SPEAKER_00: Stay tuned at the end of today's program for information on where you can get more free Hardcore History audio. Today's show is sponsored by Audible. Get a free audiobook with a 30-day trial membership if you sign up with Audible today. Go to audible.com slash Hardcore History or text Hardcore History, all one word, to 500-500 to get started today.
SPEAKER_01: December 7th, 1941. A date which will live in infinite.
SPEAKER_01: It's Hardcore History. The Blitz Edition.
SPEAKER_00: I'm very interested in pain. Not in a masochistic or sadistic way. I'm interested in pain and suffering for much the same reason that, well, virtually all of you are. We look at the entertainment you consume, take out all of the physical and mental pain and suffering, and what do you have left? It's a source of art and always has been, because it speaks to us on a human level. It doesn't matter how many things are different with human beings through the ages and how much the culture changes us, how much the technology makes us different from our forebears, we can all understand pain. I think about it a lot. You know, when I say that I'm interested in the extremes of the human experience, what does that mean? Sometimes I break it down. I think it just means pain, mental and physical. You start to wonder about being so interested in that, but James Baldwin, the writer, put it wonderfully, I thought, when he pointed out that this connects us to each other, and he wrote, quote, You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive, end quote. But it's such a strange thing, this pain, right? This evolutionary adaptation that's probably saved more human lives than anything, getting fear and pain together especially. At the same time, think of the loophole. I think it's a loophole. I wouldn't want to say that it's an evolutionary feature. Think of the loophole, that the infliction of pain, the ability to turn your own senses against you to hurt you, think about what a huge role that's played in history. Going from a place where the pain is so useful to tell you you've just put your hand on a hot stove, to a place where somebody else can put your hand on a hot stove to hurt you deliberately for one reason or another, then all of a sudden those sensors that keep you safe are the very weapon used to hurt you, to torment you, and to compel you to do things against your will. Strange thing, this sense. And our reaction to other people's pain and suffering is fascinating too, isn't it? It could sort of run the gamut anywhere from empathy and sympathy to kind of amusement or enjoyment or maybe even, you could say, emotional voyeurism. But in our defense, most of the time the kind of pain and suffering we're enjoying is fake pain, theatrical pain, storytelling pain, Hollywood pain and suffering. And no one's getting hurt for real. But the more real something seems, the more emotionally intense it can be, and that can be more satisfying. My kids have been watching live performances of plays on television and they make a big deal about how it's live and in front of you and more real that way, and I thought, what if they did the action films, or maybe not even the action films, just the trailers, the promos that run before the movie that you go to see, assuming you still go to see movies. What if they did a live performance in front of an audience of that, you know, real car crashes, real bullets in the real guns. Well, it would be a horror show, wouldn't it? I think they'd go quickly off script as the bodies piled up, but no person in their decent sensibilities would go to watch people killed in public for entertainment. But of course we all know that people have done that. Which is the normal behavior? The one that says, oh my God, torturing and killing people in public for entertainment is barbaric. Or the people that say, as someone from a time period where this was common and approved of behavior might say, hey, wait a minute. You've just put a thin veil between what you like and what we like. We both like the same thing. You just like yours to be faked. Whatever part of the brain is enjoying it, maybe the same part is being titillated one way or the other. I'd like to warn those who might be squeamish that this particular story is going to be very graphic indeed, even by our standards. But the fact that we need to issue such a warning, because we might be too sensitive about this, is itself fascinating. Because once upon a time, there were people who would appreciate a warning also about this kind of stuff, but the warning that they wanted was the warning that it was going to happen. So they made sure they got there and didn't miss the live version, and in fact, for a lot of them, so that they could get the jump on the high ticket prices that were going to be charged for the rooms close enough for you to actually witness, smell, see, and hear tortures and executions done live. There's a lot of fascinating things about us, I think, in the story I want to talk about today, but it all revolves around the question of pain one way or the other. And in a lot of the stories that we talk about, the pain is everywhere in the story, but it interspersed and melded together with the topic. In this story, it is center stage. Once upon a time, not that long ago, human beings went to public executions where torture was a huge part of the event in order to watch and enjoy it. What the heck is that? Well, we never promise answers around here because there's no one qualified to give them, but the questions about what this might say about us, either today or back then, or in perpetuity, are pretty fascinating too. But as I said, not for the squeamish, and if you're one of the people who can't handle this, good for you. Some of us are still fascinated by this for reasons that I like to think are high-minded and educational. Interesting, I hope it's just not a historical, voyeuristic trip through time to do the equivalent of virtually sitting in the seat next to that spectator at the Roman Colosseum where he watches people devoured by lions. And one of the things I have to keep reminding myself is that if I were born in a different place at a different time, if you took a baby, as I've always said, from now in a time machine back to this Roman era, for example, you or your kid might be sitting down next to the guy eating the equivalent of popcorn while you watched wild beasts devour people for your pleasure. It's obvious, isn't it, that there's a huge cultural influence on what's going on here. What's not obvious, maybe, at least not to me, is which direction the cultural influence is operating. Is it bloodthirsty times like the era of the Roman games and the Colosseum and whatnot, creating bloodthirsty human beings that like this stuff, or is it catering to an innate need? I mean, this question gets really deep when you ask, what's the default human setting for whether or not you enjoy watching others' pain and suffering for your entertainment? Because the really uncomfortable question is to say that, yes, cultural influences are playing a huge role in whether or not people like this stuff. It's modern-day culture that's making that stuff not as popular as it used to be. In other words, the default setting of humankind is to enjoy the stuff in the Roman Colosseum, and it's only modern enlightened thinking and rationality and empathy with other human beings that has sort of blunted that natural enjoyment. As we said a minute ago, the people from another time period might argue, if we started wagging our finger at what they enjoyed, that we both enjoy the same thing. We just like our version to be faked. The human equivalent of that little disclaimer you get at some movies where they'll point out that no animals were actually injured in the making of this film. Well, these days we feel the same way about people, and have for quite some time. No people were actually injured in the making of this piece of entertainment, but there are people who are purists who would say, well, I don't go in for that kind of fakery. Make my torture, violence, and whatnot real. I'm not even sure that that's true, to be honest. It depends on what side of the bed I woke up in the morning and how cynical I'm feeling. But it does occur to me from time to time that it's an untested, unproven sort of an assertion that we, in the modern developed, enlightened, post-enlightened world, that we like our violence faked. When was the public ever given the equivalent of a blind taste test on this? I mean, if we release two movies very similar to each other on the opening blockbuster summer movie season's first day, and they have to compete head to head, and one is a traditional, full of movie magic, and the actors all get out, you know, just doing fine sort of film, has to go head to head against a groundbreaking new piece of performance art that is so unusual that several of your favorite actors did not survive the production of this film, but everything you see in it is real. Who do you think wins, you know, after one week of ticket buying? You know, how many people go to one film over the other? What are the reviews? It's atrocious, but I bet it's a hit. That would be weird, wouldn't it? It's hard to imagine. So what if we imagine something that's just as weird, but you could see it happening. Imagine some tin-plated dictator in some poor, impoverished country who's already executing everyone he thinks is a criminal anyway, probably publicly, to cow his own people and keep his regime afloat. What if he just decided, listen, there's a demand for this. I could treat it like one of those restaurants that serves endangered species on the menu where people will pay $10,000 a plate just to taste something that you've never tasted before and no one will ever taste again. How many people have seen a public execution? What do you think they'd pay to go? It'd be interesting to think of the lists of famous celebrities that might sign up for something like that, just to say they went. A little selfie from the live execution. I'd be interested, just from a human experiment and data research point of view, if the guy, this tin-plated dictator, decided to do it all pay-per-view, globally. Sell $59.95, get to see the execution, there'll be some preliminaries who are staging this for entertainment value the way they stage these big boxing tournaments. You've got to have opening acts, you've got to have a walkout fight. There's a whole bunch of things that go into keeping the public happy enough to want to buy this again. You don't get to be the dictator even of a tin-plated little country somewhere else without having a few bits of understanding how to play the crowd. I'd be very interested the day after something like that occurred to look at the statistics of which countries, which regions, which peoples bought into the pay-per-view more or less. Wouldn't it be interesting to see which countries shunned it or hardly bought at all versus which countries really bought more than their share? I think that would be some interesting human data. And I suppose we would have to hope that something like that when the numbers did show up, that they didn't show it with some sort of hit. Can you imagine how that would blow open the door to incentivizing any number of cash-starved tin-plated dictators to elbow their way into the lucrative virtual execution tourism market? But even if something like that happened, there's a layer of emotional protection. I mean, you're not there. Just like there's a layer of emotional protection between a live 59.95 pay-per-view execution and what a lot of people look at online right now. You can go see historic footage of assassination attempts and executions. Heck, you can go watch some of the Nazis hung for their war crimes. Not the big people at Nuremberg, but there were lots of other punishments down the line, and some of them are online, and I don't think you're a sadist if you view it. Not at all. But there's something different, isn't it? That happened a long time ago. There's some detachment in it being a two-dimensional image, maybe even a black and white, certainly grainy, whatever, takes you more and more away from the scene. And you say to yourself, listen, this is like watching a boxing match 35 years ago. I know the outcome, and no one's hurting right now. So if somebody got hurt in that fight, it's long over. But if you're watching it live, it's not. I mean, just contemplate for a minute the idea of watching an execution live. I mean, if the laws changed where you live, and all of a sudden this became possible, and they were going to have one in the nearest good-sized city near you, how many of your friends and neighbors do you think would show up to watch? Do you think there'd be a difference between people who make a lot of money and people who don't make a lot of money, people of one religious faith or people of no religious faith or another? Do you see what I'm saying? It would be, again, interesting to see who showed up and why. Just as a mass humanity psychological experiment, would you go? If you did, what do you think would be the motivation? Curiosity? Or the idea that, listen, this isn't some staged thing like you binge watch on TV. Anything could happen, right? You don't know what's going to go on at one of these things.
SPEAKER_00: And if it was weird the first time that it happened, how long do you think, how many of these things would it take before people became comfortable with it, if they ever became comfortable with it? Let me blow your mind for a minute if you don't already know about this. Let's talk about an execution that occurred not in the Middle Ages, although you would think it was from there when you hear it, an execution that occurred in Paris. Not all that long ago, as a matter of fact, to give you an idea of context, George Washington is a full grown adult and has already been through a war and commanded troops in battle for the British. It involves a guy who tried to kill the King of France in the 1750s and in March 1757 he was going to pay for that crime and hundreds of thousands of people flocked into Paris to make sure they had a chance to see it. And according to historian Paul Friedland, the people of Paris loved executions. As a matter of fact, when he said that he italicized the word loved. He had said that the sovereign, like all sovereigns throughout the history of the world that want to tell their people to stay in line, that they were hoping that these public executions would terrify the population and enhance the political sovereignty of the ruler. But as Friedland points out, that's not always why the people were there and that's not always what they got out of it. He says in the preface to his book, Seeing Justice Done, quote, As I hope to make clear in this book, however, spectators of executions in early modern France did not tend to see the penal spectacle as a manifestation of political sovereignty. Neither were they terrified. In fact, they loved attending executions. From the 16th to the middle of the 18th century, public executions in France were extraordinarily popular with spectators from all social classes, many of whom were so desperate to watch that they rented out windows overlooking the place of execution at exorbitant sums, or staked out prime viewing spots near the scaffold or on nearby rooftops often days in advance. End quote. And what was the mood of this crowd that stormed into Paris that day to watch this event? Well, Friedland writes, and please excuse my traditional mangling of the French language when I discuss the traditional execution site in Paris, quote, Every credible primary source gives the impression that the people who massed on the Place de Grève that day could barely contain their excitement as the fateful hour neared. Terror could not have been further from their minds, unless, of course, we count the terror of missing even a minute of the spectacular show that was about to take place. End quote. He then talks about a guy, Galette is his name, who liked to go to these executions, and how he showed up, quote, On that special day, he arrived bright and early to see the show, Friedland writes, and brought along with him the 18th century equivalent of movie popcorn. Now quoting from Galette's writings, quote, I showed up at seven in the morning and found a good many of the windows of the rooms on the Grève already filled with spectators of both sexes. I was placed by Madame Superior of the establishment at a window on the first floor, and I had, as companions in curiosity, three gentlemen. I added my little store of provisions to theirs, and around noon we dined together with a fine appetite. End quote. Ladies and gentlemen, that man is describing an 18th century version of a tailgate party, and it will be hours before the event itself takes place. These people are partying it up in anticipation of this giant event, and this giant event is gruesome in the extreme. And what were these people so excited to watch? Well, the most spectacular, and that's the words of many different people, not me, execution of that age. And it was spectacular because it was unusual, because they hadn't done one of these really nasty ones in a while, so everyone wanted to see it. What was so nasty about it? Well, it was published ahead of time what was going to happen to this guy in notices so that people would know what they were coming to watch. And so they would know exactly what happened to people who tried to stick a knife between the king's ribs. The prisoner was sentenced to have big chunks of his flesh torn out of his breasts, arms, thighs, and calves. His right hand, which had held the knife, this is very symbolic, was to be burned, it said, by fire and sulfur. And then all the places where he'd had the flesh torn out of his body were to have, and I'm quoting here, molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulfur melted together, poured right into the wounds. And then his body was to be dismembered by four horses. Now again, this bears some delving down into what we're talking about here, and this is gruesome and I'm sorry, but this is juxtapositioning what we're seeing here with these human beings who want to go watch it. And the more horrible it is, for many of us, the harder it is to understand the desire to be there, involved in the process. But an enormous crowd of people turned out to do just that. In a very famous book called Discipline and Punishment, the officer of the watch at this execution's account was reprinted, so this is a primary source. Here's what the crowd saw, quote, Though a strong, sturdy fellow, this executioner found it so difficult to tear away the pieces of flesh that he set about the same spot two or three times, twisting the pincers as he did so, and what he took away formed at each part a wound about the size of a six-pound crown piece. After these tearings with the pincers, Damien, who cried out profusely, though without swearing, the source says, raised his head and looked at himself. The same executioner dipped an iron spoon in the pot containing the boiling potion, which he poured liberally over each wound. At each torment, he cried out as the damned in hell are supposed to cry out, and now he's saying what the condemned is screaming, pardon my God, pardon, Lord. Despite all the pain, the source says, he raised his head from time to time and looked at himself boldly, end quote. Some have theorized that this condemned victim was mentally ill and that he committed this crime and then paid this punishment and these days would have been seen as psychologically unbalanced. The fact that the crowd could watch all this, though, and not be made psychologically unbalanced is interesting. V. A. C. Guttrell in The Hanging Tree points out that you did not have a bunch of people watching those proceedings we just described and vomiting or anything. How many people could come back from our time period now, be placed in the crowd to watch this thing live, and not vomit? It's strange to think of something that seems like an automatic, uncontrollable response being something that's actually, you know, culturally influenced. But Guttrell points out that crying is, laughing is, what you find, you know, amusing is, I mean, all these things that may seem to be hardwired into us are cultural distinctions, including whether or not you vomit while watching a horrible torture execution, or maybe whether or not you like it. Historian Gary G. Fagan recounts the great rake Casanova who was there, and while Casanova was appalled, he looked at other people, and not only weren't they appalled, they were liking it, and he says, this is Fagan writing, quote, Casanova, who considered the spectacle, quote, an offense against our common humanity, end quote, reports that he several times closed his eyes and blocked his ears to the atrocity, but that his companions were riveted by the spectacle and never once diverted their gaze. They felt no compassion for Demian, they said, due to the enormity of his crime. Casanova's friend, Toretta, even had surreptitious sex with one of the women while the ghastly execution proceeded. Other eyewitnesses describe members of the crowd, especially the ladies, watching with detached disinterest, or even chattering and laughing, end quote. I should point out that this was a particularly extra nasty execution that these people enjoyed, because the executioners really didn't know what they were doing. They hadn't done one of these executions in a while, and when things didn't go as planned, they had to improvise. For example, when they were trying to tear this person apart with four horses pulling in different directions, he didn't tear apart. And they had to work, you know, by cutting the joints and seeing if that would help. If that didn't help, they had to start pulling the limbs in different directions. And people would have considered this, because they were looking for novelty in the unexpected, perhaps an added benefit. The reason this is so interesting is how many of us could have gone and seen that? What's different about us and people only a couple hundred years ago who, as I said, didn't just go and watch this and endure it, but sacrificed and paid a lot for the privilege? Are we the more normal example of people on the default setting when it comes to watching other people suffering? Or are they? Or maybe that's too cut and dry to distinction. Maybe it depends on who the pain and suffering is being experienced by.
SPEAKER_00: What if the person who is providing the entertainment, the person being torn apart, the hapless victim, is not in fact so hapless, and maybe has a lot of victims themselves? I mean, what if you are doing this to a horrible, murderous dictator? I mean, you think of your bad people from history. I always throw Hitler in there because he's sort of my quintessential example, but you can fill in the blanks, right? You have some terrible, terrible person go Saddam Hussein, maybe in Iraq, and let the Shiites in Iraq watch him being torn limb to limb. Does that take an attitude, which if it was anyone else, you would be horrified that you were enjoying watching the spectacle, but because it's that demonic individual, you're going to enjoy every last shriek? Now the actual idea for this talk today, this discussion, came to me after rereading a book that's very interesting. It's a book about the diary of an executioner who lived in the 1500s, 1600s in that period.
SPEAKER_00: And it was fascinating because it reminds us that there are multiple, shall we say, viewpoints in all of these affairs that we were just discussing, these torturous, terrible executions. Well, obviously, we've been focusing on the audience, the people that would like to watch this stuff, and isn't that sick? Or maybe not, depending on what's really human. But there are other angles that are just as fascinating. That book on the executioner, it was fascinating to think about the person tasked with doing this. So as bad as it is to watch it, what about the person who has to carry out the actual things that modern sensibilities would suggest even watching should make you sick? And so that became the germ of an idea to look at this from multiple vantage points because you have the crowd, the executioner, and of course, the vantage point of the victim. If you want to wonder about what goes on in the minds of people in extreme situations, what is it like to mount that scaffold, having had plenty of time to think about what you're about to face, get up there and look out at a crowd of thousands of people that have come to watch you go through what you're about to go through, and then begin to go through it, bit by bit, sometimes for hours on end. If you want the understatement of the century, there's a quote attributed to Robert Francois Demian as he's led out to go begin his ordeal that would take hours and end up with him in pieces. He just said, rumor has it anyway, it's going to be a hard day. I wonder if there was a way to add up all the people in human history that have found themselves in that same position, that it's going to be a hard day sort of position, execution victims since the dawn of time. I wonder how many of those people there were. I mean public executions have pretty much been going on since history has been written down, right? We all understand that it's not ubiquitous, it's not everywhere all the time, but my goodness, you know, the amount of cultures over the eras that utilize public executions is far more common than not. And as we said earlier, it serves an obvious purpose for the state, doesn't it? It's a message. And the Assyrians, you know, one of the earliest peoples, to carve this message in stone, showing what they did to people who broke their biggest laws, that's a way of making sure that even if you weren't there to watch it live, you can still get the message. Herodotus, the so-called father of history, so that's how far back we're going here, tells the story, which may or may not be true, that one of the early kings of Persia, Camp Isis II, forced the nobles of Egypt to convene in a public place to watch 2,000 of their children killed in front of them. That's not for entertainment value because you can't imagine a more horrifying scene if that were true, right? I mean, what does that sound like? But it sends a message, doesn't it, from the ruler of Persia to all the people in Egypt, you know, stay conquered, or this will happen again.
