A Revolutionary Pain in the Neck

Today, July 28 marks the anniversary of the death of French revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre. During the French Revolution, Big Max ran a group called the Committee of Safety, which was a pretty cool thing to be in charge of since it gave him political license to condemn all his enemies to death. 

The main target of the French Revolution’s blood bath was the King and Queen as well as most of the French aristocracy.  It was Robespierre that condemned King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette to death.  Of course the main down fall of the French Revolution was that they began to turn on each other.  In very short order Robespierre lost political power and popularity and as the Buddhists would say was able to realize his karma in this lifetime when he was also executed.

 In honor of Robespierre death Killer History brings a discussion of the French Revolution’s execution method of choice, the Guillotine. 

At its basic level the guillotine was a grizzly device used to separate an individual from his or her head. Usually large crowds would form to watch the public decapitations and in the case of the French Revolution became quite vocal in their calls for the aristocracy’s blood to be spilt.  The execution itself took a split second to happen, with gravity doing the work to drop the giant blade across the accused individual’s neck, thus severing the head.

The guillotine was not the first mechanical device used for decapitation, but found its place when the French Revolutionaries in their attempt to create rules of governance took up the issue of executions in its newly established penal code.  Dr. Guillotine, obviously with an angle for self promotion of his invention introduced rules to the assembly that mandated executions should be via decapitation.  He suggested that the assembly adopt at device that he designed and offered a series of sketches of the new death machine in the fall of 1789. 

While the assembly initially mocked the good Doctor’s death machine, they did adopt his other penal code suggestions that included the standardization of punishments on a national level, the treatment of the accused/condemned individuals family, prohibition’s to seize the accused/condemned individual and/or their family’s property and the safe return of the executed person’s body after death.

It took a couple of years of debate before the assembly could agree to retain execution and then further discussion on finding a humane method.  Most of the members of the assembly felt that previous execution methods were just too brutal for a modern society.  Eventually support for decapitation started to grow since it was such a quick and accurate method to put someone to death and consequently the adoption of Dr.Guillotine’s killing machine started to gain traction in 1791. 

The first decapitation machine was built and tested on corpses.  After a few tweaks were made a final version was ready for prime time. The first Guillotine execution happened in the spring of 1792.

One of the not so significant impacts of the Guillotine was it leveled the playing field for executions. Before this device was built only the rich and infamous were decapitated in France and throughout Europe for that matter.  The Guillotine enabled even the most common criminal to be humanly executed. 

Of course, what is nearly forgotten is the Guillotine was an invention created via the need for political compromise.  In 1789, many French Assembly members wanted to ban executions since the methods used had been so barbaric.  The Guillotine was seen as a tool of compromise. Hard liners that insisted the death penalty was a crime deterrent would be happy and more liberal members that fretted about of the pain and suffering of the condemned individual were also satisfied.   Of course, by the end of 1799 nearly 15,000 people were executed in France including many of the members of the Assembly that called for its implementation.

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