indigenous Americans (Wendat) who visited France were "appalled by the tortures exhibited during public punishments and executions, but what struck them as most remarkable is that 'the French whipped, hanged, and put to death men from among themselves,' rather than external enemies"
(Graeber / Wengrow, quoting historian Denys Delâge)
Delâge goes on to note that indigenous critics, who were likely familiar with atrocities such as Amerindian cannibal rituals, nevertheless observed that European torture practices "manifested power in a conspicuous way, thereby revealing the existence of an internal war [...] the European ritual[s] revealed the existence of a dissymmetry, an irrevocable imbalance of power"
Graeber / Wengrow sum this up, 514: "Public torture, in seventeenth-century Europe, created searing, unforgettable spectacles of pain and suffering in order to convey the message that a system in which husbands could brutalize wives, and parents beat children, was ultimately a form of love. Wendat torture, in the same period of history, created searing, unforgettable spectacles of pain and suffering to make clear that no form of physical chastisement should ever be countenanced inside a community or household."