SPEAKER_00: The Chinese, having been around essentially forever as a civilization, also very familiar with the use of public executions as a tool of enforcing state power and sovereignty. And they've been around so long they've been able to live through many different eras where the ideas of legal reform and capital punishment will change, some more liberal, some quite draconian indeed. The Chinese, one of the very early civilizations, to attempt to deal with crime in a way that sometimes comes into vogue, this idea that, what if you just punished every little teeny crime in the most severe way? Wouldn't that just deter everything? More on that later. In the New World, of course, there are plenty of examples. The Aztecs with their tearing of the beating heart out of the sacrificial victims, whether war captives or not. In the northeast of the United States, famously, the tribes there used to torture people to death and the tribe would gather around and take part in it, including allegedly children too. And the warrior would, you know, who was being tortured, or the woman who was being tortured, or what have you, would defiantly, you know, resist the torturers and it could go on for days. All these things, someone would probably point out, have a religious element to them. There's a huge ritual involved, so maybe it's not so much that these humans are getting a kick out of watching this thing. There are other deeper questions involved, which is true, but one wonders how much it alleviates the fact that people may have been having a good time watching this. It's unknown. You can't tell. For example, you look back on the Assyrian reliefs, the carvings where they show that they are impaling their victims on stakes. You can't tell if there's a crowd there and there'd be no way to tell if they were having a good time. You first start seeing that phenomenon in Rome, right? Famously. At the gladiatorial games and people showing up the way you would go to a pro wrestling match today if the wrestlers were fully armed and left a lot of dead people at the end of the show on the ground. And animals, by the way. This is where you clearly can see, because the records are so good and the connection between enjoyment and horrific torture and suffering is so obvious. I mean, you could write it off 900 different ways, but at the end of the day, these people are enjoying themselves and going to great lengths to make sure they don't miss these horrific, murderous encounters that will play out in front of them in real time. So let's look at Rome for a minute as part of an evolution, or maybe you could call it like, you know, we like to graph history. And if you had a wonderful graph, like a stock market graph for periods in time where human beings overtly wanted to do this more for whatever reason, including a culture that might really encourage it. The Roman gladiatorial game era may be the high watermark in history on that graph because it's hard to find anything quite so brazen about the commercialization, marketing, and staging of torture and death as a spectator event. And it's fascinated people for a long time. I mean, because it's so obviously an interesting question about humanity and human nature, Rome's arenas and the violence that was perpetrated in them and the, the almost modern marketing of it. The understanding of what the customer wanted and how things should be advertised and the order that events should happen in, as I said a minute ago, staged. And also many of the modern media sort of dynamics were also in play, the need to continually, for example, provide new and novel and more inventive and grander spectacles to keep the people coming back. And there's all sorts of theories on how this developed and there's this linear progression from, you know, very early Roman things and then layer by layer, new things get added. For example, when Rome becomes more of an empire and starts conquering more far flung places, you begin to see the importation of exotic animals from strange locales. And this becomes part of the fun, right? We're going to have an animal show at the local arena and the people can come and look at the animals. But somehow that turned into people can come and look at the animals, kill each other and have men kill the animals and have animals kill the men. And we'll listen to the scale of what we're talking about this becoming eventually and bear in mind this idea that once upon a time, you know, probably advertising that you had a giraffe and a monkey and an elephant might be enough to bring the people into the seats. But eventually you got to go to extremes. Will Durant writing a long time ago says, quote, The simplest event in the amphitheater was an exhibition of exotic animals gathered from all the known world. Elephants, lions, tigers, crocodiles, hippopotami, lynxes, apes, panthers, boars, bears, wolves, giraffes, ostriches, stags, leopards, antelopes and rare birds were kept in the zoological gardens of emperors and rich men. And were trained to skillful exploits or merry pranks. Apes were taught to ride dogs, drive chariots or act in plays. Bulls let boys dance on their backs. Sea lions were conditioned to bark in answer to their individual names. Elephants danced to symbols struck by other elephants or they walked on a rope or sat down to table or wrote Greek or Latin letters. End quote. Sounds like something you'd take your kid to at this point, doesn't it? Durant then continues, quote, Animals might be merely paraded in bright or humorous costumes. Usually, however, they were made to fight one another or with men or they were hunted to death with arrows and javelins. In one day, under Nero, four hundred tigers fought with bulls and elephants. On another day, under Caligula, four hundred bears were slain. At the dedication of the Colosseum, five thousand animals died. If the animals wished to compromise, meaning not fight each other, they were stung to combat by lashes, darts and hot irons. Claudius made a division of the Praetorian Guard fight panthers. Nero made them fight four hundred bears and three hundred lions. End quote. Now let's just stop for a minute and think about this. Can you imagine what that looks like? We talk about some of the greatest showmen in the modern era and the sorts of exploits they pulled off. Who's the promoter that comes up with the idea of let's have hundreds of the royal guard fight hundreds of lions? And what does that look like? Here's the thing, though. We might do a movie today with the concept of a war between human armies and lion armies. Three hundred Praetorian Guard against three hundred lions. But it'd involve a lot of CGI and stuff like that. We did a lot of graphics made with your computer and all that. The Romans don't mess with any of that. They didn't have the ability, obviously, but at the same time, you know, maybe they didn't like their wild, crazy fantasy stories faked. You want to see human armies against lion armies? Don't turn it into a Lord of the Rings movie. Do it live on the stage in front of an audience. It's an absolutely crazy scene to imagine, though, isn't it? No matter how you break it down, that is so weird. Would you watch it if it were on, you know, available from some video site right now? Would you watch it live? Now, here's the thing. That falls in the weird category to me more than it falls into the horrific stuff. Well, that's a terrible thing to say. But I mean, in terms of just raw human cruelty, there's almost a sporting element to the other if you're really sort of sick. The lions might win, or the people might win. I mean, you know, one of the things you have to understand about the Romans and many of you, of course, already do is they will bet on anything. And just because we're pointing out the really blood sport aspect of what they loved, they loved it all. Horse races, chariot races, sporting events that were bloodless. I mean, all of it. And a good day at one of the arenas, like one of the good ones in Rome, Rome is like the New York City and the Broadway of these sorts of shows, bigger, better. And, you know, all the all the highest caliber performers are in Rome. The other arenas are sort of the off Broadway people. But a full good day at a place like the Forum involves all sorts of stuff with the violence being just one element and a good promoter. And somebody staging this thing the right way knows how to mix, you know, some, some performances, maybe by your favorite singers with some good stuff in between some religious messages here or there for the kids. I mean, it's all was a whole bunch of stuff. And if you were really good, you know, there was even lunchtime and lunchtime, you run down to the bottom of the Coliseum, and everybody would get lunch at the same time. But of course, you know, you still got to have something to eat. You still got to have something for the people who are coming back with their lunch a little early, you can't have nothing on stage. So that was when, you know, the pure executions would often take place. Lunchtime. The Roman writers say they were usually less people in the stands, but because of the empty seats, those people, you know, had more of a chance to sort of influence the way things went, and they could yell stuff out. And people would do what they said sometimes. In other words, to please the crowd, if you had some person that you were slowly putting to death in front of, you know, the people that had come out of the food court early, and they had a good suggestion, you do it for them, right? Anything to keep the folks happy and coming back next week. And once again, you can't help but sit there and go, who else ever did that?
SPEAKER_00: Some of these histories I've been reading make it plain that, you know, normally, and I tend to fall into this category too, you think everything has happened before somewhere in history, right? There's nothing new under the sun, as the old saying goes. But you'd be hard pressed to find any widespread similarity anywhere else to what the Romans were doing in these games, except for these territories that the Romans took over and spread the games to. One of the interesting arguments used against those who suggest that this is a particularly Roman thing is how popular these games were when they sprouted up in places that had never had them before, and the locals found that they liked them quite a lot too. But this ability to actually control what was done to the victim, you know, giving the mob essentially the people with the loudest voices or the highest paying customers, the right to control the action is like a godlike power. Think about the virtual reality video game element that had just been added to a real situation in real time. Here's what historian Gerci Fagan writes, quote, He then points out that Seneca is trying to make a point about how, you know, crowds are bad for your morals and you tend to go down to the lowest common denominator essentially in a crowd. But then he says, quote, Seneca's account reveals something of the spectator's mental state. During executions, their ability to direct the course of action on the sand would have strengthened an already formidable sense of empowerment, indeed, the ultimate sense of empowerment, over life and death itself. This was one of the clearest manifestations of the crowd as Domini, lords of the arena, the crowd merely called out its wishes to see them enacted, end quote. It's at this point I have to take three steps back for a second. That is such a wickedly weird concept, if you think about it. I mean, if you really go, what the heck was that like to have a person walk into the arena? Historian Donald G. Kyle describes them as, you know, naked or nearly naked, with a placard either held with them or around their neck explaining what their crimes are and their sentence is, and then tying them to a stake. Or he says, alternatively, just leaving them in the arena alone, unarmed, to face the fate. There's a sentenced fate that they're supposed to face. But as historian, you're a G. Fagan pointed out, it might be open to interpretation, depending on what the crowd wanted. You want to burn somebody, there's fire there. You want to rip pieces of them apart, there's implements available. You want to pour something hot, molten metal of some sort on them. We got some right here. As I've said before, I am fascinated by the extremes of the human experience, and I'm not sure there's anything far greater in terms of extremes than being a condemned prisoner who's going to die via execution. If you had a scale of like, easiest way to be executed and hardest way to be executed, I think these days we do it about as easily as we can make it, lethal injections and stuff like that. But our sensibilities are different than the sensibilities of these earlier eras, where people dying at executions wasn't the goal. It was a byproduct of the goal. The goal was the suffering. And in the case of Rome, the suffering wasn't just to pay for the crime, it was to entertain the crowd. And I'm hard pressed to find a situation in terms of being executed and putting yourself in the position of the condemned that would frighten or scare me or drive me out of my mind as I thought about what was going to happen, as much as the situation in the Roman arena. But this may be personality-based. I mean, you go to some of these other cultures, the Japanese have thought about every way that they can possibly kill convicts and prisoners and people they don't like, for example. Maybe they'll boil you. Does it help if you know that's what they're going to do? Tomorrow morning you're going to get boiled? There was a history I was reading connected to this, and I'm going from memory here, but they had been talking about someone who was going to be beheaded in the morning, and the question was, how does one prepare themselves for that? The night before, what's going through your head? What are the mental and physical preparations? I mean, it's not the kind of thing that most people throughout history have had to think about, right? Although we all know, as I think I said earlier, if you added up all the people throughout history that have been in this position, it's a sizable number. If you're someone like yours truly, though, and someone says, you have a choice between knowing what they're going to do to you tomorrow or not knowing what they're going to do to you tomorrow, my personality wants to know, for whatever reason. So for me, the idea that you could go into this arena, ostensibly to be lit on fire and burned to death, but you know, if the crowd has a better idea, we may go with that. That would frighten me more than having someone say, well, they're going to tear you apart tomorrow with tongs. At least I can sort of mentally prepare myself. How would someone prepare themselves to be beheaded in the morning? Well, it would sure help to know that that's what was coming, at least as my personality is sort of organized. Now, what might they do to you? Well, the sky's the limit in terms of the inventiveness of man to try to figure out ways, not just ways to, you know, add a little variety to the situation, but ways that would even, you know, entertain the crowd more. If you go down the list of things, crucifixion's on there, but crucifixion's slow, so they often would combine, Donald G. Kyle says, crucifixion with some other punishment that they like. Fire was used a lot. They like fire in the arena. But, you know, and it surprised me to actually read this. I didn't know this, but Kyle says that the number one way people died in the arena was due to beasts, you know, wild animals. And while I knew that that was big in the arena, I had no idea that it might be the number one cause of death to the people they were dragging out of there. I do know, and Kyle has something in his notes about it, where he says that there was quite an emphasis on finding these animals for the arena. By the way, just like there was a big emphasis on finding the people for the arena, too. It's very strange to think about this, but here in the new media world, we always talk about needing content to keep the audience satisfied. Well, if you think about it that way, and they did, the content that was needed at these games, and not just the ones in Rome, but all the off-Broadway areas, too, were the people. Who's going to die in the arena? Well, we got some slaves, and this is actually true. They have, you know, accounts where they try to figure out, okay, we've got some slaves from this uprising in Judea. Okay, let's parcel them out. They need them for games here. They need them for games here. I mean, literally, it is providing content for these shows. And as I said, there's other things at the shows. There's performers and magicians and jugglers, all kinds of fun things. But if you were to look at the posters that they put up all over the city announcing that these are coming, the violent parts are often sort of the main events. And in terms of animals, to get back to the beasts question, Kyle says that they wanted real wild ones. They didn't want anything raised in captivity. They didn't want anything that had been in captivity very long, because after all, if you're selling, we have a lot of wild lions on your little posters all around your city to get people to come to the show. You don't want them to get there and find out that the lions don't do much because they're just waiting for you to throw their typical meat lunch to them. You want something that's going to go after these people you've tied to the crosses. And I should point out, but I don't want to go there because there's a lot of controversy as to how far you can take what was going on in the arena because there's accounts that may or may not try to overhype some of this stuff. But there are stuff, and again, I don't want to get into it, but there's stuff about women are going to come in here and be forcibly raped by bulls before they're put to death. I mean, whether or not these things happen, the thought that that would even be thrown out there by some inventive mind as something that people would like to see is extremely disturbing. For a modern person, and this is perhaps a sexist way of thinking, but I think it's ingrained in some of us, the idea of watching women die in the arena is more upsetting than watching the men, but it didn't seem to bother the crowd at all. Watching women ripped apart by beasts was going to be just as fun as watching men ripped apart by beasts. It's hard for we modern people to get our minds around this, especially since to me this is so different than, say, the gladiator fights, which maybe we could conceive as something that's a much more push to the edge version of things we already like. Ever been to a big boxing fight in Las Vegas or something? I mean, this is a violent sporting event, but the buzz amongst the crowd, there's almost nothing I've ever experienced like it. You think to yourself, well, listen, it's very barbaric, but you could see the same sort of interplay going on in terms of whatever parts of our brain are being stimulated. It's boxing plus. It's pro wrestling with weapons for real. And, as all sporting events, you don't know who's going to win, training may come into it, coaching, strategy, tactics, I mean, sports fans could get into something like that, could bet on it, I could see it. To me, these executions, though, are different. And even if most of the crowd didn't go in for the butchery, like Professor Fagan had said, certainly a number of people did. I'm reminded of another quote by Seneca talking about the games, and it was like a throwaway line, but it was something about how he was insinuating you couldn't allow even a dull moment between acts, and, you know, call said that the crowd or something to the effect had called for some throat cutting in the meantime so that they wouldn't get bored. Again, a throwaway line, but the horrificness of the actual imagery, if you imagine it, is sobering. So why did the Romans like it, and how did they justify it? Don't these seem like the most logical follow-up questions? The why they liked it part we're going to continue to talk about because it's really sort of the focus here. I mean, the obvious things that come to mind right away is curiosity about any of these things. Maybe you came, first of all, maybe you're Seneca and you came for all the other stuff, and you just got grossed out by the violence, probably not, but maybe. Or maybe you're curious, you want to see what this looks like. One of the other things that's talked about in events like these is even if you've been to many of them before, this is not scripted content, right? This is like a live sporting event in the sense that you don't want to DVR it and hear what happened later. You have to be there because something weird could happen, and sometimes does. So there's curiosity. There is sheer sadism, and sadism is a weird thing. I think, again, my opinion, and totally non-academic and unqualified, but doesn't it seem like some of the tendencies that are more unusual on an individual level become more common on a crowd level? So whereas it might be rather rare to meet someone who's a sadist in a crowd of people, as a crowd of people I think we're more sadistic. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, maybe, kind of thing. And as for how the Romans justified this, because let's remember, by our modern standards they are harsh and brutal and strict, even in this period where it's off their highs. They used to be stricter, they're loosening up a little, by our standards they're still very strict. The Romans were into things like law, though, and reason, and all these sorts of deals. So how did they look at this kind of stuff and say to themselves, well, listen, this serves a good purpose. Well, here's how our old friend writing many decades ago Will Durant put it, it's a nice succinct description. Most Romans defended the gladiatorial games on the ground that the victims had been condemned to death for serious crimes, that the sufferings they endured acted as a deterrent to others, that the courage with which the doomed men were trained to face wounds and death inspired the people to Spartan virtues, and that the frequent sight of blood and battle accustomed Romans to the demands and sacrifices of war. He then mentions several famous Roman writers and how they basically supported the idea of the games, and then gets to Cicero, the lawyer, writer, at one time, consul, famous at the end of the Republican period. And even though Cicero would make comments approving of the games sometimes, he also said this, which is a pretty humanist sort of thing for a Roman writer to put pen to paper about. Durant says about Cicero and the games, quote, Cicero was revolted by the slaughter, quote, this is Cicero, what entertainment can possibly arise to a refined and humanized spirit from seeing a noble beast struck to the heart by its merciless hunter, or one of our own weak species, cruelly mangled by an animal of far greater strength, end quote. As we said earlier, trying to figure out why the people in Rome enjoyed these violent entertainments is something that's been interesting to people for a very long time, and crosses into that territory between a couple of disciplines like psychology and history. It has so many variables that it's not surprising that you don't have widespread agreement on what this is. I mean, people argue, and the prevailing theory tends to change every decade or so. There are some commonalities, the things you run into generally most of the time, and the number one commonality, something that won't surprise any of us, when we ask how these ancient people could watch other human beings treated this way, it's easy if you don't consider them to be human beings, and the dehumanization of the victims here is obvious. I mean, as everyone you'll read points out, the vast majority of these people who are dying in the arena are slaves, one way or the other. Now, they may not have been slaves their whole lives. If you capture somebody on the battlefield and make them prisoners, they can be slaves the next day. And a lot of these people who died in the arena, by the way, were captured prisoners, sometimes made to fight other prisoners for the enjoyment of the crowd. Nonetheless, the idea that we expect some sort of empathy and sympathy from the crowd might be flawed if the crowd sees these people as, well, what the Nazis would have called the Untermenschen, right? These are sub-humans, these are slaves, they're people with no rights, and they're people that are widely reviled in the society, especially the ones at the lowest level, especially the ones that have broken Roman law. We said earlier, you know, how many people would be appalled at the idea of watching some horrific torture execution today, and how many would change their mind if you said, yes, but it's this horrible dictator, this is a Hitler or a Saddam Hussein or somebody we're doing it to. How many people would go, oh, well, in that case, count me in? Well, for a lot of the Roman crowd, I was reading stuff by several different authors, Kyle, among them, who were suggesting that, you know, a big part of the Roman desire to watch this stuff comes from seeing the victims in a similar light to that, right? They're deserving of this, therefore, you know, why not get a little bit of enjoyment from their death while at the same time making it so horrible that other people who might think of doing this are dissuaded? Now, before we leave the Roman example, there's one element that's worth bringing up because it's a, it's an estuary, if you will, it's a crossover point between the modern violent entertainment and the ancient entertaining violence. And it has to do with something that some historians call the fatal charade. The fatal charade is something that you can easily imagine developing because you need to have more novel and new things to bring in the crowds. I mean, remember, at the Coliseum, they were having naval battles take place for the crowds with water. I mean, the spectacles are amazing. So you can imagine how the dynamics of it all mean that, you know, these grow to unimaginable proportions, a little bit like History podcast that becomes six hours long. But these fatal charades involved using the condemned criminals in plays, comedy, drama, anything like that, dressing them up as characters, putting, you know, sets up and having them reenact what went on in the story. But the stories they pick are often homicidal and involve maimings. And so what they did then was they did it for real. We said earlier, what if you made one of those previews that they show at the movie theater for an action film, but used real bullets and had real people get really hurt? You know, what would that be like? Maybe like these, you know, fatal charades in Rome. Historian Donald G. Keil, in his notes, quoting several other historians, wrote about the fatal charade, quote, The combination of theater and execution in the amphitheater was not theater proper, but rather, Bartsch says, a violation of the theatrical by the actual, or rather, a conflation of the two, not a representation, but a replication. As she notes, the actual death in the charades fulfilled the requirements of both the plot and the penal code, end quote. That's a crazy line. That the deaths in these fatal plays met the needs of both the plot and the penal code. That it wasn't a representation like a movie would be today. It was a replication. It's like doing a story on the Manson Family murders, but reenacting them rather than replicating them on film. And what makes it so different is it's right in your face. There's no doubt that people are really enjoying this. Whereas in all the other situations that come to mind that would involve other ancient peoples that you can find, it's so hard to disentangle the religion from the ritual and, you know, the lack of sources to tell you specifically that people were having a good time to figure out, as we said, whether or not the Aztecs are actually doing it. Whether they're enjoying watching this ceremony involving human sacrifice, or whether it's all part of some giant, you know, religious ritual that sort of overlays the entire question, that explains it in a way that's a lot less denigrating towards the human species than the simplistic, you know, attitude of, well, they're having a good time watching this person suffer and die. The Roman example is the most damning I can find that forces you to look into a mirror. And if you're trying to make the case that human beings are inherently good, inherently empathetic, and inherently, you know, with a sense of brotherhood and sisterhood toward their fellow man, you know, you have to hold this as exhibit A and say, well, then, how do you explain this? So then, of course, the question arises briefly, and not without controversy. If these things were so popular, why the heck did they disappear? And the answers, of course, are less simplistic and more argued about than they used to be. I still think most of the historians that you'll look at will acknowledge that there's a role in the change in sensibility, shall we call them, between a minority Christian Rome and one that was increasing in, you know, importance in that society, right? The ethics were changing, and the views on things like the arena and how moral something like that was were also changing. Now, let's be honest, even if it wasn't for ethical reasons connected to their faith, you could understand why Christians might think the game sucked. I mean, look at how many Christians met their end in these arenas for, well, let's be honest, their countrymen's entertainment in many cases. There's an interesting twist on this, by the way, this idea that Christianity may have helped kill the games, but it hasn't anything to do with a growth in refinement of sensibilities and all that. It has to do with maybe you could call it a scheduling conflict.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, for example, the games themselves were happening a couple of times a year, like mini Olympics, and that just happens to be the time when you had, you know, some of the more serious holiday periods for Christians. And so maybe we're talking about something here that has to do with a question of scheduling conflicts, as I said, leading to a reduction in consumer demand, maybe. There's another theory that these things had only existed as long as they had because the emperors gave them all the support because it helped, you know, the whole bread and circuses thing. Well, these are the circuses, right? They play a role for the emperor. They play a mystical role that connect the emperor to the subjects. I mean, there's a whole lot of theories about this. Once it stops doing that to the same degree, there's no reason for the emperor to go to those great expenses and all that other trouble. Might as well just have a nice chariot race and call it good. I should point out too that, you know, these Roman traditions where they have these games, these go way back in their history, and they actually involved other Italian peoples like Samnites and Etruscans and people who would have sometimes at funerals and whatnot, these duels. And duels are not that uncommon throughout history. It was this Roman, as we said, layering when we talked about the animals, but layered on all the different levels of performance and attraction. And I mean, these things, as we said, were like a variety show with the violence as sort of the headline or acts. But I read that they didn't die out all at once and that even quite a bit of time later, after emperors and whatnot had tried to get rid of them, they were still popping up here or there. So, you know, maybe not quite getting the ratings they used to get, but still bopping around, you know, the off-Broadway circuit and, you know, pulling into locals every now and then for a little, you know, gory equivalent of old-fashioned dinner theater, maybe. Now, if this were a program dealing with executions or criminal law or criminal justice or the penal system or anything like that, there'd be a lot of examples to go into where you're seeing public executions all over the world all the time. It's just, it's depressingly familiar. But what you don't have is the kind of evidence that Rome provided of what the mentality of the crowd watching was. And nowhere else do you really see such raw enjoyment. For example, it's very possible that those Japanese people living nearby, what did we say, a person, a convict being boiled to death, sometimes that happened. And if it did, that might be unusual and you might want to go watch. And so, you know, you pick up a few friends and you go get some food and you go down to the beach to have some fun. Certainly might have happened in my cynical way of looking at things sometimes. I imagine it probably did, but I don't have the written sources in English to prove it. The next place that I can prove it, or at least make a logical case with some evidence, is a lot nearer to our own time than Rome was. Perhaps a little bit more of an indictment. It's one thing to try to say that those ancient people living thousands of years ago were almost a different species from us, but it's much harder to claim that when you're talking about a time period, say, as we said, when George Washington is a young adult. And Robert Francois-Damien is being torn apart over four hours in front of tens of thousands of early modern French spectators. George Washington's lifespan is actually not a bad historical marker for this conversation, because over his lifespan these sorts of spectacular, grotesquely medieval torture executions will go out of fashion. Washington, of course, born in the early 1730s, died on the cusp of the 19th century, I think it was December 1799, lived during a period often labeled in your high school history textbooks as the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason. Those kinds of executions don't sound very enlightened, do they? And they were passing away during this era for a bunch of interesting reasons. But the reason that we can use it to examine our question of people and violence and the extremes of the human experience is we get these sources, really an explosion in sources, starting at around the 16th century. So from 1500 to about 1800, you can really see this entire question from multiple viewpoints in ways you've never been able to before. And I think that's why if you buy reading material in English on this subject, it is inordinately concentrated on the period from 1500 to the early 1800s and in Western Europe, because the sources are plentiful. And from multiple viewpoints. Take, for example, one of the most interesting. There is nothing from the Roman era that gives you the perspective of the person whose job it was to execute people in the arena. What did the guy who had to do all these horrible things to the condemned think, right? You wouldn't know. But we have the equivalent of a diary kept by an executioner in Germany in the 16th century.
