Lynn Hunt: Inventing Human Rights

good afternoon my name is David Marshall and I'm executive Dean of the College of Letters and science and you know humanities and Fine Arts at UC Santa Barbara I'm very glad to welcome you here today to this inaugural lecture of the Wade Clark roof lectures on human rights and you'll be hearing from Professor Lynn hunt in a few minutes I've known professor hunt and her work for many years but I'm not going to have the honor of introducing her today I'm just going to give you a brief introduction to this series and to make a

couple of comments about it this is a new series with the Capps enter a new endowed lecture series which has been created by the Friends of the cap Center in honor of the founding director Wade Clark roof we as some of you know had a kind of mini campaign when we had a National Endowment for the Humanities challenge grant which resulted in a 1.5 million dollar fundraising effort and eventually a 2 million dollar endowment in the cap Center and as part of that a group of friends of the center decided that they wanted to create

a lecture series in honor of Professor roof this was not his idea and I know that he had to be persuaded to go along with it in the end he couldn't resist the prospect of an endowed lecture series on human rights in the cap Center even if he had to lend his name to it professor roof has been the jf Ranney professor of religion and society in the Department of religious studies at UC Santa Barbara since 1989 he was chair of the department of religious studies from 1999 to 2004 and most importantly in our context

today in 1999 he became the founding director of the Walter H Kap center for the study of ethics religion and public life a position that he still holds today he's a leading sociologists of religion professor roof has won many honors and birds and positions held positions of leadership both nationally and internationally and I'm not going to even touch upon those today although I thought I'd make one exception because we have a very distinguished French historian speaking today I'll note that last year professor roof was the distinguished Tocqueville Fulbright chair in American Studies at the école

des Jose dude in Paris this is a real honor to hold that position professor Wolff is a very active and influential scholar and his newest book is titled religious pluralism and civil society as director of the cap center Clark roof has made a crucial contribution to the vibrant public humanities programs at UC Santa Barbara as well as an enduring contribution to local and even national discussions about some of the most important and compelling issues of our day this of course is in the great tradition of Professor Walter Capps who as both professor in our department

and as congressman for this district stood for enlightened and ethical public discourse dialogue and debate and in this context I should acknowledge the presence of our congresswoman Lois Capps who has carried on that tradition in Congress thank you for joining us for the inaugural lecture of the Wade Clark roof lecture on human rights and now I would like to introduce and indeed thank professor roof who will introduce our speaker today good afternoon Thank You Dean Marshall I'm honored and humbled to have my name associated with a lectureship on human rights considering that the Daily News

currently care stories about torture starving children and sexual trafficking not to mention the enduring realities of racial and gender inequalities and religious-based conflicts we cannot escape the simple fact that so much remains to be done to secure the most basic of human rights the challenges are daunting yet the topic by its very nature in one way or another touches all of us Lynne hunt our speaker today notes that quote human rights is our only commonly shared bulwark end of quote against the evils of violence pain and domination it is my hope that this lectureship in

years to come will promote debate and dialogue about these harsh realities but more than just that that it will inspire civic action efforts at extending and enforcing our basic human rights a democracy such as ours should settle for nothing less I want to thank especially Leslie gray Nicole clan fur Leonard Wallach and Dean Marshall who envisioned this lectureship and work to make it happen and of course I think the donors who deemed it worthy of support I thank all of you present today for joining with me in this inaugural lecture Jay's lecture is co-sponsored by

the UCSB affiliates Office of Community Relations the history department at UCSB PAC's 2100 the Santa Barbara Association for unit go the centered barber chapter of ACLU and the United Nations Association of the United States of America Santa Barbara County Chapter my thanks go to all of these organizations then we also note that courtesy of the book ten copies of Lynne Hunt's new book inventing human rights are available for purchase in the foyer of Victoria Hall after the lecture this is a wonderful book that she's written very readable and very informative and tells you a great

