Hiding a Ritual of Obedience

This chapter describes executions as rituals of obedience and discusses how it was used in the symbolic construction of the relationship between rulers and citizens by attempting to force individual internalization of the state's monopoly over legitimate physical violence. The chapter talks about how the elimination of executionary publicity becomes inseparable from the practices of the modern public sphere. Under the Third Republic, many people learned to be the spectators of new sights that worked by representing a reality that was physically absent (dioramas, cinema) and in turn acquired new standards of speed. They came to find executions too slow, marred by shocking incidents, severed from reality, and likely to produce unhealthy emotions. Ultimately, these spectators began to develop a public culture accustomed to more distanced forms of political communication. The depublicization of executions was achieved when the authorities concluded that the public spectacle of death no longer had an exemplary effect and was no longer a tool that legitimized the state's monopoly over physical violence.