SPEAKER_00: How amazing is it to have that point of view to add to try to three-dimensionalize this? And what about the condemned themselves? Again, nothing from the Roman arena on how that poor individual felt before they went through what they went through. But in the era we're talking about, the condemned could speak sometimes. And what they said was written down and transmitted. And then, of course, we have an audience that you can examine now from multiple viewpoints over multiple centuries in multiple countries. So if you want to examine this fascination with the spectacularity of death and people's interest in it, this is perhaps the best laboratory we can work within, because there's a lot of data to synthesize. Now, the problem in talking about this is there is a lot of variation. Region to region, era to era. And so any generalized statements are bound to be false in some way. So I hope I can count on your indulgence on this to try to get us to where we have to be to have a discussion about this. We're going to generalize. But if you want to understand what happened that allowed modern people, you know, from the Louis XIV era of the Enlightenment, to go to these torture executions and enjoy themselves, you have to kind of understand how it got that way, right? We have to have some context. And as a bridge to maybe take us backward for some context, I was thinking of a reform that a couple of rulers during George Washington's lifetime implemented. But they were secret reforms, which is kind of interesting. For example, Frederick the Great of Prussia, who is considered one of the Enlightenment rulers, a guy who didn't just read people like Voltaire, the famous Enlightenment thinkers, he was a pen pal. So he was one of these people that implemented changes that's part of all this stuff that we broadly call the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason. And one of the things that Frederick the Great did was reform the legal system in the 1740s. Now, he did away with a couple of medieval type executions. I mean, I think he got rid of burning, for example, couldn't burn somebody alive anymore, I think. But I know that he kept stuff like breaking with the wheel. But his secret order, his reform dictated that the person who was going to be subjected to this ordeal be strangled beforehand. That's not the interesting part per se. The interesting part is that Frederick mandated that this strangling be done in such a way that the crowd wouldn't know it. As far as the crowd was concerned, they were still watching a person being broken apart in the most horrific medieval fashion possible. But Frederick and the executioners would know that the person actually felt no pain. What's going on there? And before we think of it as an isolated example, Maria Theresa of the Habsburg Empire a couple decades later issued a similar sort of order. And her point was that, listen, the person's dead anyway. I mean, that's what we're really doing here, trying to deprive this person of his life. Why, you know, prolong the suffering? But then why keep the strangling secret? And that takes us back to the rationale behind these spectacular public executions from this bizarrely modern era. Why did they do them at all? The point of all this was to create a shockingly frightful spectacle, a deterrent, a warning. And for the purposes of the warning, it really wouldn't matter whether or not the condemned was actually feeling the pain that the audience thought they were feeling. The most important part of the equation was that the audience did indeed think they were feeling the pain and suffering. And when you consider what the really nasty executions that a guy in Frederick the Great's time would have had available to him. You know, they're frightful indeed. I mean, burning, for those of you who find that particularly horrible, others might choose, you know, it's a personal preference question, as their most horrible, most to be avoided, potential execution method, breaking on the wheel, like we mentioned a little earlier. What the heck is breaking on the wheel? Historian Garrett Fagan has a horrific description. And you can see after you hear it why strangling somebody ahead of time would have been an act of considerable mercy. He writes, quote, Particularly unpleasant was wheeling, also called braiding, or breaking on the wheel in France, or breaking with the wheel in Germany. The procedure, he writes, took many forms and was employed in numerous countries across the European continent and in foreign colonies. The usual method was for the victim to be tied to a scaffold or laid out on the ground with wooden struts to raise the limbs, and a wagon wheel or a hammer, iron bar, or club used to break them. Special execution wheels were manufactured with projecting flanges for added smashing power. Alternatively, victims could be run over repeatedly by heavy wagons. The traditional, the word means end of the ceremony, was for the condemned to have their ruined limbs threaded through the spokes of another wagon wheel, the braiding part of the action, which was then hoisted on a pole for display. There the victim, if not dead already, could linger for days. A harrowing eyewitness account from a 1607 execution reports how the victim was transformed, quote, into a sort of huge screaming puppet writhing in rivulets of blood, a puppet with four tentacles, like a sea monster of raw, slimy, and shapeless flesh, mixed with the splinters of smashed bones, end quote. This takes us back to the reasons for these spectacular punishments, the justifications, and, when you go back to how it all started, the water becomes very muddy indeed. For example, remember us wondering about many other peoples in history and whether or not the fact that there are heavy religious overtones to what's going on, whether or not that means you can determine if they were there because they wanted to see the violence? I mean, if the Aztec crowd is witnessing the human sacrifice ceremony, is this fun? Or is this a form of piety, right? Hard to tell. The waters are very muddied. In the Europe, preceding the period we're talking about here, the same thing is true. And big disclaimer here, that's not to say that there aren't religious overtones in the Roman arena, there were. And that's not to say there aren't religious overtones at Robert Francois Demian's execution, there were. But it's pretty obvious from those two examples that it's not the number one thing. In Rome, the number one thing is the amusement of the crowd. In Demian's case, the number one thing is demonstrating the authority of the state. The fact that people are enjoying watching the authority of the state being demonstrated, that's a different question. That's more human. In the period that leads up, though, to these relatively secular pursuits in the mid-1700s, you have very religious executions. So once again, is the crowd there for fun? Or is this something larger? We compared the Roman arena to a kind of theater, sort of, right? A theater where the violence was real, but maybe touching some of the same parts of your mind or psyche that enjoys watching the faked version now. Entertainment, as I said, was the goal, though, right? What's the form of execution here that will be most novel and interesting to watch? In the case of the executions in the Europe of the Middle Ages, the ones that are the precursors to these later examples we've been going over, these are also like a form of theater. But it's more like a morality play or a passion play, or one of these message-oriented displays where there's going to be a lot of drama, there's going to be quite a bit of horrific violence. But if it all goes off the way these executions in the Middle Ages were supposed to go off in a lot of these cases, again, exceptions exist and there are local variations, there would be a happy ending at the end. And the person who suffered the most pain and violence during the experience will find themselves, if they conduct themselves properly, of course, in heaven with God and the saints. And the crowd will at times, if these historians are to be believed, seem almost jealous of them. Just out of curiosity, what would have to happen, what would it take to make you jealous or envious of someone who had just endured a long, drawn-out, painful public torture execution? I don't remember ever seeing any accounts from the Roman era of people, spectators in the arena, feeling a whole lot of envy for the person being eaten by wild animals as part of their death sentence in front of them. Now, if you had told me I had overlooked something, I wouldn't be surprised. If you'd said that there were accounts of the Christian martyrs who had witnessed their brethren dying in the arena and wished that they could have that happen to them too, I wouldn't be surprised. You see accounts like this all over the world at various times, very devout people who have a completely different set of logical priorities, ones that are not based on here and now, but are focused more on a long-term, forever-afterwards venue. It changes your rational calculation, right? If you're much more worried about an eternity in heaven rather than the momentary, you know, logical pros and cons that weigh into the situation you might be facing here. Now, fast-forward a few centuries and as we all know, the Christians go from a persecuted sect in Rome to running the joint when it comes to Western Europe. And when the Western Roman Empire goes away and leaves all these successor states in its wake, the vast majority are Christian and the ones that aren't will be. This is the... I think it's fair to say if you go from like late antiquity to, you know, when the age of reason begins, this is Europe at its most intense religiosity, right? Their most fervent... This is the era where, you know, it encompasses the Crusades, it encompasses all the religious wars that happened because of the schism between, you know, the Protestants and the Catholics. I mean, there's a lot that go into this and a ton of people will die. I mean, witches, inquisitions, it's all during this era. There's a line and I'm going from memory that I once read a historian said that they said in this era, the most vicious procedures were inflicted on devout Christians by even more devout Christians. You have near universal Catholicism in these countries until the great schism with Martin Luther, there are enclaves of Jews, there's actually Islamic folks in some places and there's a bunch of heretical Christian sects. Whether they're Christian or not, of course, is the main issue that are being wiped out and persecuted. But there's a worldview now in place, right? A reality that in some ways is like our own. If you drop an apple, gravity does what gravity does, right? It does now and it did then. But there are other elements of reality that are believed to be a hundred percent valid by almost everybody that influences everything. Take, for example, the near unanimity of the idea that there is a heaven and a hell and a God watching over everything and that everything is divinely ordained. Now, we have people, of course, who believe that today, but it's one of many different belief systems out there. In fact, one of the great things about living in a free society, in a free part of the world, is that you're free to pick and choose your own reality. You know, within limits, I mean, you still have to acknowledge gravity. But otherwise, I mean, you can treat it like a buffet, if you will. I'm going to take a little bit of Eastern mysticism, mix it with Catholic doctrine, add a little bit of hard science and some UFO-ology, because I like that, plus massage, and whip it into a 21st century philosophical smoothie, if you want. But I think we have to recognize that that's a freedom that did not exist in most times and most places. There are, of course, you know, errors in places where it did, but by and large, the belief system was a lot more constrained, both legally and obviously in terms of religion and faith, but also because of the old garbage in, garbage out element of what were the people even being exposed to. I mean, take for example, an illiterate person in the middle of Europe in, oh, I don't know, we'll say, you know, the 10th century. What do you know? You know, probably the religious texts that were read to you by somebody else and anything you personally experienced. Well, that's going to limit your worldview right there. And if there's 100% belief in the religious texts and everyone else feels the same way, well, that helps explain the accounts of some of the executions that have come down to us from this era, which are as bizarre as anything I've ever seen. But without the faith explanation, it doesn't make any sense. So first of all, when we talk about executions in the Middle Ages, what do we mean? Historian Paul Friedland points out, by the way, that there are far fewer sources and accounts of executions from this era than you would think, considering its infamy in terms of torture and execution. Quite a bit of torture, though. A lot of mutilations during this time period, right? Very eye for an eye. You know, you could lose a hand if you're a thief, a lot of that kind of stuff. In his book, The Lure of the Arena, historian Gary G. Fagan writes, Passing beyond antiquity, our sources for the Dark Age punitive practices are not good. But throughout the Middle Ages in continental Europe, it is clear that many forms of aggravated execution and public torture were employed, including burning, boiling alive in oil, feet first, decapitation, burial alive, drawing and quartering, branding, flogging, and miscellaneous forms of mutilation. For those guilty of multiple offenses, cumulative punishment could be applied, if stipulated by the court. In this way, lethal and non-lethal punishments were often combined, so that torture preceded execution or mutilation of the body was carried out post-mortem. The Sachsen Spiegel, he continues, an illuminated German legal code of 1220-1235 AD, shows beheading, hanging, hacking, the birching and shearing of women tied to a stake, and mutilation. It is not evident, from the Sachsen Spiegel, however, that these punishments attracted crowds, but there is no reason to think that they did not. If these executions in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance did indeed draw crowds, and I don't see why they wouldn't, what were the crowds there for? What was the draw? What did they expect to have happen? What did they hope to have happen? Well, this is why we sort of set up the religious stuff up till now, because that's what twists us in a unique way. Because if I told you that the legal system wanted an exemplary deterrent to deter people from committing crimes, and that's why they hung up bodies and pieces of bodies and heads on stakes at the bridges and all that, that wouldn't surprise you, would it? Justice has always had a deterrent effect, or there's always been a lot of theories about that. There's nothing new in that question. It's the religious side that, to the modern mind, is harder to understand. What if you went to this execution, instead of feeling, you know, I think we have a mindset, a stereotype in our minds, of how these executions go with the crowd? And the crowd is jeering and throwing refuse and heaping abuse on the condemned as they make their way to the scaffold or the gallows or the ravenstone. And then when they're up there just about to die, the crowd is jeering at them and all this. And while this did happen, and the sources say it depends on what the bad person did and how they comported themselves during the whole process, but more often than not, in this period we're talking about right now, the crowd felt a connection to the condemned, a compassion. And if the whole thing went off well, the historians often describe this as being a spiritually moving event. One of them used the word, maybe two of them used the word potentially beautiful. Now let's remind ourselves for a second about what this beautiful event might be and then ask ourselves again what it would take for you or for me to watch this live and describe it afterwards as beautiful. So in his book, Rituals of Retribution, historian Richard Evans recounts the tale of an Englishman named John Taylor who lived in the early 1600s and did a little traveling and wrote about what he saw. One of the things he saw is while he was visiting the continent, he got to see one of those executions that they weren't doing much where he was from anymore in England. As I said earlier, I think the English have a penchant for hanging that we'll talk about in a little bit, but it didn't mean they didn't do other things. It just meant it was a little bit more unusual. So when John Taylor goes to the continent and sees an opportunity to go to an execution where they're breaking someone with the wheel, he goes. And he describes it in his language from that time period this way, quote, Monday the 19th of August, about the hour of 12 at noon, the people of the town in great multitudes flocked to the place of execution, which is half a mile English, meaning distance, without the gates built more like a sconce than a gallows, for it is walled and ditched about with a drawbridge, and the prisoner came on foot with a divine with him, meaning a priest or a religious figure, all the way exhorting him to repentance, and because death should not terrify him, they had given him many rouses and carouses of wine and beer, for it is the custom there to make such poor wretches drunk, whereby they may be senseless either of God's mercy or their own misery, but being prayed for by others, they themselves may die resolutely or to be feared desperately. End quote. So then Taylor describes the execution, which would have been maybe unusual for him to see. He says, quote, End quote. End quote. End quote. This was part of the exemplary deterrence and the idea of the period, right? You not only have to have the execution be like this, but you have to have pieces of the body lying around to remind people. You got to put them in gibbets and cages, and you got to cut them up in pieces and put the pieces in different places, and you got to leave the people who die on the gallows hanging there till they fall off by themselves as an example to others. So now considering this Englishman's description of this rather unusual execution by his standards, if you had witnessed it live, do you think you would have called it beautiful? Would it have been some sublime spiritual experience for you? Now, I said earlier, some of this stuff, some of these executions are so bizarre, if you don't have the faith element, you can't even get your mind around it. It's hard enough to get your mind around it with the faith element. Friedland gives another example in his book, and I would quote it from the original source, except that there's too much Latin in it, it's hard to follow. But essentially it talks about one of these breaking on the wheels that happens, and the original source is talking about how, as the condemned is being killed, as they're being broken on the wheel, they are singing or shouting religious verses, and the crowd is picking up where the condemned leaves off. So he'll do the first verse, they'll do the second, in unison, he'll do the third, they'll do the fourth. It's a call and response while he's being killed. What's more, according to this source, he's talking to the guy who's killing him, the executioner, and I guess the only way to put it is he's making requests, right? Tell the crowd I want the next verse in Latin, and all this kind of stuff. It's completely bizarre to the modern mind. But as Friedland says, this is the kind of thing that the people in that era would have seen as potentially beautiful. A wonderful lesson for the kids, right? A morality lesson here. Here's what could happen to you if you go wrong. But if you continue to believe in God and you sincerely seek redemption through repentance, you too can make it to heaven. I mean, there's an element of faith involved here that's understandable to modern people of faith. But because this isn't modern faith, this is a medieval version of it or a Renaissance version of it, the part that's harder to understand is that the people in the crowd very well may have seen the violence being done to the malefector's body as necessary to get to the heavenly goal. And if that's the case, then what was being done to that malefector's body was a good thing. And because it was being done, someone's soul is going to be saved. And if you actually watch that, that's a pretty good, crazy, entertaining show with a good message at the end and a feel-good sort of an attitude. When you get home, you're all wrung out. The emotions have been totally in play. I mean, I guess what I'm saying is there's an entertainment to that, isn't there? At the same time, it is so formalized when you read the rules. But I mean, they have it written down to who stands where and what the formations in line are supposed to be and who comes first. And this is a celebration of both religious and secular authority. But it's so ritualized, it would be hard to make a case that it's anything but that. So if you say people are enjoying what they're seeing and they go home glad they came and there's a huge draw for the next execution, I don't think there's any argument about that. But it's not the same thing as what's going on in the Roman arena, is it? Friedlin says, quote, Witnesses usually bridge the physical distance between themselves and the patient, meaning the condemned, through prayers, tears, and empathy. The public transformation of the condemned criminal into a repentant sinner enabled the entire community to undergo a kind of healing that may be experienced as profoundly beautiful and uplifting. End quote. Now, it also had a lot of other ritual important elements to it. The key, though, as historian Richard Evans points out, the whole affair requires an absolute consensus on the part of everyone involved, executioner, state authorities, condemned, audience, that there is the possibility of an afterlife. Evans writes, quote, End quote. They had paved the way to eternal life for a soul seemingly beyond redemption. End quote. There's a certain irony, isn't there, that modern people instantly recognize in a situation like this, that Europe in its most religiously fanatic period in its history are treating their outcasts, malefactors, and lawbreakers in exactly the same fashion as the individual at the center of their religion was treated? Jesus Christ, of course, perhaps the most famous victim of a hideous public torture execution. On a cross, by the way, which is just how some of these European execution victims were killed, too, by their Christian executioners. And while historians point out that sometimes the crowd could make the connection between the similarities between the condemned having to make their way to the scaffold and Jesus having to make his way to where he was going to be nailed to the cross, no one seems to make the next obvious connection, which is, wait a minute, if our Savior died in one of these hideous public torture executions, should we really be doing this to other people? Nonetheless, this is kind of what makes history fun, and we as people interesting. You just can't make this stuff up. So, I think it's pretty fair to say that while we won't give the people in this era a get-out-of-jail-free card to totally be absolved from the charge that they might have been going to these affairs for sheer entertainment and enjoyment, we will say that like all those other cases we mentioned, you know, the northeastern Native American tribes, for example, we don't know. The water's too muddy to say because there's obviously ritual and religious elements involved, too.
SPEAKER_00: It's only when you strip away those elements that maybe the potential get-out-of-jail-free card religious side of this ceases to protect the society from charges that they're just watching this stuff to get a kick out of it. And the reasons, by the way, that this will happen over the period from about 1500 to 1800 are complex, they're argued about, they're also interwoven, so it's very difficult to say you have to pay a lot of attention to this element of what's going on because it's hard to quantify how much that matters compared to some other element that's going on and how they interact. Take, for example, one of the theories, which I love, I love this theory because there's an element to it that just touches some hardcore history, a little nerve of mine, but one of the ideas behind how these executions go from these religious experiences where the crowd and the condemned are working together to get a soul to heaven, well, one of the theories on how this changes, Friedland subscribes to this, I guess, I think, and that's that the Lutherans changed this a bit. You know, there's this great schism, right, we all understand the Protestant reformation, the big revolution, Martin Luther kicks off, and by the way, the Protestants as an overall entity didn't seem to have a problem with executions. Luther was quoted as saying, what's the famous quote, the hands of the executioner, the hands of God or something like that. But when these Lutherans begin to be early on executed as heretics, they're a curiosity for the crowd. And one of the reasons they're a curiosity, Friedland and others write, is that they will go to the execution happy and glad and impatient and ready. And the thing about them that's so difficult is that when the confessors are dealing with them or the priests are dealing with them or the authorities are dealing with them or the crowd is trying to deal with them, there's almost a like who's out Christianing who element. You can call them heretics all you want, but when they're screaming in pain during the execution, they're screaming out the name of Jesus Christ. What did we say earlier, that line I like, that during this period the most horrible procedures were done on devout Christians by even more devout Christians? But Friedland and others point out that this may have short-circuited this entire ritual we talked about earlier, right, the one where as Peter Spierenberg says, he says this requires the cooperation of the condemned for it to work right, for you to go home after watching one of these events feeling satisfied and like you did a good thing and like all is right in the world. Everything has to go as planned, but what if the criminals, as you would have seen them, these heretics, what if they don't repent? What if they don't say they were wrong? What if they don't play the role that they're supposed to play? Well, it does a number of things, but the one thing it certainly does, as is pointed out over and over by several different people, is it short-circuits the script. The one thing these events don't have a lot of is uncertainty. It's a very formalized affair we just described these executions in the Middle Ages and afterwards. The fact that these Lutherans could do anything adds an element of uncertainty. Are they going to recant their faith right before they're about to be burned alive? Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn't. It creates a level of uncertainty that is not that dissimilar, pardon me for saying so, to a sporting event where you don't know the outcome. Friedland quotes historian David Nichols, who said that people were, quote, drawn to the burning of heretics by curiosity. They were novelties and people wished to see how this new kind of criminal faced death, end quote. Now apparently this curiosity about Protestant heretics won't last very long, but some historians think that this plays a role in breaking down the barriers, if you will, separating people who are going to these things for ritual reasons and people who are going to these things for spectacle reasons. Now as I've said before, there's disagreement on a lot of this stuff. A lot of the question we're getting into now, you will find the experts I've noticed disagree not that this is a factor, but how much weight you give each factor. So we just mentioned the curiosity factor with Protestant heretics. How important is that? Different people disagree. There are other elements in play here that should be mentioned that are interesting, that are part of the reality of the times, if you will. How about the fact that this is the period where people really start examining and medically dissecting human bodies. It'll be like a theater sometimes. They'll open up a person and there'll be a crowd watching from above of disinterested scientific men who will see, oh, that's how the ligaments work and there's the aorta and that kind of stuff. And they get these bodies, by the way, usually from execution victims, and it's considered to be one of the parts of the sentence if the judge wants to make it extra bad, he'll say not only are we going to break you on the wheel, but afterwards we're going to give you to the doctors to, it was called, another doctor. You will be anatomized. You will be anatomized. Now to you and me, we may say, who cares, we're already dead, but you're talking about people who have a very different belief system. And being anatomized is not only something that might mess you up in the heaven question, it's darn shameful. And another thing you'll notice with these executions where modern people will go, well, what's the point of that? Who cares? It's part of shaming the individual and maybe their family and certainly anyone who might want to do what they did. But by far the greatest amount of agreement you will see when you read from years ago to now, the experts on the subject of these kinds of executions and what's involved, the elephant in the living room is state power and state authority. As we mentioned earlier, if you look at the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the development of states and the history of all that afterwards, you famously will get to the Treaty of Westphalia in the 17th century where they will talk about the nation state being the highest form of political organization and all that kind of stuff. It's during this period that these nation states, these budding infant nation states, are beginning to create the sort of bureaucracy and power and all that stuff that we associate with them now. And the number one thing you have to do, by the way, is secure a monopoly of force. You can't run a modern nation state and have a bunch of warlords and barons and other people able to have their own private armies and messing with you. So job one, get rid of them, and there's only one authority and they're in the capital and you begin to get these so-called absolutist states of the era, the Louis XIV era. Now there's a lot of reasons this is important. As I said, maybe the number one most important part. But start with the fact that it's the main reason you can't follow this story chronologically. Because depending on how advanced the authority of the state is in any given region, the execution procedures and all that stuff will be at different phases. So for example, places like London, in a country like England, which establishes a monopoly of force relatively early compared to the rest of the states in Europe, you will see the executions take on a different form. You will see the goal of the state being different. You will see the reaction of the crowd watching differently. Paris will do something similar, but you could go out in the hinterlands, go to some small place in Bavaria maybe, and you'll find that a long time after they've stopped doing the whole religious connection with the condemned and all that in places like London and Paris, they're still doing it in the backwoods of Bavaria. So this is all happening at different times. Now if, as we said, you lose the get out of jail free card when your ritual turns into a spectacle, how much do you blame the power of the state for this? Well, let's understand what they do, right? They begin to have a problem with the religious side of this whole deal. Because the state's interest in these public executions is for things to be as absolutely horrifying as possible to the crowd to send a message. This is deterrence at work. But what if through all those religious ceremonies that we've been talking about, the religious side of things turns this condemned criminal who the public should hate and be repelled by and not admire at all, what if it turns them into an almost sainted figure? So you begin to see these complaints from the authorities going, hey, we can't have this, right? We don't want the crowd to feel any sort of admiration. We want them to feel scorn for this figure. So they begin to have problems with what they want out of these executions, conflicting with what the religious side of the budding nation state wants with the execution. The goals of the clergy and the state are at odds. This, by the way, corresponds to this same period where a bunch of the elites in these most civilized societies, right, if you're in London or Paris or whatnot, the really civilized elites are not so religious as they used to be. Again, it would be stupid to say that they're not religious compared to now. But compared to the so-called, you know, superstitious high watermark of the Dark Ages, you know, not so dark as we now know, but you know what I mean. This is a whole different animal, these rationalists of the budding pre-Enlightenment era. And they're often the ones who are pushing this idea that, hey, these religious people are screwing up the goal of this thing, which is to make these criminals the worst people on earth and you'd never want to be one. Historian Richard Evans in Rituals of Retribution writes about this new sort of Enlightenment era that's budding. And let's not pretend that it's budding amongst the rank and file in the population. It's budding amongst the very cream of the intelligentsia. But they have an influence. Here's what Evans writes, quote, The new rationalistic concentration on public punishment as a theatrical demonstration designed to make the public at horror the criminal was part, in other words, of a broader concentration on the educative and deterrent function of punishment. It is easy to see that this concept of penal policy ran counter to the religious and crypto materialist rituals, which played such a major part in capital punishment in the early modern period, and which before the 18th century were accepted in elite as well as popular culture. End quote. So this is an example of one of the arguments being made by someone Evans identifies as one of the rationalist pamphleteers of his day. Listen to the arguments against the religious side of this whole, what do we call it earlier, sublime, beautiful experience. Evans says, quote, The ultimate purpose of public punishment is largely frustrated if the malefactor dies in circumstances that arouse a kind of admiration and respect. And by the singing of inspiring funeral hymns often has the deleterious effect of causing weak and melancholy natures to desire for themselves a form of extinction, which is they think allows them to meet their end more peacefully, indeed more joyfully than on their deathbed after a lengthy illness. End quote. Evans then points out that this doesn't mean that these people thought the condemned should have no religious consolation, but that it should occur in private. You know, heal their souls privately, but don't let it soften the crowd's attitude toward them. In other words, the idea that this should be something where you see this person as going off to some wonderful destination, in part because you're sending them there, that that screws up the whole reason the state wants this guy dead or woman dead. Now, there are other things that get thrown into the mix as reasons why the attitudes of the spectators change from ritualistic to voyeuristic. Take broadsheets, for example, and the rise of broadsheets.
