The guillotine dominated a gruesome part of European history and continues to engage the imagination to this day.
But the guillotine was never supposed to become the killing machine that it did.
When the French physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin advocated for the use of the beheading device as a method of execution, he could not have known that it would be used to kill thousands of his countrymen.
The guillotine was initially invented as a mercy device. It was supposed to be a modernization of Medieval execution methods that had grown gory and inhumane. Enlightened people could not bear to kill people in such ways any longer. There had to be a better way. Those condemned to die should not also have to be tortured en-route to their final punishment.
A death penalty opponent, Guillotin was displeased with the breaking wheel and other common and gruesome methods of execution and sought to persuade Louis XVI of France to implement a less painful alternative. French surgeon and physiologist Antoine Louis, together with German engineer Tobias Schmidt, built a prototype for the guillotine.
According to the memoires of the French executioner Charles-Henri Sanson, Louis XVI suggested the use of a straight, angled blade instead of a curved one.
Old execution methods
Before the invention of the guillotine, execution was brutal and somewhat arbitrary. A person’s death experience would be shaped by the strength of the arms of the man wielding the ax or the skill of the person tying a slip knot.
Some beheadings would take more than one swing to accomplish. Others would slowly die at the end of a rope. In the Medieval world, this was simply a fact of life, but during the Age of Enlightenment, these arbitrary factors began to weigh on the minds of many.
Prior to 1791, under the Ancien Régime, there existed a variety of means of capital punishment in France, depending on the crime and the status of the condemned person:
- Hanging was the most common punishment.
- Decapitation by sword, for nobles only.
- Burning for arson, bestiality, heresy, sodomy, and witchcraft. The convict was occasionally discreetly strangled.
- Breaking wheel for brigandage and murder. The convict could be strangled before having his limbs broken or after, depending on the atrocity of his crime.
- Death by boiling for counterfeiting.
- Dismemberment for high treason, parricide, and regicide.
The new wave of enlightenment sentiment led to a reexamination of the death penalty. Death didn’t have to be painful, messy, or arbitrary. It could be fast and efficient as the rest of the machines being invented at the time.
New execution method
Contrary to popular belief, Joseph-Ignace Guillotin did not invent the execution method that bears his name. Guillotin was simply the person who advocated for its use in France.
Joseph-Ignace Guillotin did not believe in the death penalty and thought that if people should die, it should be as fast and painless as possible.
The guillotine was not invented during the 18th century, there are records of similar devices being used across Europe for hundreds of years, but the method did not gain traction until the advocacy of Joseph-Ignace Guillotin.
Guillotin put out six proposals to the French government regarding execution.
He proposed the following:
- All punishments for the same class of crime shall be the same, regardless of the criminal (i.e., there would be no privilege for the nobility)
- When the death sentence is applied, it will be by decapitation, carried out by a machine
- The family of the guilty party will not suffer any legal discrimination
- It will be illegal to anyone to reproach the guilty party’s family about his/her punishment
- The property of the convicted shall not be confiscated
- The bodies of those executed shall be returned to the family if so requested
Joseph-Ignace Guillotin believed that the use of the guillotine would make execution fast and painless for the victims, even though he did not believe in capital punishment.
Many of these proposals were indeed taken up by the government, which led to the so-called execution “machine” to take up his name. What Joseph-Ignace Guillotin did not know was that his proposals were about to make it extremely easy for [the French Revolution] to slaughter thousands of his fellow citizens via his methods.
Legacy
By all accounts, the guillotine is indeed a quicker and cleaner method of execution. The singular action of the decapitation eliminates much of the arbitrary human error that had been a part of European execution for centuries while still partaking in monarchs’ favorite method of killing. (Kings and despots loved to display the heads of victims as a display of power and justice over the gates and walls of cities throughout Europe.)
The guillotine became so ubiquitous that Joseph-Ignace Guillotin’s family demanded the name of the device be changed. Their request was refused, so his family changed their name instead. They did not want to be associated with the device.
