Convicts are executed with the guillotine during the French Revolution. Vintage engraving. • WIKIMEDIACOMMONS “The deputy Guillotin / In medicine / Very expert and very clever, / Made a machine / To purge the French body / Of all the people with projects / It’s the guillotine, oh ford! / It's the guillotine! In 1793, as the Revolution turned into civil war, a song made fun of the machine that fascinated as much as it frightened its contemporaries:the guillotine. Four years after its presentation to the National Assembly, the object embodies much more than a new tool of criminal justice. Yet this is how he was promoted on the 1 st December 1789. In the middle of the debates on the reform of justice, the deputies see themselves submitting a bill tabled by the doctor and deputy Joseph Ignace Guillotin. It is article 6 that is most talked about:it proposes that all those sentenced to death without exception be executed in the same way. These will have their heads cut off "by the effect of a simple mechanism". The privilege of beheading Compared to the way the death penalty was previously applied, the progress seems obvious. Previously, only nobles had the privilege of being beheaded with an ax or a sword:according to the representations of the time, having one's head cut off did not tarnish the honor of the family. The majority of criminals from the people, on the other hand, saw themselves applying infamous penalties such as hanging, the wheel or the gallows, and their bodies were exposed for a long time in the streets, in full view, after having been tortured, in order to sully their reputation. But if the guillotine aims to put all individuals on an equal footing before the death penalty, it must also make it possible to humanize the killing. This is to avoid unnecessary suffering. As early as 1777, in his Plan of Criminal Legislation , Jean-Paul Marat had he not written:"We will make the apparatus of torture awful, but let death be sweet"? Inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment, this project of humanizing the execution of sentences is not unique to the French revolutionaries:the guillotine is inspired by devices described and used for a long time in several European States with the same aim of softening the application of justice. Tested on corpses And yet, the French deputies hesitate a lot before adopting it. If the first five articles of Guillotin's law are passed quickly enough, the debate on the terms of the death penalty is adjourned. Immediately, political reflection becomes encumbered with fantasies. Shocked by the idea of an immediate, mechanical and egalitarian execution, some newspapers mock Guillotin and attribute to him remarks as ridiculous as they are invented:"With my machine, I'll blow your head off in the blink of an eye and without you felt the slightest pain. » The question did not come back to the Assembly until much later, in the spring of 1792, for pragmatic reasons. Passed on June 3, 1791, the law on the death penalty requires finding a new means, more effective, faster and more precise than the hand of the executioner. Consulted, Doctor Louis, permanent secretary of the Academy of Surgery, is formal:only a machine will achieve this goal. Urgently and unenthusiastically, the Assembly ordered a prototype of the instrument which, two years earlier, had only inspired sarcasm. It was built by Jean-Tobie Schmidt, a harpsichord maker. It was a harpsichord maker who was commissioned by the deputies to build the prototype of the guillotine in 1792. On April 17, in the courtyard of the Bicêtre hospital, near Paris, the machine was tested on live sheep as well as on human corpses. The public is carefully chosen:there are doctors, deputies, members of the Council of the hospices and obviously also Sanson, the executioner. In the opinion of all, the test is conclusive:"The experiments of the machine of Mr. Schmidt were made Tuesday in Bicêtre on three corpses which it decapitated so clearly that one was astonished at the force and the speed of its action. » A true adapter of the machine in France, Doctor Louis was quickly eclipsed by Guillotin, who gave his name to the object. An inconvenient efficiency A week after these tests, the guillotine is put into service in Paris. It is Nicolas Jacques Pelletier, sentenced to death for having attacked, beaten and robbed a passer-by, who inaugurates the device. Organized on the Place de Grève, the event caused a sensation. Accustomed to attending executions, the spectators who come that day are no less frustrated, and even shocked, by the incredible speed of the process. In the blink of an eye, the blade cuts Pelletier's head, which falls into a basket, spurting sprays of blood. Perfectly successful from a technical point of view, the execution is nevertheless experienced as a worrying moment. Organized in this way, the public execution is no longer that moment apart, of which the long rituals of the executioner, known and expected, once underlined the seriousness, the importance and the sacredness:rapid, cold, silent and almost invisible, the passage of the metal blade makes the administration of capital punishment more prosaic, more mundane and, ultimately, even more frightening. Also read:La Marseillaise, musical soul of the Revolution In the spring of 1793, Prudhomme, the editor of the newspaper Les Révolutions de Paris , expresses the discomfort felt by those who, until then, promoted the machine as a tool for progress. The machine seems to constitute the best possible compromise between the need to maintain order and that of ensuring justice, because "one could not imagine an instrument of death which better reconciles what one owes to humanity, and what 'requires the law'. And yet, as Prudhomme writes, the image of the guillotine has darkened further. Two months before, it was used to behead the king. With the establishment of exceptional justice, the scaffolds are multiplying in France. The Emblem of Terror Saluted with brave pride by the sans-culottes, the take-off machine became, among the counter-revolutionaries, the hated emblem of the revolutionary monstrosity and the pride of their time. Is not the mechanical horror of the series of executions that punctuate the Terror the striking proof that men have emerged from nature? Doesn't it show that the inventions and machines promoted by encyclopaedists and philosophers in the name of the "new man" are actually dragging humanity into its own destruction? In novels, songs and prints, the guillotine embodies the Promethean delirium of French revolutionaries who, in wanting to reverse the order of the world, insolently believe they can govern life and death. If they are generally more nuanced, most revolutionaries nevertheless know that this unbridled imagination, used on purpose as a weapon against the Revolution, says something true about their own contradictions. Prudhomme is aware of this:"A criticism of this torture is that if it spares the condemned man pain, it does not sufficiently conceal the sight of the blood from the spectators:we see it flow from the edge of the guillotine and sprinkle in abundance the pavement where the scaffold is; this repulsive spectacle should not be offered to the eyes of the people; and it would be very easy to counter this inconvenience, which is more serious than one might think, since it familiarizes with the idea of murder committed, it is true, in the name of the law, but with a coolness which leads to deliberate ferocity. . This is only the beginning of a long debate:even today, the guillotine, used until the end of the XX th century, remains one of the most tenacious clichés about the French Revolution. Find out more The Guillotine and the imaginary of Terror, D. Arasse, Champs, Flammarion, 2010. The guillotine before Guillotin Before 1789, various instruments were used in Europe to remedy the "failures" of executions with swords or axes. As early as 1765, Abbé de La Porte described this machine used in Scotland:“The instrument used is a square piece of iron, one foot wide, with an extremely sharp cutting edge. […] As soon as the signal is given […], the executor freely drops the piece of iron. » A device with a simple and effective mechanism From report presented by Doctor Louis on March 7, 1792 to the National Assembly, several craftsmen presented a certain number of very different projects for a decapitating machine. Its shape is fixed after several weeks:sometimes painted red or built in red wood, about 4 meters high, the instrument has an inexpensive, simple and effective mechanism, which can be reproduced in a standardized way.
