The Guillotine

Although indelibly associated in literature, the cinema, television and the European cultural tradition generally with the French Revolution, 1789-93, and with the death penalty in France, the machine that beheads by means of a blade that falls between two grooved vertical columns is in reality much older. Small primitive versions were used for the execution of nobles as early as the fourteenth century, especially in Scotland.

It was the French physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, born in Saintes in 1738 and elected to the National Assembly in 1789, who first promoted a law that required that all executions, even those of commoners and plebeians, be carried out by means of a “machine that beheads painlessly”. An easy death –so to speak– was no longer to be the prerogative of nobles. After a series of experiments on cadavers taken from a public hospital, the first of these machines –in all essentials identical to the one here– was put up in the Place de Grève in Paris on 4 April 1792, and the first execution –in the event, of a very plebeian highwayman– took place on the 25th of the same month. Soon this invention was to become the hallmark of the years 1792-94.

Science quickly now discovered a new and surprising fact (confirmed since by modern neurophysiology): a head cut off by a swift slash of axe or guillotine knows that it is a beheaded head whilst it rolls along the ground or into the basket –consciousness survives long enough for such a perception.

After the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette on 21 January 1793, the “machine”, called only thus until these two events, became known also as “la louisette” or “le louison”; only after 1800 did the term “la guillotine” became established. As such it remained in use in many countries, including the Papal States and the kingdoms of Piedmont and Bourbon Naples until 1860; it was used in France until the abolition of the death penalty under Mitterrand in 1981. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin died peacefully in 1821, at the age of eighty three.