Mildred wanted me to check out "Rituals of Retribution" by Richard J. Evans, which is a heavy volume, covering centuries of capital punishment in Germany. I haven't actually read it yet, but I had a gander at the passages dealing with what caused the search, to wit, the use of torture and the death penalty in 18th century Prussia. Now bear in mind that courtesy of felis, we found out that the state edict by Fritz he quotes re: sodomy in the full text clearly deals with sodomy in the sense of "viehische Vermischung", i.e. bestiality, not m/m sex. However, felis demonstrated that sodomy in the sense of homosexuality was also a term used in 18th century German (whereas in modern German it usually means strictly bestiality). So I can't say whether the poor guy Evans mentions as being burned for "sodomy" in FW's time had had gay sex, or whether he had a go at the sheep. Anyway, here are the relevant passages:
The eighteenth century saw the phasing-out, then the abandonment of torture in virtually every German state. Already in the second half of the seventeenth century, torure began to be less widely applied, with its incidence in Munich falling from 44 per cent of criminal cases in 1650 to merely 16 per cent forty years later. In Prussia King Friedrich I. already required all cases where torture was proposed to be referred to him for advance approval. It was limited to cases of murder and treason by order of Friedrich II. in 1740, then abolished formally by him on 4 August 1754. Other German states followed suit in the second half of the eighteenth century, dropping torture in practice even before it was abandoned by law. Torture was last used in Würtemberg in 1778, and it was formally abolished there in 1809.
(The author lists the various German states and their documented use of torture vs the formal abolishment. Guess which one was the last? Hannover. Last use in 1818; it gets formally declared illegal in 1822. Bear in mind here Hannover is still ruled by Britain, as it will be until Victoria ascends to the throne. Bear also in mind how certain authors even today, like, say, David O. the Émilie and Voltaire biographer, go on about how much more barbaric the German states, especially Prussia, were compared to England in the 18th Century.)
One factor: the increasing use of prisons not just as a temporary hold until the penalty for the criminal was executed (i.e. killing them, torturing them, cutting off limbs) but instead as its own punishment:
The decline of public corporal and capital punishment in Weimar, for example, began with the construction of the penitentiary (Zuchthaus) in 1719. It was some time before this development really took hold. Ironically, the wave of prison foundations that swept the German states in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was part of a general crackdown on crime and deviance that also included a number of draconian extensions of the death penalty. In 1725, King Friedrich Wilhelm I. of Prussia issued an edict declaring that all gypsies found within the boundaries of his kingdom were to be strangled, while sodomites would be burned alive. In 1736 the same monarch threatened to hang thieves in Berlin from gallows erected in front of the houses which they had burgled. (...)
However, this development was relatively short-lived. Not only was it being gradually undermined by the increasing availability of imprisonment as an alternative to these draconian physical sanctions, it was also threatened by the growth of order and stability in German society in the eighteenth century. Recent studies have shown that a long-term decline in crimes of volence began in the late seventeenth century, and continued well into the twentieth. Far from representing a shift from crimes against the person to crimes against property, as used to be thought, this was part of a long-term reduction in overall crime rates which went hand in hand with the growing control of the stae over its citizens. (....) The neding of the great wars of religion that devastated Europe for a century and a half after the Reformation left European society searching for peace and order in an altered world. In a depopulated Germany, in particular, the competition for land and researches had become markedly less severe in the wake of the Thirty Years War. And the end of the 'seventeenth-century crisis', the improvement in climatic condotion with the gradual ending of the 'little ice age', and the start of a prolonged period of growth and prosperity in agriculture, meant a slow improvement in living standards which also played its part in the transformation of social attitudes. The eighteenth century was an era of relative social peace after the upheavals of the previous two hundred years. In the long run, this was bound to have an effect on the way that penal sanctions operated.
While long-term developments in the history of the law, the state and society all undoubtedly underlay the trend towards milder punishments that begain in Germany towards the middle of the eighteenth century, it remains the case that the power over penal policy lay in the hands of the princes, and that legislation to restrict and abolish torture and to do away with the more baroque forms of public punishment was enacted by individual monarchs. Here the crucial figure was Friedrich II (known to his English admirers as Frederick the Great), who succeeded to the Prussian throne in 1740. Like many eighteenth-century monarchs, he was on extremely bad terms with his father, and determined to reverse many of his policies when he became king. (...) Friedrich II paid particular attention to the legal system. 'Princes are born to be judges of the people,' he wrote; 'everything that makes them great has its origin in the administration of justice.' He found the confusion of Germanic and Roman law, the variety of local practice and custom, the prevalence of corruption and delay (...) both irrational and unproductive. He apointed a series of leading jurists to advise him, especially Samuel Cocceji (1697-1751), Johann Heinrich von Carmer (1721 - 1801), and Carl Gottlieb Svarez (1746 - 98). Their ideas on the civil and criminal law were shaped by the doctrines of the French philosophes. In 1740 they undertook a comprehensive programme of judical reforms, including the effective abolition of torture, as all as the replacement of drowning in a sack with beheading as the punishment for infanticide. A characteristic example of the Prussian monarch's attitude towards penal sanctions and their purpose can be seen in his attitude to the punishment laid down by his father for the crime of unnatural sexual intercourse. Ten years before Friedrich II. came to the throne, in 1730, Andreas Lepsch had been burned at the state in Potsdam for sodomy. In 1746, Friedrich II. critisized this procedure on the grounds of its effects on the public, remarking:
"It is undeniable that through frightful public capital punishments, many young and innocent spirits, who naturally want to know the reason for such a terrible executio, especially if they are also unaware of the finer sentiments (just as the criminal is), will be scandalized rather than improved, and it is even possible that evil tendencies may be awakened in them, tendencies of which they previously had no inkling."
