In matters of torture, the man was able to demonstrate a formidable inventiveness. From the wheel to the pal passing through the punches and even the moray eels, everything was good to punish the condemned in the most atrocious sufferings...
Water torture in the 15th century
This article is from the magazine Sciences et Avenir Hors-série n°194 "Crimes et Châtiments" dated July-August 2018.
Wheel • François I, who rekindled the fire for heretics, also brought up to date, in 1534, the ancient torture of the wheel. He intended it for highwaymen in order to "give fear, terror and example to all others not to fall or fall into such inconveniences" , as specified in an order. What is it about ? The victim is tied to a cross of Saint-André (in the shape of an X), then beaten with sticks intended to break his bones. It is then attached to the spokes of a cart wheel, an operation facilitated by its multiple fractures. The wheel was fixed on a mast, and the whole exposed to the public… and to bad weather. No criminal - even from a high social class - could escape this torture which, however, did not concern women "because of the decency due to their sex" . To them:fire, gallows or take-off.
Strapade • Heretics but also deserters suffered this ordeal which gave its name to a square and a street in Paris, where it was practiced until 1687. By means of a rope and a pulley attached to a gallows, the condemned man was hoisted up by his arms tied behind his back. From below, the executioner suddenly released the rope before blocking it brutally so that the body did not touch the ground. The terrible shock dislocated the unfortunate. We repeated the operation several times.
Water • In the Middle Ages, this torture was inflicted as part of the "question", time of the trial where the accused was tortured - without his life being put in danger - to obtain his confession or the names of accomplices. The so-called Dimanche le Loup, a young member of the gang of criminals known as the Coquillards who terrorized the region of Dijon, was able to experience it in 1455. The defendant was tied up and forced to drink until he was suffocated. Despite this treatment, Dimanche le Loup did not denounce any of his comrades. We could also try to provoke the impression of drowning. The victim was then kept lying down, the head lower than the feet and covered with a cloth on which water was poured in abundance, which caused in him an intense feeling of panic. The simulation of drowning, obtained in this way or simply by keeping the suspect under water in a bathtub, was practiced by the Gestapo during the Second World War and by French soldiers during the Algerian war. waterboarding was also inflicted by the CIA on many prisoners at Guantanamo after September 11, 2001. According to a public report, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the masterminds of the attacks, suffered 183 waterboards in 2003.
Impalation •
Wheel • Francis I st , which rekindled the fire for heretics, also brought up to date, in 1534, the ancient torture of the wheel. He intended it for highwaymen in order to "give fear, terror and example to all others not to fall or fall into such inconveniences" , as specified in an order. What is it about ? The victim is tied to a cross of Saint-André (in the shape of an X), then beaten with sticks intended to break his bones. It is then attached to the spokes of a cart wheel, an operation facilitated by its multiple fractures. The wheel was fixed on a mast, and the whole exposed to the public… and to bad weather. No criminal - even from a high social class - could escape this torture which, however, did not concern women "because of the decency due to their sex" . To them:fire, gallows or take-off.
Strapade • Heretics but also deserters suffered this ordeal which gave its name to a square and a street in Paris, where it was practiced until 1687. By means of a rope and a pulley attached to a gallows, the condemned man was hoisted up by his arms tied behind his back. From below, the executioner suddenly released the rope before blocking it brutally so that the body did not touch the ground. The terrible shock dislocated the unfortunate. We repeated the operation several times.
Water • In the Middle Ages, this torture was inflicted as part of the "question", time of the trial where the accused was tortured - without his life being put in danger - to obtain his confession or the names of accomplices. The so-called Dimanche le Loup, a young member of the gang of criminals known as the Coquillards who terrorized the region of Dijon, was able to experience it in 1455. The defendant was tied up and forced to drink until he was suffocated. Despite this treatment, Dimanche le Loup did not denounce any of his comrades. We could also try to provoke the impression of drowning. The victim was then kept lying down, the head lower than the feet and covered with a cloth on which water was poured in abundance, which caused in him an intense feeling of panic. The simulation of drowning, obtained in this way or simply by keeping the suspect under water in a bathtub, was practiced by the Gestapo during the Second World War and by French soldiers during the Algerian war. waterboarding was also inflicted by the CIA on many prisoners at Guantanamo after September 11, 2001. According to a public report, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the masterminds of the attacks, suffered 183 waterboards in 2003.
