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The debunking of superstition and dogma removes one of the pretexts for torture, but leaves it available as a punishment for secular crimes and misdemeanors. People in ancient, medieval, and early modern times thought cruel punishments were perfectly reasonable. The whole point of punishing someone is to make him so unhappy that he and others won't be tempted to engage in the prohibited activity. By that reasoning, the harsher the punishment is, the better it accomplishes what it is designed to do. Also, a state without an effective police and judiciary had to make a little punishment go a long way. It had to make the punishments so memorably brutal that anyone who witnessed them would be terrorized into submission and would spread the word to terrorize others.

But the practical function of cruel punishments was just a part of their appeal. Spectators enjoyed cruelty, even when it served no judicial purpose. Torturing animals, for example, was good clean fun. In 16th-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. According to the historian Norman Davies, "The spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized." Also popular were dogfights, bull runs, cockfights, public executions of "criminal" animals, and bearbaiting, in which a bear would be chained to a post and dogs would tear it apart or be killed in the effort.

Even when they were not actively enjoying torture, people showed a chilling insouciance to it. Samuel Pepys, presumably one of the more refined men of his day, made the following entry in his diary for October 13, 1660:

Even the less flamboyant penalties that we remember with the euphemism "corporal punishment" were forms of hideous torture. Today many historical tourist traps have stocks and pillories in which children can pose for pictures. Here is a description of an actual pillorying of two men in 18th-century England:

Pepys's cold joke about Harrison's "looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition" referred to his being partly strangled, disemboweled, castrated, and shown his organs being burned before being decapitated.

Out to Charing Cross, to see Major-general Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered; which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition. He was presently cut down, and his head and heart shown to the people, at which there was great shouts of joy… From thence to my Lord's, and took Captain Cuttance and Mr. Sheply to the Sun Tavern, and did give them some oysters.

One of them being of short stature could not reach the hole made for the admission of the head. The officers of justice nevertheless forced his head through the hole and the poor wretch hung rather than stood. He soon grew black in the face and blood issued from his nostrils, his eyes and his ears. The mob nevertheless attacked him with great fury. The officers opened the pillory and the poor wretch fell down dead on the stand of the instrument. The other man was so maimed and hurt by what was thrown at him that he lay there without hope of recovery.

Another kind of "corporal punishment" was flogging, the common penalty for insolence or dawdling by British sailors and African American slaves. Whips were engineered in countless models that could flay skin, pulverize flesh into mincemeat, or slice through muscle to the bone. Charles Napier recounted that in the late-18th-century British armed forces, sentences of a thousand lashes were not uncommon:

I have often seen victims brought out of the hospital three or four times to receive the remainder of the punishment, too severe to be borne without danger of death at one flogging. It was terrible to see the new, tender skin of the scarcely healed back laid bare again to receive the lash. I have seen hundreds of men flogged and have always observed that when the skin is thoroughly cut up or flayed off, the great pain subsides. Men are frequently convulsed and screaming during the time they receive from one lash to three hundred and then they bear the remainder, even to 800 or a thousand without a groan. They will often lie as without life and the drummers appear to be flogging a lump of dead, raw flesh.

The word keelhaul is sometimes used to refer to a verbal reprimanding. Its literal sense comes from another punishment in the British navy. A sailor was tied to a rope and pulled around the bottom of the ship's hull. If he didn't drown, he would be slashed to ribbons by the encrusted barnacles.

By the end of the 16th century in England and the Netherlands, imprisonment began to replace torture and mutilation as the penalty for minor crimes. It was not much of an improvement. Prisoners had to pay for food, clothing, and straw, and if they or their families couldn't pay they did without. Sometimes they had to pay for "easement of irons," namely being released from spiked iron collars or from bars that pinned their legs to the floor. Vermin, heat and cold, human waste, and scanty and putrid food not only added to the misery but fostered diseases that made prisons de facto death camps. Many prisons were workhouses in which underfed prisoners were forced to rasp wood, break rocks, or climb moving treadwheels for most of their waking hours.

The bland phrase broken on the wheel cannot come close to capturing the horror of that form of punishment. According to one chronicler, the victim was transformed into a "huge screaming puppet writhing in rivulets of blood, a puppet with four tentacles, like a sea monster, of raw, slimy and shapeless flesh mixed up with splinters of smashed bones." In 1762 a sixty-four-year-old French Protestant named Jean Calas was accused of killing his son to prevent him from converting to Catholicism; in fact, he had tried to conceal the son's suicide.