SPEAKER_00: Broadsheets, by the way, a term still used for the oversize newspapers today, it was a kind of newspaper, I guess you could say, a booklet, a pamphlet, sometimes it was just one big piece of paper. But think about something that looked like Ben Franklin did it on his home printing press, and that's not a bad mental image. Oftentimes it was mostly illustrations, because who knows how many people in the audience could actually read, and the text would often explain what was in the pictures, and sometimes it almost looked like a comic book where you would see several different panels showing events in chronological order. When these things first started to appear, I think it was late 1500s, maybe even earlier, what they were showing was often sort of a cautionary tale, a moralistic cautionary tale. So maybe the first pain in the comic book shows the person being born, and everything looks great. And then the next pain shows the person at adolescence and still going good, everything's right. And then the third pain maybe shows the pivotal moment in their life where they decide to kill and rob this person. The next pain shows them being judged by the authorities, the next pain shows them being executed, the last pain maybe just shows them hanging on a deserted gallows while the buzzards circle above. And of course the message to be absorbed by the little kiddies at night when you show it to them is, you know, stay on the straight and narrow or this could happen to you. But over time these broadsheets begin to become more, let's just say lascivious, salacious, much more of something we would recognize today in fact.
SPEAKER_00: If you said tabloid-esque, that might not be too far off the mark. This coincides with a period, and again there's a chicken and an egg element, how much of this is encouraged by the broadsheets and how much of it is, you know, what society is doing and the broadsheets are just playing into the trend. But an increased interest in crime and punishments and we would say today gossip. I just read one history where the historian was saying that one of the prime things language has been used for since language began was gossiping, depending on how you define that term. But in a sense these broadsheets began showing real things when they would talk about these executions, which kind of helped with the draw, right? The people knew that these were real events. But then the people doing the broadsheets would embellish them and dramatize them. They'd make the crimes more salacious and they'd usually be about unspeakable things, which are of course if you're gossiping the best thing to speak about. And they would then in lurid detail talk about the execution and there would be a lot of focus on the dramatic last moment, the climactic last speech maybe from the gallows or the raven stone. Paul Friedland talks about one of these famous people. Think about sort of a Matt Drudge of their day, just knowing exactly what sort of, you know, what the mood of the public really was signifying, right? What buttons did you have to push to really sell a lot of these broadsheets? And he says the titillating short stories had subjects like murder, incest, parasite, rape, sodomy, and sorcery. No confirmation yet that one of them was called hardcore history. But you begin to see a change in what the people want. And it's difficult to untangle how much of that is because the people were changing and how much of the fact that the people were changing was due to the fact that they were reading more of these broadsheets and it was interesting the more and more in true crime and what was going on and these people who were dying on the gallows. And as one historian said, it was a tragic spectacle that these people were selling, these broadsheet publishers. But it helped change the focus in some unquantifiable way from a religious-oriented ritual to something that was much more based on curiosity and salaciousness and maybe even a voyeuristic enjoyment of somebody else's suffering. And this is where we get to the next thing. These broadsheets were existing at the same time and were intertwined with these people who like to go to the executions now for less religious reasons and more for fun. Historian Paul Friedland says that it was in the 16th century that you first saw the beginnings of these people who would show up to the executions more for fun. Maybe fun's not the right word. They were almost like a rarefied group of hobbyists, it seems like, for a while, till it became a mass thing. These people used to be in on it years before the trend started. I used to see these guys all the time at Executicon. These people would start to purchase select seats so that they could be at the execution but not right down in the mosh pit. In fact, Friedland says that to those folk, the people right around the scaffold or the ravenstone or the gallows, those people are actually characters in the great tragic spectacle too. So you want to be able to take the whole scene in from a really good vantage point, preferably elevated, preferably with cocktails servable and snacks. Friedland calls these people penal voyeurs, voyeurs of the penal system in action. He says that they are perhaps analogous. The same in a similar way to these people who are now enjoying the broadsheets as they get more and more pulp-like. 1950s comic booky, salacious, this is like steam pulp, maybe you could say. And that there's a connection between the two, perhaps. Maybe one helps create the demand for the other. You read a few broadsheets and you think, God, maybe I should see one of these things live. Friedland writes, quote, in many respects we might think of Rosette's readers, he means Francois de Rosette, maybe the Matt Drudge of his day in terms of broadsheets. We might think of Rosette's readers as analogous to the new penal voyeurs who were gathering in windows overlooking the scaffold at precisely the time when he was writing his tragic stories. Rosette's tragic realism made readers feel as if they were almost there at the scene of the execution, but with the relative freedom to experience their emotions as if they weren't, to forget themselves and sob with delight in private. In a way, he writes, the new penal voyeurs experienced a similar sense of being almost there. From behind their windows, at a considerable distance from the scaffold, they could gaze out at the real-life drama unfolding beneath them and they could take it all in. The suffering of the patient, the compassion of the crowd, as if they were all characters in a magnificent spectacle to which they themselves were not participants, but spectators. They were beginning, in other words, to process the execution scenes played out before them, almost as if they were watching one of Pierre Corneille's tragic heroes or heroines deliver a monologue prior to execution, peeking in on the most intimate moments of another person's life and death. Outside the traditional framework of participation and compassion, they were free to feel a sense of tragic delight, or free to feel nothing at all. For them, the crowd gathered around the scaffold had become a kind of Greek chorus, reacting to the suffering of the condemned and expressing the compassion that they, seated up above the windows, no longer felt. End quote. Now I'm relying on a small number of sources here, smaller than I like because believe it or not, there's not a lot, especially of the stuff we're talking about here. But I think Friedland's wonderful, his book is wonderful, and he tries to get his mind around these really interesting questions. He does as good of a job as any I've ever read on the subject. And he helps us understand this transition, which is difficult because, as we said earlier, the transitions will happen at different times in different places. You can't follow this chronologically. And that's true, isn't it, for any of these great so-called periods in history, in your history books, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, whenever. I mean, the Renaissance comes to Italy a lot earlier than it comes to England, right? So we all understand that changing sensibilities, changing cultural attitudes, changing ways of life, all this stuff happens much more slowly than sometimes the histories make it out to be. We don't change, we people like switching on a light bulb, right? But in this era we're talking about here, there's an interesting little twist to it all. You know, someone once told me when we were talking about how many listeners someone had for their show, and they said it's not always how many people are listening, sometimes it's who those people are. Well, what if you manage to create a religion, and you convert one person in another country, but that person is the absolute ruler of that country? How many individuals is that worth? In this day and age, in our modern democracies all around the world, you've got to co-opt a significant chunk of the population for any big movement in any direction. What if you just had to convert one person? We mentioned Frederick the Great earlier, the ruler of Prussia, so often associated with the Enlightenment. This is a guy who for all intents and purposes has done what a lot of other kings throughout history have done, convert to a new religion, and then sort of impose that on his country. But his religion, for lack of a better word, is reason, and the age of Enlightenment's values. I mean, as we said earlier, this was not a guy who was just reading Voltaire, he was corresponding with him as a pen pal. He was all in, as Will Durant kind of said about the Enlightenment ideas, and he wanted to create a country that represented this, right? That didn't have torturous, barbarous torture executions going on all the time. I mean, one of the first things he did when he took the throne, he's got rid of the penalty of burning sodomites. Those of you who are Frederick the Great fans will understand that there might be some interesting irony there. He also would eliminate execution for a ton of crimes, I mean, you no longer cut the thieves' hands off. I mean, he's doing, these are all things that he can do by himself as the ruler. You don't have to convince a whole lot of people in the country that this is the way to go. You can just do it. And in reading Richard Evans' book on this, fabulous book on this subject, it's fascinating to note that in this era, if you were going to have, for example, a less medieval, I'm sorry, the historians are cringing every time I use that word, but I mean it as an adjective, a less horrible, torturous, barbaric sort of system in a more enlightened age, reform was going to have to come from the absolute rulers because it doesn't sound like the people they ruled over had a lot of trouble with it at all. They were enjoying it. They were snapping up the broadsheets. They were still going in large numbers and more and more people were viewing it as an event. So if you'd actually told your people, listen, we're going to get rid of this breaking on the wheel thing, they might have been upset about it. If you actually said something like, we're going to strangle them first so they don't feel any pain, but don't worry, we're still going to go through with the execution, they wouldn't like that either. So here's how you explain the idea behind secret strangling. Why did Frederick the Great tell his authorities to kill the execution victim before they went through the horrible execution but make sure that the crowd didn't see it? Because the crowd wanted to see it. Why did Frederick the Great care at all? Hmm. This is a little bit more interesting. As I said, this is maybe a person who's a legitimate convert thinking, you know, why must this person suffer any more than is necessary? And this gets to the whole idea behind the Enlightenment, right? You get this change in viewing things in such religious terms and you start to see, and it's very modern, isn't it? A focus more on life here and now and not as much of an emphasis on the hereafter. For example, we said earlier that in the earlier eras, the punishment in these executions was often viewed as the pain and suffering you went through. The death was the byproduct. People like Frederick the Great are from a much more modern era where they look at the punishment in the execution as being the deprivation of any more life. You don't get to live anymore. Your life ends now. That's your punishment. If that's the case, why not just cut your head off? Why do we have to go through all the rigmarole? Oh yeah, because we need to send a message to the crowd. So strangle that guy, but don't tell anybody. Fascinating. But why listen to me when we can have an expert like Richard Evans explain it to us? He quotes the law code that Frederick is working on, which enunciates this new rationalist way of viewing things like the penal system and says that these executions and the point of them is, quote, Not to torment the criminal, but rather to make a frightful example of him in order to arouse repugnance in others, end quote. And then Evans says about that, quote, Nothing could express more clearly the monarch's understanding of the purpose of punishment. It did not matter in the least that the malefactor was actually dead when the sentence was carried out or that a deliberate deception was being played on the public. For the rationalistic Frederick II, the execution was a kind of pedagogical theater, drawing its purposes and its methods from the model of baroque tragedy. Its purpose was not to inflict suffering, but to deter by making an example of the offender. And it had to awaken feelings of revulsion in the onlooker. Anything that seemed likely to frustrate this purpose was to be avoided. This included the infliction of pain to such a degree that the sympathy of the crowd might be evoked. Apart from this obvious political purpose, it is also important to note that Frederick did, in the end, consider that excessive suffering was, if possible, to be avoided. The degree of pain was to be calculated precisely in rational terms, end quote. I love that this chapter in Evans' book is entitled A Rational Degree of Pain. In other words, these Enlightenment rulers had no problem at all with inflicting a ton of pain on people and suffering, but only if it could be justified as practically useful.
SPEAKER_00: Now, this may look horrible to us today, but it was a huge improvement over the previous conditions. Another huge improvement, another Enlightenment execution reform that doesn't seem like such a huge improvement to our modern ears was the increasing use of decapitation as an execution method. It used to be something in most of these countries that was reserved for the nobility back in the old days, because it's considered to be an easy death when you think about the alternatives. Well, over this era, in the more progressive European continental states, the practice of beheading the victim becomes more common, and you see more and more people that wouldn't have qualified for it half a century before being either with a sword or an axe cut in two at the neck. And before you think about this as just the most gruesome thing you can think of, let's point out that when you think about your options, what would you choose? As long as everything goes well, execution by the swords pretty quick, right? Take it over breaking on the wheel, take it over strangulation, death at the gallows, I mean, what would you rather have, right? Of course, the problem is that little phrase, executed well, this requires some skill on the part of the executioner, a skill which is only sometimes there. Those of you out there who've actually practiced with a sword know that actually cutting something efficiently is not as easy as it looks. There's some skill involved, and hopefully you want to be relatively sober when carrying out the act, and sometimes neither of those things can be present at an execution. And then you have something really nasty, you know, in front of you. But here's the thing, if you're the crowd, once again this is part of the attraction now. You don't know how this is going to go. Even this has its own draw, because there's a lot of gossip in how these things go. I mean, you can go look at the French history where they're talking about, in letters to each other, these decapitations, and the ones that don't go well are extra gossipy, more interesting, a little bit more juicy, pardon the adjective there. Another thing that has become somewhat of a draw to the crowd is the fact that the way the condemned person behaves right before they die, not as predictable as it used to be. Remember, there was a metaphysical carrot involved here that helped assure that the condemned criminal would play their part in this ritual, this scripted sort of affair, right? What if they weren't the penitent Christian, for example, undergoing the good death? What if they weren't penitent? What if they weren't even acting like they were a Christian? What if they were complaining about the authorities? What if they were abusing the religious figures that were there? What if they were clowning around for the crowd to get the crowd's approval? Or what if they were just going to their death like Clint Eastwood, absolutely fearless and cool, and the crowd looked at them and thought it was awesome? Badass. I mean, none of that is what the Enlightenment rulers who are orchestrating these new spectacles, that's not what they're trying to achieve. Now remember, these are people that are a lot more concerned than people from the earlier era about effectiveness. So when you take away this idea that the person is going to go right to heaven, and that this is all a religious ritual, and their soul is going to be saved, and everything is going to be wonderful afterwards if they cooperate, you take away a big reason for them to cooperate. Add to that the fact that most of these, again, are more progressive. I say that because there was always nasty activities continuing back in the backwoods. But in the places that are leading the edge of this enlightened madera, they're not torturing people much anymore either, which was the other thing you could do if the condemned criminal wasn't following the proper script. Follow the script or we'll take you back and rip an ear off, or take another pinch out of your skin with the glowing hot tongs. But if you're not doing glowing hot tongs anymore, and if the person doesn't think they're going straight to heaven as long as they cooperate, they don't cooperate as much. The other thing that happens is that people who are absolutely out of their minds terrified are more of a problem too. And that's not good if you're an enlightenment ruler trying to send a message to the crowd, because when they see terrified people who, as one author said, clearly understand the implications of both what they have done and what they're about to have done to them, the crowd tends to become more sympathetic than these enlightenment rulers want. You do not want the crowd sympathizing or going to the side of the condemned. That's a complete slap in the face in what the whole point of these executions were, right? But if you have a poor woman convicted of infanticide who no longer is sure that she's going to heaven and has no one telling her that that's everything that's going to happen, a person who may be just falling apart as they're executing her emotionally, I mean, the crowd can be vicious and want to see blood, but part of why they're going for this event is that it is an amazing human drama. It's not just watching people be killed, it's watching everything as we quoted from the Friedland piece, I mean, the most intimate moments of someone's life and death, and you having an emotional high and low roller coaster ride throughout this whole thing is again part of the attraction. I don't ever find that it is this deep and real. In his book on English executions, historian V.A.C. Guttrell quotes Edmund Burke, you know, one of the enlightenment writers from the period, famous guy, talking about the draw of these sorts of things, these executions, and you know, sort of where they speak to humanity in their soul. And as quoted by Guttrell, Burke writes, quote, choose a day on which to represent the most sublime and affecting tragedy we have. Appoint the most favorite actors. Spare no cost upon the scenes and decorations. Unite the greatest efforts of poetry, painting, and music. And when you have collected your audience, just at the moment when their minds are erect with expectation, let it be reported that a state criminal of high rank is on the point of being executed in the adjoining square. In a moment, the emptiness of the theater would demonstrate the comparative weakness of the imitative arts and proclaim the triumph of real sympathy. End quote. The comparative weakness of the imitative arts, the triumph of true sympathy, I mean, isn't this what we asked earlier if you made two films? And one showed the pretend pain and suffering that we normally do in our movies, and another showed the real thing with real bullets and real guns and real blood, which would the public choose to see? Might depend on the specific individual in question, right? Are you the kind of person that would go see movie A or movie B? Reminds me of Charles Dickens' explanation for why people go to these public executions and what they get out of it. And he said that it is in our secret nature to have a dark and dreadful interest in the subject. I think that sort of rings true, at least to my sensibilities. Makes you wonder what else is in our secret nature. And are we all, you know, wired the same way? Do we all have that secret nature or are some people different than others? Some people choose the real violence movie. Others would never think of going to that. They want to go see the imitative arts because, after all, it provides a buffer that allows you to enjoy violence where if you knew it was real, you couldn't possibly have it. And you could have fun knowing that that person was suffering. It's interesting to me that for other human beings, that's exactly what makes it more exciting and worth watching than the pretend stuff, right? People really are suffering. The triumph, as Burke said, of real sympathy. Now, both Charles Dickens and Edmund Burke are specifically referring to the English experience. Not really British yet, although oftentimes when you say English in this period, it includes Wales. This is one of the most intensely studied versions of the public execution experience, right? When we have these questions and you are reading in the English language, the majority of the sources you're going to have are from England. And it skews the whole thing because the English experience is somewhat different than the continent. For example, we mentioned earlier a penchant for hangings. Now, as we all know, hanging has been around since before recorded history. Maybe the cheapest, the dirtiest way to execute somebody you can think of, right? No muss, no fuss. As long as you don't care about the suffering of the victim, it's about as easy as you can get. It's also sort of banal from a spectacle standpoint. If you were actually crafting this for the spectacle itself, you'd say, hanging? Really? Come on! Where's the fun in that? The English, we should point out, have pretty much enjoyed most every type of execution at one time or another. They take a backseat to no one on the continent, and during various rains, they would boil you, they'd burn you. They love to burn heretics, but then who doesn't during these eras? But the English experience has really colored the whole question of public executions and the way the crowd behaves. It's colored all of us in English-speaking countries because the predominant amount of evidence comes from England. And it colors the experience in other ways because the English are ahead of their time, I guess you can say, in terms of the development of things that influences these public executions. So if you're one of those historians that wants to make state authority the number one reason for these executions being the way they are, well, the English are ahead of most of the rest of the world in state formation, modern post-Vesphalian state formation. So they're ahead of the game on that. So you see the trends showing up earlier there. If you want to talk about the religious ritual side of the executions and how when that was eliminated because the absolutist rulers didn't think it was helping them deter crime, again, the English were ahead of the game on that one too. If for no other reason than, unlike the absolutist regimes of the period on the continent, in England it's not an absolutist regime. You have a king, but you have parliament. I mean, it's all pretty famous, right? The English system different than the continent, but interestingly, a whole group of historians will say, well, that's why the English execution situation is so different. How is it different? Well, certainly it fits the stereotype that we often think of all these executions a lot more because the stereotype itself is of the English experience, the whole carnival atmosphere at the public executions. Very English. The bravado and the almost joking nature that some of the condemned will show with the crowd. You know, the famous line, they would make the executions go through a very long sort of procession on the way to the execution spot, and there were bars on the way, and one of the execution victims famously goes into the bar and gets the drink or has it brought out to him and says, I'll pay you on the way back. And the crowd loves that, right? A little bravado on the way to your death. The English example is also unusual because they go through one of these periods where they sort of try to deter crime the way we talked about at the very beginning of this story, that in certain eras, the legal system will get it through their head that the best way to deter crime is to have maximum penalties for even minuscule crimes, right? There's a whole Chinese dynasty, for example, there's other eras where you steal something, you're gone. Any little crime, you're gone. In England, it's known now as the Bloody Code, which was a series of legal measures, very class-oriented, by the way, very skewed against the lower classes, that started making almost anything you can think of, at least on the law books, punishable by death. You pickpocket somebody for more than 12 pence, 12 pence, nothing, right? 12 pence of value, boom, eligible for the death penalty. You wore a disguise in the forest, boom, eligible for the death penalty. I mean, it got to be like crazy. I mean, if you go and look at the law codes in England in the 1650s, there's probably half a hundred offenses that can get you the death penalty, right? And this is an era not that far from the Middle Ages, and you know, 50 things or whatnot will get you the death penalty.