Impalation • Driven into the anus or the vagina of the victim, the stake - or pal - is more or less pointed. The duller it is, the longer will be the suffering of the victim, whose weight and movements slowly complete the skewer. Practiced in Babylon and in the Neo-Assyrian Empire, more than a thousand years before our era, the pal was widely used by the Ottomans. In 1453, during the siege of Constantinople, the Venetian ship captain Antonio Rizzo paid the price for having defied the sultan's ban on crossing the Bosphorus. In 1800, during Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, the French resorted to this punishment to execute Soleyman el-Halaby, the assassin of General Kléber. The Chinese, for their part, would have developed the same torture, but with young bamboos planted under the commode of the victim. Growing several tens of centimeters per day (for the fastest varieties), the grass managed in a few days to cross its victim from side to side.
Stoning • In ancient history, death by throwing stones is often the result of a collective movement which aims to "cleanse" the group of a disturbing element. Quoted in the Bible ("Whoever blasphemes the name of the Lord shall be put to death:the whole congregation shall stone him" , Leviticus 24:13-14), it allows the act of revenge to be shared between the participants and the guilt to be divided accordingly. It is still practiced, especially on women for reasons of adultery, in some Muslim-majority countries, including Afghanistan.
Precipitation • Pushing a traitor or a criminal from the top of a promontory was a very ancient punishment, practiced among the Greeks as well as the Latins. It made it possible to wash away an offense made to the gods or to punish a reprehensible political act. In Athens, precipitation took place in the Barathre, a ravine. But it was a Roman hill that made this torture go down in history. "It is not far from the Capitol to the Tarpeian rock" , goes the saying. Which means that the two places, that of glory and that of fall, being close to each other, it is appropriate to have the modest triumph.
Stylus • A few points, as many children and a Christian teacher who was a bit too strict and who, from then on, will have well deserved his fate:thus can we summarize the story of Cassian, a teacher in Imola (Italy), around 300 of our era, as reported by the poet Prudence (348-405) in The Book of Crowns. His crime? Refuse to deny one's religion and worship pagan gods. Armed with the awls with which the master had equipped them for his lessons, the students were invited by the local governor to use them directly on Cassian's naked and bound body. Treated like a common tablet. Three times nothing, just repeated small blows, and directly on the skin. The suffering slowly increases, until it becomes unbearable, and death becomes the dearest wish of the martyr, who implores it desperately.
Flogging or beating • Killing by whipping - or any long, flexible instrument that one had at hand - was a method mainly used in Rome in a private setting against slaves. It is also public for lovers of vestals or priestesses of Vesta, subject to an obligation of chastity, who were executed naked, and for individuals accused of treason.
Tar and feathers • This shameful pain - it takes a few days to get rid of it! - was invented in England, at the time of the Crusades. An order from Richard Coeur de Lion specifies to his sailors what to do to a thief:shave his head, coat him with mud and cover him with feathers. The pain became afflictive a few centuries later, when the mud was replaced by boiling tar applied directly to the skin.
Scaphism • A torture reported by Plutarch (46-125) and which concerns a certain Mithridates, killed by Artaxerxes, king of Persia. The unfortunate man, who had offended his sovereign with a bluster, found himself enclosed between two hollow stones so that only his arms, his head and his legs came out. For seventeen days, they fed him and made him drink, without ever allowing him to relieve himself. "Worms and helminths swarm as a result of the corruption and putrefaction of excrement; they penetrate inside the body and cause it to rot", describes Plutarch.
Moray eels • Many animals have been turned into executioners against their will. In Rome, in addition to wild beasts, Seneca reports how the Emperor Augustus (63 BC - 14 AD) saved from an atrocious death a slave who was to be thrown into a pool of moray eels by his master, whose vase he had broken.
Lingchi • The principle of this punishment from Imperial China was "to slash and cut to pieces a convict in a stipulated number of stab wounds carried out in a prescribed order*" before chopping off his head. In use probably from the 10 e century, this punishment was introduced into the Chinese penal code with the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368), obsessed with the risk of sedition. The lingchi (or "sentence of 1,000 knives") was pronounced to punish misdemeanors and crimes that risked challenging the social order or the authority of the State. Thus it was above all reserved for parricides, crimes of lèse-majesté or attempts at rebellion against the Emperor. Its abolition was not decreed until… April 1905. The last person sentenced to this sentence had been executed the previous year.
By Bernadette Arnaud and Henri Morel
*Quoted in Jérôme Bourgon, Gregory Blue and Timothy Brook, "Death by a Thousand Cuts" in Chinese Perspectives, 2009/4.
This article is from the magazine Sciences et Avenir Hors-série n°194 "Crimes et Châtiments" dated July-August 2018.