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The guillotine remained in use in France well into the 20th century. Thus it came to symbolize state terrorism but also swift and equal justice. It was the guillotine’s plummeting blade that took off head after head with just a bit of cleaning and sharpening in between, answering the need of the moment. This number included almost exclusively those charged with political crimes. The most careful estimate for the number of French executed during the Terror, the height of the radical Revolution, was 17,000. With the need to execute many prisoners the guillotine was pressed into greater use. As the Revolution became more radical, and politicians saw plots everywhere, increasing numbers of citizens were sentenced to death. Less cruel and unusual?Įventually, the French Revolution became more politically radical, moving from a system where the king would continue to govern within a constitutional system to a republic where the people’s representatives would wield political power to a de facto dictatorship. The guillotine was a killing machine that provided not just a convenient method of execution but the proper political and ideological message for the Revolution. And it ended the capricious torment of the condemned by the monarchy as well as the privilege that nobles had, even regarding the manner of their deaths. It leveled bodies and society, with all citizens subject to the same punishment. The so-called “ national razor” took off the heads of the royal family as well as the humblest thief. His ideas finally became law in March 1791 and the guillotine was used for an execution the following year. It would be easy to use, work quickly and offer the same treatment to all condemned, regardless of social standing.
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Joseph Guillotin, who presented plans for a bladed machine to execute criminals. The solution to disparate forms of execution and social equality was first presented to the French National Assembly on Oct. Fleischmann (1908), Wikimedia Medium is the message One of the many goals of the French Revolution, which took place from 1789 to 1815, was to level society, to take away the privileges of the nobility, who lorded over commoners.Įxecution by guillotine in France, 1793. For nobles, a quick, relatively painless, and more dignified beheading replaced an hours-long public display. This parade of horrors was the fate of commoners. Not everybody suffered so terribly, however. Crowds gathered to watch the prisoner endure physical torments almost too dreadful to imagine: hot pokers, boiling lead poured into wounds, dismembering hooks, and of course, the horses readied to draw and quarter. Public executions were spectacles that were part public holiday, part grim warning. That would purify the soul of the condemned before his final judgment, deter others from committing crime, and showcase the power of the king to impose unbearable suffering on his subjects. Under the French monarchy in the 17th and 18th centuries, execution was meant to be painful. And there are, perhaps, lessons in history that could provide an answer to current concerns about the unusual cruelty of execution methods in the U.S. While the death penalty is the ultimate punishment meted out by the state, it is not meant to be torture.įrom the stake to the rope to the firing squad to the electric chair to the gas chamber and, finally, to the lethal injection, over the centuries the methods of execution in the United States have evolved to make execution quicker, quieter and less painful, both physically and psychologically.