Amende honorable
Amende honorable was originally a mode of punishment in France which required the offender, stripped to his shirt, and led into a church or auditory with a torch in his hand and a rope round his neck held by the public executioner, to beg pardon on his knees of his God, his king, and his country; now used to denote a satisfactory apology or reparation.
The amende honorable was sometimes incorporated into a larger ritual of capital punishment (specifically the French version of drawing and quartering) for parricides and regicides; this is described in the 1975 book Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault, notably in reference to Robert-François Damiens who was condemned to make the amende honorable before the main door of the Church of Paris in 1757.
This article incorporates content from the 1728 Cyclopaedia, a publication in the public domain.
This article incorporates text from the public domain 1907 edition of The Nuttall Encyclopædia.
Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia; from the article "Amende honorable". Image Credit.
