ABSTRACT

Chapter one examines how torture became prohibited in the eighteenth century. It challenges the ‘conventional’ story of torture’s abolition that Beccaria and Voltaire revealed the ‘true’ nature of torture and convinced the European sovereigns into abolishing it. This chapter makes the argument that torture’s prohibition is more complex than this story suggests. Although not discounting the role of the human rights movement, this chapter argues that torture was prohibited because of fortuitous events, particularly a revolution in the European legal system, changing perceptions of the human body, and the secularisation of pain.