![]() This article thus aims to provide an analysis of the forms this thanatopower Footnote 4 has taken. However, while Western states Footnote 2 may be highly involved in developing policies for prolonging human life, they continue to legitimize some forms of interrupting human life-although they have done away with death as a punitive measure, as in the case in France since 1981 Footnote 3. The emergence of palliative care in the late 20th century may be seen as a symptom of this evolution (Memmi, Citation1996). Of course, state “killings” have gradually disappeared over the 20th century, particularly since the end of World War II, which saw an unprecedented “lay sacralization” of human life. ![]() Yet this first type of state intervention obscured another, pertaining to how the state, through law and public policies, could actually organize the interruption of some lives. From this standpoint, a process of medicalizing death, familiar to sociologists and actively fostered by the French state, was already underway. Whether focusing on the heart or the brain, this first type of codification sought to associate the time of medically defined death with that of its legal recognition it used medical knowledge (clinical definitions of death, ways in which it could be measured) to legitimize a political definition. The primacy of cardiac activity in the definition was reaffirmed by a 1947 decree and remained in force until 1996, when the legal system was faced with the new challenge of organ transplants and set the new criterion of cerebral activity Footnote 1. The 1889 Civil Code initially set a single definition for it (as the cessation of heartbeats) as well as a time threshold authorizing the implementation of inheritance laws. Have the state and the law lost interest in death? Far from it, according to Iacub, who, in a 1999 article, identified the key stages characterizing the French legal definition of death (Iacub Citation1999).
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