Summary of Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

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#1 The execution of Damiens the regicide was recorded by Bouton, an officer of the watch. He was quartered, which meant his flesh was torn apart by red-hot pincers, his right hand holding the knife with which he had committed the parricide.

#2 The executioner, Samson, told the court that there was no hope of succeeding. He asked their lordships if they wanted him to have the prisoner cut into pieces. The clerk of the court, Monsieur Le Breton, asked them again, and again the patient said no. The four limbs were then pulled away, and the trunk and the rest were covered with logs and faggots and fire was put to them.

#3 The French prison system was based on the Léon Faucher rules, which were written in 1833. The prisoners’ day began at six in the morning in winter and five in summer. They worked for nine hours a day, two hours a day was devoted to instruction, and work ended at nine o’clock in winter and eight in summer.

#4 The prison time-table of 1786 defines a certain penal style. It was a time when Europe and the United States re-organized their economy of punishment. They eliminated torture as a public spectacle, and replaced it with less physical forms of punishment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Mar 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669376484

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Insights on Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The execution of Damiens the regicide was recorded by Bouton, an officer of the watch. He was quartered, which meant his flesh was torn apart by red-hot pincers, his right hand holding the knife with which he had committed the parricide.

#2

The executioner, Samson, told the court that there was no hope of succeeding. He asked their lordships if they wanted him to have the prisoner cut into pieces. The clerk of the court, Monsieur Le Breton, asked them again, and again the patient said no. The four limbs were then pulled away, and the trunk and the rest were covered with logs and faggots and fire was put to them.

#3

The French prison system was based on the Léon Faucher rules, which were written in 1833. The prisoners’ day began at six in the morning in winter and five in summer. They worked for nine hours a day, two hours a day was devoted to instruction, and work ended at nine o’clock in winter and eight in summer.

#4

The prison time-table of 1786 defines a certain penal style. It was a time when Europe and the United States re-organized their economy of punishment. They eliminated torture as a public spectacle, and replaced it with less physical forms of punishment.

#5

The public exhibition of prisoners was abolished in 1831, and the use of prisoners in public works was discontinued in most countries by the end of the eighteenth or beginning of the nineteenth century. The ceremonial of punishment tended to decline, and was only maintained as a new legal or administrative practice.

#6

Punishment will tend to become the most hidden aspect of the penal process. This has several consequences: it enters the realm of abstract consciousness, its effectiveness is seen as stemming from its inevitability rather than its visible intensity, and it is the certainty of being punished rather than the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that deterrs crime.

#7

The disappearance of public executions marks the decline of the spectacle, but it also marks a slackening of the hold on the body. The body now serves as an instrument or intermediary, and is deprived of its dignity.

#8

The modern rituals of execution attest to this double process: the disappearance of the spectacle and the elimination of pain. The same movement has affected the various European legal systems, each at its own rate.

#9

The guillotine was a perfect vehicle for these principles. It took life almost without touching the body, just as prison deprives of liberty or a fine reduces wealth. It was intended to apply the law not to a real body capable of feeling pain, but to a juridical subject, the possessor of the right to exist.

#10

The last vestige of the great public execution was its annulment: a drapery to hide a body. Benoît, triply infamous for his mother’s murderer, homosexual, and assassin, was the first parricide not to have a hand cut off.

#11

The age of sobriety in punishment began in the nineteenth century, when the public execution was abandoned and physical punishment was avoided. By 1830, public executions had almost completely disappeared.

#12

The process of changing the way the French punished crimes was not complete by 1840. The reduction in the use of torture was a tendency that was rooted in the great transformation of the years 1760–1840, but it did not end there. The practice of the