deal about the history and development of the notion of human rights books will be signed by the author at a table in front of the stage at the end of the lecture so now our speaker Lynne hunt is the Eugen Weber professor of modern European history at UCLA a former president of the American Historical Association she taught at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California Berkeley before joining the faculty at UCLA she has written extensively on the French Revolution few of her books revolution and urban politics in provincial France politics culture and class

in the French Revolution the family Romance of the French Revolution he's also written all the history on the historical method as a topic the new cultural history with Joyce Appleby and Margaret Jacob telling the truth about history with Jacques Ravel histories French constructions of the past and with Victoria Bernal beyond the cultural turn her latest book inventing human rights a history appeared to critical acclaim in March 2007 please join me in walking professor hunt to Santa Barbara well thank you so much for coming out on a Sunday afternoon and for inviting me to come to

Santa Barbara a place which I've always tremendously much enjoyed coming to and thank you for those lovely words of introduction I am at going to be talking sooner or later in my lecture sooner rather than later actually about the question of torture but I will not be very explicitly talking about the current debates it is rather to set the context for the current debates but I'm happy to talk about the current debates later if you would like human rights doctrines rely on a claim of self evidence Thomas Jefferson made this very clear in 1776 we

hold these truths to be self-evident he wrote famously in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations took a more legalistic tone whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom justice and peace in the world yet this too was a claim of self evidence whereas being

simply a legalistic way of asserting a given something self-evident this claim of self evidence crucial to human rights even now gives rise to a paradox if equality of Rights is so self-evident then why did this assertion have to be made and why was it only made in certain times and places how can human rights be universal if they are not universally recognized shall we rest content with the explanation given by the 1948 framers that to quote them we agree about the rights but on condition no one asks us why can they be self-evident when scholars

have argued for more than 200 years about what Jefferson meant by his phrase debate will continue forever because Jefferson never felt the need to explain himself no one from the Congress wanted to revise his claim even though they extensively modified other sections of his preliminary version moreover if Jefferson had explained himself the self evidence of the claim would have evaporated an assertion that requires argument is not self-evident my first question is therefore a deceptively simple one what made someone like Jefferson slave owner prosperous planter Virginia patriarch imagined that equal natural and universal rights were self-evident

how and when did they get their self evidence Jefferson's language of 1776 had a certain influence beyond the borders of the new United States and perhaps especially in France but the Declaration of Independence remained as John Quincy Adams said in 1821 merely an occasional state paper it had no constitutional standing in contrast the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and citizen of 1789 stood as the preamble to the new French Constitution its invocation of the natural inalienable and sacred rights of man galvanized opinion world-wide this gives me a more precise question where did the

phrase rights of man come from when was it used first well I could have spent a lifetime trying to find an answer to that question but fortunately computerized data basis of French literature allow us to ask the question more systematically the first appearance of the rights of man occurred in 1762 in Russo's social contract now Rousseau used the phrase only once and never defined it and yet already by 1763 people were referring quite often to rights of man the term appeared even more frequently in the 1770s and 1780s with no inventor cited and it often

appeared alongside rights of humanity and of course natural rights the most important predecessor to rights of men the expression no sooner appeared then it was considered self-evident the ambiguities of this process can be heard in the words of the French Calvinist Minister Jean Paul Robeson Tet Shen who wrote to the French King in 1787 to complain about the limits of a proposed Edict of toleration for Protestants like himself Robbo insisted to quote him we know today what natural rights are and they certainly give to men much more than the Edict Accords to Protestants the time

has come when it is no longer acceptable for a law to overtly overrule the rights of humanity that are very well known all over the world they may have been well known yet in 1787 Robbo himself granted that a Catholic King could not officially sanction the Calvinist right of public worship only tolerate private religious practice in short everything depended on the interpretation given to what was no longer acceptable as he said the time has come when it is no longer acceptable for a law to overtly overrule the rights of humanity my first efforts then led

me to the 1760s and 1770s as the critical turning point in the emergence of human rights doctrines Rousseau might have been the first to use rights of man in French but that only shows that something in the intellectual or cultural environment made people ready to seize upon the notion one by the way that Rousseau himself did not pursue and eventually came rather to dislike things were happening that would give rights of man more concrete meaning amend them was a campaign against the use of judicial torture and cruel punishments that was beginning to take shape in

