Maybe today our prisons will cause shame. The 19th century was proud of the fortresses it built on the boundaries of cities and sometimes in the heart of cities. He was pleased in that new benignity that replaced the scoops. He was amazed not to punish the bodies and to know how to correct the souls. Those walls, those locks, those cells were a true company of social orthopedics. Those who stole were imprisoned, also those who raped or killed.

Where does the curious project of enclosing to correct, discipline, control, that bring with them the penal codes of the modern era come from? Is it an inheritance from medieval dungeons? Rather, a novel technology: the development of a set of collective coercion procedures to divide into zones, measure, channel individuals and make them both “docile
and useful.” Surveillance, exercises, maneuvers, scores, ranks and places, classifications, exams, records: a way to subdue the bodies, to master human multiplicities and to manipulate their forces, which was deployed in hospitals, the army, schools and workshops: discipline.

The nineteenth century invented, without a doubt, the freedoms, but it gave them a deep and solid subsoil: the disciplinary society, on which we still depend.