SPEAKER_00: A mere century later, it's like 200 offenses will get you the death penalty. And as I said, many of them very small. It's a very famous period in English history. Now, we should point out that there's lots of pardons and acts of mercy and all these things that the ruler and the church and whatnot can provide, so that a lot of these people sentenced to death don't actually go to the gallows. Out of 35,000 death sentences, V.A.C. Cottrell says, only 7,000 executions happened. But the executions were often of people very much like the poor people who came to watch the executions. And the crimes they were being killed for were things that many in the crowd didn't consider all that bad. You take a woman who starved her child to death and bring her up on the gallows in England, as did happen, and the women in the crowd will yell and scream horrible things at the wretch. But you bring a little petty pickpocket or somebody who was maybe poaching the king's deer in the forest or something like that up there, and then they make a jaunty, brave speech and maybe talk to a pretty girl in the audience right before they're executed, and the crowd could find themselves very much on the side of the condemned. And while it's hard to imagine some of the more absolutist regimes in Europe putting up with, say, anti-government screeds on the gallows from their condemned criminals, in England, Cottrell says they have a long-standing custom of allowing the condemned to say some stuff before they die, even if it gets seditious. And as I said earlier, the English usually like to hang their condemned criminals, and while this might seem like a more merciful sentence than some of the things we've been talking about going on in Germany and the Netherlands and France and places like that, Cottrell reminds us that it's not as sweet and nice as you may think. I mean, if you're thinking of judicial hangings today, those should be called neck-breaking, would be a more accurate term, because they're scientifically designed, in most cases, to break the neck of the execution victim, which is theoretically quick and theoretically painless. Before the modern era, though, if somebody's neck broke, that was a side byproduct. That wasn't the goal. They were often using ropes that were 12 inches long and turning people off of ladders. That's not neck-breaking. That's good old-fashioned strangulation. And Cottrell reminds us that they are much nastier than the thin veneer of respectability that is often used with euphemisms and other ways to disguise the horribleness of it. He says when you get right back down to basics, you are talking about, he says, the choking and the pissing and the screaming, and that is often hidden in the sources. But the people who went and watched it live knew damn well what they were seeing and getting. As he also points out, and this blew my mind when I read it, I'm going to quote it verbatim, he said, Late 18th and early 19th century English people were very familiar with the grimy business of hanging. This is so large a social fact separating that era from our own that, although it is not the most obvious way of defining modern times, it must be one of them. In other words, defining modern times, if you want to look at it that way, it's the age where we are not familiar with public executions. Where the idea that you might see a human body hanging somewhere near you and not think of that as something out of the ordinary is what separates modern times from, shall we say, early modern times. I will say that the English rationale, the way that the English defend their massive amount of executions compared to places like Prussia and the Netherlands that are starting to really, really, really decline their executions, is the English do it in sort of, we Americans would say, with a liberty argument. They claim that the only way to deter crime in their system is by making sure that if they catch you, you will receive maximum punishment because the chances of catching you are tiny. Because the English do not want to live in a police state. Historian Paul Friedland said, a Frenchified police state like those absolutist regimes, and the price you pay for not having that surveillance to deter crime in advance is allowing that there's going to be that crime, but if the authorities catch you, you will receive an enormous punishment. And it's supposed to have, just like the executions on the European continent, a deterrent effect, as a famous axiom from the time said in Britain that men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen. Right? Gautrel quotes a minister of parliament writing in the middle 1800s who said that the question was not, quote, one of softening the heart or saving the souls of murderers, but of preventing the queen's subjects from being murdered. End quote. And he also points out that hanging isn't something that was chosen because it's particularly easy necessarily, even though it is, but because it was particularly appalling in terms of sending a message. He says no one who lived in that era was under the illusion that hanging was anything other than a horrible way to die. It's also a very dishonorable way to die. And this is not the sort of things that we today would pay much attention to when we look back. We're focused on the pain and the suffering of the actual execution, aren't we? But if you could bring back someone from that era and watch one of these executions on television together, they would notice things that maybe we wouldn't. And they would be able to determine whether or not the court that sentenced this malefactor had considered that they should be extra harsh or extra lenient. I mean, for example, were they dragged to the scaffold or the gallows or the raven stone in a freshly skinned ox hide? If they were, it's more dishonorable. Right? There's a whole bunch of things that we would call symbolic today that don't matter much to us that would have been to some of these people more important than the fact that they were dying. I was fascinated to read some of these things where, you know, they're really trying to alter their sentence, these people who are being sentenced or who have committed these crimes one way or the other. But they're not trying to get out of dying. Either they're trying to die in a more honorable way or they're trying to reduce the number of dishonorable things that have to happen to them on the way to their death. Once again, hard for us to understand today because their status in their society means nothing to us, of course. But shame and dishonor plays its role in the state's effort to use these affairs to deter other people from committing these crimes. Right? In that sense, the people in England, who would better be called British somewhere in the middle of this story, are not in any way different than their neighbors on the continent during this time period. And in fact, not very different from people conducting executions all throughout history. I mean, isn't that the overwhelming reason you do them? Not the only, but I mean, deterrence, right? Stop people from committing those kind of crimes. But of course, as we said, everyone in Europe during this time period in the West entering this era where the ritual side of things, the religious side of things sort of fading more into the background, leaving people that are more concerned with effectiveness. And if deterrence is what you're after, you know, more and more of the public intellectuals in these countries start asking legitimate questions about, well, is that what we're getting? Are we getting deterrent effects for these horrible, spectacular executions? And there was lively debate. You would think that exhibit A, for anyone making the argument that these executions weren't deterring people, would be the fact that the audience is enjoying themselves, right? They're not terrified and awed by the majesty of the law and justice. They're more likely to be worried that they didn't pack enough snacks in case the pregame festivities for this little event run long. So you have this disconnect between what you're after and what you're getting, and then you have this third big elephant in the living room. And we've already sort of alluded to this earlier. It's sometimes just called the change in sensibilities. And as with everything in this, it happens at different times in different places, and there's a trickle-down effect where it will start sometimes, as we said with Frederick the Great, just the ruler will get this change in sensibilities. Other times it will become some of the literate class, and there will be a trickle-down over time. Some of these changes in sensibilities will never reach the lowest class of people. Now, trying to explain this so-called change in sensibilities is as difficult as trying to explain something like, why did the 1960s happen? Right? I mean, it's going to be a zeitgeist, as sometimes reality can be referred to, and playing into the zeitgeist are going to be all different kinds of trends and forces and whatnot. I mean, to just give you one little teeny strand as an example of how many things are playing into it, the growth of the popularity of novels in this period, from about 1500 to 1800, people reading more of these things with characters and storylines designed to get them to feel and be sensitive and care and have empathy for the people in the story, right? I read one historian who suggested that there's a cause and effect pinged back and forth between the culture and these novels, but that essentially they were training people to have empathy. Now again, who's reading novels in these societies? Right? The literate people to begin with. So it's not a broad-based change in sensibilities, but it's a change in sensibilities amongst, shall we call, the class of people that most folk want to emulate. And so in many of these countries, you now have middle-class people and certain amounts of mobility that didn't exist in the classes before. And one of the ways you associated yourself with the better classes is to emulate their attitudes. And if they were starting to think that public executions were gauche and that there was something inhumane about them and barbaric, well, then those were the kinds of attitudes that began to infuse your class over time. Right? As I said, a trickle-down effect. Now here's the thing. Why would these executions be considered anything other than great entertainment? Wasn't it these hobbyists from the upper classes that were first going and enjoying them as spectacles to begin with? Hmm. Well, here's the way historian Paul Friedland explains it. You're broad-brushing when you talk about the intellectuals of the Enlightenment because there were different opinions from the intellectuals of the Enlightenment. But one of them was that man, for lack of a better word, is basically good. And that we're basically sympathetic and basically empathetic. And if you're in a situation where a lot of people aren't that way, then they've got screws loose, right? They're the outliers. That's not normal human behavior. That's abnormal human behavior. The problem is that when these people are writing this, that's the way their societies are behaving. Paul Friedland writes, quote, The growing public fascination with, and curiosity about executions were on a collision course with contemporary penal theory, which regarded exemplary deterrence as the very reason for punishment. I changed the French word there, folks. He continues, quote, While the new penal voyeurism was still restricted to the relatively privileged members of society, few seemed to take notice of the discrepancy between the intent of the punishment and the way in which it was being perceived by these spectators. But as this new way of watching made its way down the social ladder, alarm bells were sounded. End quote. He then points out that the praying and weeping crowds from the religious ritual era had probably never really been terrified by executions the way the state wanted. This was kind of getting out of control. He then points out that there's a third element involved, this elephant in the living room, this revolution in sensibilities. He says, quote, At the same time, another cultural crisis was looming on the horizon. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a revolution in sensibilities would sweep over both sides of the channel. And human beings would be reimagined as naturally benevolent and compassionate. The eager anticipation of amateurs, who watched executions as if they were a dramatic performance, or perhaps even worse, the callous indifference of those in the windows, who watched and felt nothing, would be difficult to square with the new view of human nature as instinctively compassionate. End quote. He then goes on to say that you have this growing conflict between spectators desperate to watch people die on the scaffold, a penal theory that is built around the idea that people won't be able to watch that kind of thing without being terrified, and he says a culture of sensibility that insists that people can't watch this stuff without being horrified, because if they aren't horrified, they're kind of inhuman. So the reactions of the crowds in a lot of these cases were vexing both the authorities and a lot of the intellectual class. They were not reacting the way that they were supposed to. Not as the target audience for these spectacles of justice. Not as human beings watching cruelty to other human beings. I read in one of the things I was researching for this program an account where they were talking about watching somebody burning alive in front of you today, and they said it's impossible for most people to watch something like that up close without feeling almost physical pain themselves. And that it's not a mental response. It's not like you actually process it all. It's instantaneous, right? You almost feel the physical pain for the person who's suffering in front of you. Just like Gautrelle was saying about people not vomiting at the horrible executions of people like Demian, right? They're not vomiting, and we would today in large numbers. Why? It's not a processed thing. It's something that's so ingrained in us that it just has become physical. Somehow the cultural elements like Gautrelle said that you cry based on what your culture tells you you should be crying at. I mean, the fact that you couldn't watch somebody burning alive today without feeling physical pain, and somebody before this revolution in sensibilities happened could, is an interesting difference in us, isn't it? And I still can't make myself believe that we're not empathetic creatures. We may just be discriminatory empathetic creatures. I mean, if you're watching someone broken on the wheel, you may or may not care about them. If it's your child, I think you're going to feel every blow as if it's happening to you personally. Maybe you'd feel that way if it was your first cousin. Maybe you'd feel that way if it was your second cousin twice removed, your neighbor from down the street. But maybe at some point, you no longer feel quite the same. You're not quite feeling the blows like it's your own child. As we said about the Roman arena, how did these Romans watch these people, you know, massacred in front of them in horribly painful ways and enjoy it? They didn't see them as human, maybe. It's a slave. It's a Christian. It's a this. It's a that. Not human. Not the same. Not my kid. Now, I'd said earlier that I want to view this from a couple of different angles. And simply taking that approach seems to me a perfect example of something we do in the post-revolution in sensibilities age that maybe would not have been such an obvious way to do it before. It's an effort to try to walk a mile in the moccasins of the people in this story, right? An effort to gain a little empathy for what they were going through. A little sympathy. And it's kind of strange because, of course, you know, there are so many different things. How would you be able to gain any real empathy? And some of these questions have no answers, but there's something human in this that wants to ask them anyway. I mean, take, for example, trying to have a little empathy with someone who's going to get their head cut off. I ask you, how would anybody know what that felt like? Doesn't keep us from wondering, though, does it? And I imagine you'd wonder a hell of a lot more and a lot more intensely if this beheading that we're theorizing about was about to happen to you. If it's me, I have to break this entire experience down into two halves, right? The obvious half, what's it like walking up to that scaffold and dealing with the execution? But then there's a whole other half, which is easy to forget about when we're just discussing this sort of from a high-minded plane, now, but what's it like to live with this hanging over your head for days or weeks? I read an account by a boxing trainer, a famous guy who said the minute the fight was signed, his boxer instantly started living with the fear, no matter how tough and strong and badass they were, of their opponent, and they lived with it every night. They would wake up in the cold sweats and they would dream about this stuff all the time. What's it like living instead of knowing you're going to face Joe Louis on the 25th of August? You're going to get your head cut off on the 25th of August. We've got to believe that there were people, I've actually seen some writings from the condemned who were basically just over it by this point, figuring this is prolonging the agony, let's just get the whole thing over with, but prolonging the agony is part of the whole deal. When we make a transition, by the way, from the religious figures sincerely trying to save the soul of the condemned to an era where the authorities are looking at the religious figures in a much less devout way and seeing them as just another way to break down the condemned, right? I mean, this whole situation breaks people down psychologically though, doesn't it? What's worse, you know, the horrific agonies you put yourself through mentally before the event or the event itself, maybe depends on what's going to happen to you, right? In your head, if you're thinking you got off easy, that breaking on the wheel charge that you could have been convicted of has been commuted to a nice honorable quick decapitation, I'm sure in your head you're thinking of the stories where you've heard those things go wrong, right? Take the one that Joel Harrington in his book, The Faithful Executioner, recounts of a woman in Nuremberg convicted of infanticide. This is, as you will know already, probably by listening to me, pretty common charge in this era. I'm sure today we would chalk a bunch of that up to postpartum depression. Nonetheless, a lot of women going to their deaths in this era for killing their newborns. A woman named Margarethe Vogtlin in 1641, an extremely beautiful person of 19 years, she's described in the sources, was to be decapitated. She was sat in a chair. She was made ready by the executioner's assistants. You know, they'll make sure that the neck is exposed in the right area. And in this particular kind of execution by the sword, you swing it like a baseball bat more than you swing it like a chopping instrument. So you want a nice level swing. And you didn't always get one. According to one chronicle reprinted by Harrington, quote, No such luck though, Harrington says. And from underneath the chair, he says, the victim now wounded, cried out, this 19-year-old girl, quote, There's another account in another book of a hangman in, a Breton hangman in northern France who required more than 20 blows of the sword to cut off the head of his victim. Now I'm a poor swordsman. That might even be a generous description. But I can't imagine taking 20 strokes of the sword to cut anything that thin a human neck. It should be pointed out that legally most of the time these executioners were allowed three strikes. It's a little like baseball, right? Three strikes and you're out.
SPEAKER_00: And out meant the crowd could pick up stones and throw them at you. Not legally, of course. The king never said, Well, you can kill my executioner if he doesn't do it in three strokes. But, you know, there's unwritten rules to baseball and decapitations in this era, too. And even if you sat there and wondered about how quickly a decapitation went, if it went well, maybe you would worry that it might not. Nonetheless, if it did go well, wouldn't you choose this method if it were up to you? Although there are different ones, right? I mean, as we said earlier, I think, you know, if you're going to go through an execution during this era, you know, what is your choice of method of dying? Because there's no lethal injections. I don't read a whole lot of accounts of hemlock drinking since Socrates back in ancient Athens. And believe it or not, we modern people would obviously think of shooting as a potential method to get out of this relatively painlessly. And yet that seems to be something that was confined to how a soldier would be treated rather than someone in civilian life. You don't hear a lot of shootings as a civilian form of execution. When this era starts, though, it's kind of freaky because it starts off with sort of the biblical approach to execution methods, right? You know, the eye for an eye, mosaic law kind of thing. And so, for example, if a murderer in the latter part of the Middle Ages, maybe into the Renaissance, if a murderer killed somebody with a hammer, he might be executed, you know, on a scaffold by an executioner holding a hammer. I've read all different kinds of accounts about what the ritual was, and there's religious elements to it, but it even goes back to pre-Christian superstition, canceling out the evil of the deed. You hit your murder victim with a hammer, so we hit you with one. And even when the era of actually dispatching people that way, you know, started to go away, in some places, usually once again outside the big cities when you get to the superstitious countryside, they would still include the eye for an eye thing, even if it was only symbolic. So we might strangle the person who was the hammer murderer, but then after they were dead, hit him with a hammer a few times as a, you know, symbolic act. So the ways in which people were killed in this early period, though, often mirrored what they did. If you were an arsonist, they burn you. They drowned a lot of people for a lot of crimes. You know, drowning, believe it or not, an actual form of execution, widely practiced during this era. Hang you, decapitate you, break you on the wheel, any number of things, right? Now the other thing that could happen to you, of course, is that they could do damage to you on the way to being executed. So if just dying isn't enough for you in this early period, you might be tortured on the way to death. And one of the ways that was pretty popular involved those famous red hot tongs. We alluded to them earlier. Think about giant pincers that are glowing orange, and then what they do is they take what were called usually nips out of you. They would take the glowing pincers, take it to a piece of skin, maybe your breast, maybe your arm, and take and burn and rip a chunk out. More than three nips, I read, is considered to be fatal. Hence, no one wanted to give anybody more than three nips. The goal was to have someone suffering, not to have them die before they died where they were supposed to in the way they were supposed to. But there's broadsheets and carvings and artwork showing the executioner riding in the cart with the victim, giving him the prescribed court mandated number of nips on the way to the scaffold. In his book, Seeing Justice Done, historian Paul Friedland quotes a primary source, someone who witnessed one of these executions, this one in December of 1558, involving the pre-execution nastiness that also might psychologically torture you as you thought about it for days or maybe weeks ahead of time. He writes, quote, the guilty party, after having made a full confession, was condemned to be executed. After the reading of the judgment, the executioner had him get into a cart and he was placed on the knees of the executioner's wife. The executioner then began to torture him with red hot pincers until they reached the house of the cannon whom he had murdered. There, the executioner cut off both his hands upon a chopping block that had been placed for this purpose on the cart. The executioner's wife blindfolded him and as her husband cut off a hand, she would place the stump from which a spurt of blood was escaping into a kind of cone, which she solidly tied up to stop the hemorrhaging. He was then led to the court of bail where he was decapitated and cut up into four pieces, which were then hung from olive trees outside the city walls, end quote. Now, again, one of the ritualized aspects of this that was also popular in the earlier period was to go to the scene of the crime to carry out the act of justice. Right? So we cut this guy's hands off outside the home of the person those hands killed. This is another aspect that may have kept the size of the crowds down at earlier executions because there was no set spot for them, right? If you had to have them at important ritualized places connected to the crime itself, they were in different spots all the time. Once you have a ravenstone or a gallows that's in the same place all the time, probably in a pretty high traffic spot, well then everybody knows where the execution is going to be and you saw corresponding growth in crowd size. In fact, historian Richard Evans says crowd sizes showing up to these public executions in Germany will continue to rise and will be at their very highest when the practice is done away with. So it never really lost its draw. And its draw, once you start getting the numbers, a real reason you don't have a lot of the information before this period is it wasn't recorded. Once you start getting the numbers, it's already a lot of people showing up to these things. Historian Garrett Fagan says that when the sources begin to pay attention, he says to the spectators in the 18th century, the crowds emerge as substantial to enormous. Evans in Rituals of Retribution writes specifically about the German experience, quote, Although contemporary estimates must be taken with a pinch of salt, it is clear that the crowds at these events were frequently very large. It was said that 20,000 people attended an execution in the Thuringian town of Klingen in 1788, for example. And the same number, the last public burning, held in Eisenach in 1804. While in 1771, the night before the execution of Matthias Klostermaier, the town of Munich was, now he's quoting a primary source from that era, quote, Already so filled with outsiders that they could barely be accommodated anymore in private houses. Thus the next day's dawn had scarcely broken when a wave of people came flooding through all the streets and alleyways. And while one part of the crowd pressed on to the town hall, the other hastened over the Danube bridge to the place of execution, where the masses multiplied more and more. Evans continues, quote, On the 19th of February 1807, now quoting from a contemporary report, thousands of spectators surrounded the high market in Vienna, where the condemned man got on to the wagon with the two preachers. Thousands of people filled the streets, and many thousands of spectators stood around in a circle at the place of execution. He then quotes a person who remembered that the entire population turned out in the town he was from during an execution and that the streets and houses away from the execution square were completely devoid of life. Victor Gautrelle says that in England and London, you could sometimes have crowds of 100,000 people or more. Let's remember, all these numbers come from times and places where the populations were a lot smaller than they are now. Some of these towns that had 20,000 people show up for executions may not have had 20,000 people living in the nearby vicinity. And this was an era when it was a lot harder to get from place to place. So 20,000 people showing up at a village execution is a lot of people. 