4 Chapter 4: How Punishment is Understood
The Enlightenment marked a significant turning point in European thinking about punishment. For centuries, punishment had often been understood primarily as a means of retribution, moral correction, and the public assertion of political and religious authority. Executions, corporal punishment, torture, and public displays of suffering were intended not only to punish the individual but also to warn the wider community. During the eighteenth century, however, Enlightenment thinkers increasingly questioned whether such practices were rational, humane, or effective. Writers such as Cesare Beccaria argued that punishment should be proportionate to the crime, predictable, and directed toward preventing future offenses rather than inflicting vengeance. These ideas emerged alongside broader challenges to traditional authority and helped inspire reforms in European criminal law and penal institutions.
The history of punishment since the Enlightenment is therefore also a history of changing ideas about the individual, society, and the legitimate power of the state. The decline of public executions and torture, the rise of prisons and penitentiaries, and the development of systems emphasizing rehabilitation reflected new assumptions about human behavior and social order. Yet punishment did not simply become more humane. Modern states developed new forms of surveillance, incarceration, forced labor, and institutional control, while debates over the death penalty, prison conditions, juvenile justice, and rehabilitation have continued into the present.
The first source comes to us from Italy during the Enlightenment. Though Cesare Beccaria is advocating for reform to how punishment is carried out, make sure you stay focused on how punishment was understood in the moment the source was written, not just how Beccaria wants it changed. The other two sections bring us sources from periods of revolution. One by Maximilien Robespierre from the waning days of the Reign of Terror and the other set from the early days following the successful Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. With both, make sure you stay focused on the reason why punishment is being used, not just that it was.
4.1 Cesare Beccaria: Essay on Crimes and Punishment (1764)
Cesare Beccaria (1738–1794) was an Italian philosopher and jurist. He is best known for his 1764 work On Crimes and Punishments (Dei delitti e delle pene), in which he challenged many of the harsh and arbitrary practices of eighteenth-century European criminal justice. Influenced by Enlightenment ideas about reason, individual rights, and social contracts, Beccaria argued that laws should serve the common good rather than the interests of rulers or privileged groups.
In On Crimes and Punishments, Beccaria condemned torture, arbitrary imprisonment, excessive punishments, and the death penalty. He argued that punishment should be proportionate to the crime, imposed according to clear laws, and designed primarily to prevent future crimes rather than to exact revenge. He also maintained that justice should be predictable and applied equally to all members of society. Beccaria’s arguments became highly influential in European debates over criminal justice and helped inspire reforms to legal systems throughout Europe and beyond. His work provides an important example of how Enlightenment ideas challenged traditional institutions and promoted new understandings of law, punishment, and individual rights. When reading this source, pay attention to how justice was administered and understood at the time it was written, not how Beccaria wants that understanding to change.
The following is adapted from Cesare Beccaria, An Essay on Crimes and Punishments, E. D. Ingraham, trans. (Philadelphia: H. Nicklin, 1819).
If we look into history we shall find that laws, which are, or ought to be, conventions between men in a state of freedom, have been, for the most part the work of the passions of a few, or the consequences of a fortuitous or temporary necessity; not dictated by a cool examiner of human nature, who knew how to collect in one point the actions of a multitude, and had this only end in view, the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Observe that by justice I understand nothing more than that bond which is necessary to keep the interest of individuals united, without which men would return to their original state of barbarity. All punishments which exceed the necessity of preserving this bond are in their nature unjust. The end of punishment, therefore, is no other than to prevent the criminal from doing further injury to society, and to prevent others from committing the like offence. Such punishments, therefore, and such a mode of inflicting them, ought to be chosen, as will make the strongest and most lasting impressions on the minds of others, with the least torment to the body of the criminal. The torture of a criminal during the course of his trial is a cruelty consecrated by custom in most nations. It is used with an intent either to make him confess his crime, or to explain some contradiction into which he had been led during his examination, or discover his accomplices, or for some kind of metaphysical and incomprehensible purgation of infamy, or, finally, in order to discover other crimes of which he is not accused, but of which he may be guilty. No man can be judged a criminal until he be found guilty; nor can society take from him the public protection until it have been proved that he has violated the conditions on which it was granted. What right, then, but that of power, can authorise the punishment of a citizen so long as there remains any doubt of his guilt? This dilemma is frequent. Either he is guilty, or not guilty. If guilty, he should only suffer the punishment ordained by the laws, and torture becomes useless, as his confession is unnecessary. If he be not guilty, you torture the innocent; for, in the eye of the law, every man is innocent whose crime has not been proved
Crimes are more effectually prevented by the certainty than the severity of punishment.
