Key Arguments

• Foucault synthesizes reformers’ plans as a spatialized city of punishment: "This, then, is how one must imagine the punitive city. At the crossroads, in the gardens, at the side of roads being repaired or bridges built, in workshops open to all, in the depths of mines that may be visited, will be hundreds of tiny theatres of punishment."
• Every crime and criminal should have its own readable punishment: "Each crime will have its law; each criminal his punishment. It will be a visible punishment, a punishment that tells all, that explains, justifies itself, convicts: placards, different-coloured caps bearing inscriptions, posters, symbols, texts read or printed, tirelessly repeat the code."
• Visual devices, including deception, are enlisted to increase clarity and fear while staying within an economy of example: "Scenery, perspectives, optical effects, trompe-l’œil sometimes magnify the scene, making it more fearful than it is, but also clearer. From where the public is sitting, it is possible to believe in the existence of certain cruelties which, in fact, do not take place."
• The essential requirement is that every punishment be a moral fable: "But the essential point, in all these real or magnified severities, is that they should all, according to a strict economy, teach a lesson: that each punishment should be a fable."
• These scenes are meant to surround ordinary life, in counterpoint to examples of virtue: "And that, in counterpoint with all the direct examples of virtue, one may at each moment encounter, as a living spectacle, the misfortunes of vice. Around each of these moral ‘representations’, schoolchildren will gather with their masters and adults will learn what lessons to teach their offspring."
• The old ‘great terrifying ritual of the public execution’ is to be replaced by this dispersed, sober theatre: "The great terrifying ritual of the public execution gives way, day after day, street after street, to this serious theatre, with its multifarious and persuasive scenes."
• Foucault notes that some reformers also want one supreme exemplary punishment for parricide, serving as a ‘keystone’ of the system: "But perhaps it will be necessary, above these innumerable spectacles and narratives, to place the major sign of punishment for the most terrible of crimes: the keystone of the penal edifice."
• Vermeil’s imagined iron cage suspended in a public square exemplifies this absolute punishment: "‘Thus he would be exposed to all the rigours of the seasons, sometimes his head would be covered with snow, sometimes burnt by a scorching sun. It is in this energetic torture, presenting rather the extension of a painful death than that of a painful life, that one would truly recognize a villain deserving of the horror of nature in its entirety’".
• Despite this rich repertoire of ‘picturesque punishments’, the project notably does not envisage imprisonment as a universal form: "There is a whole new arsenal of picturesque punishments. ‘Avoid inflicting the same punishments,’ said Mably.… To be more precise: the use of imprisonment as a general form of punishment is never presented in these projects for specific, visible and ‘telling’ penalties."

Source Quotes

Country people, too, will be witnesses of these examples and will sow them around their huts, the taste of virtue will take root in these coarse souls, while the evil-doer, dismayed at the public joy, fearful at the sight of so many enemies, may abandon plans whose outcome will be as prompt as it is gloomy’ (Servan, 37). This, then, is how one must imagine the punitive city. At the crossroads, in the gardens, at the side of roads being repaired or bridges built, in workshops open to all, in the depths of mines that may be visited, will be hundreds of tiny theatres of punishment. Each crime will have its law; each criminal his punishment.

At the crossroads, in the gardens, at the side of roads being repaired or bridges built, in workshops open to all, in the depths of mines that may be visited, will be hundreds of tiny theatres of punishment. Each crime will have its law; each criminal his punishment. It will be a visible punishment, a punishment that tells all, that explains, justifies itself, convicts: placards, different-coloured caps bearing inscriptions, posters, symbols, texts read or printed, tirelessly repeat the code. Scenery, perspectives, optical effects, trompe-l’œil sometimes magnify the scene, making it more fearful than it is, but also clearer.

It will be a visible punishment, a punishment that tells all, that explains, justifies itself, convicts: placards, different-coloured caps bearing inscriptions, posters, symbols, texts read or printed, tirelessly repeat the code. Scenery, perspectives, optical effects, trompe-l’œil sometimes magnify the scene, making it more fearful than it is, but also clearer. From where the public is sitting, it is possible to believe in the existence of certain cruelties which, in fact, do not take place.

From where the public is sitting, it is possible to believe in the existence of certain cruelties which, in fact, do not take place. But the essential point, in all these real or magnified severities, is that they should all, according to a strict economy, teach a lesson: that each punishment should be a fable. And that, in counterpoint with all the direct examples of virtue, one may at each moment encounter, as a living spectacle, the misfortunes of vice.

Around each of these moral ‘representations’, schoolchildren will gather with their masters and adults will learn what lessons to teach their offspring. The great terrifying ritual of the public execution gives way, day after day, street after street, to this serious theatre, with its multifarious and persuasive scenes. And popular memory will reproduce in rumour the austere discourse of the law.

And popular memory will reproduce in rumour the austere discourse of the law. But perhaps it will be necessary, above these innumerable spectacles and narratives, to place the major sign of punishment for the most terrible of crimes: the keystone of the penal edifice. In any case, Vermeil had imagined the scene of absolute punishment that should dominate all the theatres of everyday punishment: the only case in which one had to seek to reach an infinity of punishment, something equivalent in the new penal system to what regicide had been in the old.

‘Thus he would be exposed to all the rigours of the seasons, sometimes his head would be covered with snow, sometimes burnt by a scorching sun. It is in this energetic torture, presenting rather the extension of a painful death than that of a painful life, that one would truly recognize a villain deserving of the horror of nature in its entirety, condemned to see no longer the heaven that he has outraged and to live no longer on the earth that he has sullied’ (Vermeil, 148–9). Above the punitive city hangs this iron spider; and the criminal who is to be thus crucified by the new law is the parricide.

The idea of a uniform penalty, modulated only according to the gravity of the crime is banished. To be more precise: the use of imprisonment as a general form of punishment is never presented in these projects for specific, visible and ‘telling’ penalties. Imprisonment is envisaged, but as one among other penalties; it is the specific punishment for certain offences, those that infringe the liberty of individuals (such as abduction) or those that result from an abuse of liberty (disorder, violence).

Key Concepts

• This, then, is how one must imagine the punitive city. At the crossroads, in the gardens, at the side of roads being repaired or bridges built, in workshops open to all, in the depths of mines that may be visited, will be hundreds of tiny theatres of punishment.
• Each crime will have its law; each criminal his punishment. It will be a visible punishment, a punishment that tells all, that explains, justifies itself, convicts: placards, different-coloured caps bearing inscriptions, posters, symbols, texts read or printed, tirelessly repeat the code.
• Scenery, perspectives, optical effects, trompe-l’œil sometimes magnify the scene, making it more fearful than it is, but also clearer.
• that each punishment should be a fable.
• The great terrifying ritual of the public execution gives way, day after day, street after street, to this serious theatre, with its multifarious and persuasive scenes.
• the major sign of punishment for the most terrible of crimes: the keystone of the penal edifice.
• It is in this energetic torture, presenting rather the extension of a painful death than that of a painful life, that one would truly recognize a villain deserving of the horror of nature in its entirety
• the use of imprisonment as a general form of punishment is never presented in these projects for specific, visible and ‘telling’ penalties.

Context

Later in this excerpt, Foucault gathers diverse reform proposals (Bexon, Vermeil, Mably, etc.) to sketch the imagined ‘punitive city’—a dispersed, theatrical penal space with one ultimate exemplary torture—highlighting that this entire semiotic program initially excludes generalized imprisonment.