son’s suicide.56 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.”57 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.”58
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.59 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.”60 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.”61 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?”62
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.64
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.
I have demarcated the 18th century on this and the other graphs in this chapter to highlight