In proportion as punishments become more cruel, the minds of men, as a fluid rises to the same height with that which surrounds it, grow hardened and insensible; and the force of the passions still continuing in the space of an hundred years the wheel terrifies no more than formerly the prison. That a punishment may produce the effect required, it is sufficient that the evil it occasions should exceed the good expected from the crime, including in the calculation the certainty of the punishment, and the privation of the expected advantage. All severity beyond this is superfluous, and therefore tyrannical. The punishment of death is pernicious to society, from the example of barbarity it affords. If the passions, or the necessity of war, have taught men to shed the blood of their fellow creatures, the laws, which are intended to moderate the ferocity of mankind, should not increase it by examples of barbarity, the more horrible as this punishment is usually attended with formal pageantry. Is it not absurd, that the laws, which detest and punish homicide, should, in order to prevent murder, publicly commit murder themselves?
It is better to prevent crimes than to punish them. This is the fundamental principle of good legislation, which is the art of conducting men to the maximum of happiness, and to the minimum of misery, if we may apply this mathematical expression to the good and evil of life….
Would you prevent crimes? Let the laws be clear and simple, let the entire force of the nation be united in their defence, let them be intended rather to favour every individual than any particular classes of men; let the laws be feared, and the laws only. The fear of the laws is salutary, but the fear of men is a fruitful and fatal source of crimes.
Source: Cesare Beccaria, An Essay on Crimes and Punishments, E. D. Ingraham, trans. (Philadelphia: H. Nicklin, 1819)
This text is part of the Internet Modern History Sourcebook. The Sourcebook is a collection of public domain and copy-permitted texts for introductory level classes in modern European and World history. Unless otherwise indicated the specific electronic form of the document is copyright. Permission is granted for electronic copying, distribution in print form for educational purposes and personal use. If you do reduplicate the document, indicate the source. No permission is granted for commercial use. (c)Paul Halsall Aug 1997
4.2 Maximilien Robespierre: Justification of the Use of Terror (1794)
Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794) was one of the most influential leaders of the French Revolution. A prominent leader of the Jacobins and the twelve person Committee of Public Safety, Robespierre became closely associated with the Reign of Terror (1793–1794), when the revolutionary government used imprisonment and execution against those considered enemies of the Revolution.
He delivered his famous defense of revolutionary terror on 5 February 1794 before the National Convention. The speech came during the most radical and violent phase of the French Revolution, when France was fighting foreign armies while also confronting rebellions, political opposition, economic crisis, and fears of counterrevolution. It was in this atmosphere that Robespierre argued that “terror” was necessary to defend the Republic. In his view, terror was not simply uncontrolled violence; it was a form of revolutionary justice directed against those who threatened liberty and equality. This argument reflected the revolutionary government’s belief that traditional legal protections could be temporarily subordinated to the preservation of the new Republic. Within this context, use the source to focus on how punishment was understood during this period of the French Revolution. Within this context, use the source to focus on how punishment was understood during this period of the French Revolution.
The following is adapted from Maximilien Robespierre, On the Moral and Political Principles of Domestic Policy.
But, to found and consolidate democracy, to achieve the peaceable reign of the constitutional laws, we must end the war of liberty against tyranny and pass safely across the storms of the revolution: such is the aim of the revolutionary system that you have enacted. Your conduct, then, ought also to be regulated by the stormy circumstances in which the republic is placed; and the plan of your administration must result from the spirit of the revolutionary government combined with the general principles of democracy.
Now, what is the fundamental principle of the democratic or popular government-that is, the essential spring which makes it move? It is virtue; I am speaking of the public virtue which effected so many prodigies in Greece and Rome and which ought to produce much more surprising ones in republican France; of that virtue which is nothing other than the love of country and of its laws.
But as the essence of the republic or of democracy is equality, it follows that the love of country necessarily includes the love of equality.
