A Ghostly Corpse in the City? Spatial Configurations and Iconographic Representations of Capital Punishment in the ‘Belgian’ Space (16th–20th C.)

Abstract

This contribution addresses the complex relation between ‘sovereign’ power, legitimate State violence, and public space in the ‘Belgian’ territories. By linking the spatiality of the execution and its iconographic representation to changing socio-political power configurations, it studies the role of the Belgian ‘culture of capital executions’ in its specific path of State formation. The trend of removing the death penalty from the communal agora is a general issue in the West. From the Middle Ages, capital executions were characterised by specific appropriations of space by central authorities, local elites and ordinary citizens. During the eighteenth century, local powers faced attempts of the central governments to control the public execution, and more specifically the death penalty. Data from the 1770s to the 1850s, during several quickly succeeding political regimes, supports the hypothesis of a decline of publicly exposed death penalties. In nineteenth century Belgium, the gradual disappearance of the public execution as a spectacular expression of the State runs parallel with the (all but) inexistence of an iconography’ of public executions. The guillotine appears as the expression of a change in criminal justice and it also influences the representation of capital execution. It focuses now on the cutted head, the seat of the mental faculties. During the same period, cell confinement is considered by the State as a mean of control the criminal's mind.