The syndic himself comes to lock the door of each house from the outside he takes the key with him and hands it over to the intendant of the quarter the intendant keeps it until the end of the quarantine. On the appointed day, everyone is ordered to stay indoors: it is forbidden to leave on pain of death. Each street is placed under the authority of a syndic, who keeps it under surveillance if he leaves the street, he will be condemned to death. The following, according to an order published at the end of the seventeenth century, were the measures to be taken when the plague appeared in a town.įirst, a strict spatial partitioning: the closing of the town and its outlying districts, a prohibition to leave the town on pain of death, the killing of all stray animals the division of the town into distinct quarters, each governed by an intendant. Translated from the French by Alan Sherida. Originally published in France as Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison. The full text is available online, here we share a segment from the chapter Panopticism (pp195–200.)
To comprehend the meaning and the gravity of the Hungarian government's decision of declaring a state of emergency, one should revisit Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish.
"(.) in order to see perfect disciplines functioning, rulers dreamt of the state of plague." Hoover Archives Research Assistance Scholarship.
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