It is also true that this sublime sentiment assumes a preference for the public interest over every particular interest; hence the love of country presupposes or produces all the virtues: for what are they other than that spiritual strength which renders one capable of those sacrifices? And how could the slave of avarice or ambition, for example, sacrifice his idol to his country?
Not only is virtue the soul of democracy; it can exist only in that government ….
. . .
Republican virtue can be considered in relation to the people and in relation to the government; it is necessary in both. When only the government lacks virtue, there remains a resource in the people’s virtue; but when the people itself is corrupted, liberty is already lost.
Fortunately virtue is natural to the people, notwithstanding aristocratic prejudices. A nation is truly corrupted when, having by degrees lost its character and its liberty, it passes from democracy to aristocracy or to monarchy; that is the decrepitude and death of the body politic….
But when, by prodigious efforts of courage and reason, a people breaks the chains of despotism to make them into trophies of liberty; when by the force of its moral temperament it comes, as it were, out of the arms of the death, to recapture all the vigor of youth; when by turns it is sensitive and proud, intrepid and docile, and can be stopped neither by impregnable ramparts nor by the innumerable armies of the tyrants armed against it, but stops of itself upon confronting the law’s image; then if it does not climb rapidly to the summit of its destinies, this can only be the fault of those who govern it.
. . .
From all this let us deduce a great truth: the characteristic of popular government is confidence in the people and severity towards itself.
The whole development of our theory would end here if you had only to pilot the vessel of the Republic through calm waters; but the tempest roars, and the revolution imposes on you another task.
This great purity of the French revolution’s basis, the very sublimity of its objective, is precisely what causes both our strength and our weakness. Our strength, because it gives to us truth’s ascendancy over imposture, and the rights of the public interest over private interests; our weakness, because it rallies all vicious men against us, all those who in their hearts contemplated despoiling the people and all those who intend to let it be despoiled with impunity, both those who have rejected freedom as a personal calamity and those who have embraced the revolution as a career and the Republic as prey. Hence the defection of so many ambitious or greedy men who since the point of departure have abandoned us along the way because they did not begin the journey with the same destination in view. The two opposing spirits that have been represented in a struggle to rule nature might be said to be fighting in this great period of human history to fix irrevocably the world’s destinies, and France is the scene of this fearful combat. Without, all the tyrants encircle you; within, all tyranny’s friends conspire; they will conspire until hope is wrested from crime. We must smother the internal and external enemies of the Republic or perish with it; now in this situation, the first maxim of your policy ought to be to lead the people by reason and the people’s enemies by terror.
If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country’s most urgent needs.
It has been said that terror is the principle of despotic government. Does your government therefore resemble despotism? Yes, as the sword that gleams in the hands of the heroes of liberty resembles that with which the henchmen of tyranny are armed. Let the despot govern by terror his brutalized subjects; he is right, as a despot. Subdue by terror the enemies of liberty, and you will be right, as founders of the Republic. The government of the revolution is liberty’s despotism against tyranny. Is force made only to protect crime? And is the thunderbolt not destined to strike the heads of the proud?
. . . Indulgence for the royalists, cry certain men, mercy for the villains! No! mercy for the innocent, mercy for the weak, mercy for the unfortunate, mercy for humanity.
Society owes protection only to peaceable citizens; the only citizens in the Republic are the republicans. For it, the royalists, the conspirators are only strangers or, rather, enemies. This terrible war waged by liberty against tyranny- is it not indivisible? Are the enemies within not the allies of the enemies without? The assassins who tear our country apart, the intriguers who buy the consciences that hold the people’s mandate; the traitors who sell them; the mercenary pamphleteers hired to dishonor the people’s cause, to kill public virtue, to stir up the fire of civil discord, and to prepare political counterrevolution by moral counterrevolution-are all those men less guilty or less dangerous than the tyrants whom they serve?
Source: Maximilien Robespierre, On the Moral and Political Principles of Domestic Policy
This text is part of the Internet Modern History Sourcebook. The Sourcebook is a collection of public domain and copy-permitted texts for introductory level classes in modern European and World history. Unless otherwise indicated the specific electronic form of the document is copyright. Permission is granted for electronic copying, distribution in print form for educational purposes and personal use. If you do reduplicate the document, indicate the source. No permission is granted for commercial use. (c)Paul Halsall Aug 1997
4.3 Vladimir Lenin: Letter to Felix Dzerzhinskii and Decree of the Sovnarkom establishing the Extraordinary Commission to Fight Counter-revolution (1917)
Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) was a Russian revolutionary and leader of the Bolshevik Party. Influenced by the ideas of Karl Marx, Lenin argued that capitalism created fundamental class divisions and that a revolutionary movement led by the working class was necessary to overthrow the existing political and economic order. Lenin became the central leader of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and played a leading role in establishing the Soviet state. His writings and political theories, including his ideas about the revolutionary party, imperialism, and the transition from capitalism to socialism, profoundly influenced communist movements around the world.
