innocence: signs of the normal

Its difficult to doubt that cruelty is a major obsession and obscenity of modern life. The mediatised examples are a running faucet of lurid sensationalism that play on the disquieting tendencies of attraction and repulsion. Leaving aside, the more large-scale but often equally ritualized violence of war, are we as individuals more cruel than our ancestors? Are we more wanton in our infliction of pain?

Read More:http://www.answers.com/topic/battle-of-culloden

In January, 1757, Robert Francois Damiens made a feeble attempt to assassinate Louis XV of France. Though his small life barely penetrated the king’s thick winter clothes, causing little more than a four inch scratch, Damiens was caught,and tortured to make him name his accomplices of which he had none. Then he became centerpiece of a theatre of cruelty. The philosopher La Condamine, for one, was so fascinated by the prospect of such an extravagant spectacle that he got himself a place on the scaffold to watch the victim. He was part of a huge audience that paid exorbitant sums to view Damiens’s flesh pulled off with red-hot pincers and his battered body pulled apart by horses. After that the Parisians- aristocrats, bourgeoisie and workingman alike- went back to their dinners.

---Three posts eighteen feet high reached to the sky and met at the top to form a triangle. The horizontal crossbeams were nine feet across allowing for multiple people to be strung across. Not only was this design meant to be efficient in executing multiple people (rarely was there only one person executed at Tyburn) but it was also created with public viewing kept in mind. Public executions were always a popular event to attend and Tyburn hangings always drew in a big crowd. William Hogarth immortalized the Tyburn crowds in his Industry and Idleness series. Monday was the big execution day, and for a fee you could get a seat in the stands specially built just to attend the hangings. Other spectators had to push and shove in the crowd to get a glimpse while pickpockets and prostitutes made use of the spectacle to get some money in their pockets.---Read More:http://georgianaduchessofdevonshire.blogspot.com/2010/08/tyburn-triple-tree-of-death.html

The Damiens execution was more elaborately staged than most for the time, but it was still highly traditional. Damiens’s executioners had carefully copied, with scrupulous attention to detail, the way Francois Ravaillac, the assassin of Henry IV, had been put to death in 1610. The French however, should not be branded a peculiarly ferocious. The treatment of traitors in England, a method of execution that had first been used against Catholic priests in Elizabeth I’s reign, was equally horrifying.

Before a vast crowd in a carnival-like atmosphere, the traitor was hanged, but taken down while still alive; then his genitals were cut off and stuffed in his mouth, he was disembowled, and finally his head was cut off and his trunk quartered. The head, stuck on a pike, would festoon Temple Bar for years; sometimes the quarters were sent to decorate provincial cities. These were but upsurges in an ocean of cruelty. Several times a year huge crowds swarmed to Tyburn to watch and enjoy the executions by hanging of men and women, youths and girls, turned off the ladder into eternity for minor robberies and petty pilfering, as well as murder and mayhem.


---Tom Idle is being driven to the scaffold in the same cart as his coffin and a demonstrative Methodist preacher, whose dire words and the imminence of his own death seem to have filled the condemned man with horror. They are preceded by the Ordinary of Newgate, whose duty it was to comfort the prisoner at the hour of his execution. The ‘Ordinary’s Account’, published later, was always a bestseller, but an alternative story – ‘The last dying Speech and Confession of Tho. Idle’ – is already being peddled here by the ballad-seller in the foreground, even before Idle is dead. Hogarth implied that there were two ways of interpreting this scene: one was through the moralistic chronicle of the Ordinary, which would emphasise the inevitable moral decline from early misdemeanour, through crime, to the gallows (much as in Hogarth’s own narrative); the other was through the more subversive ballad which might rescue the sinner and make him into an heroic figure for the populace.--- Read More:http://industryandidleness.wordpress.com/plate-xi-the-idle-%E2%80%99prentice-executed-at-tyburn/

Such sadism was not merely an occasional visual thrill, for cruelty had been deeply embedded in western European society for centuries and was still to be for a century or so more. It was a constant theme of everyday life, a continuing event of family experience.

Cruelty to animals was widespread. One might say total. Cocks fought each other to the death, bulls and bears were baited by specially trained dogs; cats were sewn up in effigies of the pope to create realistic howls when they were burned. Oxen and horses were driven and flogged until they dies. And yet, animals were not treated much different, or worse than infants or small children. The callous behavior of parents and adults to infants in seventeenth-century England or eighteenth-century France is scarcely credible. Swaddling was universal. Newborn babies were stretched out on a board, a piece of diaper stuck between their thighs, and then strapped down so tight they could not move. Swaddled infants were frequently hung up on pegs on the wall and left there, and of course they lived in their own feces and urine until they were re-swaddled. In any event death of an infant was of small consequence: 50 per cent of all infants died before they were a year old.

---Nero has embarked on a life of highway robbery. He is seen here being apprehended after committing a murder in the dead of night. As with Tom Idle in Industry and Idleness, Hogarth underlines that the reality of being a highwayman is far from the glamorous, romantic existence presented by popular heroes such as Captain Macheath in The Beggar’s Opera. Indeed, Nero’s grotesque appearance conveys the inherent viciousness of his character and brutalising way of life. His victim, Ann Gill, his lover and partner-in-crime, lies prostrate on the floor, her throat slit. Her swollen stomach makes it clear that she was pregnant. --- Read More:http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/hogarth/modernmorals/fourstagesofcruelty.shtm

The fight against cruelty was long and arduous. However, this attitude never permeated the whole of society or restrained the behavior o


vernments. Its influence has always been fragile and may be even growing towards certain classes of men and women. There is no cause for self-congratulation; the aesthetic and pornography of violence stirs deep and dangerous emotions and seems ingrained in the world of advertising and marketing to create tension, fear, and anxiety to sell product.

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