97

By studying the disappearance of public executions during the Third Republic, this article hypothesizes that what may have at first seemed to belong to the physical realm was actually a means of questioning the social system. In order to analyse how the human body affected politics, as well as the particular punitive technology of physically eliminating criminals, we shall question the ways in which historically specific sensibilities were exploited. This essay explores how they were used and policed. This “policing” of emotions subtly played with what it was acceptable to feel when observing a guillotine execution, and ultimately prescribed the “right way” of viewing such spectacles. It was notably via these means that the bloody ritual of public execution gradually came to be seen as intolerable. Finally, this article shows that the changes that came about were less concerned with execution themselves than with how they were to be seen and experienced.