This chapter notes how ancient societies used capital punishment, highlighting methods of execution and various legal codes (e.g., Draco's Code and the Code of Hammurabi) authorizing executions. The chapter discusses the "divine right of kings," corporal punishments used in prior centuries, and the lex talionis doctrine. It also highlights how punishment practices were tied to religious and societial beliefs, including interpretation of religious texts. The chapter traces the change in the law from the Dark Ages to the Enlightenment, taking note of how judicial torture--a practice associated with contintental European civil law systems--was outlawed in certain locales in the eighteenth century even as harsh systems of punishment (e.g., the English "Bloody Code") persisted. The chapter also describes the Enlightenment thinkers--John Bellers, George Fox, William Penn, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Frederick II, Cesare Beccaria, and William Blackstone--who critiqued torture and capital punishment or called for the death penalty's abolition or curtailment. The chapter describes the death penalty's abolition in Tuscany (1786) and Austria (1787) and how the Enlightenment shaped the law.

Civil war has beset France yet again. Victor Hugo reacts to the slaughter of the Commune in 1872 by telling – like Vergil, Lucan, and Augustine – a story from the past. Quatrevingt-treize is set during the Terror (1793) following the French Revolution. Paradigmatic characters and places instantiate ideologies that have mapped positions since ancient Rome. As in Augustine, no history has managed to overcome civil war. Christianity has merely enabled the shift to a new form of domination in monarchy. A new republic is needed that will refound France – a universal paradigm like Rome – on secularized Christian values that will finally bring new order to the world.