By the middle of 18 hundreds, most of these major states are doing away with public executions or changing them in ways to make the crowds very small. The educated middle classes now found the crowd's behavior repugnant and its deliberate desacralization at the hands of the authorities had gradually stripped it of its meanings for the common people. Evans then says that what had happened was you had this religious ritual that the state eventually took the religion out of, de stabilizing the whole thing. And basically left nothing left but for people to enjoy it for curiosity reasons, or statistic reasons, or filling the blank reasons he writes.