Tortured Subjects: Pain, Truth, and the Body in Early Modern France. (Reviews).

Tortured Subjects: Pain, Truth, and the Body in Early Modern France. By Lisa Silverman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. xv plus 264 pp.).

In the early twenty-first century, pain speaks only negatives: senseless, undesirable, terrible. In early modern Europe, however, pain was multivocal: feared and avoided, but also embraced and valorized. In a world where "people... endorsed different interpretations of pain in different spheres of their lives (5)," torture acted to hold together-not fragment-society. Lisa Silverman offers a new cut at an old story: the end of torture and the advent of a less cruel penology. Her interpretation depends neither on the rise of an enlightened critique of the "savagery" of early modern criminal procedures nor on the specific epistemological ruptures Foucault postulated. For Silverman, the decline of torture came only when pain's cultural meaning changed.

The paradox she addresses--and which drives her work--is that the use of torture persisted long after its legal utility disappeared. To explain this conundrum, she must first reconstruct the early modern epistemology of pain and locate torture's place within it. While little in this section will surprise medieval or early modern scholars who have long recognized the care with which torture was applied and its function in inquisitorial investigations, Silverman's discussion of the theory of torture is necessary because it lays the foundation for her argument. Pivotal is Silverman's understanding of the quality of truth in early modern jurisprudence; eighteenth-century legalists regarded truth as "product, as artifact to be discovered (20)." Torture's value to the judicial system was therefore "closely tied to the role of proof in early modern law (43)." Yet proof remained a contested territory. Where "complete proofs" existed, that is, the testimony of two reliable witnesses or written evidence (a forged docum ent, for example), torture was needless because a complete proof was adequate (and necessary) for conviction in capital cases. Complete proofs were, however, rare and, as Silverman demonstrates in the case of one suspected murderer, Jean Bourdil, proximate or less thorough proofs were usual. Torture could "be employed only when [such] a proximate proof existed (45)." Proximate proofs created "grave suspicion," but were in and of themselves inadequate. Confession under torture, in which truth was literally "pulled Out of" the suspect, was then requisite for a capital conviction. The paradox developed, however, with the promulgation of the 1670 criminal ordinance, according to which the absence of a complete proof made a capital conviction impossible. Yet, the two forms of torture (the question preparatoire and the question prealable) were not abolished until 1780 and 1784 respectively (albeit being less frequently applied). Why then did magistrates continued to order suspects tortured once law had negated its validity? According to Silverman, torture persisted because at least until the 1760s pain remained a "meaningful experience" in the connection between body arid soul. The final three chapters of Silverman's book describe the epistemology of pain in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France and show why after mid century that epistemology shifted.

Silverman is guided by the realization that we today are able to see a difference between "truth-seeking" and "pain-inflicting" that simply did not exist for seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Europeans. Our ability to make that distinction depends entirely upon "epistemological changes that occurred in the eighteenth century (22)." Thus, the jurists of early eighteenth-century France (or rather Toulouse, the focus of Silverman's research), despite their familiarity with the doctrine of proofs and its new constitution in 1670, nonetheless continued to regard pain-torture--as meaningful. Silverman locates the reasons why in the lives of the jurists themselves. She sketches the connections between post-Tridentine confraternal life, lay piety, and what she calls "the valorization of pain." Many Toulouse jurists belonged to one or another penitential confraternity--such as the Penitents bleus--that not only served as a venue for the expression of spirituality but also linked local elites to national politi cal ones. Jurists in Toulouse remained involved in penitential activities--processions, flagellations, works of charity--until near the end of the eighteenth century. Thus, pain assumed a profound personal meaning for jurists that the publication of the 1670 ordinance alone would have done little to alter.

What then drove the epistemological shift that eventually provoked the public discussion and-increasingly--the condemnation of torture? Surgeons opened the way. Over the course of the eighteenth century, surgeons (and other medical practitioners) began to reevaluate the function of pain. Whereas once surgeons felt that to mute pain was to blur symptoms and make treatment more difficult, over the course of the century their perceptions of pain became more complex. If many, like Jean-George Gargaud, a member of the Toulouse parlement, still might thank God for allowing him "to do penance in the pains of a long illness (133)," surgeons were coming to appreciate such suffering differently. Pain was for them not merely an individual's torment but society's agony as well; in Silverman's words, "a social experience that provokes negative affect in all those involved as witness to pain (150)." Thus, the public debate on pain/torture central to the enlightened enterprise was adumbrated by surgeons who "socialized" and endowed it with essentially negative messages. Such discussions then "provided the model ... for all those concerned with the potentially damaging effects of pain (151)."

The philosophes exploited and expanded this surgical model. Silverman's final chapter addresses the rise of a public discussion of torture: the Calas affair, Voltaire's entry into the fray, and the writings of Cesare Beccaria. The story is a familiar one, but instead of interpreting the outcry against torture as essentially a humanitarian reform movement or a step in the process of civilization (or, on the contrary, as a movement from a force ouverte to a more sinister force douce or symbolique), Silverman locates the reasons for the shift in changed perceptions of bodies in pain. The philosophes, building on the arguments of the surgeons, Silverman implies, altered the meaning of torture from a "tool in the creation of a more harmonious society" (by revealing truth) into a "violation" and a "danger to civil society (176)."

Much of the information in this short book--the discussions of torture, of confraternal life, and of the philosophes--is quite well-known. Few historians would dispute that an epistemological shift occurred in the mid to late eighteenth century. More original--and more controversial--is Silverman's argument about the importance of medical and surgical ideas on the body generally and on pain specifically as a basis or model for the arguments of the philosophes. This, too, is not totally new. Kathleen Wellman has indicated the influence of physiological thinking on the program of Enlightenment. (1) And one wonders why Silverman did not spend more time elaborating and analyzing this linkage--one less familiar to the wider historical public and, by her own admission, critical. Certainly the connections between medicine and politics deserve more attention than Silverman gives them in an all-too-brief and underdeveloped chapter. Still, Silverman's explanation for the transformation in the understanding of pain (fro m meaningful and even salutary to senseless and probably destructive) and its repercussions on the body politic as well as on the body physical has the distinct advantage of removing torture from an absolute category of "barbaric" and relocating it in a broader historical context.y Lindemann

ENDNOTE 

(1.) Kathleen Wellman, La Mettrie: Medicine, Philosophy, and Enlightenment (Durham, NC, 1992).