Robert-François Damiens
Damiens was the last person in France to be executed by drawing and quartering, a gruesome procedure reserved for those convicted of attempting regicide, or the assassination of a monarch. He had attempted to kill King Louis XV in 1757 and was executed in March of that year. Foucault opens Discipline and Punish with a description of the execution because it demonstrated the convergence of sovereign power and public spectacles of punishment. Most importantly, it was the last such execution in France, and so it marks the end of an era of this kind of power. Foucault discusses Damiens as the last marker of the sovereign era.
Jeremy Bentham
Bentham was a British philosopher and reformer who lived from 1748 to 1832. A utilitarian, he believed societies should aim to increase the happiness of the greatest number of people, without impinging on their rights or limiting sources of happiness that were harmless to others. This led him to advocate for individual rights and freedoms, including freedom of expression, equal rights for women, and rights to sexual freedom. In Discipline and Punish, he is important as the theorist of the Panopticon, a building whose design could be used for prisons, hospitals, and schools and whose aim would be the most efficient way of managing prisoners, patients, or students. The building was originally thought of by Bentham’s brother, and it was never actually built, but for Foucault, it symbolizes a new distribution of power in which people think they are always being watched all the time, from pan (“all”) and opticon (“observation”).
The Sovereign
The sovereign as a figure is the ultimate source of power in monarchical societies, including France and England. Discipline and Punish is about the loss of sovereign power in the early 1800s, as authority started to be attributed more to the people of a country and less to their ruler. Thus, the book opens with the last execution of someone who attempted regicide, or the killing of a sovereign, in France. This would be the ultimate crime in a sovereign society, because it is a killing of the source of power itself. But, as Foucault describes, societies began to change in what they considered the nature of crime and the sources of power.
The People
As sovereign power waned, the power of the people rose. This marks the rise of more democratic rather than monarchical societies. Power rests in the population, which can vote and organize and protest, rather than in an individual who dominates that population. At first, this power was directed against the sovereign, for instance as people protested public executions that were an exercise of sovereign authority. Eventually, the power is also directed back against the people themselves, as everyone begins to feel that everyone is watching and judging everyone else. This is one of the ironies of the rise of power belonging to the people. It means everyone is both a part of power and subject to a power that is everywhere.
