Ah, the guillotine from the get-go and to this day, it is the must-have accessory
for any French protest or revolution. And French Revolutions there have been many.
In fact, how many? Well, if you want to find out, today is your lucky day
since I'm doing a collab with my good friend at history House productions who
will be discussing this very subject so after this video make sure to check out
his channel too. Despite its strong association with the French Revolution,
the guillotine is much more ancient than that.
For example, the Halifax gibbet was used in England as early as the 13th century
up until the mid 17th century when Oliver Cromwell forbade capital
punishment for petty theft. Heck! The French Revolution wasn't even the first
time a guillotine was used on French soil since it was employed in 1632 for
the execution of the Duke of Montmorency in Toulouse. So if Dr. Guillotin didn't
invent the guillotine, why name it after him? Well, let's find out.
Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin was born prematurely on the 28th of May 1738
in Bordeaux, France. Family tradition wants that his mother gave birth to him after
being startled by the agonising screams of a man being broken on the wheel. The
story is supposed to have shaped Dr. Guillotin's future pursuit of a more
humane method of execution. Having moved to Paris to study medicine and become a
physician, he wrote in 1788 a pamphlet arguing for more non-nobility
representation at the Estates-General, which got him elected the following year
as a representative of the Third Estate. And following the Tennis Court Oath, he
became a deputy of the new French government, the National Constituent
Assembly. There, he mostly directed his attention towards medical reform until
the 10th of October 1789 where, during a debate on capital punishment, he proposed
a bill that stated:
He saw in this a less brutal and more egalitarian method of execution which
may sound ridiculous until you learn how executions were done back then. You see,
in the "Ancien Régime", capital punishment was a complicated affair with different
executions in function of the crime and the person. While hanging was the most
common method, beheading was reserved to Nobles and could take up to two or three
strikes. Burning was for heretics and arsonists. Death by boiling for counterfeiters
Dismemberment for high treason and regicide. And the breaking wheel was
left to highway robbers and murderers, the latter was the very torture that
supposedly led to Dr. Guillotin's premature birth. It consisted of breaking
the bones of the condemned to braid them around the wheel, which was then risen up
on a spike where, unless granted mercy, the condemned was left to agonise in
pain while being pecked by birds. So yeah, I guess the guillotine was better in the
same way amputation is better than dying of a septic shock.
At first his proposition gained little traction until he delivered an eloquent speech on the
1st of December which he ended, perhaps too eagerly, by saying, "Now with my
machine I cut off your head in the twinkling of an eye and you never feel
it!" This inappropriate remark immediately catapulted him to national fame as his
words became a popular joke. The following day, the renowned royalist
journal, "Les Actes des Apôtres", derided his comment into a song:
"And then off-hand, His genius planned, That machine, that ' simply kills -that's all-, Which after him we call, 'Guillotine' .
Ironically, the author of the song would later be Guillotined.
The song was the first time anyone had used that name, a name
that Dr. Guilllotin would come to regret his whole life. You see, unlike Robespierre,
Dr. Guillotin was actually against the death penalty but he did not fool
himself knowing very well it wouldn't be abolished so quickly. Instead, he hoped
that the use of a more humane method of execution would be a first step towards
its abolition. That first step was taken almost a
year later on the 3rd of June 1791 when the Assembly voted in favor of carrying
all death sentences by decapitation. The design of a machine that could do just
that was tasked to the Secretary of the Academy of Surgery, Dr. Antoine Louis,
who submitted to the assembly a detailed report on the subject the following year
in March. By April, the machine had been built and tested; at first, on animals and
then the corpse of children and women. From these tests, Dr. Louis would come to
recommend the emblematic angled blade instead of the crescent shape that had
been used until then. Ironically enough, the memoirs of the chief executioner,
who looked as creepy as you would expect, claim it was actually the king himself,
an amateur locksmith, who recommended the design while offering his own neck to
demonstrate why. And on the 25th of April 1792, a highwayman named Nicholas Jacques Pelletier
became the first man guillotined. While the execution was deemed a success,
the public's reception was underwhelming at first with the crowd demanding the wooden
scaffold back. But eventually, they came to love it to the point of nicknaming it "La Sainte Guillotine".
Probably because they allowed much more executions than before.
A month later, Dr. Louis died. It's commonly believed that
he was guillotined but that is unlikely since it would be more than a year before the
reign of terror started. It is also commonly believed that Dr. Guillotin was
guillotined. And as much as I want that to be true
for historical irony, it is not. He did get imprisoned but was saved by the
downfall of Robespierre who, spoiler, got guillotined. Instead he died at the peaceful
age of 75 in 1814, deeply regretting that his name was attached to an instrument
of terror. After his death, his children petitioned to have the guillotine
renamed but the petition was refused and they were allowed instead to change
their own name. Victor Hugo would later say, "They're
miserable men. Christopher Columbus cannot attach his name to his discovery;
Dr. Guillotin cannot detach his from his invention." And that is how the guillotine
became France's primary method of execution up until its last use in 1977
Yes. 1977, not 1777, not 1877, but very much 1977.
On the same year Star Wars: A New Hope came out, a man has been guillotined
in France. On the same year the Apple II computer came out, the Atari was released,
and Elvis Presley died, a man was beheaded in France. While these guys were
in power and people dressed like this, we were still chopping heads off in France.
Yep. The last person to be guillotined was Hamida Djandoubi, a tunisian
immigrant who had kidnapped, tortured and murdered his girlfriend,
Élisabeth Bousquet. In February 1977, he was sentenced to death and on September, he
was guillotined thus making him the last person executed in Western Europe
and the last person beheaded in the Western world. Four years later, the death
penalty was finally abolished in France in 1981.
This was Barris. I will see you in two weeks but until then my friends,
Merde!