In the eighteenth century, social inequalities in France could be noticed in the most different environments and habits of that people. Even when suffering some kind of punishment, members of the nobility enjoyed privileges that did not extend to other sections of the population. In general, nobles could be executed by the action of a sword or an axe. On the other hand, the popular died quartered, hanged or were burned alive.
This situation changed in the year 1789, when members of the Third Estate held a protest demanding the drafting of a constitution for the country. From a political point of view, the establishment of a new set of laws would be designed so that the old nobility privileges were to be extinguished and that the laws were equally applied among all citizens of the France. It was at this moment that the guillotine appeared in French lands.
Having its invention attributed to physician and politician Joseph Ignace Guillotin, the guillotine did not appear as a method of execution used to frighten enemies of the revolution. In fact, several historical accounts say that primitive versions of the guillotine existed or were tried out a long time ago. In fact, Joseph Guillotin's job was to improve the instrument and propose its use for quick, indirect execution.
From a moral point of view, the use of the guillotine was initially advocated for all sentenced to death had the same penalty and that the executioner of the order did not have to get his hands dirty with blood. With this, we can see that the legal introduction of the guillotine aimed precisely to fulfill the aspirations for equality that inspired the French revolutionaries. In 1792, with the approval of King Louis XVI, the guillotine was made official as an official instrument in carrying out the death penalty.
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What initially would have been another achievement for equality, turned out to be a terrible machine for summary executions. With the radicalization of the French revolutionary process, execution by the guillotine ended up being scarily vulgarized. Beginning in 1793, approximately fifty guillotines began operating for six hours a day. Among its most famous victims were King Louis XVI himself and Georges Danton, one of the popular leaders of the revolution.
In less than a year, the guillotines used in the French Revolution are estimated to have killed about twenty thousand accused. This bloodbath, while showing the terror imposed in the popular phase of the revolution, attested to the lack of a cohesive project enough to stabilize the tensions that gripped the country. In this way, Dr. Guillotin's proposal of a humanitarian nature was seriously corrupted from its original aims.
Despite all this noise, the guillotine took a long time to stop being used as an instrument of execution. It was only on October 9, 1981, that French President François Mitterand signed the decree extinguishing the use of the death penalty in the country. In this way, the guillotine was definitively retired from its quick and terrible services.
By Rainer Sousa
Master in History
Would you like to reference this text in a school or academic work? Look:
SOUSA, Rainer Gonçalves. "The Guillotine and Revolutionary France"; Brazil School. Available in: https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/historiag/a-guilhotina-franca-revolucionaria.htm. Accessed on June 27, 2021.
