Justice & Law Quote by Pierre Corneille

Corneille flips the audience's gaze away from the spectacle and back onto the moral act that supposedly justifies it. In 17th-century France, punishment was theater: public executions weren’t only about removing a criminal, they were staged confirmations of state power and social order. By insisting that "the crime" is the disgrace, not "the scaffold", Corneille is trying to sever that theatrical link - to stop shame from attaching to the apparatus of justice and reattach it to individual agency.

The line also smuggles in a defense of legitimacy. If the scaffold is not disgraceful, then the regime that erects it isn’t, either. That’s a politically convenient distinction in an era when sovereign authority needed to look divinely sanctioned rather than brutally coercive. Corneille, the tragedian of honor and duty, is always negotiating between personal passion and public law; here he makes the state’s violence narratively "clean" by reframing it as mere consequence, not moral stain.

The subtext is an argument about reputation. Scaffolds generate sympathy, martyrs, and doubt - the executed can look noble, even wronged, especially when the punishment becomes the most vivid part of the story. Corneille tries to control that optics: don’t let the machinery of death steal the moral spotlight. It’s a playwright’s insight as much as a moral claim. Whoever owns the frame owns the verdict.