In 1762, the same year Rousseau introduced the phrase “rights of man,” a French court in Toulouse convicted Jean Calas, a 64-year-old Protestant, of murdering his son Marc-Antoine to prevent his conversion to Catholicism. Calas endured hours of horrific public torture. He died protesting his innocence.

Voltaire took up the case months later, raising funds for the family and publishing his Treatise on Tolerance, in which he argued that religious intolerance could not be a “human right,” his first use of the expression. Initially, Voltaire focused his outrage on religious bigotry rather than the torture or execution methods themselves. The Calas family had discovered Marc-Antoine dead by apparent suicide, but claimed murder to avoid the legal penalties for suicide. Police arrested multiple family members based on inconsistent testimony. Voltaire’s publicity eventually led the Royal Council to acquit the family by 1765. Only then did Voltaire’s focus shift to condemning judicial torture itself, which he first denounced in 1766.

The 1760s marked a turning point across Europe. Prussia had abolished judicial torture in 1754, followed by Sweden (1772), Austria and Bohemia (1776), and France in stages (1780, 1788). Britain ended public processions to Tyburn in 1783, while revolutionary France renounced all torture in 1789 and introduced the guillotine—billed as a humane method of execution—in 1792. Yet before the 1760s, brutal punishments remained ubiquitous. Britain still employed whipping, branding, and execution by drawing and quartering despite the 1689 Bill of Rights’ prohibition of cruel punishment. Colonial America permitted similar punishments, with especially severe penalties for enslaved people. In France, the courts routinely sentenced convicts to public humiliation, branding, whipping, and five different methods of execution, including breaking on the wheel.

The immediate catalyst for reform was Cesare Beccaria’s 1764 Essay on Crimes and Punishments. The 25-year-old Italian aristocrat rejected torture, cruel punishment, and the death penalty, arguing for justice based on “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” His book, quickly translated and widely read, valorized sentiment and empathy in arguing against torments and useless cruelty. Yet even Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire did not immediately connect the emerging language of human rights to torture’s cruelty, suggesting that cultural assumptions had inhibited empathy.

The explanation for this delayed recognition lay in a fundamental cultural transformation regarding views of the human body. Bodies gained new positive value as they came to be seen as separate, self-contained, and individualized. After the 14th century, boundaries between bodies grew sharper as individuals developed greater self-control. People increasingly kept bodily excretions private, felt shame about public defecation, and found sleeping with strangers repellent. In the 18th century, new cultural experiences reinforced this trend. After 1750, opera audiences began listening in silence, fostering intense individual emotional responses, rather than responding vocally and collectively to events on stage. Theaters eliminated stage seating in 1759 and installed benches in the pit in 1782 to create order and distance. Home architecture became more private, with specialized bedrooms and private spaces like boudoirs replacing multipurpose rooms.

Portraiture’s proliferation proved particularly significant. After 1750, exhibitions displayed increasing numbers of portraits depicting ordinary people, especially in Britain and the American colonies, where portrait production quadrupled between 1750 and 1776. This surge reflected a growing belief that ordinary individuals possessed distinction simply through their individuality. Portraits shifted from emphasizing status symbols toward natural renderings of psychological uniqueness. The 1786 invention of the physionotrace, a mechanical method of producing profile portraits, further demonstrated the era’s fascination with capturing individual differences.

This cultural shift collided with traditional justifications for judicial torture. French jurist Pierre-François Muyart de Vouglans defended the old system in 1767, arguing against Beccaria that criminal law rested on experience rather than abstract reasoning. Muyart claimed that humanity’s unruly passions could be controlled only through the terror of avenging justice. Public execution served as a sacrificial rite meant to restore moral and political order. The condemned person’s body did not belong solely to the individual but served higher religious and communal purposes. By the late 18th century, however, public executions often devolved into drunken, unruly spectacles that disturbed observers rather than inspiring awe.

A new, secular understanding of pain emerged, in which suffering belonged exclusively to the individual and could not be sacrificed for communal benefit. This shift stemmed from reevaluating the body itself, not from medical advances. Reformers increasingly argued that public punishment brutalized spectators and destroyed empathy. In 1787, Benjamin Rush insisted that private punishment in prisons aimed at rehabilitation better served society, noting that even criminals shared the same human nature as everyone else.

Initially, even pro-Calas defenders accepted torture’s legitimacy, treating his refusal to confess under torture as proof of his innocence. This defense relied on the traditional assumption that bodies in pain speak truth. After 1750, however, scientists and reformers like Beccaria rejected this view, arguing that pain had no connection to moral truth and that the innocent might confess under duress. Beccaria particularly objected to torture’s private administration, which denied public protection to the accused.

The reform campaign accelerated dramatically in the 1760s. Beccaria’s book spawned 28 Italian editions and nine French editions before 1800, plus translations into English, German, Dutch, Polish, and Spanish. His French translator, André Morellet, strategically moved a reference to “the rights of man” to the introduction, framing it as the book’s central purpose. Publications advocating penal reform grew from a handful in the 1760s to 39 in the 1780s. Reformers like Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville deployed increasingly strong rhetoric, linking cruel punishments to barbarism and violations of human rights. In 1788, Brissot founded the Society of the Friends of the Blacks—an abolitionist organization—showing how the campaign for penal reform was becoming associated with the general defense of human rights.

During the 1780s, lawyers defending wrongly accused clients adopted novelistic, first-person narratives in their briefs to arouse public empathy and indict the entire legal system. Charles-Marguerite Dupaty’s 1786 brief defending three men condemned to the wheel proved so effective that the Parlement of Paris ordered it publicly burned, though public opinion sided with the reformers. The Marquis de Condorcet published pamphlets supporting Dupaty and denouncing the court’s contempt for humanity. By 1788, even the French monarchy adopted reform language. Criminal code reform became one of the most frequently cited demands in 1789 grievance lists for the Estates-General.

This transformation reflected a profound philosophical shift. The new model of personhood saw emotions and reason as partners rather than antagonists. Passions, grounded in biology, fed moral sensibility, which education could cultivate for humanity’s improvement. This view replaced the traditional model based on original sin and the need to contain inherently evil passions. Benjamin Rush’s 1787 pamphlet articulated the new vision, calling sympathy the vice-regent of divine benevolence. Sympathy provided the foundation for morality. Public punishment destroyed this sympathy by making spectators callous. The abolition of torture thus resulted not merely from legal reform but from a fundamental cultural transformation in which individuals came to be understood as autonomous, inviolable, and connected to others through shared sympathy and fellow feeling.