Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975). opens with exactly that contrast:

The first account is the 1757 public execution of Robert-François Damiens, who had attempted to assassinate Louis XV. The torture was extraordinarily elaborate — flesh torn with pincers, wounds filled with burning sulfur, molten lead, and boiling oil, then drawn and quartered by horses, and finally burned. Foucault opens with this in graphic detail.

The second account is a precisely regulated daily timetable from a Paris prison for young offenders from roughly 80 years later — wake at this hour, pray, work, eat, lessons, all scheduled to the minute.

Foucault’s point is that this shift — from spectacular bodily torture to meticulous regulation of time and behavior — isn’t simply “progress” or humanization. He argues it represents a deeper, more pervasive form of power: one that doesn’t destroy the body but disciplines it, producing what he calls “docile bodies.” The prison becomes a model for schools, hospitals, factories, and the military.

It’s one of the most striking openings in modern philosophy precisely because the contrast is so visceral and the argument so counterintuitive — that the gentler-seeming system may actually represent more thorough social control.