1. Torture

2. TORMENTA At the Midsummer's Fair in mid ‑ sixteenth ‑ century Paris, cat ‑ burning was a regular attraction. A special stage was built so that a large net containing several dozen cats could be lowered onto the bonfire beneath. The spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized. Cruelty was evidently thought to be funny.' It played its part in many of Europe's more traditional sports, including cock ‑ fighting, bear ‑ baiting, bull ‑ fighting, and fox ‑ hunting.

3. Two hundred years later, on 2 March 1757, Robert Francois Damiens was condemned in Paris 'to make honourable amends':

4. He was brought in a tumbrel, naked except for a smock, and carrying a torch of burning wax in his hand. The scaffold stood on the Place de Greve. Pincered at the breasts, arms, thighs and calves, his right hand holding the knife, with which he perpetrated the said act, he was to be burned on the hand with sulfur, to be doused at the pinion points with boiling oil, molten lead, and burning resin, and then to be dismembered by four horses, before his body was burned, reduced to ashes, and scattered to the winds.

5. When the fire was lit, the heat was so feeble that only the skin on the back of one hand was damaged. But then one of the executioners, a strong and robust man, grasped the metal pincers, each one foot long, and by twisting and turning them, tore out huge lumps of flesh, leaving gaping wounds which were doused from a red ‑ hot spoon.

6. Between his screams, Damiens repeatedly called out, 'My God, take pity on me!' and Jesus, help me!' The spectators were greatly edified by the compassion of an aged cure who lost no moment to console him.

7. The Clerk of the Court, the Sieur de Breton, went up to the sufferer severe times, and asked him if he had anything to say. He said no...

8. The final operation lasted a very long time, because the horses were not used to it. Six horses were needed; but even they were not enough...

9. The executioner asked whether they should cut him in pieces, but the Clerk ordered them to try again. The confessors drew close once more, and he said 'Kiss me, sires', and one of them kissed him on the forehead.

10. After two or three more attempts, the executioners took out knives, and cut off his legs... They said that he was dead. But when the body had been pulled apart, the lower jaw was still moving, as if to speak... In execution of the decree, the last pieces of flesh were not consumed until 10:30 in the evening.

11. Damiens was being punished for attempted regicide. His immediate family were banished from France; his brothers and sisters were ordered to change their names; and his house was razed. He had approached Louis XV as the King was entering his carriage, and he had inflicted a small wound with a small knife. He made some sort of complaint about the Parlement. He made no attempt to escape, and said that he only wanted to give the King a fright. Nowadays, he would be assessed as a crank.

12. Torture had been an established feature both of legal proceedings and of executions since Roman times. St. Augustine recognized its fallibility, but admitted its necessity. Torture at executions was thought to have a didactic purpose. Death was the least part of the penalty when the convict was to be impaled, disemboweled, burned at the stake, or broken on the wheel.

13. Damiens's death was the last of its kind in France. The Enlightenment did not approve. Shortly afterwards a Milanese, the Marquis Cesare Beccaria ‑ Bonesana (1735-94), published a tract, On Crimes and Punishment', 1764. It argued that torture was both improper and ineffective. Translated into many languages, with a preface by Voltaire, it was the catalyst of reform across Europe. It is widely seen as the starting ‑ point of a long progressive trend which was to press first for humane methods of execution, and eventually for the abolition of the death penalty. The 'cruelty curve' was to decline until liberal opinion held that torture degrades, not the tortured, but the torturer and the torturer's masters. But that was not the whole story. And torture in Europe did not come to an end.