The 18th century marked a turning point in the use of institutionalized cruelty in the West. In England reformers and committees criticized the "cruelty, barbarity, and extortion" they found in the country's prisons. Graphic reports of torture-executions began to sear the public's conscience. According to a description of the execution of Catherine Hayes in 1726, "As soon as the flames reached her, she tried to push away the faggots with her hands but scattered them. The executioner got hold of the rope around her neck and tried to strangle her but the fire reached his hand and burned it so he had to let it go. More faggots were immediately thrown on the fire and in three or four hours she was reduced to ashes."

During an interrogation that attempted to draw out the names of his accomplices, he was subjected to the strappado and water torture, then was broken on the wheel. After being left in agony for two hours, Calas was finally strangled in an act of mercy. Witnesses who heard his protestations of innocence as his bones were being broken were moved by the terrible spectacle. Each blow of the iron club "sounded in the bottom of their souls," and "torrents of tears were unleashed, too late, from all the eyes present." Voltaire took up the cause, noting the irony that foreigners judged France by its fine literature and beautiful actresses without realizing that it was a cruel nation that followed "atrocious old customs."

Other prominent writers also began to inveigh against sadistic punishments. Some, like Voltaire, used the language of shaming, calling the practices barbaric, savage, cruel, primitive, cannibalistic, and atrocious. Others, like Montesquieu, pointed out the hypocrisy of Christians' bemoaning their cruel treatment at the hands of Romans, Japanese, and Muslims, yet inflicting the same cruelty themselves. Still others, like the American physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence Benjamin Rush, appealed to the common humanity of readers and the people who were targets of punishment. In 1787 he noted that "the men, or perhaps the women, whose persons we detest, possess souls and bodies composed of the same materials as those of our friends and relations. They are bone of their bone." And, he added, if we consider their misery without emotion or sympathy, then "the principle of sympathy… will cease to act altogether; and will soon lose its place in the human breast." The goal of the judicial system should be to rehabilitate wrongdoers rather than harming them, and "the reformation of a criminal can never be effected by a public punishment." The English lawyer William Eden also noted the brutalizing effect of cruel punishments, writing in 1771, "We leave each other to rot like scare-crows in the hedges; and our gibbets are crowded with human carcasses. May it not be doubted, whether a forced familiarity with such objects can have any other effect, than to blunt the sentiments, and destroy the benevolent prejudices of the people?"

Most influential of all was the Milanese economist and social scientist Cesare Beccaria, whose 1764 bestseller On Crimes and Punishments influenced every major political thinker in the literate world, including Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams. 63 Beccaria began from first principles, namely that the goal of a system of justice is to attain "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" (a phrase later adopted by Jeremy Bentham as the motto of utilitarianism). The only legitimate use of punishment, then, is to deter people from inflicting greater harm on others than the harm inflicted on them. It follows that a punishment should be proportional to the harm of the crime -- not to balance some mysterious cosmic scale of justice but to set up the right incentive structure: "If an equal punishment be ordained for two crimes that injure society in different degrees, there is nothing to deter men from committing the greater as often as it is attended with greater advantage." A clearheaded view of criminal justice also entails that the certainty and promptness of a punishment are more important than its severity, that criminal trials should be public and based on evidence, and that the death penalty is unnecessary as a deterrent and not among the powers that should be granted to a state.

Beccaria's essay didn't impress everyone. It was placed on the papal Index of Forbidden Books, and vigorously contested by the legal and religious scholar Pierre-François Muyart de Vouglans. Muyart mocked Beccaria's bleeding-heart sensibility, accused him of recklessly undermining a time-tested system, and argued that strong punishments were needed to counteract man's innate depravity, beginning with his original sin.

I have demarcated the 18th century on this and the other graphs in this chapter to highlight the many humanitarian reforms that were launched in this remarkable slice of history. Another was the prevention of cruelty to animals. In 1789 Jeremy Bentham articulated the rationale for animal rights in a passage that continues to be the watchword of animal protection movements today: "The question is not Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?" Beginning in 1800, the first laws against bearbaiting were introduced into Parliament. In 1822 it passed the Ill-Treatment of Cattle Act and in 1835 extended its protections to bulls, bears, dogs, and cats. Like many humanitarian movements that originated in the Enlightenment, opposition to animal cruelty found a second wind during the Rights Revolutions of the second half of the 20th century, culminating in the banning of the last legal blood sport in Britain, the foxhunt, in 2005.

But Beccaria's ideas carried the day, and within a few decades punitive torture was abolished in every major Western country, including the newly independent United States in its famous prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishments" in the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution. Though it is impossible to plot the decline of torture precisely (because many countries outlawed different uses at different times), the cumulative graph in figure 4-2 shows when fifteen major European countries, together with the United States, explicitly abolished the major forms of judicial torture practiced there.

Sources: Hunt, 2007, pp. 76, 179; Mannix, 1964, pp. 137-38.

FIGURE 4-2: Time line for the abolition of judicial torture