He ordered therefore that the practice should stop. Nor was this the only example of the new attitude to penal policy. The Prussian monarch issued a similar decree in 1749 concerning the punishment of breaking with the wheel. The objective was 'not to torment the criminal but rather to make a frightful example of him in order to arouse repugnance in others'. Friedrich commanded therefore that, providing the offender's crime was not of 'such enormity' that a 'completely abhorrent example' was necessary, 'the criminal should be strangled by the hangman before being broken by the wheel, but secretly, and without it coming to the special attention of the assembled spectators, and then his execution with the wheel can proceed'. 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 Friedrich II., the execution was a kind of pedagical theatre, 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 policial purpose, it is also important to note that Friedrich did in the end consider that excesssive suffering was if possible to be avoided. The degree of pain was to be calculated precisely, in rational terms. Along with these measures, Fredrich II. and his advisoers also issued new procedures to speed up the administration of justice and remove abuses. The King throught that if there were fewer executions, each one would constitute a more impressive spectacle. The point was not to kill offenders but to educate the public. A crucial step was taken in 1743, when Friedrich II. removed the death penalty for theft. Where he considered that education would be effective with offenders as well as with the public, he encouraged a switch from capital and corporal punishment to imprisonment. The prison, as a Berlin judge wrote in 1770, should be 'a place not only of punishment but also of improvement'. The prosons and workhouses which were now constructed reflected the widespread eighteenth century belief that poverty, crime and vagrancy were chiefly the result of an idle and disorderly lifestyle. Hard work and submission to the prison rules were intended to encourage a change of attitude on the part of the prisoners and centration on public punishment as a theatrical demonstration designed to make the public abhor the criminal was part, in other words, of a broader concentration on the educative and deterrent function of punishment.
The next big change in Prussia re: capital punishment comes in 1795 and is therefore out of the scope of our era. I haven't found anything in these pages more specific to whether or not the "sodomy" indicated as having been abolished included the m/m variety or not. An English reader would automatically assume it did, I guess, due to the different way the term is used today in English and in German.
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Torture and capital punishment in 18th Century Prussia
Date: 2021-03-15 12:24 pm (UTC)The eighteenth century saw the phasing-out, then the abandonment of torture in virtually every German state. Already in the second half of the seventeenth century, torure began to be less widely applied, with its incidence in Munich falling from 44 per cent of criminal cases in 1650 to merely 16 per cent forty years later. In Prussia King Friedrich I. already required all cases where torture was proposed to be referred to him for advance approval. It was limited to cases of murder and treason by order of Friedrich II. in 1740, then abolished formally by him on 4 August 1754. Other German states followed suit in the second half of the eighteenth century, dropping torture in practice even before it was abandoned by law. Torture was last used in Würtemberg in 1778, and it was formally abolished there in 1809.
(The author lists the various German states and their documented use of torture vs the formal abolishment. Guess which one was the last? Hannover. Last use in 1818; it gets formally declared illegal in 1822. Bear in mind here Hannover is still ruled by Britain, as it will be until Victoria ascends to the throne. Bear also in mind how certain authors even today, like, say, David O. the Émilie and Voltaire biographer, go on about how much more barbaric the German states, especially Prussia, were compared to England in the 18th Century.)
One factor: the increasing use of prisons not just as a temporary hold until the penalty for the criminal was executed (i.e. killing them, torturing them, cutting off limbs) but instead as its own punishment:
The decline of public corporal and capital punishment in Weimar, for example, began with the construction of the penitentiary (Zuchthaus) in 1719. It was some time before this development really took hold. Ironically, the wave of prison foundations that swept the German states in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was part of a general crackdown on crime and deviance that also included a number of draconian extensions of the death penalty. In 1725, King Friedrich Wilhelm I. of Prussia issued an edict declaring that all gypsies found within the boundaries of his kingdom were to be strangled, while sodomites would be burned alive. In 1736 the same monarch threatened to hang thieves in Berlin from gallows erected in front of the houses which they had burgled. (...)