France and elsewhere in Europe and the American colonies it took a while however for intellectuals and reformers to see how human rights could be linked to the question of torture and cruel punishment it took a while even for them to object to torture and cruel punishment let me focus for a moment on the case of the Enlightenment most famous agitator Voltaire because he is especially revealing when Voltaire intervened in the notorious Kalaa affair in 1762 he only objected to the role played by religious bigotry in the execution of the Calvinist Jean Cala remembering that Calvinism

is still illegal in 1763 cologne victim his son who had probably committed suicide to prevent his conversion to Catholicism this was the charge against him the family had no interest in reporting it as a suicide because suicides and friends in the 1760s were subject to trial the body was exhumed a trial was held you could not be buried in hallowed ground all of your property was confiscated suicide was not something a family wanted to admit to Voltaire did not condemn in itself the application of the preliminary question which my next shot slide will show that

is judicially sanctioned and supervised torture thank you before execution designed to get those already convicted to name their accomplices originally kala his wife his other son his servant and a visitor to the house for dinner were all arrested and were going to be subjected to torture the higher courts decided to convict kala subject him to torture to get him to name the rest of them as accomplices now we don't have a picture of what actually happened to kala because judicial torture was carried out in secret therefore there are no newspaper representations or engravings at the

time this is in engraving an earlier engraving but from the same part of France Toulouse in southwestern France describing what was the characteristic form of administering this preliminary question Kalaa was stretched by a similar system of cranks and pulleys that steadily drew up one arm up while an iron weight I don't know if you can see it well here kept his feet in place when calab refused to provide names after two applications he was tied to a bench in the next slide and pictures of water were forced out his throat while his mouth was held

open by two small sticks it wasn't called this then but this is obviously an example of water boarding the proceedings were supervised by a judge and recorded by a notary you can see the judge and a notary in at least the judge in the picture Voltaire did not criticize the means used to execute Kalaa either no doubt because it was relatively common in 18th century France reserved to men convicted of homicide or highway robbery breaking on the wheel in my next side took place in two stages first the executioner tied the condemned man to an

x-shaped cross and systematically crushed the bones in his forearms legs fyz and arms by striking each one with two sharp blows using a winch fastened to the halter around the condemned man's neck and assistant under the scaffold then dislocated the vertebrae of the neck with violent tugs on the halter meanwhile the executioner struck the midsection with three hard blows of the iron rod then the executioner took down the broken body and fastened it limbs bent excruciating lis backward to a carriage wheel on top of a ten-foot pole there the condemned man remained long after death

concluding a most dreadful spectacle as one observer described such an execution in the 1780s in a secret instruction the court granted kala the grace of being strangled to death after two hours of torment before his body was attached to the wheel Voltaire made much of Calas protestations of innocence at both his torture and execution as if his ability to endure the pain and suffering proved his lack of guilt in his initial writings about kala in 1762 1763 Voltaire never once used the general term torture employing instead the legal euphemism the question I can say this

by the way because Voltaire's writings are available on cd-rom and thus are searchable during the 1760s his focus began to shift and increasingly the criminal justice system itself and especially its use of torture and cruelty came under fire Voltaire denounced judicial torture for the first time in 1766 after reading an essay by an Italian reformer Cesare Beccaria essays on crimes and punishments published in 1764 and after that he linked kala and torture together frequently natural compassion makes everyone to test the cruelty of judicial torture insisted Voltaire though he himself had not said so earlier what

