Michel Foucault titled his lectures at the Collège de France from 1971 and 1972 "Theories and Institutions of Punishment." In these lectures, he addresses questions of power and punishment for the first time, exploring the practices and institutions of discipline that would become a central hallmark of modern society and preoccupy him until his major work "Discipline and Punish" (1975) and beyond. He begins with investigations into medieval law, penance and martyrdom, as well as the peasant uprisings of the Nu-Pieds in France in the 17th century, to which the emerging modern French state under Richelieu responded with new techniques of surveillance, confinement, and discipline. Foucault identifies a historical key moment in the development of the state of the modern disciplinary society.