The Importance Of Guillotine During The French Revolution

714 Words3 Pages

“Off with the head” said as people were about to get killed. The guillotine claimed the heads of tens of thousands of victims ranging from common criminals to revolutionaries, aristocrats and even kings and queens. It was the main method of execution in France was this way. It was used for many reasons, people saw it as fascinating, people were viewed as celebrities who ran the execution, and how it works and why were people sent here. So it was supposedly the best way to execute people.

First, it was used because it was quick and clean. In spite of its efficiency, an execution by guillotine was still a sickening spectacle. When the head was severed, blood poured from the body as the heart continued to pump. When it was used frequently (as …show more content…

As the fame of the guillotine grew, so too did the reputations of its operators. Executioners won a great deal of notoriety during the French Revolution, when they were closely judged on how quickly and precisely they could orchestrate multiple beheadings. The job was often a family business. Multiple generations of the famed Sanson family served as state executioner from 1792 to 1847, and were responsible for dropping the blade on King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, among thousands of others. During the 19th and 20th centuries, the role of chief headsman fell to Louis and Anatole Deibler, a father and son pair whose combined tenure extended from 1879 to 1939. People often chanted the Sansons’ and Deiblers’ names in the streets, and their choice of clothing on the scaffold was known to inspire fashion trends. Executioners were also a subject of morbid fascination in the criminal underworld. Same with the last paragraph they loved everything about …show more content…

a wooden structure which was supposedly created from two fifteen foot high uprights capped by a horizontal beam. The blade was an axe head, attached to the bottom of a four and a half foot wooden block that slid up and down via grooves in the uprights. This device was mounted on a large, square; platform which was four feet high. People saw this as a whole new era because it bad made the public happy. How people were chosen is by what was the crime they did. If they killed someone they died with them. This was done so that the privilege of execution by decapitation would no longer be confined to the nobles and the process of execution would be as painless as possible. The first machine was called Louisette, or Louison, but soon became known as la guillotine. Later the French underworld dubbed it “the widow.” Use of the guillotine continued in France well into the 20th century, diminishing during the 1960s and ’70s, with only eight executions occurring between 1965 and the last one in 1977. In September 1981 France outlawed capital punishment and abandoned the use of the guillotine. Some people saw it in a bad way and some in a good way. It may not be the cleanest way but better than blood and