had long seemed acceptable to him and many others now came into doubt as with human rights more generally new attitudes about both torture and punishment first crystallized in the 1760s not only in France but elsewhere in Europe and in the American colonies Voltaire's friend King Frederick the Great of Prussia took steps towards abolishing judicial torture in his lands in 1754 others followed in the next decades Sweden in 1772 and Austria and Bohemia in 1776 in 1780 the French monarchy eliminated the use of torture to extract confessions of guilt before sentencing and in 1788 it provisionally

abolished the use of torture to produce the names of accomplices in Britain the drop was introduced introduced to make hangings more to make them quicker and more humane and in 1783 the British government discontinued the public procession to Tyburn where hangings had become a major popular entertainment in 1789 not long after passing the Declaration of the Rights of Man and citizen the French Revolutionary Government renounced all forms of judicial torture and in 1792 it introduced the guillotine which was meant to make the execution of the death penalty uniform and as painless as possible by the

end of the 18th century then public opinion seemed to demand an end to judicial torture enter the many indignities visited on the bodies of the condemned as the American physician Benjamin Rush insisted in 1787 we should not forget that even criminals quote possessed souls and bodies composed of the same materials as those of our friends and relations Russia's statement points to one of the most important elements involved in the emergence of human rights identification or empathy with others especially those of different social standing and even convicted criminals two broad changes helped prepare the ground in

the second half of the 18th century for human rights new attitudes about the self and new practices concerning the body in the last half of the 18th century people learned how to empathize across more distant social boundaries than ever before in part thanks to new forms of reading in particular the remarkable rise to prominence of the epistolary novel the la ville based on an exchange of letters they're reading gave them a new appreciation for the widely shared aspiration for moral autonomy a crucial ingredient in human rights I am arguing here that the epistolary novel did

not just reflect important cultural and social changes of the time novel reading actually helped create new kinds of feelings including a recognition of shared psychological experiences and these feelings then translated into new cultural and social movements including human rights can it be coincidental that the three greatest novels of psychological identification of the 18th century Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Crain Clarissa and Russo's own Julie were all published in the period that immediately preceded the appearance of the rights of men what was needed in addition to empathy indeed a necessary precondition for empathy with the judicially condemned

was a new concern for the human body and a new framework for interpreting the pains of the body once sacred only within a religiously defined order in which individual bodies could be mutilated or tortured for the greater good the body became sacred on its own in a secular order that rested on the autonomy and inviolability of individuals bodies gained a more positive value as they became more separate more self-possessed and more individualized over the course of the 18th century while violations of them increasingly aroused negative reactions the ability to identify across social lines and recognize

a widely shared aspiration for moral autonomy might have been acquired in any number of ways and I do not pretend that novel reading was the only one still novel reading seems especially pertinent in part because the heyday of one particular kind of novel the epistolary novel coincides chronologically with the birth of human rights novels of all sorts of had been published before but they took off as a genre in the 18th century especially after 1740 the date of publication of Samuel Richardson's Pamela the work that sparked a novelistic explosion and a engraving of it is

shown on my next slide in France eight novels were published in 1701 52 in 1750 112 in 1789 in Britain the number of new novels increased six-fold between the first decade of the 18th century and the 1760s more people could read and novels now featured ordinary people such as Pamela as central characters facing the everyday problems of love marriage and getting ahead in the world literacy had increased to the point where servants male and female could read novels in the big cities the novel reading was not then nor is it now common among the lower

classes novels like those of Richardson and Rousseau drew their readers into identifying with ordinary characters who are by definition unknown to the reader readers empathized with the characters especially the heroine or hero thanks to the workings of the narrative form itself through the fictional exchange of letters in other words epistolary novels taught their readers nothing less than a new psychology and in the process laid the foundations for a new political and social order novels made the middle-class Julie and even servants like Pamela the heroine of Samuel Richardson's novel the equal and even the better of

rich men such as mr. B shown here Pamela's employer and would-be seducer novels made the point that all people are fundamentally similar because of their inner feelings and many novels showcased in particular the desire for autonomy personal independence in this way reading novels created a sense of equality and empathy through passionate involvement in the narrative now there is no way to make a completely convincing case about the power of novels in the space of a few minutes I can at least cite a witness or two on my behalf Denis Diderot one of the leaders of

