The confessor's speech close to the torture victims (Paris, 17th-18th century)

The ritual of execution in early modem France appears inconsistent in that it excludes the condemned one from the religious community, particularly with the denial of Last Rites and Christian burial, while permitting the presence of a confessor at his sides. From a judicial point of view, the relationship between speech, salvation, the condemned and the confessor is fundamental to the comprehension of the link between the king's justice and God's justice. The crossroads of baroque literature, judicial archives and books of penance and confession reveal the position held by the confessor since the counter-reformation within the desacralization of justice in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.