Debat, Guillaume <br/><br/>
Emotions and public order on the theme of capital punishment. A sensitive reading of the debate on the death penalty and its implementation (1789-1792) 

 -  2024.<br/>							 
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<br/><br/> This article is in accordance with Lucien Febvre’s call to “reconstitute the emotional life of the past”, as well as Barbara Rosenwein’s work on “emotional communities” and William M. Reddy’s writings on “feeling” and “emotional regimes”. The aim of this article is to investigate the place of emotions and sensibilities in debates on the death penalty and its realization through the concepts of “emotional communities” and “emotional regimes”. A detailed study of the speeches of several deputies will demonstrate that emotions and sensibility are used from a rhetorical perspective − to reinforce an argument and lend weight to a position, whether the abolition or the retention of the death penalty. The debates from 1789 to 1792 also helped redefine an “emotional communites”. Indeed, they illustrate that deputies share the same sensitive reticence in dealing directly with the concrete dimensions of capital punishment. The discussions reveal that the death penalty and its execution are prisms for questioning the degree of the acceptability of certain emotions. The debates between 1789 and 1792 provide a case study for understanding the construction of an emotional space surrounding the death penalty and public order.