the French enlightenment wrote a eulogy of Richardson when the English author died in 1761 in it he compared Richardson to the greatest authors among the ancients Moses Homer Euripides and Sophocles Diderot focused in particular on the immersion of the reader in the world of the novel and I quote him one takes despite all precautions a rule in his works you are thrown into conversation you approve you blame you admire you become irritated you feel indignant how many times did I not surprised myself as it happens to children who have been taken to the theater for

the first time crying don't believe it he is deceiving you if you go there you will be lost Richardson's narrative creates the impression that you are present Diderot recognizes and moreover this is your world not a far distant country not an exotic locale not a fairy tale his characters are taken from ordinary society Diderot says the passions he depicts are those I feel in myself now Diderot did not use the terms identification or empathy empathy being a twentieth-century term but he nonetheless provides a compelling description of them you recognize yourself in the characters you imaginatively

leap into the midst of the action you feel the same feelings that the characters are feeling in short you learn to empathize with someone who is not yourself and can never be directly accessible to use unlike say members of your family and yet who is in some imaginative way also yourself that being a crucial element in identification this process explains why one male reader wrote to Rousseau and we have hundreds of letters from men and women military officers to ordinary people writing to Rousseau I have felt passed through my heart the purity of Julie's emotions

empathy depends on identification Diderot sees that Richardson's narrative technique draws him ineluctably into this experience it's a kind of hothouse of emotional learning I quote utero again in the space of a few hours I went through a great number of situations which the longest life can hardly offer across its entire duration I felt that I had acquired experience so much does Diderot identify that he feels bereft at the novel's end a feeling that we all know quote I felt the same sensation that men feel who have been closely entwined and lived together for a long

time and who are now on the point of separating at the end it suddenly seemed to me that I was left alone Diderot has simultaneously lost himself in the action and regained himself in the reading he has more of a sense of the separateness of his self than before he now feels lonely but he also has more of a sense that others have selves too Diderot graphs moreover that the effect of the novel is unconscious to quote him one feels oneself drawn to the good with an impetuous 'ti one does not recognize when faced with

injustice you experience a disgust you do not know how to explain to yourself the novel has worked its effect through the process of involvement in the narrative not through explicit moralizing Jefferson drew a similar conclusion when asked for a list of recommended books by a young relative in 1771 he gave great prominence to the novels of Richardson Rousseau Laurence Sterne his personal favorite Montell and goldsmith fiction he insisted produces the desire for moral emulation even more effectively than reading history contemporaries did not always appreciate the effects of novels the English novelist and wit Horace Walpole

derided what he called the tedious lamentations of Richardson quote which are pictures of high life as conceived by a bookseller and romances as they would be spiritualize by a Methodist teacher Catholic and Protestant clergy denounced the potential in such novels for obscenity seduction and moral degradation novels were already linked with masturbation and neither Richardson nor Rousseau initially claimed authorship of their novels a rhyme in the lady's magazine for 1771 summed up a view widely shared with Pamela by name no better acquainted for as novels I hate my mind is not tainted many moralists feared that

novels so discontent in the minds especially of servants and young girls most commentators agreed on one thing Walpole notwithstanding novels had an uncommon power because they affected both body and mind they taught the meaning of moral autonomy and showed that everyone aspired to it that they often taught this through central female characters who could not in fact achieve total autonomy is a paradox that has already commanded considerable attention and that I am happy to discuss later the expansion of empathy through novel reading was part of the cultural shift that began in the 1760s but only

part it intersected with what I will call for short the rise of the self-contained person although it might seem that bodies are always inherently separate from each other at least after birth boundaries between bodies became more sharply defined after the 14th century individuals became more self-contained as they increasingly felt the need to keep their bodily excretions to themselves the threshold of shame lowered while pressure for self control rose defecation and urination and public became increasingly repellent people began to use handkerchiefs rather than blowing their nose into their hands spitting eating out of a common bowl