100,000 people showing up to an execution in London is a large execution even though that's a big city. After all, 100,000 people is a large spectator crowd at a major sporting event now, with population, transportation, and everything up to modern standards. So good luck finding anything that drew as many people in this time period as these executions did, as large as some of the battles of the period. Now the reason this plays into walking a mile in the moccasins of the condemned here is because they literally sometimes had to do that on the way to the execution site. Now conditions were different everywhere, but a lot of the more famous sites, there were long processions that took you to the place where you were going to die. And there were a lot of people who viewed you and screamed at you, or supported you as the case may be, along the way. In fact, it's probably not too much of a conjecture to wonder if the condemned person had ever seen a crowd as large as the one that shows up to watch them die. Now as we said earlier, the place where you're dying may determine how the crowd reacts, the time period may also, and of course the nature of your crime. Sometimes they were all over you in a terrible way, making your experience that much worse. Sometimes they were sort of in your camp, praying for you, hoping for you, or maybe just a little bit sympathetic in the later period to your roguish courage that you're showing on the scaffold, or whatever it might be. It's interesting to note that when they will finally do away with the public execution here, some of the people who were critical of that said that you're depriving the condemned of the only support they have in this moment where they're going to die. The crowd's on their side, but sometimes it's not. There's a lot of stories about it. Especially, the crowd in England could be particularly nasty if they didn't like you, and things thrown, and epithets hurled, and all kinds of things. Think about how much that plays into the experience, though, of the terribleness of it. If you're the condemned, having to see all these people, and just your senses absolutely must have been overwhelmed by the amount of sensory input coming your way. There's several accounts where the religious figures who were writing these accounts say that the condemned, all along the procession, kept their eyes focused a couple of inches from their face at a crucifix that was being held out. You just kind of try to tunnel vision this thing and not think about it. Another thing about the not thinking about it, if you're trying to walk a mile in the other man's moccasins, or woman's moccasins as the case may be, is is that person sober? And if it was your situation you were dealing with here, would you be? Earlier we quoted that British observer who watched a breaking on the wheel in Germany, or breaking with the wheel, and he was critical of the idea that these people would go to the gallows, or the raven stone as we said, so intoxicated that they really didn't know what was going on, that it kept them from making their most important last piece with God and the world and the whole thing. You want to kind of have your wits about you when you do that because it's really important. He mentioned that the crowd sort of took that job for him so that maybe the condemned could be out of it. In many of these different areas that are chronicled, there are, shall we call them, alcohol injection opportunities along the way, and some of it's built into the ritual. Some of these places, these bars along the famous execution route are known for. You stop here, you bring the condemned in here, and he gets a glass of wine from us. It's our contribution to the public good, or whatever it might be. Gautrel points out over and over how many of these people going to the gallows were dead drunk practically. Now here's the thing again, who wants to broad brush? Because let's say you're going to be beheaded on the continent, one of those lucky people who gets a decapitation is your sentence, you don't want to be drunk I would think. I mean you might want to be so you don't know what's going on, but if you don't know what's going on you might move. The number one reason that people didn't have successful decapitations is because they moved. So you don't want to be swaying around drunkenly and having, who knows, maybe a slightly drunken executioner trying to figure out how to time the wobble. Now in terms of what the experience might be when the condemned finally reaches the scaffold and looks out and sees that crowd, well if you had a fear of public speaking imagine what that's like. Although some of these people in the places that let them speak would speak, there'd usually be some religious stuff that would go on in the scaffold, and during the ritual religious period quite a bit sometimes, and then the execution would commence. Do you feel anything in a decapitation that goes off well? Do you have any consciousness at all that it's happening? A lot of people have theorized about this. There's a famous, and I'm sure totally discredited, so don't even bother contacting me about it. I'll say it's probably discredited at the outset of people, some doctors during the time period, working in the era when the guillotine was in heavy use, you know that blade that drops down and just mechanically separates people's head from their body. They'd had some, I guess if I'm going from memory here, had some discussions with the condemned basically saying, listen we're going to do some experiments after you're dead. So if you feel anything, blink, things like that, or slapping the face of the recently decapitated head and trying to get the eyes to focus on them. Let's just say it's been interesting to wonder, even with the spinal cord severed, how long any amount of consciousness might exist. I mean two seconds, three seconds, no seconds. That brings me to one of the interesting lines about hanging that I looked up when I was trying to figure out, okay if that's what decapitation is like, what is hanging like? And hanging is weird, and I want to be careful here because while I was researching it I was shocked to find a lot of comments from people who had relatives who had hanged themselves and were not so happy that the various sites I was looking at were giving detailed information about it. They thought maybe it enabled these horrible family tragedies in there. So a thousand apologies in advance, that's not what I'm trying to do here. But when you try to get into the minds of people who aren't just going to go through this, but who are going to ruminate on what it's like to go through this for a long time before they actually do, you know what's that like? And I have to say that there is, I've searched and searched, I find no common agreement on what it's like in terms of painful versus not painful. Whole lot of different accounts, some of which say it's very painful, other accounts saying that they were out the minute it happened. Let's remember something though, in this period as we said earlier, this is not the modern kind of hanging where the goal is to try to break the neck of the condemned person through a particularly long drop and a jerk in a specific direction that's supposed to separate the spinal cord, right? Considered to be, again, a quick death, no one's quite sure how long. In this era, as I said earlier, you would often see people hung on very short ropes that were like 12 inches long. I mean if you go look at the artwork from the period, it almost looks like they did it wrong. Like to a modern eye you're going, well that rope's not long enough, they must have had to shorten it to get it into the whole frame, artistically speaking. No, that's how they did it. It looked like somebody basically was hanging by a really, really six inch short rope. But that means you're strangling, by design. And often times they would simply take you up on a ladder, turn the ladder sideways, as I said, and turn you off as it was called. In England, before they got all fancy with the trap door stuff, they used to just take several people sometimes on the back of a cart, hook them up to a gallows, which was often just a piece of wood laid between two trees, and just drive off and leave those people as it was said dancing in the air. Those things, by the way, could go bad too, because people would, you know there are lots of stories actually about family members and friends and definitely executioners sometimes having to run up and hold on and pull on the legs of their loved one to try to speed this process up. I read several accounts from people that all said that you get this really loud roaring in your ears, you know, probably from the blood being constrained. And the ones who survived said that when the rope was removed, you know how it feels when your foot falls asleep and it's really painful when it starts pins and needles? Well, they had that in their head and they said it was so bad, you know, you halfway want to go back and be executed rather than have to deal with it. I'm tempted to say after the research I've done that the experience is heavily based on any number of variables. It could range across a wide spectrum of, you know, you were out one minute after they put the rope around your neck to 15 minutes later, you're still choking, strangling, and convulsing. And the crowd's watching that and taking note, by the way. This is all something where you are the entertainment and one wonders, you know, if you know for any period of time what's going on, you know, in your performance as it's perceived by the audience. For example, and it's like a contemporary account from the 1700s by a doctor who's living in an era where they are executing people by hanging a lot, so he has a lot of time to do research on this. And he says that there's a certain period of time where those being hanged know they're hanging. Gautreaux quotes a Dr. Alexander Monroe professor of anatomy at Edinburgh in 1774 telling a guy named James Boswell that, quote, the man who is hanged suffers a great deal, that he is not at once stupefied by the shock. A man is suffocated by hanging in a rope, just as by having his respiration stopped by having a pillow pressed on the face. For some time after a man is thrown over, he is sensible and is conscious that he is hanging, end quote. There are lots of accounts of the rope breaking, the malefactor falling to the ground and somewhat recovering, and sometimes the crowd gets on their side that this is like a sign from God and they should be reprieved, or later on in the not so religious period that it's not fair to try to kill somebody twice. Nonetheless, they're often hanged again. But they give us some stories sometimes about what it was like, you know, and what they perceived. And again, stories are variable, so it's likely that it's, you know, dependent, heavily dependent on conditions and variables like where the rope ends up, for example, around your neck. Is it around your windpipe or your carotid arteries, things like that. In fact, a lot of these variables were understood at the time, and people would talk about where to place the news and how to position the condemned. But as V.A.C. Cottrell points out, it made little difference. And he'll mention the names of a bunch of different people that went to their death on the gallows here. He'll also quote a lot of primary sources, so if you hear me say quote within the quote, it's a primary source. He writes about these precautions to position the rope well, to limit the suffering, quote, These precautions did little good, however. There was a common pattern in what ensued. As an early 19th century broadside representative declared the noose of one man's halter, quote, Having slipped to the back part of his neck, it was a full 10 minutes before he was dead, end quote. So too at the very last Tyburn hanging in 1783, quote, The noose of the halter, having slipped to the back part of his neck, it was longer than usual before he was dead, end quote. Hatfield's noose slipped twice, Cottrell says, and when he did drop, it was only 18 inches, so his death was prolonged and noisy. Ings struggled on the end of his rope for five minutes before he was still. Hartley, quote, was much convulsed and struggled for 10 minutes after the drop fell, end quote. The knot having slipped behind his neck, Governor Wall in 1802, took 15 minutes to die in agony, so the hangman pulled on his legs. In 1804, Ann Hurrell was driven to a scaffold erected in the widest part of the Old Bailey, the regular drop being out of commission for a while. When the cart drew away, meaning when the cart she was standing on drew away and left her hanging by her neck with nothing underneath her, when the cart drew away, quote, she gave a faint scream, and for two or three minutes after she was suspended, appeared to be in great agony, moving her hands up and down frequently, end quote. Cottrell continues, quote, hanged in Glasgow in 1820 for treason. James Wilson, quote, died with difficulty, and after he had hung about 20 minutes, blood was seen on his cap opposite the ears. In 1829, Thomas Birmingham's rope slipped, end quote, prolonged his sufferings to a considerable extent. He breathed in agony for nearly five minutes. Shouts and screams from the mob caused the executioner to hang on his legs until life was extinct, end quote. And it could get wild, and once again, if you're in the crowd, perhaps that's what keeps bringing you back. You never know what's going to happen. Cottrell continues, quote, at a 1797 hanging, the scaffold platform gave way, precipitating clergymen and executioner to the ground. There was no time to hood the two prisoners, so they, quote, swung off with their distorted features exposed to the view of the distressed spectators, end quote. An arsonist, Charles White, struggled incessantly to escape his bonds. He kicked at the executioner and the ordinary, meaning the religious figure, dislodging the cap hiding his face. The crowd yelled in excitement. Partly suspended, he struggled still, reaching the platform with his feet, freed his hands and held onto the rope. The executioner had to force him from the platform and pull at his legs. As he choked, the crowd saw his distended tongue and uncovered and distorted features, and they shrieked, end quote. So even though there are accounts of hangings that make it sound like the condemned seem to die almost instantly, and those definitely are throughout the historical record, obviously they have these other kinds of incidents as well. Then there's stuff like burning, which once again conjures up the worst of the worst terrorist groups today. And the deliberately medieval again is an adjective, but also denoting a time period from a long time ago where you used to do this kind of mosaic law stuff. It conjures up the worst of those kinds of groups, right? When you talk about burning people to death, but they were still doing this up until the early 1800s. Again, after George Washington has died of old age. Women got it a lot more than men, and it was often viewed as an alternative. So, whereas we started to get much more enlightened about breaking women on the wheel, you wouldn't want to do that to a woman. You spare them the breaking on the wheel. You burn them. Things like that. We mentioned earlier the people who were burned on witchcraft charges. In the United States they were usually hanged, but in Europe, lots of burning. Some estimates as high as 100,000 people burned for witchcraft crimes in Germany alone during this broad period. And it wasn't just women, although it usually was. And we can be all high and mighty about not understanding our forebears for why they did that, but that's because we had the unique advantage of, well, most of us. Not believing in sorcery and witchcraft and not thinking it's a problem in our community and not believing that they live amongst us and not believing that the only thing that really fixes the problem is burning them to death. Check our bias right at the door on that one.
SPEAKER_00: If we were talking about something like terrorism that we did believe in and there was a 100% agreement that the only way you stopped that was through burning terrorists or maybe even suspected terrorists to death, I imagine we'd have a few proponents of that even now. Nonetheless, what was it like to go through that burning experience? Well, that depends also. And there's a lot of famous ones. You know, Joan of Arc comes to mind, right? I read some accounts that talked about the likelihood that the smoke itself would render a person unconscious. During the later period when they're still doing this into the 1700s in Britain, for example, they're doing the same version of secret strangling that they're doing in places like Prussia, but they're doing it openly. Like in one of the particularly horrific, more recent burnings, they were executing a woman for killing her husband. They called that petty treason, by the way, back then. So major treason was like crimes against the state. Petty treason was a wife killing her husband. Nonetheless, they had the strangulation thing rigged up, if the woodcuttings I've seen are correct, sort of on a chain and it was around her neck on the stake. And then somebody would hold this chain 12, 15 feet away, away from the faggots of wood that were burning, and strangle them just before the flames reached them. But this time we were told that the chain got too hot and the guy whose job it was to strangle the woman so she didn't have to suffer burning in this late enlightenment period, you know, where of course you wouldn't have a burning where you didn't strangle somebody. We're not human. I had to let go of the chain and everything got very old fashioned very quickly. The woman's name, by the way, was Catherine Hayes, who was burned alive in London in 1726. This account comes from Public Executions, the Nigel Cawthorn book, and he takes an account, sounds like a near primary source, but maybe not, from the Newgate calendar, sounds like a newspaper, and it says, quote, Hayes received the sacrament and was dragged on a sledge to the place appointed for her execution. When the wretched woman had finished her devotions, in pursuance of her sentence, an iron chain was put around her waist, with which she was attached to the stake. When women were burned for petty treason, it was usual to strangle them by means of a rope, passed around the neck and pulled by the executioner, so that they were willfully insensible to the heat of the flames. But this woman literally burnt alive. The executioner let go of the rope too soon in consequence of having his hand burnt by the flames. The flames burned fiercely around her, and the spectators beheld Catherine Hayes pushing away the faggots while she rent the air with cries and lamentations. Other faggots were instantly piled on her, but she survived amidst the flames for a considerable time, and her body was not perfectly reduced to ashes until three hours later. End quote. So you have this image of a person struggling to kick away the burning, you know, faggots of wood around her, and they just keep piling more on. She doesn't sound like she's dying from smoke inhalation to me. And one of the things, by the way, that you will read about, a little color here, in these later burnings is the executioner will sometimes hang a little bag or a pouch around the neck of the person manacled to the stake, and that pouch contains gunpowder. And the hope is that when things get hot enough, that will explode, putting you out of your misery so you don't have to be burned to death. And as the period goes on, you'll read more and more accounts of, you know, like when noblemen have to be killed, you know, rarely, but when noblemen have to be killed like that, they'll be having whole bladders filled with this gunpowder hoping for the best. And while that does, by the way, look a little like the secret strangling thing, which enlightened rulers trying to limit the suffering of the condemned, there's also a practical way to look at this. I mean, this is insurance, isn't it? So that you won't have another one of these incidents that gives the state a black eye, like some woman manacled to a post, screaming to the crowd and kicking away the wood as fast as you can pile it back on. That doesn't look good for anyone. A little pouch of gunpowder around the neck might save us all a lot of trouble next time. And one thing I don't think we have pointed out that's worth mentioning is that a lot of these people being executed are bad people who have committed bad crimes, right? Things we would treat severely today. Murder, rape, robbery, all those kinds of things. So let's not make angels out of these people that don't deserve it, although I doubt no matter how bad you are, we want you burned alive. That having been said, let's remember that in a lot of these places, England, for example, we've mentioned already, they are executing people for crimes that no modern state would ever execute people for. And even with all of our modern techniques and justice system and everything we have going for us now, we still make mistakes in convictions, right? What was the failure rate like? You can only imagine in this time period, because right before this time period is when they're doing like, you know, trial by ordeal. We're going to throw you in the river and if you sink, you're innocent. If you float, you're guilty. I mean, you know, we're only a little ways out of that period. So I imagine a bunch of these people being executed are bad people. I imagine a bunch of them aren't. And if we're going to walk a mile in their moccasins and try to wonder how they must have felt, don't you think afraid has to be like the most dominant emotion that's just overwhelming them, psychologically breaking them? There were these rogues and people who went to their deaths almost carefree. There were some others who went with an almost tinge of madness. So perhaps neither one of those people as affected by fear as the average Joe or Jane. But V.A.C. Cottrell points out that an almost stupefying level of fear affected most people. He writes, quote, Most people would mount the scaffold, now quoting primary sources, quote, Trembling in a very extraordinary manner, their whole frame violently convulsed, their minds bordering on stupefication, having to be supported by officials. He continues, Elizabeth Godfrey, hanged for murder in 1807, went to the scaffold in a state of frenzy. Greenacre in 1837 refused the attentions of the ordinary of Newgate, bravely enough. But at the scaffold, he was, quote, totally unmanned. All his fortitude had left him. He was unable to speak, and the officer was obliged to support him or he would have fallen, end quote. He mentioned several other examples and then continues, quote, An 18 year old girl had to be dragged to the scaffold at Bristol by half a dozen men in 1849, the clergyman vainly asking her to walk quietly. By 1868, he writes, the images were seared in memory, quote, Half fainting wretches, sometimes supported between warders and chaplain, sometimes struggling fiercely with the executioner, to plunge and shriek and kick until the lumbering drop falls, sometimes sinking into pitiable sinkhope, to be hanged sprawling over a chair, end quote. Cottrell says that for many, the fear they felt inside was betrayed by their bodies. Losing control of their bladder or bowels, he says even Marie-Anne Twiddet had to squat on the cobblestones, as her bowels gave way when she saw the cart that was going to transport her to the waiting guillotine. And it's not really the time or the place, but there have been long debates about whether or not the culture that the people in the past lived in made their fear less than ours would be today, or even made their sensitivity to physical pain less than we would feel today. Without going too deeply into it, most of the more modern things that I've been reading went out of their way to contradict those earlier ideas. But as I said, another topic for another time, let's just point out that when these women, for example, in England went to the stake to be burned to death, the fire probably felt as hot as it would be for you or for me. Now of course there's no way to prove it, and it would differ person to person, but I imagine that in these times of paralyzing fear, those with extra strong religious beliefs might have had a higher level of comfort. One of the most heartbreaking primary source accounts I ran into has to do with a German arsonist, a woman who was, I assume, burned, because during this period they often burned arsonists, but she was burned, I think, at the stake. But the source chronicler, who's writing this for religious purposes, so understand that going into it, points out that as she's being executed, she is calling out to Jesus basically saying, don't go anywhere, I'll be there in a minute, I'm coming, I'm on my way. I mean, here's what historian Richard Evans chronicling this in Rituals of Retribution writes, he says, The last words of Anna Tupler, an arsonist executed in Spiller in Silesia on 6th November 1744, were very similar to someone else he recently quoted. Quote, Lord Jesus, she cried, I'm here, Lord Jesus, I'm coming now, Lord Jesus, take my soul up to heaven. End quote. You can hear, can't you, the desperation, right? Make sure you hear me, I'm coming right now. I found myself greatly moved by that.
SPEAKER_00: And I can only imagine that those of lesser faith that found themselves in the same position might have been just a little bit jealous. Karl Marx had that famous quote about religion being the opium of the masses. Well, if you're about to be burned at the stake, don't you think a little opium, or a lot of opium, is just what the doctor ordered? In fact, if it's me, we're probably medicating from the time the most insane moment in the whole affair happens. Again, as a modern person, we would think that moment is the moment when the flames are lit right in front of you as you're chained to the stake. But for the people in this era, if I'm reading the sources correctly, the insane moment, one that would be on their life's top five, you know, most impactful moments in my life, if they were cataloging something like that at the very end, you'd have to say that, you know, somewhere on the top five list is that moment the executioner actually touched me. Because the touch of the executioner is an insane thing, and you have to talk about the executioner to set up a little bit about how someone back then might have felt about it. We've been looking at this from the point of view for a little while now of the person doomed to die in this execution, really when you think about it, the star of the show. But there's another star of the show, maybe call them the supporting actor. And their role in this, if we're looking at the question of the extremes of the human experience, is just as extreme as the person who's dying up there for the entertainment of the crowd. It's his job to kill them for the entertainment of the crowd. And whereas the condemned only has to go through this situation once, and then is out of their misery, the person on the other end of the story, the best supporting actor, if he does a good job in this tale, has to do it over and over again. It's the way he makes a living, it's the way he feeds his family, and then he has to think about it at night. And then he has to clean his equipment the next day. I mean, this is a psychological challenge that in modern times, terrible regimes have had a hard time dealing with. I mean, there are stories you can read about the German government during the Nazi years trying to figure out how you get around the problem of the people that you get to shoot all these Jews that you line a pit with are having psychological problems. There's only so much liquor you comply someone with. And yet they managed these executioners back in Europe during the day. And it's more difficult to do that maybe even than a modern person might think. Because the tendency is to think something like, well, you wouldn't have gone into that trade if there wasn't something you liked about it. Either you like the job, or you like the pay and the benefits and you don't mind the job. We can think of any number of reasons why a person might choose or not choose to go into such a trade. The modern bias at work there, though, when I start to think like that, is I forget that in many periods in human history, people have no choice in this kind of thing. When I was growing up, it was one of the things you would say about these unfree governments in many parts of the world. They're going to tell you what you do for a living and Americans and Western Europeans, we'd all shudder, right? Seems like a basic human freedom, doesn't it? But in this era, as in many other areas and places, the class system is not very mobile. In fact, what we call class in a lot of these eras would be better called casts. And there is no mobility between them. And you could be born into a place in society where you have limited or no choices. For example, what if your dad is an executioner? Guess what you're doing for a living in all probability? You're going to be executing people too. And if you turn out to be one of those people of an artistic, sensitive disposition, really not the killer kind of person, if you want to feed your family, you're going to learn the trade and figure out a way to make it work for you. Because the society in these eras wasn't going to let you do much more than that. See, here's the thing right away that confronts our mental image, our stereotypical image of the executioner in this period, the hooded executioner and whatnot. That's more, by the way, something that happened in England than the continent. But the reason wasn't because the executioner wanted everyone to see their face and to be proud of the situation necessarily. Some of them may have chosen to obscure their features. But everybody else who lived in the town where the execution was happening, they damn well wanted to know where the executioner was. And they wanted him to stand out of the crowd, because they didn't want to accidentally come in contact with him in any way, shape or form because he was, as Paul Friedland writes, an extraordinary being, both extraordinarily blessed in some ways with special powers, but also undeniably cursed with a lot of others, including the ability to turn you from an honorable person into a dishonorable person in your heavily class based, nay cast based almost society, simply by touching you.
