Common wisdom has it that under torture most people will say whatever
is demanded of them. Our image of the torture room is of a place
where false confessions are already prepared, only waiting to
be signed by the victim who, sooner or later, is bound to break
down under pain. Testimony gained under torture is, we know, unreliable.
Torture can never be a path to the truth.

Lisa Silverman seeks to question the inevitability of this folk
wisdom. Through a detailed analysis of the use of torture in the
French town of Toulouse between 1600 and 1788 (the year the use
of judicial torture was abolished) she seeks to show that within
a particular epistemological paradigm current in Early Modern
France, torture made sense. While we assume that torture produces
falsehoods, within this paradigm torture could be assumed to produce
truth. According to the doctrine of The Fall human beings are
essentially corrupt. Thus if one requires the truth, relying on
what people intentionally say will lead one astray. Humans "forget"
things they don’t want to remember, they embellish, they lie.
Thus, for the Early Modern French, if truth is to be gained at
all, it must be extracted forcibly from people, by some means
that bypasses their will. Torture is this means. It enables one
to "destroy human will through pain as a means of achieving
truth" (p.7). Within the torture chamber, the human mind
is so taken over by pain that it is incapable of making up lies
and the truth finally comes screaming out.

In addition, because the tortured subject was thought to be incapable
of saying anything but the truth, torture had a redemptive aspect.
Admittedly, the guilty would confess and be punished, but those
who maintained their innocence under torture could be trusted,
and thus cleared of the charges against them (although gradually
the practice of releasing those who maintained their innocence
stopped).

The idea that pain might offer redemption made sense within the
wider cultural context. Pain could be a gift from God, enabling
the sufferer to imitate the suffering of Christ. It could be a
penance and indeed at this time members of Roman Catholic lay
confraternities, including many court officials, practiced self-flagellation.
Even beyond the religious sphere, pain was thought to be meaningful,
and, possibly, beneficial. Thus surgeons debated whether pain
should be relieved, maybe, they thought, it was best left, because
it might aid diagnosis, or because it might itself be part of
the curative processes.

Gradually, however, Silverman argues, pain became secularised.
It came to be thought of as the mechanical consequence of tensions
in the nerves, as something wholly physical, as opposed to spiritual.
Pain ceased to be meaningful and came to be seen in a wholly negative
light. No longer could the pain of torture being seen as something
that enabled the subject to bypass their corrupted will and utter
the truth. Rather the enlightened view had it that in destroying
the will torture reduced the subject to an animal being. An animal
being, furthermore, that instinct drove to say whatever would
stop its suffering, whether that be the truth or not. As the links
between pain and the truth came to be doubted, torture no longer
made sense as a practice and was eventually banned.

Tortured Subjects is a very good book. Silverman’s thesis
is perceptive and original. Whether her claims are true is harder
to judge. Although Silverman uses a wide range of sources ranging
from official statistics, to court documents, to legal textbooks,
some types of sources are noticeably missing. Silverman’s central
claim is that in Early Modern France it made sense to assume that
under torture people spoke the truth. Surely the evidence of those
who were actually victims of torture would be relevant to this
thesis. Silverman notes that letters and other documents written
by torture victims still exist but she doesn’t tell us what they
say. Did the victims of torture feel that they could do nothing
but say the truth, or did they find themselves making false confessions
and telling lies? If Silverman is correct and in Early Modern
France there was a cultural expectation that torture victims told
the truth surely this should come out in the felt experience of
torture?

In addition, Silverman fails to adequately support her thesis
by discussing cases that could be assumed to be hard for the Early
Modern French if they held the epistemological paradigm that Silverman
claims. Silverman claims that the Early Modern French believed
that torture forced the victim to tell the truth. However, as
she mentions, it was well known that in some cases suspects confessed
under torture to crimes that they had not committed. Surely the
way in which these cases were negotiated is relevant to assessing
the plausibility of Silverman’s thesis. If she is right and torture
was assumed to produce the truth then this should be clearly revealed
through contemporary discussions of false confessions, but Silverman
makes no use of any such evidence.

Curiously, Tortured Subjects also omits information regarding
the technical details of torture. While such a work could all
too easily become pornographically voyeuristic, Silverman errs
in the other direction. She tells us that the methods of torture
employed were the estrapade (a device that lifts subjects by their
wrists), the water torture (which involved stretching victims
and then forcing water down their throat), and the mordaches or
brodequins (a metal device fastened to the shins into which pieces
of wood were forced thus compressing the bones). But many details
are left unclear: Did the estrapade dislocate the subject’s shoulders
or not? What exactly happens to someone who is forced to drink
three buckets of water? Were victims permanently injured? Did
some of them die? Answers to these questions are needed not only
to satisfy morbid curiosity, but also to enable the reader to
judge the plausibility of Silverman’s thesis. Claiming that torture
was considered a means of gaining reliable testimony, rather than
a punishment, is far more plausible if no permanent physical harm
was done to those tortured.

In the end Silverman’s thesis remains interesting and provocative,
but under defended. Her work will be of use to those interested
in conceptualizations of pain and suffering, and their relationship
to the body and truth. Tortured Subjects is well written
and accessible, but it is a work of intellectual rather than popular
history; it’s more concerned with religious thought and legal
training in Early Modern France than it is with blood and gore.

© 2001 Rachel Cooper

Rachel Cooper is a lecturer in philosophy in the Department
of Interdisciplinary Human Studies, Bradford University, U.K.

Categories: Philosophical, General