The two sources in this section were both authored by Lenin. The first, “Letter to Felix Dzerzhinskii, December 19, 1917” is a short but important document associated with Vladimir Lenin’s consolidation of Bolshevik power following the Russian Revolution of 1917. Vladimir Lenin wrote to Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the newly established Cheka (the first Soviet secret police agency). In the letter, Lenin emphasizes the need for decisive action against political opponents and perceived threats to the revolutionary government. Dzerzhinskii’s Cheka soon became a central instrument of this policy.
The second source is a decree to the Sovnarkom, the Council of People’s Commissars, which was the executive government established by the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution of 1917 and was initially chaired by Vladimir Lenin. The body issued decrees that fundamentally transformed Russian society, including measures concerning land redistribution, workers’ control, peace negotiations, and the nationalization of property. In the context of this chapter, the Sovnarkom was the governmental authority that established the Cheka in December 1917. Using these two sources together, we can paint a picture of how punishment was understood in revolutionary Russia.
The following are replicated in their entirety from the Internet Archive. Sources were compiled by A.K. Harrington and were originally housed at the University of Durham.
Letter to Felix Dzerzhinskii, December 19, 1917
In connection with your report today dealing with the struggle against sabotage and counter-revolution, is it not possible to issue the following decree:
STRUGGLE AGAINST COUNTER-REVOLUTION AND SABOTAGE
The bourgeoisie, landholders, and all wealthy classes are making desperate efforts to undermine the revolution which is aiming to safeguard the interests of the toiling and exploited masses. The bourgeoisie is having recourse to the vilest crimes, bribing society’s lowest elements and supplying liquor to these outcasts with the purpose of bringing on pogroms. The partisans of the bourgeoisie, especially the higher officials, bank clerks, etc., are sabotaging and organising strikes in order to block the government’s efforts to reconstruct the state on a socialistic basis. Sabotage has spread even to the food-supply organisations and millions of people are threatened with famine. Special measures must be taken to fight counter-revolution and sabotage. Taking these factors into consideration the Soviet of People’s Commissars decrees: . . .[Lenin includes the language that the Sovnarkom will use to form the Cheka the following day]
Decree of the Sovnarkom, December 20, 1917
The Commission is to be named the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission and is to be attached to the Soviet of People’s Commissars. [This commission] is to make war on counter-revolution and sabotage …. The duties of the Commission will be:
1. To persecute and break up all acts of counter-revolution and sabotage all over Russia, no matter what their origin.
2. To bring before the Revolutionary Tribunal all counter-revolutionaries and saboteurs and to work out a plan for fighting them.
3. To make preliminary investigation only – enough to break up [the counter-revolutionary act]. The Commission is to be divided into sections :
(a) the information [section],
(b) the organisational section (in charge of organising the fight against counter-revolution all over Russia) with branches, and
(c) the fighting section.
The Commission will be formed tomorrow….. The Commission is to watch the press, saboteurs, strikers, and the Right Social-Revolutionaries. Measures [to be taken against these counter-revolutionaries are] confiscation, confinement, deprivation of [food] cards, publication of the names of the enemies of the people, etc.
Source: Vladimir Lenin: Letter to Felix Dzerzhinskii and Decree of the Sovnarkom establishing the Extraordinary Commission to Fight Counter-revolution as found at Internet Archive. Sources were compiled by A.K. Harrington and were originally housed at the University of Durham.
This text was accessed via the Internet Modern History Sourcebook. The Sourcebook is a collection of public domain and copy-permitted texts for introductory level classes in modern European and World history. Unless otherwise indicated the specific electronic form of the document is copyright. Permission is granted for electronic copying, distribution in print form for educational purposes and personal use. If you do reduplicate the document, indicate the source. No permission is granted for commercial use