SPEAKER_00: And by the way, this touching doesn't just mean, you know, while they're performing their duties as executioner, it means running into them even accidentally at the marketplace and having you brush against them. It can be that innocuous. This is why the authorities and the citizens want the executioner dressed at all times in clothing that clearly marks out the fact you're the executioner. And in some places they have to carry like special staffs that are certain colors so that the crowd knows, wait a minute, there's the guy who kills and tortures for money and if I touch him even accidentally, I'm dishonored. I imagine that even in the most crowded marketplace, there must have been a nice buffer zone of no people around this guy and his close family members. And I have to confess, the more I read about the executioners of this era, it's probably fair to call them the executioner class of Central and Western Europe in this era, the more fascinated I am by them. But there's not very much on them, as surprising as that might sound to 21st century audiences, and it's remarked upon by some of the historians who say that the role of the executioner was sort of downplayed, they were seen as more of a cog in the machine, as opposed to how they appear more now in the histories, which could be compared to say a ringmaster at a circus, a deadly circus, of course. But that's the person who's orchestrating and conducting the entire spectacle. If it works, this is the person who in a place like Germany will go up to the magistrates afterwards and hold the sword up and say, my lord, did I do well? And wait for his, you did exactly what you were supposed to do, kind of response that's all formalized and everything. But if that guy screws up, well, justice gets a black eye, and whose fault is that, right? And before we go any farther, let's understand that the ramifications for screwing up an execution could be a lot worse than losing your job. People throw stones when things like that happens, and executioners have been killed. Interestingly enough, one of the historians points out that I read that they refrained from touching them though anyway, right? We're still not going to touch him, even if we want to kill him, we're going to throw things at him, because if we touch him, then we get dishonored, right? It's like leprosy, which was another problem in the period, and it could spread. We don't even want to be near, you know, somebody who could get you sick, and well, this is a different kind of sickness. It's the early modern sickness known as dishonor, and if you don't already have it, you don't want to get it. The idea of them as extraordinary beings is fascinating to me, and yet when I've read the historians kind of go down the list of why, you know, they might be called different kinds of beings, it's interesting, and even on a genetic level, because what ends up happening is this infamy that these people have make them unmarriable, for example. So the people that they end up marrying are often women who are from families of executioners also, so they sort of double down, the stories say, on their weirdness, because they don't get to live with other people either. So they're marrying into their own kind of class, if you will, and into distant relatives, and mixing these families, and then over generations you get these great executioner families. But they're a little strange because they're a bunch of people who live in this world of executioners on both sides down many generations, and they don't get to mingle with anyone else. As historian Richard van Doman points out, quote, Because of his dishonorable occupation, the executioner lived outside the community, which only served to heighten his sinister image. He could only marry within his own circle, so that a succession of executioners evolved. The executioner had to distinguish himself by wearing special clothes, which generally differed from his black or red robes of office. Attempts to secure a special status by dressing conspicuously failed on account of the rigid dress regulations for the executioner. He earned good wages and got on comfortably, but he had to live outside respectable society, sit alone in a separate place in church, and was required to eat and drink on his own at the inn. End quote. And this affected everyone in his family too, as van Doman says, quote, The social implications of dishonor were suffered not only by the executioner, who at least had an occupation, but also by his children, who were forbidden to learn an honorable craft. Town craftsmen in particular ostracized the executioner. End quote. But Paul Friedland really blew my mind when he talked about how this dishonorable taint turned all these people into people that could only hang out and intermarry with each other, which over time creates, well, dynasties of executioners related to each other, but also people who've been intermarrying in a small circle for a long time, genetically closer to each other than to any of the outside population. He writes, quote, How are we to explain the rise of this closely interrelated caste of people who gradually came to occupy most of the official posts of executioner in the cities and towns of northern France, the Netherlands, and German-speaking northern and central Europe? Perhaps the endogamy of executioners was itself the cause of the opprobrium, as practitioners of this very problematic profession came to be, quite literally, a separate tribe or race of people. Most likely, the endogamy and the revulsion attached to the profession were mutually reinforcing. As executioners became more reviled, they increasingly married their own kind, in turn, making them seem even stranger. End quote. It's Friedland who says that they became an extraordinary being, so profane that the executioner could not come into contact with other people or objects without profoundly altering them. In other words, he's something kind of magical, and at the same time, an untouchable. The better ones also seemed to be part psychologist or psychiatrist, because they had to, think about this for a minute, they had to shepherd human beings from life to death, the most extreme emotional and stressful moment of their lives, right? And in these executions that were almost always these carefully staged dramas, these spectacles of justice, it had to go a certain way. For it to come off without a hitch, the executioner needs the cooperation of the condemned. They need to work together to pull this thing off. And I know that sounds weird, but it's in everyone's interest. I mean, we mentioned earlier that there's a journal and Joel Harrington's book on the faithful executioner is wonderful. But unfortunately for we moderns, the book does not address the things we want to address. The executioner whose name is Franz Schmidt from Germany, he doesn't say here's how I lived with myself and all these things we want to know. Every time he seems to be thinking about the victim too much, he switches to what they did, you know, what made them end up in this position in the first place, the horribleness of their crimes, which by the way, is something a lot of people would do today. Focus on the crimes, not the justice. Nonetheless, Harrington has great color throughout the book and explains the context of all this stuff. He says Franz Schmidt executed 394 people over his career and tortured and dished out corporal punishment to hundreds more. Think about that for a minute. If a guy like that comes up to me for the last drink, right? I mean, if we said earlier that one of the moments that might be the most impactful of your life is the moment the executioner touches you. Another might be when you're in the poor sinner's parlor, as it was sometimes called, you know, saying your goodbyes and talking with the religious figures and all that stuff. And then the announcement comes in, as it often did in the German states especially, the executioner is at hand. And this person shows up, Franz Schmidt showed up in his best robes of office, came with a drink and shared the famous last drink with the condemned. There also in many places was a famous last meal, sometimes called the hangman's meal. And this is supremely weird. I think it was Richard Evans who pointed out for a lot of these poor, convicted German criminals during this era, this lavish meal that they gave them right before they died was probably the greatest meal that they'd ever had and far above anything they'd ever even seen. And oftentimes the people who judged you and the religious figures and even the executioner will eat with you at this meal, and you might be required to wear your own burial shroud, so the whole thing's not weird, none at all, right? It's part of the psychological breakdown. I mean, I'm in my burial shroud, I'm having the best meal I've ever had, I'm eating with the guy who's gonna kill me. But if a guy with 394 kills on his record comes to me and says, listen, I know what I'm doing here, I've done this a lot of times, let me tell you how it's gonna go easiest for you and easiest for me, I think I'm gonna listen to him. After all, if I squirm around too much and don't do what this guy wants, he's gonna take more than one shot at my head, if this is a decapitation for example. And Shubie pointed out, another historian had a great line, he said, listen, these people are under enough pressure anyway, they have a reputation not totally without reason of drinking too much, what would you do, again, your job to kill people, how are you gonna handle that? But if these guys take too many strokes to do the job, it might be open season on them and violence, as Richard Evans points out, violence against executioners who botched the job, well, the sources are abundant, but that will make him even more nervous, right? So you really want this condemned to sit still, work with you, and you'll all get out of here as easy as possible, right? I'm gonna listen to the experts in this case, if he explains to me the best way to hold my head to make this go fast. If I'm gonna be broken on the wheel or broken with the wheel, the directions might be a little bit more complex. Just to throw this in there, because I think it's also interesting, another reason these people are so dishonorable is they often had a lot of side gigs in the community that were also sort of untouchability things, like cleaning the latrines and picking up dead animals and all the stuff people don't want to do, right, the unclean kind of stuff. But it's kind of interesting because they could often make a really good living this way, right, almost to the point where they're rich. And one source pointed out how interesting it was because we modern people think that money is the great equalizer. And his point was, no, no, no, in the earlier era, you could be as rich as Midas. But if you're at a certain level of society, I mean, if you're rich as Midas, because you clean latrines, nobody cares. And so these executioners often did real well with all their side gigs, and they were knackers and all these other things, but nobody wanted to eat with them anyway. Another weird thing about them is that at the same time, they're these dishonorable beings that you don't want touching you. They also are kind of thought of as magical healers. Obviously, they know a little bit about anatomy. They also practice torture and keeping people alive to be executed. In fact, they probably had pretty darn good amateur knowledge. It's kind of tough to have the person do what they need to do in a way that doesn't dishonor you, but people went to them as healers. They also had another side business, and this one of the weird parts of the era, leftover from the Middle Ages, they could sometimes sell a little blood on the side. The blood of the condemned was often thought to have magical properties, especially for epileptics. And at a lot of these executions, people would rush the scaffold to get a hold of some blood. And the smarter, more entrepreneurial executioners usually had their assistants already in advance, ready to go, basically saying something like, hey, hey, hey, hey, who paid? Okay, they get one, they get one. I mean, sort of a Dracula side gig selling blood, but, you know, supply and demand and all that. Supply and demand is not a bad way to describe sort of the process that led to the decline of these master executioners, these master craftsmen. Because as the 1700s, you know, go on, and you get to the latter part of them, these executions become rarer and rarer. I mean, the numbers are actually published, you know, Prussian records, the records in the Netherlands, the records in Paris, and you're seeing single digits in some places at some times, right?
SPEAKER_00: There's no reason to have a full time executioner on staff, and there's no reason to have a lot of them, and so they start declining in number. Some of them probably making professional, you know, attempts at the side gigs to make those work full time. But you end up with fewer of these people. And as time goes on, they're getting older. One of the histories I read had a letter from one of these old executioners trying to assure a potential employer that he's still got it, right? You know, essentially, it said something like, you know, I know I'm old, I know the sword is heavy, but you know, it's like riding a bicycle. But it's a sign that fewer and fewer of these people are even around. The ones that are around are getting old, and they're not exactly, you know, as they say in boxing, to rest is to rust. They're rusting. And it's part of the reason you see more and more botched decapitations during this period, which was a significant problem. And as we know, being people, if you have a significant problem, we're going to try to invent ways to eliminate it. And that's what the guillotine was. You know, the blade that drops down the scaffolding and separates a person from life to death in the blink of an eye, literally. That's an attempt to cut out the human equation, believe it or not, as bad as that looks to us now. It was a step forward in sort of man's progress towards becoming more humanitarian. It took away the infamy associated with being touched by the executioner that would spread to your family in the old days. Now, you know, this was all about a rational penal system. You have to die, but it doesn't have to be any more painful than this. There's no infamy attached to it. The executioner is no longer this infamous figure that scares the heck out of people. He's just a guy who's a technician. And as much as the guillotine is associated with these bloodthirsty crowds that come to watch the execution like it's something special because we're using a guillotine, we should remember in context everything we've been discussing, right? To these people, the guillotine was to be shortchanged. There's no show. You can hardly see it. It's over in the blink of an eye. You can go watch executions with a guillotine. Official judicial ones. There's one famous one from France. I think it was shot in the 1930s or something. It's in slow motion the entire thing because even then, it's, I mean, they run the prisoner out, boom, boom, it happens so fast you can't believe it. If you came all day and tailgated in expectation of that, that's like, you know, when I used to buy pay-per-view boxing matches and somebody would walk out and boom, it's over with one set. I mean, you know, that's a good way to feel cheated as an audience. At least one of the histories I was reading made it sound like people really would have preferred to go back to the more spectacular executions simply for entertainment value alone. Some people. Not all people. And this brings us back around to the third viewpoint here I wanted to examine things from. We did the condemned. We did the executioner. How about the audience? But the audience has really been the question throughout this entire conversation, hasn't it? How the audience is reacting. And during this period, this is when it kind of gets fascinating. The aspect of, okay, so we human beings like this stuff. They've been watching it. Okay, so we're maybe not surprised if we're real cynical. So why did it end? And how did it stop? That's an interesting process. Is there a roadmap there where you could say, okay, we've inoculated ourselves against that once before and here's how we did it? During this period, when the sensibilities, as we said earlier, begin to change among some people in some classes, the audience going to these executions begins to, in some manner of speaking, look at itself and not like what it sees. Peter Spierenberg in his book The Spectacle of Suffering gives a primary source account, a dramatized one, he points out, from a person who was, shall we say, on the cutting edge of these new sensibilities, who didn't even want to see one of these public executions but stumbled into one. Remember the Place de Grève is the execution site in Paris. While the victims suffered, I studied the spectators. They chattered and laughed as if they were watching a farce. But what revolted me most was a very pretty young girl I saw with what appeared to be her lover. She uttered peals of laughter. She jested about the miserable man's expressions and screams. I could not believe it! I looked at her five or six times. Finally, without thinking of the consequences, I said to her, Madame Iselle, you must have the heart of a monster, and to judge by what I see of you today, I believe you're capable of any crime. If I had the misfortune to be your lover, I would shun you forever. As she was no fishwife, he writes, she stood mute! I expected some unpleasant retort from her lover. He said not a word. Then, a few steps away, I saw another young girl drenched in tears. She came to me, leaned upon my arm, hiding her face, and she said, This is an honorable man who feels pity for those in anguish! Exclamation point again. End quote. Now those comments also emphasize another key thing that was making some in the crowd judge others in the crowd harshly for the way that they were reacting. Women. Women were staples at these executions, pretty much every source suggests from the get-go. Some sources suggest that women and boys traditionally made up the majority of the crowd. It hadn't been a problem before this era, but this is the era, remember, that has certain built-in assumptions amongst a lot of the intelligentsia about human nature. And one of those assumptions has to do with womanhood, and how women are naturally the more compassionate sex. As one primary source quote on Reddit said basically something like, they're scared of spiders, but they can go to these executions and watch intently and enjoy it? So the reality of women at these executions was clashing with the intelligentsia's view of what womanhood was in their minds, in their writings, in their assumptions. Once again, if womanhood is really like this ideal compassionate mothering state, then what we're seeing when we see women go to these executions are twisted people. People with a screw loose. In other words, they're establishing a new baseline for normalcy. One that is idealistic perhaps, at least for some people in their times, and then what they're seeing on the ground, at ground zero, clashes with their ideal. But it is fascinating as a modern person to read some of these letters that are published in the histories. There are upper class women in France, for example, and their letters are in Friedland's book, which is wonderful, as I said. And you can see that there is an element of the soap opera going on here. Some executions are horrible, others are wonderful, others are beautiful. The people are all a huge part of the draw. You have celebrity executions. Imagine some of our most famous people who have tons of cosmetic lines in reality shows and everything getting into trouble. And then the public execution where their former popularity plays into the draw of the crowd later. If you love this person in that film, wouldn't you love to see them in their final performance on the scaffold? Friedland actually uses some of these letters as a way to try to make his case that it wasn't class that determined whether or not you had feeling for these people who died on the scaffold. Because a lot of these women in Parisian high society, for example, went to watch executions of people they knew well and enjoyed them. Friedland relates the story of Madame Tiquette's execution in 1699. He says that spectators of every class crowded the streets between the prison and the execution ground in Paris. He says all the windows overlooking the scaffold had been rented out well in advance. And then he writes about a letter written by a woman named Denoire talking about the execution. He says, quote, despite having been personally acquainted with Madame Tiquette, Denoire's account of the execution dwells far less on whatever emotion she might have experienced at the sight of watching her friend die than on the feelings of excitement she felt at watching the spectacle of the execution. At times, Denoire compares Tiquette's performance, in quotation marks, to the experience of watching a dramatic production, recalling Rosette's blurring of the theatrical and the real in his particular brand of tragic realism. This is Madame Denoire writing about watching her friend die. Quote, Again, it sounds like a soap opera. And Friedland notes that it was only for a brief moment in the letter that this woman looked at herself and wondered about her own emotions as a spectator. She writes, quote, one never saw anything as beautiful as her head when it had been separated from her body. They left it for a time on the scaffold so the people could see it. Her face was turned in the direction of the Hotel de Ville, and I assure you that I was dazzled by it. In the end, I was so touched by her death that it took me more than six months to recover from it. And it is with pain that I now recall these thoughts. End quote. Friedland has another letter he quotes from a high society Parisian woman who was talking about a case, a murder case involving a woman at the center of it that obsessed Paris like a great gossip story. You know, for months they followed the trial, and then eventually the woman has to go up on the scaffold and be executed, and then they throw her body on a fire and burn it up, sending the ashes up into the smog of Paris, and the letter writer says that, you know, for months all of Paris lived and breathed this story as the trial was going on, and now all of Paris was literally breathing this person in, you know, every time they inhaled. Now this hadn't caused any sort of fuss for a long time. By the 1690s, you were starting to get the very earliest, you know, complaints and rumblings about women, and how unseemly it was that they might enjoy this kind of stuff. And they were having the same problem with boys and kids. In the ritualistic religious era, you could have choirs of kids singing and hymning during the worst of the executions. It was considered to be a good lesson. Hold them up on the shoulder of the father so that they could see better. Take them to the gallows afterwards. Let them see what happens to malefactors. Take them to the gibbets. Show them the dead bodies rotting inside. The better classes started looking at that and thinking that there was something wrong with that. Child abuse, we would say today. Or at least the stirrings of people who began to think that way. And for anyone who didn't, there was beginning to be public pressure in the culture on them. And it's interesting that it was only directed at the so-called better people. For example, V.A.C. Gittrell in his book The Hanging Tree talks about Sir Joshua Reynolds, one of these so-called better people who in 1790 decided to go to a hanging. You know, no big deal. People do it all the time. It was starting to become important, which people? And he was appalled to find the newspapers criticizing him the next day for going. They basically said that the man he went with, someone lower on the social strata, we would expect those kind of people to go, but not somebody like Sir Joshua Reynolds. And Reynolds was kind of confused, sort of caught off guard by the change in sensibilities, if you will. And so he wrote a letter to his friend Boswell, who he went to the execution with afterwards, kind of saying, what's wrong with going to an execution? Here's the defense, if you will, for enjoying a hanging, a good hanging. He says a hanging well carried out. And I should point out that he went to the hanging to watch, well, five people being hanged. But one of them was a servant girl for somebody he knew. And the servant girl knew him. She recognized him right before the noose was put around her neck and bowed to him, you know, in front of this giant crowd. She, by the way, was being hanged for a little theft. Such was the bloody code, right? But Reynolds says the whole thing went well. What's the problem? He wrote to his friend Boswell about the criticism he received in the newspapers for going and said, quote, I am convinced it is a vulgar error, the opinion that hanging is so terrible a spectacle, or that it in any way implies a hardness of heart or a cruelty of disposition, any more than such a disposition is implied in seeking delight from the representations of a tragedy. Let me stop here. He means like a drama or a play. He continues, such an execution as we saw, where there was no torture of the body or expression of agony of the mind, but where the criminals, on the contrary, appeared perfectly composed, without the least trembling, ready to speak and answer with civility and attention to any question that was proposed. Neither in a state of torpidity or insensibility, but grave and composed. I consider it is natural to desire to see such sights, and if I may venture, to take delight in them, in order to stir and interest the mind, to give it some emotion, as moderate exercise is necessary for the body, if the criminals had expressed great agony of mind, the spectators must infallibly sympathize. But so far was the fact from it that you regard with admiration the serenity of their countenances and whole deportment, end quote. Now this is clearly a guy who doesn't feel the physical pain of the, you know, victims that he's watching. Otherwise, he might have approached the way he described this differently. But thirty years before this guy writes that, Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations, wrote something else, called The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759, where he basically implied that it's natural when watching someone burn to death, as we've been saying, to feel the physical pain of the victim. He wrote, quote, By the imagination we place ourselves in his, the sufferer's, situation. We conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments. We enter, as it were, into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, end quote. Again, these thinkers are implying that this is the way we are. So then what does that make people who aren't that way? Like poor Sir Joshua Reynolds, right? It makes him someone liable to be criticized by the cultural critics of his day. It also shows a change in the mood. And these historians will go over letters and comments and editorials and all sorts of things to show that the mood is changing, and that this change of sensibility is happening. Now, we told you, like when we were talking about how you try to quantify all the different threads that play into any zeitgeist, the 1960s, for example, well, how much value to place on this change in sensibilities, among some classes, in some places, and how much weight to put on the fact that the authorities are not liking some of the main things involved in these executions anymore, is sort of a tomato or tomato thing, if you're an expert. I mean, this is the kind of things they have debates over. No one argues that they all played a role, but they do argue over how much of a role. The people out there that are ground zero cynics will point out that, listen, there was never a real change in the attendance rates at these executions, unless you want to say that they continually grew. As Richard Evans points out, the high-water mark for attendance at public executions in Western Europe are right before they're taken behind, you know, the jail walls and made private, showing that there's no drop-off in demand. And people who put a great amount of importance on this particular angle will point out that people never grew out of public executions because of a change in sensibilities. They had the public execution and the spectacle taken away from them by the authorities. There are lots of reasons the authorities seem to be less than satisfied with these public executions. The first thing is that slowly but surely, a consensus was developing that they weren't doing what you wanted them to do, not just because people weren't terrified, but because they weren't deterring crime. Voltaire and other public intellectuals had argued that the death penalty for almost anything or these spectacular ones actually made certain kinds of crimes worse. So the authorities, during this big era of penal reform in the 1700s especially, were trying to get down to a bedrock principle about what works. The other thing that was happening in the 1700s, if you remember your history, is the always present fear of the mob amongst the European autocratic rulers, exploded in intensity right around the 1790s. That wonderful party known as the French Revolution happened, which would spread some of these ideas like an intellectual contagion all over Europe. And all of a sudden, the most dangerous thing if you are a ruler of one of these countries that you can think of is a large crowd of your people together in one place. Especially if a lot of them are perhaps partying, especially if they're very wound up about something. I mean, worst case scenario, imagine if the public execution that you are staging to draw all these people into one of your main cities to watch and get all drunk and excited about, is somebody whose crime was political against you, the regime. The 1800s of course will be the era of revolution in Western Europe, 1848 of course the crown jewel year. But all of a sudden the idea of getting a lot of the masses in one place at one time, all of a sudden sounding very counter productive. The AC Guttrell says that it was the authorities that imposed emotional restraint on the crowds by taking away their public execution, because it wasn't serving the needs of the state. And you have some German sources that talk about the execution itself, and I think I'm quoting here but from memory, brutalizing the spectators. So you can't argue that they're enjoying what they're seeing, but you're arguing that it's the exposure to these kinds of spectacles that are making you enjoy it, right? You become callous, used to it, numb. And there is a ton of class animosity in the sources where the masses who go to these executions are portrayed, you know, increasingly as lower and lower class, more and more brutal. And you know, for example, the Prussian nobility is completely disconnected from them, Richard Evans says. I mean, they sneer at the masses and think of them as bloodthirsty and low in terms of culture. By the middle 1800s, most of these major states are doing away with public executions or changing them in ways to make the crowds very small. For example, they will still execute people publicly in Paris till the 1930s, but they'll do it in a way that minimizes crowd size. And these public spectacles will go from being encouraged and staged to being discouraged, deterred, and eventually simply taken away from the public. The best quick rundown to describe the process that we did in this whole particular section of this conversation, this case study, if you will, from the early modern era, is why not Richard J. Evans's Rituals of Retribution, where he says about the ending of public executions, and he goes down the list of what year they happened in all these different states. 1855, this state did it, 1856, this state did it, and then he says of the ending of the public executions in Germany, The predominant immediate motive for this change was official fear of the mob. Public executions attracted huge crowds, and the emotions which they were thought to arouse were now considered dangerously unpredictable. Evans then says that what had happened was you had this religious ritual that the state eventually took the religion out of, destabilizing the whole thing and basically leaving nothing left for people to enjoy it for curiosity reasons, or sadistic reasons, or fill in the blank reasons, he writes, Decades of official attempts to secularize the execution ritual, remove it from the arena of popular culture, and crypto-materialist religion and convert it into a solemn expression of state power had only succeeded in destabilizing it. The transition from a status-bound society to one of growing class antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat had broken asunder the synthesis of state and community ritual that had created the early modern public execution. The educated middle classes now found the crowd's behavior repugnant, while its deliberate desacralization at the hands of the authorities had gradually stripped it of its meanings for the common people. The dismantling of guild privileges and other aspects of the urban hierarchy through the political reforms and social changes of the first half of the nineteenth century had destroyed the structured crowd and replaced it in the eyes of the authorities with a formless, volatile mob. So this idea that public executions went away because they were no longer serving the interests of the authorities is a popular one, often heavily weighted when people are trying to weigh the importance of this or that element playing into the zeitgeist, the growth in modern sensibilities, the state not liking executions anymore, and there's a bunch of other little things, the growth in private life, I mean, you can find a lot of little variables that play on to why things are unfolding the way they do, but what's clear and interesting is that it happens very quickly. Cottrell quotes people writing in the 1850s who can't believe that in the 1830s they were doing what they were doing. I mean, that's a quick change in the way people feel. Well, some people anyway, right? Which people would be a good question to ask? My history books when I was in high school made it kind of sound like the era we just talked about was the time where humankind in the better parts of the world sort of grew up in a moral sense, became more humane, threw off the shackles of leftover medievalism, and entered the modern age when it comes to moral sensibilities, right? The modern age where you could come up with things like human rights and concepts like war crimes and all these sorts of things. And I actually think there's a pretty strong case for that if we're talking about humankind collectively, all of us together. But what if we're just talking instead of about humankind, what if we're just talking about humans? Then you might have to say, well, that differs on a case-to-case basis, correct? I mean, most of our societies no longer impose this sort of cruel and unusual public punishment on criminals, but that doesn't mean their people wouldn't turn out to see it. I mean, many societies have examples of, let's call it extrajudicial justice that have happened since the early modern era that drew huge crowds. I mean, in the United States, take for example lynching. You know what lynching is, right? Lynching is an extrajudicial killing, something carried out often by a mob or by vigilantes. In the United States, a lot of black American males have been the victim of lynchings. Between 1890 and 1920, 1930, I think the cutoff was more than 3,000 estimated black males lynched. And racism, obviously a huge part of the American experience, including trying to keep people down after Reconstruction and the Jim Crow laws and all that. I mean, there's a ton of racial overtones, but it would be easier to explain if that was all that was going on. And yet, the United States of America has our citizens turn out for lynchings involving white folks too. And there are photos of them at lynchings of black folks smiling next to tortured, you know, charred corpses of the condemned, or the victims would be a better word. And there are also photos of them smiling next to the hanging, in some cases partially stripped corpses of the white criminals taken out of jails and strung up illegally. In other words, if we're doing an experiment on whether or not people would still come out to a public execution if they were ever brought back in the 20th century, the data points suggest that the answer would be yes. In fact, the United States didn't even stop public executions until the middle 1930s, and I believe 20,000 people showed up for the last one. The difference, though, is that the last one was a kind of a, what would you say, a simple hanging, although V.A.C. Gittrell might take offense at that statement. But at least it was the punishment prescribed by the enlightened 20th century society of the time. One of the really interesting comparison points when we're talking about the lynchings in the United States is you were not constrained by a law that said you can't have cruel and unusual punishments. You often were going for cruel and unusual punishments, and the actual accounts of these lynchings are terrifyingly horrible. I mean, think blowtorches. Is that enough for you? Many of them were done in private by small groups of people, and that's part of the history of the act, but that doesn't really concern us here for what we're talking about. The ones that are interesting as sort of data points, if you will, are the ones that drew huge crowds. Because you can write off small groups of people as twisted, malcontents, or unusual outliers. It's a lot harder when the sampling is of an entire town, like Waco, Texas, in 1916. And I don't mean to single out Waco. It's just the most famous case. Those of you who know your history of lynching know I'm going to speak for a minute about the Jesse Washington case. And Washington's a good example because I've had people come up to me and try to downplay this stuff. And one of the arguments they'll often use is, yeah, well, of course some innocent people were lynched, but most of these people did bad things, as though that would somehow be okay. Remember, if Jesse Washington had faced legal justice for the crimes he's supposed to have committed, he would have been hanged. A simple hanging, right? But he wasn't. Historian Amy Louise Wood describes the Jesse Washington situation this way. The 1916 lynching of Jesse Washington in Waco, Texas stands as one of the most widely known and scrutinized lynchings because it, in many ways, typified the grotesque excess of spectacle lynching. Just over two months after the birth of a nation played in Waco, an estimated 10,000 people watched as a mob mutilated, strangled, and burned Washington to death on the grounds of the city hall. The mayor, she writes, and the chief of police watched from a window above. Washington, she writes, was a 17-year-old African American. He was charged with killing a woman and maybe raping the woman. The jury deliberated for four minutes before convicting him, but justice, as I said, which would have been a simple hanging, never had a chance to run its course because, as Wood writes, Swarming women and children swarmed the city center, climbing trees and standing on rooftops to get a better view. A local photographer, Fred Gildersleeve, who had been notified that Washington would be lynched, captured the events on film from a window in city hall. Afterwards, his images were sold on the streets of the city, along with body parts and other grisly remnants from the day's events. Folks, this is not early modern France, which is shocking enough. This is 20th century Main Street America. And if you go look at the photos which were taken of this lynching in progress, you can see why they turned out to be so galvanizing in the anti-lynching movement. Because you look at it and you are staring into a time machine. They're dressed differently, but that's a photograph that gives you a pretty good idea what these early modern executions must have looked like, too. The scenery changes, the costumes evolve, but those people wearing those clothes, that's the same species as it always was. And we are the lab rats in this experiment, which wonders about how we react to this. And by the way, the things that they did to Washington, as was the case in a bunch of these lynchings, are every bit as nasty as the stuff that went on in those executions in early modern Europe we talked about. I mean, chopping off fingers, burning people. Jesse Washington was raised and lowered over a fire for at least an hour, some sources say two. He tried to climb up the chain that was suspending him over the fire, but apparently was unable to because he lacked fingers, which had been chopped off, along with his genitals. This is not unusual. A crowd of people watched this, participated in it, enjoyed it, sent postcards to other people later, one is famous and says something to the effect, quoting from memory here, you missed the barbecue, or you missed a good barbecue. This is cruelty, mass cruelty, plain and simple. My dictionary defines cruelty, by the way, as callous indifference to, or pleasure in, causing pain and suffering. Clearly that's what this is. And it's not a few outliers, or people with twisted evil minds, it's a wide cross-section of an early 20th century American city. It's tempting to label something like the Jesse Washington lynching as involving inhuman cruelty, but it looks all too human after you've leafed through a few chapters of your history book, doesn't it?
