The right to punish has been shifted from the vengeance of the sovereign to the defence of society.

This dysfunction of power was related to a central excess: what might be called the monarchical ‘super-power’, which identified the right to punish with the personal power of the sovereign. This theoretical identification made the king the fons justitiae; but the practical consequences of this were to be found even in that which appeared to oppose

The example is no longer a ritual that manifests; it is a sign that serves as an obstacle.

In these executions, which ought to show only the terrorizing power of the prince, there was a whole aspect of the carnival, in which rules were inverted, authority mocked and criminals transformed into heroes.

It is no longer simply: ‘Who committed it?’ But: ‘How can we assign the causal process that produced it?

As a result, justice no longer takes public responsibility for the violence that is bound up with its practice.

Furthermore, the atrocity of a crime was also the violence of the challenge flung at the sovereign; it was that which would move him to make a reply whose function was to go further than this atrocity, to master it, to overcome it by an excess that annulled it.

in short, make the technology of power the very principle both of the humanization of the penal system and of the knowledge of man.

The criticism of the reformers was directed not so much at the weakness or cruelty of those in authority, as at a bad economy of power.