and sleeping in a bed with a stranger became disgusting or at least unpleasant violent outbursts of emotion and aggressive behavior became socially unacceptable these changes in attitudes towards the body with the surface indications of an underlying transformation 18th century changes in musical and theatrical performances domestic architecture and portraiture built upon these longer-term alterations moreover these new experiences proved to be crucial to the emergence of sensibility itself in the decades after 1750 opera goers began to listen in silence to the music rather than walking about to visit and converse with their friends allowing them to feel

strong individual emotions in response to the music one woman recounted her reaction took looks opera obsessed which premiered in Paris in 1776 quote I listen to this new work with profound attention from the first measures I was seized by such a strong feeling of awe and felt within me so intensely that religious impulse that without even knowing it I fell to my knees in my box and stayed in this position suppliant and with my hands clasped until the end of the piece this one reaction is especially striking because she draws an explicit parallel to religious

experience the ground of all authority was shifting from a transcendental religious framework to an inner human one but this shift could only make sense to people if it was experienced in a personal even intimate fashion theater patrons displayed more of a penchant for rowdiness during performances than music lovers but even in the theater new practices heralded a different future to put spectators at a greater distance and thus make disruption more difficult sitting on the stage was eliminated in French theatres in 1759 in 1782 efforts to establish order in the pit or parterre culminated an installation

of benches at the Comedie Francaise before then spectators in the pit roamed freely and sometimes acted more like a mob than an audience thank God things have changed home architecture reinforced this sense of individual separateness the chamber in French houses increasingly became more specialized in the second half of the 18th century the once general-purpose room became the bedroom and in better-off families children would have bedrooms separate from their parents two-thirds of Parisian houses had bedrooms by the second half of the 18th century whereas only one in seven had dining rooms still the move toward individual

privacy should not be exaggerated at least in France English travellers complained incessantly about the French practice of sleeping three or four strangers to a room in an inn albeit in separate beds the use of commodes in common view urinating in the fireplace and throwing the contents of chamber pots out of the window into the street even there completes testify however to an ongoing process bodies had always been central to European painting but before the 17th century these had most often bend the bodies of the Holy Family and Catholic saints or rulers and their courtiers in

the 17th and especially the 18th century more ordinary people began to order order paintings of themselves and their families as my next slide shows in the British North American colonies portraiture dominated the visual arts in part because European traditions weighed less heavily four times as many portraits were painted in the colonies between 1750 and 1776 as were as were painted in the first half of the 18th century and many of these depicted ordinary townspeople and landowners when history painting gained new prominence in France under the Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire portraits still made up 40%

of the paintings shown in the salons the price is commanded by portrait painters rose in the last decades of the 18th century and prints brought portraits to a wide audience beyond the original sitters and their families the most famous English painter of the age shown in my next slide sir Joshua Reynolds made his reputation as a portraitist one contemporary viewer expressed his disdain upon seeing the number of portraits in the French sun'll of 1769 I quote him in vain has the public long since complained of the multitude of obscure bourgeois which it must in Sicily

pass by in review the facility of the genre its utility and the vanity of all these petty personages encourages our emerging artists thanks to the unhappy taste of the century the salon is becoming nothing more than a gallery of portraits the centuries unhappy taste emanated from England according to the French and it's signaled from many of the impending victory of commerce over true art true portraits could convey something quite different from individuality as commercial wealth wealth grew by leaps and bounds commissioning portraits as a mark of status and gentility reflected a more general rise of

consumerism ordinary people did not wish to look ordinary in their portraits and some portrait painters gained reputations for their ability to render laces silks and satins more than faces yet the portraits sometimes focused on representations of types in the second half of the 18th century such portraits declined in significance as artists and their clients began to prefer more natural-looking renderings of psychological and physiological individuality moreover the very proliferation of individual likenesses itself encouraged the view that each person was an individual that is single separate distinctive and original and therefore should be depicted as such so

