Key terms: retributivism; just deserts; capital punishment; deterrence; naming and shaming; selective incapacitation; rehabilitation; restorative justice

In the opening chapter of Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault (1977) describes a scene of punishment in eighteenth-century France. The man being punished had murdered the king:

On 1 March 1757 Damiens the regicide was condemned “to make the amende honorable before the main door of the Church of Paris,” where he was to be “taken and conveyed in a cart, wearing nothing but a shirt, holding a torch of burning wax weighing two pounds”; then, “in the said cart, to the Place de Grève, where, on a scaffold that will be erected there, the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs and claves with red-hot pincers, his right hand, holding the knife with which he committed the said parricide, burnt with sulphur, and, on those places where the flesh will be torn away, poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulphur melted together and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses and his limbs and body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes and his ashes thrown to the winds.”