as to give a spectacle not of measure, but of imbalance and excess; in this liturgy of punishment, there must be an emphatic affirmation of power and of its intrinsic superiority. And this superiority is not simply that of right, but that of the physical strength of the sovereign beating down upon the body of his adversary and mastering it: by breaking the law, the offender has touched the very person of the prince; and it is the prince – or at least those to whom he has delegated his force – who seizes upon the body of the condemned man and displays it marked, beaten, broken. The ceremony of punishment, then, is an exercise of ‘terror’.

And this superiority is not simply that of right, but that of the physical strength of the sovereign beating down upon the body of his adversary and mastering it: by breaking the law, the offender has touched the very person of the prince; and it is the prince – or at least those to whom he has delegated his force – who seizes upon the body of the condemned man and displays it marked, beaten, broken. The ceremony of punishment, then, is an exercise of ‘terror’. When the jurists of the eighteenth century began their polemic with the reformers, they offered a restrictive, ‘modernist’ interpretation of the physical cruelty of the penalties imposed by the law: if severe penalties are required, it is because their example must be deeply inscribed in the hearts of men.

When the jurists of the eighteenth century began their polemic with the reformers, they offered a restrictive, ‘modernist’ interpretation of the physical cruelty of the penalties imposed by the law: if severe penalties are required, it is because their example must be deeply inscribed in the hearts of men. Yet, in fact, what had hitherto maintained this practice of torture was not an economy of example, in the sense in which it was to be understood at the time of the idéologues (that the representation of the penalty should be greater than the interest of the crime), but a policy of terror: to make everyone aware, through the body of the criminal, of the unrestrained presence of the sovereign. The public execution did not re-establish justice; it reactivated power.

Yet, in fact, what had hitherto maintained this practice of torture was not an economy of example, in the sense in which it was to be understood at the time of the idéologues (that the representation of the penalty should be greater than the interest of the crime), but a policy of terror: to make everyone aware, through the body of the criminal, of the unrestrained presence of the sovereign. The public execution did not re-establish justice; it reactivated power. In the seventeenth century, and even in the early eighteenth century, it was not, therefore, with all its theatre of terror, a lingering hang-over from an earlier age.

Key Concepts

• The public execution is to be understood not only as a judicial, but also as a political ritual. It belongs, even in minor cases, to the ceremonies by which power is manifested.
• The public execution, then, has a juridico-political function. It is a ceremonial by which a momentarily injured sovereignty is reconstituted. It restores that sovereignty by manifesting it at its most spectacular.
• Its aim is not so much to re-establish a balance as to bring into play, as its extreme point, the dissymmetry between the subject who has dared to violate the law and the all-powerful sovereign who displays his strength.
• the punishment is carried out in such a way as to give a spectacle not of measure, but of imbalance and excess; in this liturgy of punishment, there must be an emphatic affirmation of power and of its intrinsic superiority.
• And this superiority is not simply that of right, but that of the physical strength of the sovereign beating down upon the body of his adversary and mastering it
• The ceremony of punishment, then, is an exercise of ‘terror’.
• what had hitherto maintained this practice of torture was not an economy of example, in the sense in which it was to be understood at the time of the idéologues (that the representation of the penalty should be greater than the interest of the crime), but a policy of terror: to make everyone aware, through the body of the criminal, of the unrestrained presence of the sovereign.
• The public execution did not re-establish justice; it reactivated power.

Context

In the latter part of this passage, Foucault moves from the semiotics of the body to an explicit political reading of the scaffold, arguing that public execution belongs to a set of sovereignty-restoring rituals and that its cruelty is sustained by a logic of terrorized visibility rather than utilitarian deterrence.