valued was likeness eventually that in 1786 the French musician and engravers you Louie katia invented a machine called the physio no trace which produced profile portraits mechanically one of the most famous ones is shown in my next slide now a historical curiosity long obscured by the appearance of photography physio no trace is yet another indicator of the interest in representing ordinary people Jefferson aside and in capturing the smallest differences between each person the way it worked was that the original life-size profile was done mechanically and then reduced and engraved on a copper plate listening to

music and silence using a handkerchief and viewing portraits all seem to go along with the image of the empathetic reader and they seem utterly incongruous alongside the torture and execution of Jean Carla yet the same judges and legislators who upheld the traditional legal system and even defended its harshness no doubt listened quietly to music commissioned portraits and owned houses with bedrooms though now have read novels because of their association with seduction and debauchery magistrates endorse the traditional system of crime and punishment because they believed that those guilty of crime could only be controlled by an

external force in the traditional view ordinary people could not regulate their own passions they had to be led product to do good and deterred from following their baser instincts this tendency toward evil in mankind resulted of course from original sin the writings of pierre-françois we uh give us rare insight into the traditionalist position because he was one of the very few jurists who rushed to take up becca Riyaz gauntlet and defend the old ways in print it's actually very hard to find jurists explaining the rationale of the traditional system we are as one of the

few in 1767 he published a point-by-point refutation of the italian reformer becker iya he objected in the strongest terms to becca rias attempt to found his systems on quote the ineffable sentiments of the heart to quote him I pride myself on having as much sensibility as anyone else but no doubt I do not have an organization of fibers or nerve endings as loose as that of our modern criminalist for I do not feel that gentle shuttering of which they speak we are derided Becca Ria's rationalist approached the reason it was so difficult to reform criminal

law according to him we are was that it depended less on reasoning than on experience and practice what experience taught was the need to control the unruly not coddle their sensibilities men must be judged as they are not as they should be he insisted and only the terror inspiring power of an avenging justice could rein in those tempers the pageantry of pain at the scaffold was too trying to instill terror and observers and in this way serve as a deterrence we are therefore found at revolting that Becca RIA tried to justify his arguments by reference

to what he called the sensitivity to pain of the guilty that sensitivity made the traditional system work to quote him precisely because each man identified with what happened to another and because he had a natural horror of pain it was necessary to prefer in the choice of punishments that which was the cruelest for the body of the guilty under the traditional understanding the pains of the body did not belong entirely to the individual condemned person those pains had the higher religious and political purposes of redemption and reparation of the community bodies could be mutilated in

the interest of inscribing Authority and broken or burned in the interest of restoring the moral political and religious order in other words the offender served as a kind of sacrificial victim whose suffering would restore wholeness to the community in order to the state the sacrificial nature of the right in France was underlined by the inclusion in many French sentences of a formal act of penitence in which the condemned criminal carried a burning torch and stopped in front of the church closest to the site of the crime to demand forgiveness on the way to death because

punishment was a sacrificial Rite and this is my last slide festivity inevitably accompanied and sometimes overshadowed the fear public executions as hogarth shows in this print from 1747 public executions brought thousands of people together and this shows the procession to Tyburn that's discontinued in 1783 public executions brought thousands of people together to celebrate the community's recovery from crimes in executions in Paris took place in the same square where fireworks celebrated births and marriages in the royal family as observers frequently recounted however festivity had an unpredictable quality about it the English educated classes increasingly express their

disapproval of what they called the most amazing scenes of drunkenness and debauchery that accompanied every execution at Tyburn pain punishment and the public spectacle of suffering all gradually lost their religious moorings in the second half of the 18th century but the process did not happen all at once and it was not very well understood at the time even beca rhea failed to see all the consequences of the new thinking he did so much to crystallize in the emerging individualistic and secular view pains belonged only to the sufferer in the here-and-now the attitude toward pain did

