His wife, Marie-Antoinette, was imprisoned for nine months after the King's death until she was also executed by the machine's blade. Estimates of the number of lives taken by the guillotine during the French Revolution range from 17, to 40, citizens. It is thought that three-quarters of the executed were innocent. In its "glory" days, the guillotine took 3, lives in one month. The locations of public executions were moved frequently. After beheadings, blood continued to pump out of the bodies, overtopping the gutters, and running down the streets.
In France, the guillotine remained the official execution device until the last use of the "national razor" in The mouton was the metal weight to which the blade was attached. The extra weight ensured a swift, clean cut. The blade itself was made of steel, and the heavy-duty rope was cotton. Leather straps restrained the victim's body around the arms and to the bench around the back and legs.
A leather bag or basket was also used to catch the falling head. Very few design changes occurred during the history of the guillotine. The primary modification was the adaptation of the size and weight of the machine to a horse-drawn cart when portability was needed to increase the efficiency of the machine. These moveable guillotines were mounted on horse-drawn carts that were also made of wood with wooden wheels strapped with iron. Wood braces were attached to the wheels when the guillotine was used to keep it motionless.
Guillotines were hand crafted locally and were relatively simple to make because they were without ornamentation or refined finishes. The craftsmen were very experienced with wood construction and the honing shaping and sharpening of the steel for the blade. King Louis XVI.
Louis-Auguste Duke of Berry was born August 23, He was the third son of Louis the dauphin, heir to the throne of Louis XV. After the death of his brothers and father, in Louis became the sole heir. Louis restored the powers of the Parliament, but he was indecisive, easily influenced, and lacked the strength to support reformation against opposition whose positions were threatened by change.
By , France was on the verge of bankruptcy. Pressure mounted to invoke the Estates General to handle the fiscal crisis. A Parisian crowd forced the court to move from Versailles to Paris, where it could be controlled more easily.
In June , Louis sought to escape from Paris to eastern France. However, at Varennes the royal party was recognized and forced to return to Paris, where Revolutionaries had lost all confidence in the monarchy.
France was incensed by the manifesto of the Prussian commander, the Duke of Brunswick, threatening punishment on Paris if the royal family were harmed. On August 10, , the crowd forced the Legislative Assembly to suspend Louis, who—with the royal family—became prisoner of the Commune of Paris.
The National Convention, which succeeded the Legislative Assembly, abolished the monarchy and tried "Citizen Capet," as Louis was now called, for treason. He was found guilty, sentenced to death, and on January 21, , guillotined. If the guillotine was constructed at the execution site, construction of the platform continued by adding the side rails. The stairway was built while the platform was being constructed by making a four-sided base with interior braces for strength.
Both sides were cut to hold the tops and backs of the set of stairs. A guillotine. The executioner usually owned the guillotine and accessories. Executioners in major cities owned several guillotines and cycled them in and out of use for repair.
Quality control of construction and maintenance were entirely the executioner's responsibility. The executioner also maintained a fleet of eight to 10 tumbrels for transporting the victims from the prison to the guillotine. A coach maker constructed and repaired the tumbrels and carts for hauling the guillotine's pieces, but the executioner had to approve the work.
With this particular product, quality control was also required for the execution process. Five to eight assistants helped the executioner lead the victim to the machine, remove any clothing around the neck, and cut the victim's hair.
They strapped the victim down, placed the victim's head across the lunette, and lowered the top of the lunette around the victim's neck in a series of smooth motions. An assistant raised the head for the crowd's approval, and several other assistants took the head and body back down the stairs where they were thrown into carts for disposal.
Heads of well-known victims had the added distinction of being impaled on poles. The guillotine has been relegated to history and lore and is no longer used for executions. In isolated cases, craftsmen make guillotines for entertainment films and television , but these are built with sophisticated safety systems and often as models. There are books and kits available to make models of the guillotine.
The guillotine has since been replaced by other so-called humane ways of executing criminals, such as lethal injection, hanging, gas chambers, a firing squad, and the electric chair.
Thirty-eight of the United States apply the death penalty, but Texas leads the number of executed criminals with a total of as of January of Banfield, Susan. New York: J. Lippincott, Doyle, William. The Oxford History of the French Revolution.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, As with many modern-day products, the testing began with animals. After Sanson cleanly severed the heads of live sheep and calves, he successfully tested the guillotine on the corpses of women and children. The cuts on male corpses were not as clean, however, and prompted a redesign. The height from which the knife dropped was increased, and the convex blade was changed to a sloping, triangular shape.
An apocryphal story popularized by an Alexandre Dumas novel has King Louis XVI suggesting the changes to the machine that would ultimately lop off his head nine months later.
After Sanson proclaimed himself satisfied with the redesign, it was time for the rollout. As a special unit of soldiers under American Revolution hero General Lafayette stood guard, the man whose blood would christen the new killing machine, Nicolas-Jacques Pelletier, was paraded onto the platform. Now the final moments had come. The spectacle, although quite sanguinary, was too clinical and anticlimactic to satisfy the bloodlust of the crowd. In spite of the crowd reaction, the swift justice delivered by the guillotine was deemed a success.
Manufacturing was ramped up to supply towns across France, and guillotines seeped into popular French culture. At fashionable dinner parties, model guillotines decapitated effigies of enemies or politicians, causing red perfume or expensive liqueurs to spew forth.
Toy manufacturers even produced miniature contraptions that children used to behead dolls and live mice. Executions by the guillotine may have been less tortuous, but they could now be carried out with the efficiency of a slaughterhouse assembly line.
With the executioner now reduced to more button-pusher than craftsman, Sanson could guillotine a dozen victims in just 13 minutes. At the height of this bloody phase, Sanson decapitated men and women in just three days, and the former royal executioner even guillotined King Louis XVI on January 21, The use of the guillotine for French executions continued until France abolished capital punishment in
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