SPEAKER_00: It's probably safe to say that this cruelty element is a universal part of the human experience. The uncomfortable questions start coming into play if you ask why. I should point out, by the way, and I think I have, that there's no agreement over this why issue. Why people are violent, why they would enjoy watching violence, there are theories, there are ideas, there are debates, there are studies, and it crosses many disciplines. I think storytellers have always understood, unconsciously, that there are these buttons they can push that trigger emotional responses in us that may be chemically related. Maybe they know how to push the dopamine or the serotonin button at every three pages of their script to make sure you get whatever you need to keep reading the story and be interested. Maybe it's a gunfight, maybe it's a little sexual activity, maybe it's some sort of twisted scene that makes you laugh or freak out. But somebody knows that that's a button that will work for you. Why does it work for you? What over the eras of evolutionary adaptations built on evolutionary adaptations, what is that playing into? Is it a little like playing into a jungle cat's inability to not follow something that looks like it's running away from it? I mean, is there something deep in our souls that was once upon a time very useful that's just left over, like an appendix? We don't need this cruelty or this desire to see cruelty anymore, so what's it still doing there? Do we need to get rid of it because we haven't needed it in a long time and it causes a whole lot of side effects, as we all know. The uncomfortable question, though, is to wonder if that's not the case, if we still need it somehow. If it's a standard part of who we are and along with all the obvious negative sides to it has some positive benefits. I like to sometimes use this as an analogy and you knew I was going to go here. A Star Trek episode, the one where Captain Kirk gets split into the two halves of his personality. I guess you could simplistically call them the positive and the negative half, the good and the bad half, the one with the more celebrated positive human qualities and the one that sort of shows us at our most seven deadly sins-oriented best, maybe you could say. And throughout most of the episode, there's a good and a bad one and the bad one's doing all these bad things and getting into trouble and the good one is worried about it. But morals of the story is there comes a point where hardcore decisions that affect life and death and all these kinds of things comes into play and the half that doesn't have the negative qualities is ill-equipped. There's something about those negative qualities that help round this person out so that they have what they need in different situations. Most of the time, maybe you don't need that cruelty gene to come into play, but maybe sometimes you do. That's a weird thing to think about, right? And maybe, let's suggest, it has to do with circumstances. What if it's like fire? And if you don't have it at all, you freeze to death. But maybe in a place like ancient Rome where they're watching people die in the arena, let's remember, the Romans, as Will Durant pointed out, would argue that the arena was good for their people in their day, right? Made you less shy of blood, made you a better soldier, made you tougher to watch this kind of stuff, or so they thought. And maybe for their own time, that's the level of cruelty that those people needed to thrive. Maybe we don't need that level of cruelty in a much less cruel society than the next uncomfortable question that arises from that one is, so how much cruelty do we need? And perhaps the follow-up uncomfortable question after that is, even if you decide how much cruelty you need, what if times change? This of course all implies that you can control cruelty like a temperature gauge. It is strange though to think of a, you know, we've been talking about a revolution in sensibilities, the idea that you could have a counter-revolution in sensibilities. And people could become potentially more brutal, depending on how you measure it, more cruel than their parents or grandparents. Of course, let's understand our parents and grandparents may be the high-water mark of empathetic human development. I mean, it's pretty recent. It's impossible to imagine today though a Jesse Washington-type lynching happening in a small American city in 21st century America, in front of all those people. Can't even imagine it. So we call that progress, right? Might we ever slide back in the other direction? I mean, I can't imagine you would ever see something like that again. But maybe you could say that in 20 years, due to a whole bunch of different modern influences, if you took opinion polls, 20% more of the surveyed people would say that what was done to the victim was correct. See what I'm saying? That would be backsliding, wouldn't it? And yet there's this weird dichotomy between what, I guess without study or thinking about it, what one would think should be happening to society now versus what you see. Because what you see is a very empathetic society. Some have suggested that the pendulum has even swung too far in that direction. We're too soft, too empathetic, too weepy, right? Overly so, maybe. Which then of course begs the question, you know, does the pendulum swing backwards? Does the fire naturally self-correct to the right amount of heat for the tenor of the times? Maybe something like a 9-11 happens and all of a sudden you need to change the cruelty level on the thermostat to allow for more dark side Captain Kirk activity if necessary. You dial it back too often though, in too short a period of time you might find the room uncomfortably cold. But the weird dichotomy is that in this era, this uber-sensitive, uber-empathetic era, we have more influences on us that theoretically should have warped us. According to the experts that when I was a kid were telling me that the number of simulated murders that I had seen on television as my brain was developing, you know, something in the 14,000 whatever they used to throw the number, but the average American child by the time they were 14 years old had seen 14,000 rapes, murders, whatever it was, it was a slogan. The implication was, and I don't blame them, this was all pretty new stuff. You go to 1960s television, those hardly even count as murders by 1970s standards, and those hardly count as murders by our standards today in terms of how tame they are. Nonetheless, there was ample worrying that the accumulated effect of all this simulated violence would do something nasty to my generation when we got older and we're older now. What's happened? The problem, of course, we all faced is we are immersed in the modern zeitgeist. We can't tell if we've been warped. You'd have to bring somebody back from another era and instantly say, hey, notice anything weird about us? We look funny to you. Bring back Captain America. I love this about the Captain America character, by the way. He's a 1940s era American instantly transported into the now, and you get to see his reactions to all the changes that he didn't get to go through slowly like the rest of society did. Hey, 1940s American, do we look warped to you? But to me, living in the milieu as I am, I don't see that we've been terribly affected in a nasty way. And if you had gone to the people in the 1970s and shown them the kind of violence we would see simulated today, the realism level of it, I can't imagine what they would have said. I mean, the movies that you can go see today, and lots of the R-rated ones meet this criteria, would have been rated X when I was a kid. X, by the way, traditionally what you labeled hardcore pornography, and kids once upon a time, by the scale of today, it was a lot more tightly controlled in places like the United States. So to have your non-pornographic movie labeled X for violence was a huge deal, right? You basically wouldn't be making your movie. We've got lots of movies like that now. Again, so what? Society seems to be standing. And the problem in trying to figure out if you can see long-term damage due to us seeing more and more simulated violence that's more and more real, is the zeitgeist thing again. How do you differentiate all the strands of reality and try to quantify them? We have more school shootings with youngsters than we used to. Maybe it's violent video games. How would you know? There's 10,000 other variables acting on those kids as well. But society's still standing, right? And when you think about what we're exposed to, it's a little bit shocking. I mean, take for example, this is what occurred to me. How many people have seen the images of the terrorists who are, you know, slitting the throats with the knives of the people in the orange jumpsuits at their feet? It was on like every magazine cover at one point. The videos are all over the internet, been viewed a bazillion times. That's more graphic than anything 99% of the population of the Western world would have seen when I was a kid. The kind of stuff you'd only see if you were in combat, or a first responder, or a journalist, or somebody who looked at autopsy photos. I mean, that's, that would have shocked America in 1974. Now, how many things like that have we seen? Does it do anything to us at all? If you watch 100 real killings, forget about the simulated stuff they were worried about kids watching in the 1970s. If you watched 100 real killings online in a 24 hour period, does it do anything? Here's the funny part. If it does something, I find that really interesting. If it doesn't do anything, I find that just as interesting. Interesting human experiment, right? Well, of course it would be if we had kept the variables the same. I mean, if you had shown American children 1970s level television violence for 100 years and then looked at the results, I suppose it would be one thing. But we haven't done that, obviously, right? We've deepened and intensified the experience a lot since I was a kid. We just mentioned the more realistic fake violence. There's the real violence now online to contend with, and the assassination and execution videos, all that stuff you could see. But there's a participatory element now that wasn't involved back in the day. You're not just asking how watching this stuff affects people. Now you can ask how participating in it does, in a virtual sense, right? The first person shooter games come to mind, but there's lots of things out there that do similar sorts of things in terms of immersing you in a fantasy world and allowing you to behave in ways you would never behave in the real world. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I'm not one of these people that think time should remain static. I mean, how would you have prevented this? This is the experiment, right? We're seeing how people are affected by this. And so far, I'd say, you know, we're doing pretty well. But it's such a short term horizon. I mean, what's the computer era been? What, 20 years since that really took off? 30 years? I mean, this is short term horizon stuff. Call me in 100 years, right? When we will have the ability to put you into any of these situations we talk about that are really extreme, in an almost real sense. I mean, how long until that's the case? And again, I don't see anything wrong with that either. I mean, this is an extension of storytelling. You know, this existed since the very beginning of storytelling, which was oral a long time before anybody ever wrote anything down. Pushing the same buttons in a more intense and realistic way that have always been pushed. All you storytellers out there understand the pain raises the emotional stakes in the story for human beings, right? Whether we're talking about emotional, physical, or even the kind of pain that is the fountainhead of comedy. The great poker game of life is played with chips of human pain and misery. And it is interesting and compelling, and sometimes intense and very dramatic, to watch somebody playing a high stakes game, even if you're not sitting in on it. I mean, isn't that what reading about dramatic characters in wild situations or even historical figures in the past, I mean, we're watching them play their poker game of life, betting and risking their chips of pain. And you can't look away, can you?
SPEAKER_00: And I don't think there's anything wrong with that either, unless you find yourself continually rooting for that person to lose. Just like I don't think there's anything wrong with finding something like the Jesse Washington lynching situation from 100 years ago fascinating and reading up on all you can on it. I only think it gets weird if you say something like, wow, this is so interesting. I really love to see one of those. Could a revolution in sensibilities actually backtrack that much? Another thought occurs to me, and that's what we talked about a long time ago in this discussion, that, you know, there's never been any blind taste test on this in terms of making these statements about what might happen generations from now if this slow poison of portrayed or real violence seeps into the body politic over several generations. And that's that maybe we're already where we're worried we might get to. If you say if we're not careful generations from now, they'll want to watch public executions. Who says we wouldn't now? As we mentioned earlier, one of the theories on this whole thing is that they never went out of fashion, these public executions, that if this was a free market capitalistic content related decision, and the audience got to decide, it never would have gone away, maybe. I mean, if they announced that we were going to have the first public execution in the United States since the 1930s, put it in some centralized big spot, some scaffold in the middle of Las Vegas right near all the hotels, do you think you'd be able to get a ringside seat? Think you'd be able to rent one of those rooms with a picture window view down on the scaffold in one of the nearby hotels? I wonder. And, you know, I think that there's a breakdown stage that would happen where you'd have this first execution, it'd be this groundbreaking event, and everybody would be appalled and just, you know, outraged, and there'd be a lot of public shaming, it'd be Sir Joshua Reynolds all over again, and the media would be there. But of course, only to cover, you know, the human depravity of the people that showed up to watch this act, and are there any famous ones? But what happens with the next one? You know, we're on public execution number three since the government reinstated public executions. I bet by then things start to mellow a bit. And once the public pressure relaxes, because these things are much more common, I bet the entire media approach shifts, and we're not looking at the crowd any longer and shaming them to the rest of the country. We are, in fact, playing to that crowd and doing some man-on-the-street interviews. So, did you know the person who's being broken on the wheel today here in Vegas? And I realize that example sounds more like a dystopian movie script than it does any sort of reality, but then I have to keep reminding myself, listen, we can get hundreds of people, I think there were like 500 people that showed up to Ted Bundy's execution when he was put in the electric chair. Hundreds of people will show up to these things when they're happening behind prison walls, and they can't see anything. Imagine how many more would show up if they could, if the person conducting the execution said, this guy is so bad that just this one time, we're going to move the execution back out in public. Can you imagine in the modern era how quickly that would spread on social media? Do you think you could get that 500 people that were there to see an execution that they couldn't see? Do you think that would swell to something? Could you beat the 20,000 people that showed up to the last public execution in the United States? And if you could, well, what does that tell you in terms of trends, right? We could still pack them in just as well as we could have in the 1930s. Once again, it would be an interesting human experiment. I tend to think, and again, my opinion on this is simply personal, I tend to think that maybe some of us are hardwired definitively one way or the other, right? Give me my pain and suffering fictionalized because that's how I take it best. And other people that say, no, no, I want to see it real. I want it to be real when I read my history books and know that yes, this historical figure suffered this way, or I want it real, like I want to see it live. I think there are people who are hardwired one way or the other, and then I think there's a lot of us that are probably, you know, could go either way. Much more likely to be influenced by the culture we grow up in, the times and whatnot. I mean, you might not be hardwired to like watching animals chew people up in the arena, but hey, if everybody's going anyway, and I like the food there, and it's kind of fun, and I had fun last time, I mean, I think there's a lot of people that, you know, go along with the crowd. So whereas we in this particular era are going along with the crowd by being naturally empathetic, if the crowd changed or the times changed, I think there's a lot of people in the mushy middle that could go either way, and people that would never be caught dead at a live public execution today, how gauche might change their minds if, you know, it got trendy again, like bell-bottom jeans. The amount of good stuff that was left on the cutting room floor, you know, after we put that last show together that you just heard, is amazing, because there's just so much stuff that when you're reading it, your eyes just get wide about the topic at hand. It's a wacky, weird, crazy topic, isn't it? And if you were one of those people that I'm sure are out there who wanted to hear more from the executioner's viewpoint, we mentioned a book called The Faithful Executioner by Joel Harrington, that was one of the things that prompted me to even do this subject as a topic, and that book is available if you'd like to get it from Audible, and you'll get it as an audiobook. Now as a podcast listener, I don't have to tell you the value in being able to consume your entertainment, educational materials, information in a form that allows you to still use your hands and your eyes for other tasks. Audible has been a long-time supporter of this program. They traditionally offer a free audiobook with a 30-day trial membership. Membership includes a lot of things, including a free audiobook a month, 30% off all regularly-priced audiobooks. They have an unmatched selection of topics and genres and choices. I mean, if you have The Faithful Executioner, well, you're kind of reaching into the obscure topics a little bit, aren't you? They're on Audible, too. One of the things I really like about it is that it works across a wide variety of devices and picks up where you left off. So you can go from your tablet to your car to your phone to your Echo, and all these things will pick up the... If you're in mid-sentence, boom, you just keep on listening. That's very cool. And they have free apps for your iPhone, your iPad, your Android, your Windows Phone. You can listen on an iOS device, an Android, Fire tablets, Windows Phones. I mean, you own your books. This isn't a streaming thing. And if you cancel your membership, you still own your books. And you get something called a Great Listen Guarantee. If you didn't like the audiobook you bought, you can swap it. There's a lot of other great features. We've been talking about Audible for years. And as I said, they've been supporting the show for a long time, and I like them because I love selling books. If you go to audible.com slash hardcorehistory or text hardcorehistory, all one word, to 500-500, you can get started today.
SPEAKER_01: A buck a show is all we ask. Please go to dancarlin.com for information on how to donate to the show. Be sure to follow us on Twitter. The address is at Hardcore History.
SPEAKER_00: For years, we've been trying to figure out a way to give more Hardcore History audio to the Hardcore History audience. That would be you folks. And it has been difficult. We have found out through brutal experience, you do not want anything but what you think you're expecting on the regular feed. And so the only answer we finally came up with was to have another feed, another Hardcore History podcast for you. This one exists only so we don't screw up the one you like already. So the standard Hardcore History feed, this one, will give you the so-called epic shows when we can get them to you, which is, well, five, six months sometimes now, which is too long to be out of touch. Hence the other feed. A chance to stay in touch in between long shows. A chance to deal with things that you folks don't want in place of your epic stuff. So we're providing it in addition to that. Interviews, answered questions, interesting angles, shorter bits. I mean, for example, we have two things in the can, as they say, at the time of this recording. One is an interview with Mike Duncan, famous history podcaster, expert on Rome, and author of the new book, The Storm Before the Storm. We'll talk about The Storm Before the Storm, the earthquakes that shook the Roman Republic, you know, to the foundations that eventually led to the Julius Caesar guy we all know about. If you like Rome, we're talking about it in one of the shows already up on the new feed. The other is me answering all at once a question I've answered for many of you individually for a long time. Based on something I said once, people want to know whether I think the first or the second World War German military was the superior of the two. Well, that's the very first show on our feed. It's called Hardcore History Addendum. You can get it on our website. You can get it on iTunes. Subscribe to it. Hope you like it. And it should keep us, you know, in touch more often than once every five or six months, I hope.