not change because of medical improvement in the treatment of pain the real breakthroughs in anesthesia only came in the mid 19th century with the use of ether and chloroform instead the change in attitude came about as a consequence of the re-evaluation of the individual body and its pains since pain in the body itself now belongs only to the individual rather than to the community the individual could no longer be sacrificed to the good of the community or to a higher religious purpose as the English reformer Henri daga insisted to quote him the good of society

is best promoted by a regard for individuals rather than expiating sin punishment should be seen as repaying a debt to society and clearly no payment could be forthcoming from a mutilated body where pain had served as the symbol of reparation under the traditional regime now pain seemed an obstacle to any meaningful repayment to cite just one example of this change in views judges in the British North American colonies began to impose fines for property offenses rather than whipping in the new view consequently queue cruel punishment exact it in a public setting constituted an assault on

society rather than a reaffirmation of it pain brutalized the individual and by identification the spectators rather than opening the door to salvation through repentance or to deterrence through terror torture on the other hand was repugnant because it was administered in private where the accused could not be assured of any public protection the conversion of elites to the new views of pain and punishment took place in stages between the early 1760s and the end of the 1780s many lawyers published briefs in the 1760s denouncing the injustice of the Kalaa conviction for example but like Voltaire none

of them opposed the use of judicial torture or breaking on the wheel they shared the assumption of the torturers that pain could prod the body to speak the truth even when the individual mind resisted but in the 1760s and 1770s this assumption fell apart as beca Riya insisted the criminal could dissimulate and the innocent person might well confess to a crime he or she did not commit Becka Riya to quote him the robust will escape and the feeble be condemned pain and Bekah Ria's analysis could not be the test of truth to quote him as

if truth resided in the muscles and fibers of a wretch in torture pain was merely a sensation without connection to moral sentiment in the 1770s and 1780s the campaign for the abolition of torture and for the moderation of punishment gained momentum as learned societies across Europe sponsored competitions on penal reform by the 1780s the barbarism of judicial torture and cruel punishment had been so successfully argued that the French crown itself signed on to many of the new attitudes it has decreed provisionally abolishing torture before execution to get names of accomplices louis xvi spoke of quote

reassuring innocence removing any excess of severity from punishment and punishing evildoers with all the moderation that humanity demands I've had to leave many important questions to the side here today but I hope that I have been able to show the following the Human Rights campaign's rather suddenly began to coalesce in Europe from the 1760s onward that even though Enlightenment writers helped propel these campaigns forward they did not always understand all the stakes involved that legal torture and cruel punishment suddenly became unacceptable after centuries of acceptance of their use and that we can only explain these

abrupt changes in attitudes by paying some attention to underlying cultural transformations it might seem rather a stretch to link blowing a nose into a handkerchief listening to music reading a novel or ordering a portrait to the abolition of torture and the moderation of cruel punishment yet legally sanctioned torture did not end just because the judges gave up on it or because eventually in enlightenment writers eventually opposed it torture ended because the traditional framework of pain and personhood fell apart to be replaced bit by bit by a new one in which individuals owned their bodies had

rights to their separateness and to bodily inviolability and recognized in other people the same passions sentiments and sympathies as in themselves the men or perhaps the women to return to the good dr. rush one last time whose persons we detest meaning convicted criminals possess souls and bodies composed of the same materials as those of our friends and relations if we contemplate their miseries without emotion or sympathy he said then the principle of sympathy itself will cease to act all together and will soon lose its place in the human breast human rights is not a once

and for all defined program of demands it is a view of the world and the place of people in it it is necessarily a space of continuing contestation because the threshold for what is no longer acceptable is always shifting in the 18th century when people discovered human rights they felt the scales literally falling from their eyes and self-evident truths resonating in their hearts how could they not have seen and felt its truth before it's a question that we will continue to ask ourselves in different forms one hopes for a long time to come thank you