The French Revolution saw the country spiral out of control, and the favored method of execution was via guillotine. Merchants, queens, kings, peasants, revolutionary leaders, and soldiers alike were all led to the stocks and beheaded via guillotine during this period.
The last public guillotining in France was of Eugen Weidmann, who was convicted of six murders. He was beheaded on 17 June 1939 outside the prison Saint-Pierre, rue Georges Clemenceau, at Versailles, which is now the Palais de Justice.
Numerous issues with the proceedings arose: inappropriate behavior by spectators, incorrect assembly of the apparatus, and secret cameras filming and photographing the execution from several storeys above. In response, the French government ordered that future executions be conducted in the prison courtyard in private.
The final three guillotine executions in France before its abolition were those of child-murderers Christian Ranucci (on 28 July 1976) in Marseille, Jérôme Carrein (on 23 June 1977) in Douai and torturer-murderer Hamida Djandoubi (on 10 September 1977) in Marseille.
Execution by guillotine was the official method until France abolished the death penalty in 1981.
Execution by guillotine was the official method until France abolished the death penalty in 1981.
Djandoubi's death was the last time that the guillotine was used for an execution by any government.
Elsewhere
In Germany, the guillotine is known as the Fallbeil ("falling axe") and was used in various German states from the 19th century onwards. In Nazi Germany, it saw 16,500 victims. It was used as well in East Germany for secret executions.
The guillotine was last used in West Germany in 1949 in the execution of Richard Schuh and was last used in East Germany in 1966 in the execution of Horst Fischer. The Stasi used the guillotine in East Germany between 1950 and 1966 for secret executions.
The guillotine was last used in West Germany in 1949 in the execution of Richard Schuh and was last used in East Germany in 1966 in the execution of Horst Fischer. The Stasi used the guillotine in East Germany between 1950 and 1966 for secret executions.
A number of countries, primarily in Europe, continued to employ this method of execution into the 19th and 20th centuries, but they ceased to use it before France did in 1977.
In Belgium, the last person to be beheaded was Francis Kol. Convicted of robbery and murder, he received his punishment on 8 May 1856. During the period from 19 March 1798 to 30 March 1856, there were 19 beheadings in Antwerp.
In Switzerland, it was used for the last time by the canton of Obwalden in the execution of murderer Hans Vollenweider in 1940.
In Greece, the guillotine (along with the firing squad) was introduced as a method of execution in 1834; it was last used in 1913.
In Sweden, beheading became the mandatory method of execution in 1866. The guillotine replaced manual beheading in 1903, and it was used only once, in the execution of murderer Alfred Ander in 1910 at Långholmen Prison, Stockholm. Ander was also the last person to be executed in Sweden before capital punishment was abolished there in 1921.
In South Vietnam, after the Diệm regime enacted the 10/59 Decree in 1959, mobile special military courts were dispatched to the countryside in order to intimidate the rural population; they used guillotines, which had belonged to the former French colonial power, in order to carry out death sentences on the spot. One such guillotine is still on show at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City.
In French colonies in Africa, the Maghreb, Indochina.
In the Western Hemisphere, the guillotine saw only limited use. The only recorded guillotine execution in North America north of the Caribbean took place on the French island of St. Pierre in 1889, of Joseph Néel, with a guillotine brought in from Martinique.
In the Caribbean, it was used quite rarely in Guadeloupe and Martinique, the last time in Fort-de-France in 1965.
In South America, the guillotine was only used in French Guiana, where about 150 people were beheaded between 1850 and 1945: most of them were convicts exiled from France and incarcerated within the "bagne", or penal colonies.
Within the Southern Hemisphere, it worked in New Caledonia (which had a bagne too until the end of the 19th century) and at least twice in Tahiti.
In 1996 in the United States, Georgia State Representative Doug Teper unsuccessfully sponsored a bill to replace that state's electric chair with the guillotine.
In recent years, a limited number of individuals have died by suicide using a guillotine which they had constructed themselves.
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde