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practices, officially intended to foster popular disgust for certain crimes and to force those who are sentenced for them never to forget following their release from prison what they have done, are often criticized, they also have ardent defenders, even within the ranks of self-styled progressives.44 Degradation penalties w ere different. They w ere aimed chiefly at ru ining a person’s reputation, by declaring him to be unworthy. In this sense they fell outside the roster of classical punishments. The Roman censors, whose duties included the supervision of public and private mo rality, were authorized to examine alleged violations of oaths of office or of matrimony, conduct deemed harmful by its indifference to civic virtue, even displays of luxury that w ere considered to be excessive. But they could not inflict real punishment, either by imposing a fine or by setting a term of imprisonment. Their jurisdiction extended only as far as a person’s reputation, which could be diminished through a reduc tion of honors or rank, or through a lowering of social status by exclu sion from one’s tribe.45 Like stigmatizing penalties, penalties entailing a loss of rank or status w ere to play an important role until the eigh teenth c entury in Europe. They often strengthened, and symbolically aggravated, penal sanctions applied to persons whose status under the ancien régime was associated with membership in a body considered to be socially influential (the nobility, the clergy, officers of the realm, and so on). Auxiliary punishment consisted in this case in disaffiliating offenders from such bodies. The so-called infamous penalty (peine d’infamie) was a way of publicly dishonoring them—and this in an age when honor was often considered a greater good than life itself. Thus a parliamentary councillor convicted of having falsified an inquest might, in addition to being removed from office, be solemnly stripped of his red robe during a public hearing. A priest sentenced to death might be pub licly degraded, by being made to divest himself of the chasuble, stole, and alb he had been forced to wear as if he were preparing to say mass, prior to being executed, again publicly. A noble might be made to forfeit his titles and lowered to the condition of a commoner.46 These penal ties, though they w ere not provided for by law, expressed the determi nation of such bodies to show themselves worthy of public confidence by expelling those who had showed contempt for their sworn duty to serve the common good. With the French Revolution, honor ceased to be the privilege of a few. But by the same token every person was now