However, this development was relatively short-lived. Not only was it being gradually undermined by the increasing availability of imprisonment as an alternative to these draconian physical sanctions, it was also threatened by the growth of order and stability in German society in the eighteenth century. Recent studies have shown that a long-term decline in crimes of volence began in the late seventeenth century, and continued well into the twentieth. Far from representing a shift from crimes against the person to crimes against property, as used to be thought, this was part of a long-term reduction in overall crime rates which went hand in hand with the growing control of the stae over its citizens. (....) The neding of the great wars of religion that devastated Europe for a century and a half after the Reformation left European society searching for peace and order in an altered world. In a depopulated Germany, in particular, the competition for land and researches had become markedly less severe in the wake of the Thirty Years War. And the end of the 'seventeenth-century crisis', the improvement in climatic condotion with the gradual ending of the 'little ice age', and the start of a prolonged period of growth and prosperity in agriculture, meant a slow improvement in living standards which also played its part in the transformation of social attitudes. The eighteenth century was an era of relative social peace after the upheavals of the previous two hundred years. In the long run, this was bound to have an effect on the way that penal sanctions operated.
While long-term developments in the history of the law, the state and society all undoubtedly underlay the trend towards milder punishments that begain in Germany towards the middle of the eighteenth century, it remains the case that the power over penal policy lay in the hands of the princes, and that legislation to restrict and abolish torture and to do away with the more baroque forms of public punishment was enacted by individual monarchs. Here the crucial figure was Friedrich II (known to his English admirers as Frederick the Great), who succeeded to the Prussian throne in 1740. Like many eighteenth-century monarchs, he was on extremely bad terms with his father, and determined to reverse many of his policies when he became king. (...)
Friedrich II paid particular attention to the legal system. 'Princes are born to be judges of the people,' he wrote; 'everything that makes them great has its origin in the administration of justice.' He found the confusion of Germanic and Roman law, the variety of local practice and custom, the prevalence of corruption and delay (...) both irrational and unproductive. He apointed a series of leading jurists to advise him, especially Samuel Cocceji (1697-1751), Johann Heinrich von Carmer (1721 - 1801), and Carl Gottlieb Svarez (1746 - 98). Their ideas on the civil and criminal law were shaped by the doctrines of the French philosophes. In 1740 they undertook a comprehensive programme of judical reforms, including the effective abolition of torture, as all as the replacement of drowning in a sack with beheading as the punishment for infanticide. A characteristic example of the Prussian monarch's attitude towards penal sanctions and their purpose can be seen in his attitude to the punishment laid down by his father for the crime of unnatural sexual intercourse. Ten years before Friedrich II. came to the throne, in 1730, Andreas Lepsch had been burned at the state in Potsdam for sodomy. In 1746, Friedrich II. critisized this procedure on the grounds of its effects on the public, remarking:
"It is undeniable that through frightful public capital punishments, many young and innocent spirits, who naturally want to know the reason for such a terrible executio, especially if they are also unaware of the finer sentiments (just as the criminal is), will be scandalized rather than improved, and it is even possible that evil tendencies may be awakened in them, tendencies of which they previously had no inkling."
He ordered therefore that the practice should stop. Nor was this the only example of the new attitude to penal policy. The Prussian monarch issued a similar decree in 1749 concerning the punishment of breaking with the wheel. The objective was 'not to torment the criminal but rather to make a frightful example of him in order to arouse repugnance in others'. Friedrich commanded therefore that, providing the offender's crime was not of 'such enormity' that a 'completely abhorrent example' was necessary, 'the criminal should be strangled by the hangman before being broken by the wheel, but secretly, and without it coming to the special attention of the assembled spectators, and then his execution with the wheel can proceed'. 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 Friedrich II., the execution was a kind of pedagical theatre, 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 policial purpose, it is also important to note that Friedrich did in the end consider that excesssive suffering was if possible to be avoided. The degree of pain was to be calculated precisely, in rational terms.
Along with these measures, Fredrich II. and his advisoers also issued new procedures to speed up the administration of justice and remove abuses. The King throught that if there were fewer executions, each one would constitute a more impressive spectacle. The point was not to kill offenders but to educate the public. A crucial step was taken in 1743, when Friedrich II. removed the death penalty for theft. Where he considered that education would be effective with offenders as well as with the public, he encouraged a switch from capital and corporal punishment to imprisonment. The prison, as a Berlin judge wrote in 1770, should be 'a place not only of punishment but also of improvement'. The prosons and workhouses which were now constructed reflected the widespread eighteenth century belief that poverty, crime and vagrancy were chiefly the result of an idle and disorderly lifestyle. Hard work and submission to the prison rules were intended to encourage a change of attitude on the part of the prisoners and centration on public punishment as a theatrical demonstration designed to make the public abhor the criminal was part, in other words, of a broader concentration on the educative and deterrent function of punishment.
The next big change in Prussia re: capital punishment comes in 1795 and is therefore out of the scope of our era. I haven't found anything in these pages more specific to whether or not the "sodomy" indicated as having been abolished included the m/m variety or not. An English reader would automatically assume it did, I guess, due to the different way the term is used today in English and in German.