Tea at Trianon: Invention of the Guillotine

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, May 6, 2017

Invention of the Guillotine

From Shannon Selin:

Although named after Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin (1738-1814), the guillotine was not invented by him. Other decapitation devices – the Diele in medieval Germany, the mannaia in 16th C Italy, the “Maiden” in Scotland, the Halifax gibbet in England – had existed for centuries.

Dr. Guillotin actually opposed capital punishment and wanted to make executions more humane. In 1789, as a deputy to France’s National Assembly, Guillotin argued that all capital criminals should be killed in the same fashion, and as swiftly and painlessly as possible. At the time, commoners were hanged, burned at the stake, or broken on the wheel, while nobles had the luxury of having their head chopped off by a sword. Guillotin proposed that where the death penalty was imposed, the punishment should be decapitation by means of “a simple mechanism.” In 1791, the National Assembly adopted a change to the penal code in which every person condemned to death was to have their head cut off.

It was left to Dr. Antoine Louis, secretary of the Royal Academy of Surgeons, to design a machine that would make beheadings fast and simple. The first model of what was initially nicknamed the “petit louison” or “louisette” was built by a German harpsichord maker named Tobias Schmidt. He tested it out on sheep, calves and corpses. The first guillotine execution – of highwayman Nicolas Jacques Pelletier – took place on April 25, 1792 at the Place de Grève in Paris. The official executioner, Charles-Louis Sanson, said:

Today the machine invented for the purpose of decapitating criminals sentenced to death will be put to work for the first time. Relative to the methods of execution practised heretofore, this machine has several advantages. It is less repugnant: no man’s hands will be tainted with the blood of his fellow being, and the worst of the ordeal for the condemned man will be his own fear of death, a fear more painful to him than the stroke which deprives him of life. (1)
Both Dr. Louis (who died later that year) and Dr. Guillotin greatly regretted that their names were attached to the device.

In 1795, after the death of over 16,000 people during the Reign of Terror, the National Convention passed an act that promised abolition of the death penalty when “general peace” arrived in France. But peace didn’t come. The French Revolutionary Wars turned into the Napoleonic Wars. In 1810 Napoleon Bonaparte issued a new criminal code that eradicated the eventual abolition of the death penalty. The new code affirmed that anyone condemned to death should be decapitated. Napoleon’s successors, the Bourbon Kings Louis XVIII and Charles X, also retained the guillotine, even though it had taken the lives of their brother King Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette. (Read more.)